"Corporations need to sell stock though,"...that's it in a nutshell. Most american companies now are in the stock shilling business. Anything else they do is tangential to that fact, and the main reason they don't care about outsourcing anything important, or cancelling R&D, etc. We no longer have a "made in America" mindset or direction, we have a "intangible IP is the only thing that matters and we will shill it and trade stocks at the casino to get rich" mindset. When stock price is more important than the goods and services is when a company is on the way down, and when an entire nation does it, well...it is going to suck hard. It used to be "blue chip" meant you were talking about a company that was an asset to the nation, produced valuable tangible goods or very needed and affordable services, and people bought and held their stock as a long term investment, and that stock was then valuable. Maybe it didn't appreciate that fast,but it did slowly and surely and inside the bounds of reasonableness, and it served as an indicator of generational long solid work/employment/benefits to society. Now it's just programmed economic pure voodoo wave trading and speculation, no better than throw the darts at a chart or astrology really, that has nothing to do with the actual products of a company. Combine clueless investors who let other people completely do their thinking for them in owning and selling, and C**s only insterested in how fast and how much they can suck out of one company before they go do it someplace else, and you have what you see now-the only thing keeping the US afloat is the printing press and foreign investors frantic to figure a credible way to bail out and perhaps recoup a dime on the dollar they have already wasted.
An old adage with a twist that fits, the globalist corporatists have switched to selling the sizzle, when there are no more steaks left at all.
I love that guy! He had the neatest true raw uncut adventure show ever on TV. Cheap but slick low budget production, just some dudes with cameras out in the jungle. You could just tell they got in hairy situations all the time. They always packed heat, and had the neatest wild critters. I bet the stuff they DIDN'T show was pretty wild! The TV show ran back in the early 60s and was called Wild Cargo. Every episode they brought some example out, there was this wimpy guy who acted as the straight foil, and Arthur would spring something nasty on him, like "here, pet this wild 10 inch long poisonous amazon jumping spider", or something like that.
Anyway, if it is the same croc, I remember reading about all the BS he had to go through to bring it in.
It would be nice if there was a public comment review period in conjunction with every patent. Give it like three months or something. Right now all you have is an examiner-and it certainly ain't working with that method.
Interested parties could chime in with examples of prior art, whether or not it was obvious, etc. If there was a public review before granting a patent. A simple form at the bottom of the web page for the application would suffice. Sort of a wiki patent review.
...most of the spyware/adware related help calls, wouldn't that drastically reduce the numbers? I don't know at Dell, but with the various whitebox guys I know, the bulk of the repairs is removing malwares. Granted, hardware incompatability issues might bump the number back up, but perhaps if the linux offerings were sold as bundles with the printer and etc already there and working. And if a big place like Dell did do that, the hardware accessory vendors would take notice and react accordingly, especially if Dell gave them enough notice and lead time to get their driver act together properly.
Just a thought. Eventually, some big manufacturer will offer a legit system with linux, it will be advertised, and it will sell. It *will* eventually happen. There are a lot of lower level vendors that do so now,AOpen just recently for instance, so it is only a matter of time for it to work its way up the food chain.
What would be funny (wild card funny) is if it turned out to be Apple, shipping installed triple boot systems, OSX, Windows and some Linux or BSD.
Say you had a cell of truly bad guys,professional and dedicated bad guys, and the cops nab one of them. The other guys in the cell are going to notice that one of their compatriots is now missing. They will assume he has been captured (they have no choice, they have to assume the worst because of the hard ball nature of the business they are in), and they will immediately move locale and switch to some plan B. There's nothing else they can really do. They aren't going to sit around for 90 days wondering and carry on badguy business as usual.
..."try again"? I was pointing out some maybe possible ways you'd need more than 88 numbers for a family. Some are moderately whimsical, but a lot of them aren't. If you want a smart net enabled fridge, all the food needs to be tagged for instance, else what's the point?
I was never disputing the math on amount of addresses with IPv6, it's a huge amount,obviously way more than enough, I just think people are underestimating what eventually might be net enabled, even though they might not directly ever call those devices, devices/objects will be calling other devices and those in turn reporting someplace else. An individual could easily have thousands of them within 50 years or something just looking at gross technological and societal trends. I'm old enough to clearly remember when *nothing* was net enabled. Not one single thing. nada. Zero addresses "needed". Now I look at today, go "hmm", and extrapolate it. Best I can tell, it will be a "quite large" number of things. I cannot provide an exact number,no one can obviosly, but bet a nickle it's more than a few zeroes attached to it on the left of the decimal point. And who knows, they might decide that addresses for "security purposes" are only used once, then thrown away, retired. That might use them up a faster pace. Ya never know..
