>...and took into account the fact that Internet service on its own is often pricier than it would be if bundled with cable TV."
I have to have internet anyway. The fact that I can get internet microscopically cheaper if I buy a bunch of services I don't use, isn't really a choice if I don't use the services.
And so, if I can get internet for $33 instead of $44 if I add $70 worth of TV services the great majority of which I do not watch, how the heck is this in any way a better deal?
Working it the other way. I have internet and a conventional TV antenna. What I can't get through these two mediums, I don't need to watch. There, fixed it for you.
To summarize: (1) Most of us are going to have internet anyway, so whether it can be bundled with cable is immaterial. (2) The great overwhelming majority of what I feel like watching is available either over the air (just like in the old days) or over the internet. (3) Whatever I can't watch via (2), I don't need to watch. (3a) It's JUST TV. It's not, like BREATHING. Talk to your kids; find out what drugs they're into this week, take the dog for a walk; find out what your neighborhood actually looks like, READ A BOOK.
On the one hand, a little research shows that the department really did screw up -- it's a crappy safe, and it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
On the other hand, a responsible father would have looked at that safe and said "holy smokes, that's a crappy safe" and went out and bought something that actually worked. (About $180 -- $200, not $35.) Sure, he'd have to go without beer for awhile, but what's your family worth?
It was a different time. My dad was an AmEx courier, always went armed, kept his gun in a bedside drawer when he wasn't working. I knew where it was but never ever even considered pulling it out. I honestly don't know what's different between then and now. I don't think it was just discipline. Would have to think about it.
When daughter was born, I put mine in a lockbox (a good one! not a $38 piece of crap as in TFA!), but now, at eighteen, she knows the combination, because she's grown up around guns, is a pretty good shot (she wears this t-shirt) and has earned my trust.
TFA says the safes in question cost $36 each. Confirmed on Amazon. Many years ago, when my daughter was born, I invested in a small heavy bedside safe with a Simplex lock (think, the mechanical pushbutton locks to some labs or machine rooms). Advantage: don't need to fumble with keys, and don't have to worry about the battery failing in an electronic lock if I have to open it in a hurry. Disadvantage: it cost almost $200. But I gritted my teeth and paid it, because, how much is your family worth to you? (And it still works perfectly today, almost 20 years later.) To the cynic in me, supplying officers with cheapie safes and hoping for the best might seem attractive if it makes your budget look better, but you have to figure something like this would happen eventually.
Side note: open the safe by dropping it? Why is dropping it even an option? Why wasn't it screwed into the floor? Many safes of this type have pre-punched holes in the bottom for this very purpose.
Mother-in-law, who now lives alone in a remote location, acquired a handgun a couple years ago. I looked for an inexpensive safe to keep it in. I came close to making a choice, but then I thought of all the grandkids who visited her regularly, and decided to significantly increase the budget to something I was certain couldn't provide accidental access. And I didn't need to have read this article -- you look at the cheap safes and it's pretty apparent that they're mostly for show.
I think the moral is, "cheap" and "safe" tend to be mutually exclusive.
Parenthetically, if you're going to have a safe by the bed, keep a flashlight in it with lithium batteries. Don't put the flashlight *near* the safe, because if people know it's there, they'll borrow it. (For the same reason fire buckets have pointed bottoms.)
And finally, a $15 trigger lock might have prevented the tragedy in TFA from happening, regardless of whether or not a safe was involved.
I think this will continue to work until Microsoft hits up a customer who won't roll over, it goes to court, and everything falls apart. But in the mean time, it's basically money for nothing.
You know, if you or I did that, we'd land in jail. But ok...
Got nothing in particular against Oracle. We use their database products. But RHEL and Suse both being established, robust distributions that are more than good enough, there's really no compelling reason to switch. Combine that with an inherent (but not absolutely deal-killing) distrust of Oracle's business practices, and we'll just stay where we are, thanks.
Um, yeah... Moreover, I remember reading somewhere... would have to look for the reference, that modern passenger trains are capable of going a lot faster than they do, except for the condition of existing rails.
> For fun, let's add another potential option: high speed rail. 3h 45m, $69.40 one-way, and you can use your laptop and cell phone the whole time, and get up and walk around whenever you want, and there's even a restaurant car. Would you ride it?
Depends. Will I be able to afford to ride it after it's built?
I travel Portland to Sacramento and back once a year. Amtrak station in Portland is a few blocks from work, and the train stops literally in front of my hotel in Sacramento. Convenient, right? Every year I investigate, and every year Amtrak is about three times the cost of a plane ticket, with a journey time around 30 hours vs 43 minutes of flight time. Yeah, go by train...