I honestly don't care either, I am not the least concerned over whether or not there will be enough addresses or if we use IPv4 or 6. 4 is used now, seems to be working OK, 6 is installed on most linux boxes already, so it is a non problem as far as I am concerned. If there's a buck in it, it will happen, if not, nothing lost except some dev time fooling with it, and that's mostly voluntary hobby action by the devs..and if not, they are getting paid to do it, so no harm there either, general R & D action, something all geeks like..
...all your various household robots you will be getting, and your flying cars and scooters (and antique land based excursion craft like you might have now, heh). Then all the RFID tagged stuff you buy, every piece of food (your fridge will need to be able to monitor itself), electronic media (**AAs will require it), books (it'll just happen, it's a retail article of trade), clothes (already happening), kids toys (article of trade, inventory control, finding lost stuff around the house), the pets (must be a responsible companion animal friend), all the house plants (something has to monitor soil moisture and Ph and nutrient levels), individual windows and doors and walls and other HVAC sensors to run and monitor the home (smart homes aren't smart without it), the alternate energy controllers (common as anything 20 years from now when oil is 350$ barrel), all the individual components that make up your computers (all the drives and memory and CPUs will have to be certified and "trusted"),and the etc, big whopper list and etc....
And...pretty important... the multiple chips inside of you (heart monitor, brainwave societal balance monitor, GPS tracker, blood pressure, blood chemistry, internal credit card chips and ID verification, and various "stuff" like that there), eventually mandated by government and the health/law & enforcement/insurance/your employer cartels.
so, bump up that number a scosh, could be thousands easily.
Sony was doing this for a long time, until one guy got suspicious. Millions of other people didn't see it. How about all the other manufacturers of audio CDs? Has there been a general inspection of them? Maybe there are more rootkits out there that just haven't been found yet. How about in video DVDs, or games? Maybe this sort of install a trojan along with the "copy protection" is more common than not, who knows...
Seems like there might be a new KDE based distro coming down the pike soon. All those Novell/Suse/KDE folks getting laid off, the head cheese quitting... gee, what will they do with their "spare time" now?
You mean the school district tax payers should pick up the tab for something named humans did? Why? A handful of pompous power mad idiots did this, not the entire school dstrict. Petit fascists. Screw 'em!
I'm against corporations/governmental entities and non profits who get sued using money common to their orgs to pay off fines or judgements or settlemens. All that does is shift the cost downstream to innocent parties who had nothing to do with the issue at hand.. Criminal acts are done by human beings, human beings should be the ones to pay fines. A "school" is just a building, some human doofuses are the ones who violated that kids rights. The doofuses should pay out of their own pocket and not use other peoples money-tax payers- to fund their illegal,and in this case obviously quite *stupid*, acts.
You could have longer talk time, but "the public" insists on smaller phones/laptops whatever every year. If consumers would be content with the size phones were 5 years ago, not giant bagphones like in the olden daze, just what size was common back 5 years ago, with smaller and better electronics but bigger batteries, they would last much longer, even with todays battery technology and more powerful features. When you shrink *both* the battery and the electronics, it's like, what do you (anyone you I mean, joe consumer) expect? Lithium ion tech is pretty spiffy now, make it big enough, it'll last all day long easy. And it doesn't have to be ridiculous large, but then again, phones are getting ultra ridiculous small. I know I can't use the teeny phones, can't see the screen easily nor use the buttons. My "choice" is extremely expensive larger PDA like phones with reasonably sized screens and buttons and bateries, or teensy tiny phones that are barely useable. Older phones with good enough screens you can't get batts for hardly anymore, plus the providers won't activate them if they don't have that location feature in them for e911 stuff. Just went through that at the cell store. My older phone they refuse to activate now, even though it works perfectly fine and they used to provide service for it. Had to buy a cheaper smaller one. Nuts...grumble... this is verizon by the way, they have the best coverage and cheapest rates around here, but it could be any of them really.
What I would like to see is standaridzation WITH the batteries themselves. Propietary sizes and configs are a pure ripoff, you go to replace the battery it costs 2/3rds what the entire device costs new. I just happen to get a new phone two months ago, it cost IIRC around 65$. I asked what a replacement batt was-50$.
Ripoff. We have standard sized batts, AAA, AA, C, D etc but they just won't use them, has to be different, force you more or less to keep upgrading the entire phone. I have HAM portable transcievers that run multiple watts output, they run fine on regular config batteries. What are cell phones, half a watt or something? I just got some GMRS/FRS talkies, they just use normal rechargeable AAs, no need for some weird "package" battery pack that costs ten times would it should.
You didn't mention scale of your alternative energy. The last place we lived was totally solar powered,IIRC it was 2.6 kw in full sun, plus days worth of battery bank storage, and if that went out there was a big diesel genny but we hardly ever used it. For the owners of the estate, "them", and us,"the caretakers", we ran everything we wanted to run from freezers to fridges to multiple normal full tower computers to large screen TVs and dishwashers and vacuums and..you get the picture. The only way you could tell this wasn't a normal grid-only place (besides the solar arrays in the backyard) was when the grid power went down in the 'hood and we still had all usual power. Very, very *nice* then. You really appreciate it then, you can see that having onsite power production is just slick. It just depends on how much wattage you are installing with the PV and wind genny that determines your needs and wants with various gadgetry. If you have two panels and the smallest wind genny, well, a modest laptop or mini-itx system would have to suffice. 20-40 panels large with equivalent battery bank and a few thousand watt wind genny, you can go quite "normal" and run about whatever you might want within reason.
I did learn some tricks though, the primary one is timing for heavy loads. If you schedule your most demanding electrical loads for mid-day, between 11 AM and 1 PM, that is when you have peak power usually. Like, then is when you run the washing machines or water well for showers and watering the garden, etc. Stuf like that, common sense. You do learn to turn off excess lights or use compact fluorescents. In fact, the on/off switch is your friend, you can save an amazing amount by just being consistent in use and developing "muscle memory" for hitting OFF when you really don't need to run some gadget. "Idling" adds up quick! Arrange chairs so when you are reading you can get natural sunlight from a window. And have enough storage batteries! Nothing worse than be having a nice sunny day and be producing *too much* power and no place to put the excess. And those extra batteries will get your through cloudy days, plus they will last longer if you aren't "deep" cycling them. Shallow cycles make your batts last much longer, that and be sure to install a "desulphator" on the batteries.
With that said, have you been to solarpc.com? Off-grid puter experts of the low-watt kind.
"The school district issued a prepared statement that said it solicited advice and guidance from legal advisers and law enforcement officers and acted "on its belief that it was protecting all of the children and the staff in the district."
He should sue those bozos as well now that the school is taken care of. And none of them deserve to be in the law community if they are the ones that "advised" on the censoring. If you can't understand the first amendment,a fundamental part of our history, something that is a born-with right and *not* some government granted permission or privelege, then you don't need nor deserve to be a cop or a "legal advisor".
Correct on censorship and don't forget taxes. The UN REALLY wants the ability to start imposing global taxes on this or that. Give them control of a major part of the net, you'll see taxes and even more corruption, and this time with a body that has NO directly elected members by any "global citizen".
Bad idea. Normally, I think the US fed gov is sort of out to lunch in most matters, but *not* in this instance. The UN can go do something else with their spare time. The address system is working perfectly fine the way it is.
Why? A common slang vernacular from where I grew up. This is a casual forum post. No, it doesn't bother me nor does it matter. Language evolves, we don't use "forsooth and alack" much in English now do we? My writing style is mine, good, bad, ugly, the "whole ball of wax". See, there's another one, an idiom. Perhaps "thou" might "lighten up, dude".
Don't use the regular lanes, go back to sporting goods or garden or even jewelry at wallyworld. You can checkout there with hardly ever a wait. Same thing at kmart or home depot and some others, just don't use the normal checkout areas if there is a huge line.
...percentage wise. Add up speeding, illegal lane change, driving to endanger, following too closely, failure to use turn signals, DUI and etc,etc, picky point and etc, the traffic on most interstates I have seen is well over 90% illegal. It's just more accepted and tolerated and indulged in by society at this point.
I think perhaps a better analogy might be booze prohibition way back when. Illegal as all get out, indulged by millions regularly, with highly selective harsh law enforcement.
Either way though your point is still valid. The only even half way answer I have for "the file sharing problem" is personal selective shunning. Onerous copyright compounded by gouging level prices, don't share it, don't patronize those concerns with your business either. Just say no, look for something else.
I hit a somewhat middle ground, against the ridiculous prices and vendor lockins with the **AAs products, so I only indulge with used or severely marked down pre recorded media, and those at a very low level. I have never downloaded one single thing that wasn't legal to do so, but I understand people's attitudes about it completely. You just lose all respect for a business that is so overwhelmingly run by and for crooks. There are exceptions of course, but not many.
"Yeah, and programmers deliberately write buggy software to ensure their job security. Get real. What you're describing does not happen."
Talking about lawyers and written laws here. I still disagree. It is in their financial best interests to make the law obfuscated, obtuse and arcane. And the reason there is "enough work to go around" now is *precisely* because the law as it stands is obfuscated, obtuse and arcane.