4K video - without fiber, not possible. Also, Netflix in 720 or 1080 isn't really possible without gigabit pipes and no bandwidth caps. Right now it looks like 1996 wants its videos back.
4K is a different argument. This is just a side note -- you can accept it as a matter of opinion if you wish, as I don't want to get sidetracked -- I've been somewhat of a videophile since the eighties; was an early adopter of Laserdisc, bought one of the first DVD machines, and am currently on my second HDTV. (Not counting the 780P-capable unit in my wife's hobby room, which I don't really consider HD.) I'm one of the guys who contributed regularly to rec.video, did auto-assemble editing when it was still insanely expensive, had the service manual for every TV I ever owned so I could make fine adjustments, and matching the video and sound components to the room, rather than just dumping in there the largest equipment I could afford and hoping for the best.
NTSC was never Good Enough, even at the time when there was nothing else. When progressive scan TVs became available, 480P was starting to be Good Enough for reasonably sized screens. 1080P was, finally, Good Enough for screens as large as you could put in a media room and still get far enough away from it to maintain proper viewing distance.
4K is overkill. Really, it is. I can see the application in movie theaters, but for home it's just an excuse for us to refresh all our equipment and media at our own expense.
That said, if the home industry really does go to 4K, well, I already have fiber to my home -- all I really need to do is call them and change the provisioning. But I think as soon as significant numbers of people start doing that, we'll suddenly find that the larger infrastructure isn't built out for the volume. So maybe some day, but not today. And not tomorrow. Or next year. Or the year after that. In any case, consumer 4K is not here yet, rendering the discussion moot.
Just my opinion -- NTSC -> HDTV -- huge difference (at least half due to not being interlaced). 1080P -> 4K...enh... A lot of additional expense and bandwidth requirements for not a lot of gain. I'd rather see more care in mastering HD media (a lot of which is utter carp) and improve integration, in the meanwhile giving the internet time to get used to the workload.
This is an unique time -- we finally have fiber to The Last Mile. (remember all the discussions in the early days about that?) Now we need two things: (1) A use for it, and (2) an infrastructure that can handle it. I submit that we have neither at this time.
So 305 Mbps is great for bragging rights, but what it really means is that your pr0n loads in 1/32 of a second instead of 1/8 of a second, and that still depends more on the bandwidth and traffic at the other end, and the traffic shaping in between, than it does the speed at your end.
I agree somewhat about high def streaming, and that means to me not that we need faster pipes, but that streaming as a delivery mechanism, as implemented today, is pants. One can torrent an 88 minute 1080P movie in much less time than it takes to drive to the redbox and back. What is needed is a different paradigm of pay-to-view, one that takes much better advantage of local caching. Shift the bandwidth impact from streaming resolution to delay-before-start. Pick your movie, go make a sandwich, and play it when you get back to your seat. Or at the beginning of the week, pick the ten or twelve movies you're most likely to watch, store them locally, dismiss once watched. Storage has never been cheaper. Let's leverage that and provide a level of integration good enough that Grandma can figure it out. *Then*, if you still want to, we can talk about 4K.
What legal purpose would 300 Mbps to the household serve for most people?
What legal purpose would next day delivery to the househould serve for most people? I am a USPS customer, and dang nabbit, I find getting packages within fourteen days perfectly acceptable, and anyone else who doesn't is clearly doing something suspicious!
Somewhat specious. It's like going from same day delivery to same hour delivery, at a time when no business is equipped to take advantage of the pipeline and there is no commercial need for it. There is currently no (legal) use for that kind of bandwidth for the great overwhelming majority of households. Perhaps there will be, someday, but then the problem just travels upstream -- to the infrastructure needed to support an entire city downloading substantially different content at that speed.
What legal purpose would 300 Mbps to the household serve for most people? I am a FIOS customer, but I have it provisioned at the minimum bandwidth for cost reasons. Nevertheless, I can work from home, my wife and kid can do Netflix (two different tvs) all at the same time, and I can torrent the latest version of CentOS in less time than it takes to hunt up a disc to burn it to. These monstrous bandwidths are, for an overwhelming percentage of the population (or even an overwhelming percentage of geeks) only for bragging rights. Not to actually use. It's just a faster way to slam up against Comcast throttling.
I was a charter customer of FIOS. What it buys me is (1) investing in a higher tech medium which I still believe is the wave of the future (fiber to the home) and (2) (this is important) I don't have to deal with Comcast customer support.