This is not an accident.
Remember the orignal premise, why I replied, there is "wonder" in the legal profession why they are looked down upon. Now when someone tries to tell you in a simple honest fashion some of the reasons why this might be so, you *insist* on immediate cognitive dissonance as a defense and to stay in denial.
Nice try, though.. well, sort of nice, I'll give it a debate course level of 202 rather than a 101, but that's about it...keep working at it,though, and you make a point of getting back to me when lawyers are routinely praised by society and generally looked up to. When a long thread and discussion like this isn't a preponderence or more "bashing" of your profession because that's what people really think. When it's reversed, when the situation is truely different, I'll be big enough to say the times have changed! I'll be more than glad to give you props and points then.
A lot of the reasons revolve around congress, laws passed, numbers of laws passed, and the demographics of congress in a historical sense. Lawyers have, as a profession, made up a huge number of the members of congress over the years. As such, it is in their pure selfish and planned economic interest to make laws as verbose and complex and numerous as possible. This leads to a higher potential pool of victims for the hired guns to aim at. In fact, I would state at this point in time, due to the sheer number and complexity of the "laws on the books", that just about every adult human in the US is most likely some form of "lawbreaker". You don't see these things? Where "sue happy", where the "hired guns" mercenaries can be brought in, comes about from the sheer number of ways that people can run afoul of "the law" someplace? It is an obvious and, to most everyone else who isn't a lawyer, an onerous and perpetual "job security" guild, a ruling class in a nation that is not supposed to have such a thing theoretically. We are supposed to have a government by and for "the people", not by and for a tiny subset of the population.
Where is the cutoff point? We have millions (whatever, some huge number) of laws on the books between the federal/states/local governments. When will there be "enough" laws? Really, name a calendar date, name a number, when is this time in the future when we will have *enough* laws to "be enforced"? Run a graph in your mind, see the jump historically? How is ANY normal human supposed to keep up with it? Where is an *honest* check and balance on this phenomenon when both major parties (I think of them as criminal gangs more than parties at this point) are very top heavy with lawyers, and all judicial nominees are combination party and lawyers union functionaries? Where are the public proclamations by the lawyers unions that they seek less laws, simpler laws and more fair laws, in order to make the system cheaper and fairer for the "end user", the public at large? Where is the effort to make the public law and judicial system "open" and not a closed shop with "vendor lock-in", that would be the envy of Microsoft?
Step out of your shoes and into a non-lawyers shoes for a moment, the "problems" and reasons for public enmity become rapidly apparent.
As to patents and "IP" styled law in general terms, where are the oficial stances on these laws? Outside of a very few, such as EFF type folks, etc, I am just not seeing any effort by the "law community" to make things fairer or simpler, it is the reverse, they are actively trying to make things more complex to the point of ridiculousness. And they are suceeding in these efforts.
The kids are going to OWN the computers, that means take them home with them, to do homework and independent study and what kids do, games and such. If they are thin clients it sorta defeats that purpose.
Now I imagine it could be *both* theoretically, thin client at school and stand alone with some functionality at home, but I don't know what a middle ground is called there, "pleasingly plump" clients???
Quick pop quiz for the teach on figuring out at least *one technological benefit* of a wireless/network enabled free laptop at the ratio of one laptop per one kid...
What's cheaper in the long run, hundreds of dead tree books to be delivered to hundreds of millions of poor kids over their elementary and high school years, or access to e-books by the thousands across a network, along with other educational software? Take your time, no rush...
There's more benefits, that's the most glaringly obvious one. Remember, this has some design goals in mind, harsh climate hardened, multiple ways to power it, network access, built tough to take abuse by kids. If it was me as the poor kid, I wouldn't mind sitting under a tarp if I had the educational materials, rather than having a nice schoolroom but no educational materials. Ideally of course you would want both, but this is seen as a way to leapfrog the normal "western" industrialized nation way of doing things so those cultures won't need an additional entire generation to catch up.
This is similar to why wireless is much more important and being deployed faster in the second and third world, it is much cheaper and faster than developing and installing a complete hard wired infrastructure. They are skipping centralized electrical power in a lot of areas and going to locally produced, with wind and solar PV for example, and for telco and net going straight to wireless from..nothing much.
Similar with the laptop versus expensive books, it's just much much cheaper and faster to provide a data stream. All they need is one access point per small remote village, the bulk of the laptops then jump on with wifi for schooling.
At least, that's what I have read about the project.
Slashdot Mirror
"Corporations need to sell stock though,"...that's it in a nutshell. Most american companies now are in the stock shilling business. Anything else they do is tangential to that fact, and the main reason they don't care about outsourcing anything important, or cancelling R&D, etc. We no longer have a "made in America" mindset or direction, we have a "intangible IP is the only thing that matters and we will shill it and trade stocks at the casino to get rich" mindset. When stock price is more important than the goods and services is when a company is on the way down, and when an entire nation does it, well...it is going to suck hard. It used to be "blue chip" meant you were talking about a company that was an asset to the nation, produced valuable tangible goods or very needed and affordable services, and people bought and held their stock as a long term investment, and that stock was then valuable. Maybe it didn't appreciate that fast,but it did slowly and surely and inside the bounds of reasonableness, and it served as an indicator of generational long solid work/employment/benefits to society. Now it's just programmed economic pure voodoo wave trading and speculation, no better than throw the darts at a chart or astrology really, that has nothing to do with the actual products of a company. Combine clueless investors who let other people completely do their thinking for them in owning and selling, and C**s only insterested in how fast and how much they can suck out of one company before they go do it someplace else, and you have what you see now-the only thing keeping the US afloat is the printing press and foreign investors frantic to figure a credible way to bail out and perhaps recoup a dime on the dollar they have already wasted.
An old adage with a twist that fits, the globalist corporatists have switched to selling the sizzle, when there are no more steaks left at all.
FWIW BeatrIX is built to run on those via chips.
I love that guy! He had the neatest true raw uncut adventure show ever on TV. Cheap but slick low budget production, just some dudes with cameras out in the jungle. You could just tell they got in hairy situations all the time. They always packed heat, and had the neatest wild critters. I bet the stuff they DIDN'T show was pretty wild! The TV show ran back in the early 60s and was called Wild Cargo. Every episode they brought some example out, there was this wimpy guy who acted as the straight foil, and Arthur would spring something nasty on him, like "here, pet this wild 10 inch long poisonous amazon jumping spider", or something like that.
Anyway, if it is the same croc, I remember reading about all the BS he had to go through to bring it in.
It would be nice if there was a public comment review period in conjunction with every patent. Give it like three months or something. Right now all you have is an examiner-and it certainly ain't working with that method.
Interested parties could chime in with examples of prior art, whether or not it was obvious, etc. If there was a public review before granting a patent. A simple form at the bottom of the web page for the application would suffice. Sort of a wiki patent review.
...most of the spyware/adware related help calls, wouldn't that drastically reduce the numbers? I don't know at Dell, but with the various whitebox guys I know, the bulk of the repairs is removing malwares. Granted, hardware incompatability issues might bump the number back up, but perhaps if the linux offerings were sold as bundles with the printer and etc already there and working. And if a big place like Dell did do that, the hardware accessory vendors would take notice and react accordingly, especially if Dell gave them enough notice and lead time to get their driver act together properly.
Just a thought. Eventually, some big manufacturer will offer a legit system with linux, it will be advertised, and it will sell. It *will* eventually happen. There are a lot of lower level vendors that do so now,AOpen just recently for instance, so it is only a matter of time for it to work its way up the food chain.
What would be funny (wild card funny) is if it turned out to be Apple, shipping installed triple boot systems, OSX, Windows and some Linux or BSD.
Say you had a cell of truly bad guys,professional and dedicated bad guys, and the cops nab one of them. The other guys in the cell are going to notice that one of their compatriots is now missing. They will assume he has been captured (they have no choice, they have to assume the worst because of the hard ball nature of the business they are in), and they will immediately move locale and switch to some plan B. There's nothing else they can really do. They aren't going to sit around for 90 days wondering and carry on badguy business as usual.
..."try again"? I was pointing out some maybe possible ways you'd need more than 88 numbers for a family. Some are moderately whimsical, but a lot of them aren't. If you want a smart net enabled fridge, all the food needs to be tagged for instance, else what's the point?
I was never disputing the math on amount of addresses with IPv6, it's a huge amount,obviously way more than enough, I just think people are underestimating what eventually might be net enabled, even though they might not directly ever call those devices, devices/objects will be calling other devices and those in turn reporting someplace else. An individual could easily have thousands of them within 50 years or something just looking at gross technological and societal trends. I'm old enough to clearly remember when *nothing* was net enabled. Not one single thing. nada. Zero addresses "needed". Now I look at today, go "hmm", and extrapolate it. Best I can tell, it will be a "quite large" number of things. I cannot provide an exact number,no one can obviosly, but bet a nickle it's more than a few zeroes attached to it on the left of the decimal point. And who knows, they might decide that addresses for "security purposes" are only used once, then thrown away, retired. That might use them up a faster pace. Ya never know..