And... I have to add (3) it's fun to watch the Comcast monthly door-to-door salesperson go all wonky when we tell them we're sticking with FIOS. Although, I haven't seen him since I reported him for yelling at my wife the last time.
Ahh, Comcast. If any company deserved to by purchased and dismantled, it would be you.
There's a reason why they call it "fiction". Lots of things happen in movies that couldn't possibly happen in real life. With polymers as we know them today, such a weapon wouldn't last a single shot. The chamber pressure of a.380 (the round in the movie) is beyond any plastic technology we have at present.
Besides, polymers are perfectly viewable via x-ray, and although I don't have direct experience with this, I believe a big lump of polymer would trip a metal detector, as the material contains some amount of metal.
Yeah, I know, in Die Hard 2 they mention the "glock 7", an all plastic and ceramic weapon that can get through a metal detector. After the movie came out, I witnessed several incidents of people going into gun shops or wandering gun shows asking about the infamous "glock 7". Sigh.
It doesn't exist. In fact, there is no all plastic and ceramic pistol (at least yet). The Glock 17, if you have ever seen one, has a plastic handle but the slide, barrel, bolt face and trigger mechanism (except the trigger itself) is all metal.
I know this is about what you said, but I wanted to make clear that there are no ceramic guns out there. But I'd be surprised if someone in the government isn't researching it.
Awhile back there was a short media uproar about "plastic guns" and some manufacturers had to list press releases that they were putting enough metal in the frame so that the gun outline would be distinctly visible. But fact is, they always have been.
On locksmithing, it may depend on your state. Owning the tools is legal in my state, although having them on your person in suspicious circumstances might make you a person of interest. It's like having a baseball bat -- in the park, not a big deal. In a crowd outside city hall, something else again.
> now this guy could have constructed the bottom part without a 3d printer too.
Yes. In fact, the summary fails to mention that much of the AR15 is already plastic. Has been since it was introduced. What we're seeing here is a different method of construction, not necessarily a different construction material.
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> ...and took into account the fact that Internet service on its own is often pricier than it would be if bundled with cable TV."
I have to have internet anyway. The fact that I can get internet microscopically cheaper if I buy a bunch of services I don't use, isn't really a choice if I don't use the services.
And so, if I can get internet for $33 instead of $44 if I add $70 worth of TV services the great majority of which I do not watch, how the heck is this in any way a better deal?
Working it the other way. I have internet and a conventional TV antenna. What I can't get through these two mediums, I don't need to watch. There, fixed it for you.
To summarize: (1) Most of us are going to have internet anyway, so whether it can be bundled with cable is immaterial. (2) The great overwhelming majority of what I feel like watching is available either over the air (just like in the old days) or over the internet. (3) Whatever I can't watch via (2), I don't need to watch. (3a) It's JUST TV. It's not, like BREATHING. Talk to your kids; find out what drugs they're into this week, take the dog for a walk; find out what your neighborhood actually looks like, READ A BOOK.
I'm conflicted about the legal case in TFA.
On the one hand, a little research shows that the department really did screw up -- it's a crappy safe, and it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
On the other hand, a responsible father would have looked at that safe and said "holy smokes, that's a crappy safe" and went out and bought something that actually worked. (About $180 -- $200, not $35.) Sure, he'd have to go without beer for awhile, but what's your family worth?
It was a different time. My dad was an AmEx courier, always went armed, kept his gun in a bedside drawer when he wasn't working. I knew where it was but never ever even considered pulling it out. I honestly don't know what's different between then and now. I don't think it was just discipline. Would have to think about it.
When daughter was born, I put mine in a lockbox (a good one! not a $38 piece of crap as in TFA!), but now, at eighteen, she knows the combination, because she's grown up around guns, is a pretty good shot (she wears this t-shirt) and has earned my trust.
TFA says the safes in question cost $36 each. Confirmed on Amazon. Many years ago, when my daughter was born, I invested in a small heavy bedside safe with a Simplex lock (think, the mechanical pushbutton locks to some labs or machine rooms). Advantage: don't need to fumble with keys, and don't have to worry about the battery failing in an electronic lock if I have to open it in a hurry. Disadvantage: it cost almost $200. But I gritted my teeth and paid it, because, how much is your family worth to you? (And it still works perfectly today, almost 20 years later.) To the cynic in me, supplying officers with cheapie safes and hoping for the best might seem attractive if it makes your budget look better, but you have to figure something like this would happen eventually.
Side note: open the safe by dropping it? Why is dropping it even an option? Why wasn't it screwed into the floor? Many safes of this type have pre-punched holes in the bottom for this very purpose.
Mother-in-law, who now lives alone in a remote location, acquired a handgun a couple years ago. I looked for an inexpensive safe to keep it in. I came close to making a choice, but then I thought of all the grandkids who visited her regularly, and decided to significantly increase the budget to something I was certain couldn't provide accidental access. And I didn't need to have read this article -- you look at the cheap safes and it's pretty apparent that they're mostly for show.
I think the moral is, "cheap" and "safe" tend to be mutually exclusive.
Parenthetically, if you're going to have a safe by the bed, keep a flashlight in it with lithium batteries. Don't put the flashlight *near* the safe, because if people know it's there, they'll borrow it. (For the same reason fire buckets have pointed bottoms.)
And finally, a $15 trigger lock might have prevented the tragedy in TFA from happening, regardless of whether or not a safe was involved.
I think this will continue to work until Microsoft hits up a customer who won't roll over, it goes to court, and everything falls apart. But in the mean time, it's basically money for nothing.
You know, if you or I did that, we'd land in jail. But ok...
Got nothing in particular against Oracle. We use their database products. But RHEL and Suse both being established, robust distributions that are more than good enough, there's really no compelling reason to switch. Combine that with an inherent (but not absolutely deal-killing) distrust of Oracle's business practices, and we'll just stay where we are, thanks.
> Oracle are made up of vampire squids
That seems reason enough....
Drawings in speculative fiction from the fifties.
Um, yeah... Moreover, I remember reading somewhere... would have to look for the reference, that modern passenger trains are capable of going a lot faster than they do, except for the condition of existing rails.
I remember in the seventies, fuel prices were heading up and flying was doomed. But oddly enough, it wasn't.
> For fun, let's add another potential option: high speed rail. 3h 45m, $69.40 one-way, and you can use your laptop and cell phone the whole time, and get up and walk around whenever you want, and there's even a restaurant car. Would you ride it?
Depends. Will I be able to afford to ride it after it's built?
Figments of imagination don't produce sonic booms. 's a well known fact.
I travel Portland to Sacramento and back once a year. Amtrak station in Portland is a few blocks from work, and the train stops literally in front of my hotel in Sacramento. Convenient, right? Every year I investigate, and every year Amtrak is about three times the cost of a plane ticket, with a journey time around 30 hours vs 43 minutes of flight time. Yeah, go by train...
4K video - without fiber, not possible. Also, Netflix in 720 or 1080 isn't really possible without gigabit pipes and no bandwidth caps. Right now it looks like 1996 wants its videos back.
4K is a different argument. This is just a side note -- you can accept it as a matter of opinion if you wish, as I don't want to get sidetracked -- I've been somewhat of a videophile since the eighties; was an early adopter of Laserdisc, bought one of the first DVD machines, and am currently on my second HDTV. (Not counting the 780P-capable unit in my wife's hobby room, which I don't really consider HD.) I'm one of the guys who contributed regularly to rec.video, did auto-assemble editing when it was still insanely expensive, had the service manual for every TV I ever owned so I could make fine adjustments, and matching the video and sound components to the room, rather than just dumping in there the largest equipment I could afford and hoping for the best.
NTSC was never Good Enough, even at the time when there was nothing else. When progressive scan TVs became available, 480P was starting to be Good Enough for reasonably sized screens. 1080P was, finally, Good Enough for screens as large as you could put in a media room and still get far enough away from it to maintain proper viewing distance.
4K is overkill. Really, it is. I can see the application in movie theaters, but for home it's just an excuse for us to refresh all our equipment and media at our own expense.
That said, if the home industry really does go to 4K, well, I already have fiber to my home -- all I really need to do is call them and change the provisioning. But I think as soon as significant numbers of people start doing that, we'll suddenly find that the larger infrastructure isn't built out for the volume. So maybe some day, but not today. And not tomorrow. Or next year. Or the year after that. In any case, consumer 4K is not here yet, rendering the discussion moot.
Just my opinion -- NTSC -> HDTV -- huge difference (at least half due to not being interlaced). 1080P -> 4K ...enh... A lot of additional expense and bandwidth requirements for not a lot of gain. I'd rather see more care in mastering HD media (a lot of which is utter carp) and improve integration, in the meanwhile giving the internet time to get used to the workload.
This is an unique time -- we finally have fiber to The Last Mile. (remember all the discussions in the early days about that?) Now we need two things: (1) A use for it, and (2) an infrastructure that can handle it. I submit that we have neither at this time.
So 305 Mbps is great for bragging rights, but what it really means is that your pr0n loads in 1/32 of a second instead of 1/8 of a second, and that still depends more on the bandwidth and traffic at the other end, and the traffic shaping in between, than it does the speed at your end.