I honestly don't care either, I am not the least concerned over whether or not there will be enough addresses or if we use IPv4 or 6. 4 is used now, seems to be working OK, 6 is installed on most linux boxes already, so it is a non problem as far as I am concerned. If there's a buck in it, it will happen, if not, nothing lost except some dev time fooling with it, and that's mostly voluntary hobby action by the devs..and if not, they are getting paid to do it, so no harm there either, general R & D action, something all geeks like..
...all your various household robots you will be getting, and your flying cars and scooters (and antique land based excursion craft like you might have now, heh). Then all the RFID tagged stuff you buy, every piece of food (your fridge will need to be able to monitor itself), electronic media (**AAs will require it), books (it'll just happen, it's a retail article of trade), clothes (already happening), kids toys (article of trade, inventory control, finding lost stuff around the house), the pets (must be a responsible companion animal friend), all the house plants (something has to monitor soil moisture and Ph and nutrient levels), individual windows and doors and walls and other HVAC sensors to run and monitor the home (smart homes aren't smart without it), the alternate energy controllers (common as anything 20 years from now when oil is 350$ barrel), all the individual components that make up your computers (all the drives and memory and CPUs will have to be certified and "trusted"),and the etc, big whopper list and etc....
And...pretty important... the multiple chips inside of you (heart monitor, brainwave societal balance monitor, GPS tracker, blood pressure, blood chemistry, internal credit card chips and ID verification, and various "stuff" like that there), eventually mandated by government and the health/law & enforcement/insurance/your employer cartels.
so, bump up that number a scosh, could be thousands easily.
Sony was doing this for a long time, until one guy got suspicious. Millions of other people didn't see it. How about all the other manufacturers of audio CDs? Has there been a general inspection of them? Maybe there are more rootkits out there that just haven't been found yet. How about in video DVDs, or games? Maybe this sort of install a trojan along with the "copy protection" is more common than not, who knows...
Seems like there might be a new KDE based distro coming down the pike soon. All those Novell/Suse/KDE folks getting laid off, the head cheese quitting... gee, what will they do with their "spare time" now?
You mean the school district tax payers should pick up the tab for something named humans did? Why? A handful of pompous power mad idiots did this, not the entire school dstrict. Petit fascists. Screw 'em!
I'm against corporations/governmental entities and non profits who get sued using money common to their orgs to pay off fines or judgements or settlemens. All that does is shift the cost downstream to innocent parties who had nothing to do with the issue at hand.. Criminal acts are done by human beings, human beings should be the ones to pay fines. A "school" is just a building, some human doofuses are the ones who violated that kids rights. The doofuses should pay out of their own pocket and not use other peoples money-tax payers- to fund their illegal,and in this case obviously quite *stupid*, acts.
You could have longer talk time, but "the public" insists on smaller phones/laptops whatever every year. If consumers would be content with the size phones were 5 years ago, not giant bagphones like in the olden daze, just what size was common back 5 years ago, with smaller and better electronics but bigger batteries, they would last much longer, even with todays battery technology and more powerful features. When you shrink *both* the battery and the electronics, it's like, what do you (anyone you I mean, joe consumer) expect? Lithium ion tech is pretty spiffy now, make it big enough, it'll last all day long easy. And it doesn't have to be ridiculous large, but then again, phones are getting ultra ridiculous small. I know I can't use the teeny phones, can't see the screen easily nor use the buttons. My "choice" is extremely expensive larger PDA like phones with reasonably sized screens and buttons and bateries, or teensy tiny phones that are barely useable. Older phones with good enough screens you can't get batts for hardly anymore, plus the providers won't activate them if they don't have that location feature in them for e911 stuff. Just went through that at the cell store. My older phone they refuse to activate now, even though it works perfectly fine and they used to provide service for it. Had to buy a cheaper smaller one. Nuts...grumble... this is verizon by the way, they have the best coverage and cheapest rates around here, but it could be any of them really.
/geezer tightwad rant
What I would like to see is standaridzation WITH the batteries themselves. Propietary sizes and configs are a pure ripoff, you go to replace the battery it costs 2/3rds what the entire device costs new. I just happen to get a new phone two months ago, it cost IIRC around 65$. I asked what a replacement batt was-50$.
Ripoff. We have standard sized batts, AAA, AA, C, D etc but they just won't use them, has to be different, force you more or less to keep upgrading the entire phone. I have HAM portable transcievers that run multiple watts output, they run fine on regular config batteries. What are cell phones, half a watt or something? I just got some GMRS/FRS talkies, they just use normal rechargeable AAs, no need for some weird "package" battery pack that costs ten times would it should.
heh
You would hope so.