I agree somewhat about high def streaming, and that means to me not that we need faster pipes, but that streaming as a delivery mechanism, as implemented today, is pants. One can torrent an 88 minute 1080P movie in much less time than it takes to drive to the redbox and back. What is needed is a different paradigm of pay-to-view, one that takes much better advantage of local caching. Shift the bandwidth impact from streaming resolution to delay-before-start. Pick your movie, go make a sandwich, and play it when you get back to your seat. Or at the beginning of the week, pick the ten or twelve movies you're most likely to watch, store them locally, dismiss once watched. Storage has never been cheaper. Let's leverage that and provide a level of integration good enough that Grandma can figure it out. *Then*, if you still want to, we can talk about 4K.
What legal purpose would 300 Mbps to the household serve for most people?
What legal purpose would next day delivery to the househould serve for most people? I am a USPS customer, and dang nabbit, I find getting packages within fourteen days perfectly acceptable, and anyone else who doesn't is clearly doing something suspicious!
Somewhat specious. It's like going from same day delivery to same hour delivery, at a time when no business is equipped to take advantage of the pipeline and there is no commercial need for it. There is currently no (legal) use for that kind of bandwidth for the great overwhelming majority of households. Perhaps there will be, someday, but then the problem just travels upstream -- to the infrastructure needed to support an entire city downloading substantially different content at that speed.
Why die a long painful death, when you can implode spectacularly?
What legal purpose would 300 Mbps to the household serve for most people? I am a FIOS customer, but I have it provisioned at the minimum bandwidth for cost reasons. Nevertheless, I can work from home, my wife and kid can do Netflix (two different tvs) all at the same time, and I can torrent the latest version of CentOS in less time than it takes to hunt up a disc to burn it to. These monstrous bandwidths are, for an overwhelming percentage of the population (or even an overwhelming percentage of geeks) only for bragging rights. Not to actually use. It's just a faster way to slam up against Comcast throttling.
I was a charter customer of FIOS. What it buys me is (1) investing in a higher tech medium which I still believe is the wave of the future (fiber to the home) and (2) (this is important) I don't have to deal with Comcast customer support.
And... I have to add (3) it's fun to watch the Comcast monthly door-to-door salesperson go all wonky when we tell them we're sticking with FIOS. Although, I haven't seen him since I reported him for yelling at my wife the last time.
Ahh, Comcast. If any company deserved to by purchased and dismantled, it would be you.
I've changed my mind. You are my favorite person for this week.
There's a reason why they call it "fiction". Lots of things happen in movies that couldn't possibly happen in real life. With polymers as we know them today, such a weapon wouldn't last a single shot. The chamber pressure of a .380 (the round in the movie) is beyond any plastic technology we have at present.
Besides, polymers are perfectly viewable via x-ray, and although I don't have direct experience with this, I believe a big lump of polymer would trip a metal detector, as the material contains some amount of metal.
Yeah, I know, in Die Hard 2 they mention the "glock 7", an all plastic and ceramic weapon that can get through a metal detector. After the movie came out, I witnessed several incidents of people going into gun shops or wandering gun shows asking about the infamous "glock 7". Sigh.
It doesn't exist. In fact, there is no all plastic and ceramic pistol (at least yet). The Glock 17, if you have ever seen one, has a plastic handle but the slide, barrel, bolt face and trigger mechanism (except the trigger itself) is all metal.
I know this is about what you said, but I wanted to make clear that there are no ceramic guns out there. But I'd be surprised if someone in the government isn't researching it.
Awhile back there was a short media uproar about "plastic guns" and some manufacturers had to list press releases that they were putting enough metal in the frame so that the gun outline would be distinctly visible. But fact is, they always have been.
On locksmithing, it may depend on your state. Owning the tools is legal in my state, although having them on your person in suspicious circumstances might make you a person of interest. It's like having a baseball bat -- in the park, not a big deal. In a crowd outside city hall, something else again.
You are my favorite person for this week.
> now this guy could have constructed the bottom part without a 3d printer too.
Yes. In fact, the summary fails to mention that much of the AR15 is already plastic. Has been since it was introduced. What we're seeing here is a different method of construction, not necessarily a different construction material.
I thought they already had.
> This means that right now most of IBM's Indian staffers are not college graduates. Did you know that?
Oh, I really knew that. I really, really knew that.
Personally I find the article title a bit offensive, as to call them high schoolers is an insult to the high schools of India.
I'm guessing former auto-rickshaw drivers with maybe a third grade education. Enough, barely, to recite scripts.
Because it's all about cost, you know.