You didn't mention scale of your alternative energy. The last place we lived was totally solar powered,IIRC it was 2.6 kw in full sun, plus days worth of battery bank storage, and if that went out there was a big diesel genny but we hardly ever used it. For the owners of the estate, "them", and us,"the caretakers", we ran everything we wanted to run from freezers to fridges to multiple normal full tower computers to large screen TVs and dishwashers and vacuums and..you get the picture. The only way you could tell this wasn't a normal grid-only place (besides the solar arrays in the backyard) was when the grid power went down in the 'hood and we still had all usual power. Very, very *nice* then. You really appreciate it then, you can see that having onsite power production is just slick. It just depends on how much wattage you are installing with the PV and wind genny that determines your needs and wants with various gadgetry. If you have two panels and the smallest wind genny, well, a modest laptop or mini-itx system would have to suffice. 20-40 panels large with equivalent battery bank and a few thousand watt wind genny, you can go quite "normal" and run about whatever you might want within reason.
I did learn some tricks though, the primary one is timing for heavy loads. If you schedule your most demanding electrical loads for mid-day, between 11 AM and 1 PM, that is when you have peak power usually. Like, then is when you run the washing machines or water well for showers and watering the garden, etc. Stuf like that, common sense. You do learn to turn off excess lights or use compact fluorescents. In fact, the on/off switch is your friend, you can save an amazing amount by just being consistent in use and developing "muscle memory" for hitting OFF when you really don't need to run some gadget. "Idling" adds up quick! Arrange chairs so when you are reading you can get natural sunlight from a window. And have enough storage batteries! Nothing worse than be having a nice sunny day and be producing *too much* power and no place to put the excess. And those extra batteries will get your through cloudy days, plus they will last longer if you aren't "deep" cycling them. Shallow cycles make your batts last much longer, that and be sure to install a "desulphator" on the batteries.
With that said, have you been to solarpc.com? Off-grid puter experts of the low-watt kind.
He should sue those bozos as well now that the school is taken care of. And none of them deserve to be in the law community if they are the ones that "advised" on the censoring. If you can't understand the first amendment,a fundamental part of our history, something that is a born-with right and *not* some government granted permission or privelege, then you don't need nor deserve to be a cop or a "legal advisor".
Correct on censorship and don't forget taxes. The UN REALLY wants the ability to start imposing global taxes on this or that. Give them control of a major part of the net, you'll see taxes and even more corruption, and this time with a body that has NO directly elected members by any "global citizen".
Bad idea. Normally, I think the US fed gov is sort of out to lunch in most matters, but *not* in this instance. The UN can go do something else with their spare time. The address system is working perfectly fine the way it is.
Why? A common slang vernacular from where I grew up. This is a casual forum post. No, it doesn't bother me nor does it matter. Language evolves, we don't use "forsooth and alack" much in English now do we? My writing style is mine, good, bad, ugly, the "whole ball of wax". See, there's another one, an idiom. Perhaps "thou" might "lighten up, dude".
Don't use the regular lanes, go back to sporting goods or garden or even jewelry at wallyworld. You can checkout there with hardly ever a wait. Same thing at kmart or home depot and some others, just don't use the normal checkout areas if there is a huge line.
...percentage wise. Add up speeding, illegal lane change, driving to endanger, following too closely, failure to use turn signals, DUI and etc,etc, picky point and etc, the traffic on most interstates I have seen is well over 90% illegal. It's just more accepted and tolerated and indulged in by society at this point.
I think perhaps a better analogy might be booze prohibition way back when. Illegal as all get out, indulged by millions regularly, with highly selective harsh law enforcement.
Either way though your point is still valid. The only even half way answer I have for "the file sharing problem" is personal selective shunning. Onerous copyright compounded by gouging level prices, don't share it, don't patronize those concerns with your business either. Just say no, look for something else.
I hit a somewhat middle ground, against the ridiculous prices and vendor lockins with the **AAs products, so I only indulge with used or severely marked down pre recorded media, and those at a very low level. I have never downloaded one single thing that wasn't legal to do so, but I understand people's attitudes about it completely. You just lose all respect for a business that is so overwhelmingly run by and for crooks. There are exceptions of course, but not many.
very interesting, thanks for the link!
"Yeah, and programmers deliberately write buggy software to ensure their job security. Get real. What you're describing does not happen."
Talking about lawyers and written laws here. I still disagree. It is in their financial best interests to make the law obfuscated, obtuse and arcane. And the reason there is "enough work to go around" now is *precisely* because the law as it stands is obfuscated, obtuse and arcane.
This is not an accident.
Remember the orignal premise, why I replied, there is "wonder" in the legal profession why they are looked down upon. Now when someone tries to tell you in a simple honest fashion some of the reasons why this might be so, you *insist* on immediate cognitive dissonance as a defense and to stay in denial.
Nice try, though.. well, sort of nice, I'll give it a debate course level of 202 rather than a 101, but that's about it...keep working at it,though, and you make a point of getting back to me when lawyers are routinely praised by society and generally looked up to. When a long thread and discussion like this isn't a preponderence or more "bashing" of your profession because that's what people really think. When it's reversed, when the situation is truely different, I'll be big enough to say the times have changed! I'll be more than glad to give you props and points then.
Mepis and Linspire come to mind of major distros. Debian proper, it can be anything you want on install.
I often wondered why kde and gnome didn't just cut to the chase and package their own distros based on their respective desktop environments.
A lot of the reasons revolve around congress, laws passed, numbers of laws passed, and the demographics of congress in a historical sense. Lawyers have, as a profession, made up a huge number of the members of congress over the years. As such, it is in their pure selfish and planned economic interest to make laws as verbose and complex and numerous as possible. This leads to a higher potential pool of victims for the hired guns to aim at. In fact, I would state at this point in time, due to the sheer number and complexity of the "laws on the books", that just about every adult human in the US is most likely some form of "lawbreaker". You don't see these things? Where "sue happy", where the "hired guns" mercenaries can be brought in, comes about from the sheer number of ways that people can run afoul of "the law" someplace? It is an obvious and, to most everyone else who isn't a lawyer, an onerous and perpetual "job security" guild, a ruling class in a nation that is not supposed to have such a thing theoretically. We are supposed to have a government by and for "the people", not by and for a tiny subset of the population.
Where is the cutoff point? We have millions (whatever, some huge number) of laws on the books between the federal/states/local governments. When will there be "enough" laws? Really, name a calendar date, name a number, when is this time in the future when we will have *enough* laws to "be enforced"? Run a graph in your mind, see the jump historically? How is ANY normal human supposed to keep up with it? Where is an *honest* check and balance on this phenomenon when both major parties (I think of them as criminal gangs more than parties at this point) are very top heavy with lawyers, and all judicial nominees are combination party and lawyers union functionaries? Where are the public proclamations by the lawyers unions that they seek less laws, simpler laws and more fair laws, in order to make the system cheaper and fairer for the "end user", the public at large? Where is the effort to make the public law and judicial system "open" and not a closed shop with "vendor lock-in", that would be the envy of Microsoft?
Step out of your shoes and into a non-lawyers shoes for a moment, the "problems" and reasons for public enmity become rapidly apparent.
As to patents and "IP" styled law in general terms, where are the oficial stances on these laws? Outside of a very few, such as EFF type folks, etc, I am just not seeing any effort by the "law community" to make things fairer or simpler, it is the reverse, they are actively trying to make things more complex to the point of ridiculousness. And they are suceeding in these efforts.
The kids are going to OWN the computers, that means take them home with them, to do homework and independent study and what kids do, games and such. If they are thin clients it sorta defeats that purpose.
Now I imagine it could be *both* theoretically, thin client at school and stand alone with some functionality at home, but I don't know what a middle ground is called there, "pleasingly plump" clients???
Quick pop quiz for the teach on figuring out at least *one technological benefit* of a wireless/network enabled free laptop at the ratio of one laptop per one kid...
What's cheaper in the long run, hundreds of dead tree books to be delivered to hundreds of millions of poor kids over their elementary and high school years, or access to e-books by the thousands across a network, along with other educational software? Take your time, no rush...
There's more benefits, that's the most glaringly obvious one. Remember, this has some design goals in mind, harsh climate hardened, multiple ways to power it, network access, built tough to take abuse by kids. If it was me as the poor kid, I wouldn't mind sitting under a tarp if I had the educational materials, rather than having a nice schoolroom but no educational materials. Ideally of course you would want both, but this is seen as a way to leapfrog the normal "western" industrialized nation way of doing things so those cultures won't need an additional entire generation to catch up.
This is similar to why wireless is much more important and being deployed faster in the second and third world, it is much cheaper and faster than developing and installing a complete hard wired infrastructure. They are skipping centralized electrical power in a lot of areas and going to locally produced, with wind and solar PV for example, and for telco and net going straight to wireless from..nothing much.
Similar with the laptop versus expensive books, it's just much much cheaper and faster to provide a data stream. All they need is one access point per small remote village, the bulk of the laptops then jump on with wifi for schooling.
At least, that's what I have read about the project.