No, seriously - other than churn out slightly-improved versions of the same product every 6 months, and attempt to sue their competitors into oblivion, what does Apple do?
Get their crowd of hypnotized tech fans and "because it's cool" hipsters to be early-adopters and drive THEIR version of "the next thing" into the position of being the first commercially successful version - creating the appearance that they came up with the concept (rather than just the first commercially successful design) - and leveraging this commercial success into enough perceived standing to sue the competition into oblivion.
Benefit for the rest of us: At least those with enough money and willingness to live in a walled garden, using only Apple's vision of how things should be done, get new stuff a little sooner.
Downside for the rest of us: Those of use who DON'T have the money, or AREN'T willing to live in a walled garden, end up waiting longer and paying more, or perhaps not getting the next-new-thing at all, due to Apple's litigiousness.
Now we are seeing the advent of high tech pump and dump.
I agree with pretty much everything you said except for having a minor issue with this point.
High tech pump-and-dump has been with us for a while. It was a major component of the "dotcom bubble" and has even been operated successfully (until busted) by juveniles on the comment features of stock ticker websites (such as Yahoo's).
What is new (if it really is new, rather than just the first one widely reported) is doing the "pump" part by suckering PRWeb into publishing a blatant forgery.
PRWeb, a subsidiary of Vocus, is in business to publish, for a fee, press releases from company PR departments, as a way of bringing them to the attention of the media and other interested parties. While the content of the press releases is the responsibility of their customers, they do (or should) have a responsibility to vet that each release is actually from the company it purports to be from.
kudos to the first motherboard (and/or case) manufacturer that 'solves' this by adding a socket/slot mechanism that you solder the cpu to so you can still swap them out easily
Isn't the Intel chip a BGA? Aren't there already a plethora of high-signal-integrity sockets that accept chips in BGA carriers?
sounds like more of a cost cutting measure for intel... after all, they're in the business of making chips, not putting them in to a nice plug'n'play package for easy swapping.
Cost-cutting and/or signal integrity. Signal speeds are getting into microwave frequencies now and getting those through a connector and/or across an extra inch of PC board to get to it (running near and over/under other such signals) is a royal PITA that degrades, slows, and increases the rate of errors in data even when done right.
This doesn't necessarily mean there WON'T be a socketed version. It just means that Intel is punting the socket-and-baby-board design issues downstream rather than imposing their design choices on board manufacturers. Maybe the latter will all solder the chips to the mother boards. Maybe some will design proprietary baby board/socket combos. Maybe some of 'em will come up with a standard. (Maybe AMD will promulgate a standard that includes the ability to mount Intel chips - in order to encourage MOBO makers to build boards that will also accept AMD CPUs.) It's not Intel's problem any more.
... in fact I'd prefer soldered (as long as it had a good fan), since besides heat, the enemy of electronics is corrosion and bad connections.
Not to mention that sockets are EXPEN$IVE, even when bought in bulk.
And getting modern microwave-frequency data signals across an extra inch of board and through a connector (especially the latter) is very difficult. With the rising speeds, getting a connector out of the path can produce a substantial improvement in signal integrity.
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
That requires someone to administer the mailing lists, or to set up a process to let it be administered automatically. Reply-all, on the other hand, empowers small ad-hoc groups to form instantly around an issue, without red tape delay or extra expense that might provoke middle-management nipping-in-the-bud.
I've just started a contract at a very small company. (My work there is unrelated to I.T.) They contract their system administration from an individual supplier. Getting anything done is extra cost, so it doesn't happen unless it's critical.
On the project where I'm working we're in the early design discussions. Everybody on the project is in on everything. Reply all works just fine for what we need. (Indeed, the early problems with it were OMISSION of people who SHOULD have been on it.) Removing reply all would just mean most of the people in the group would spend extra time copying email addresses (and occasionally drop one, interfering with communication). Yes we might end up with a "please drop me" later in the project. But for now we're far better off with reply-all than without it.
I've been in companies where reply-all explosions were a problem. The solution was not to kill reply-all, but to create mailing list aliases and procedurally restrict who could mail to them. Then doing a reply-all to a message on a department-wide or division-wide mailing resulted in a bounce on mail to the big list and/or a reply just to the originator of the mail. Problem solved.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions.
It's not some right of the advertisers that's at issue. It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.
Now if the advertisers and the authors really wanted to get you to see the ads, they could literally embed the text of the ad in the text of the work, rather than embedding an easy-to-filter link. (This could be done automagically at the server.) Then you'd need some serious A.I. to do the cutting. But that would also make it harder for the advertiser to track how often the ad was seen (he'd have to trust the server) and eliminate the obnoxious graphic and animated ads.
(And they ARE obnoxious. I just started a new contract and the customer's I.T. department deployed Chrome with substantially less ad protection than the firefox+adblock plus+flashblock I'm used to. Popups/overs/unders are supposedly blocked, but the animated garbage and the mouse-over stuff that pops out and covers the screen I'm trying to read are horribly annoying, and they HAVE to be sucking up a lot of network bandwidth. If advertisers had just stuck to still images scattered around the page it wouldn't have attracted so much work on countermeasures.)
First off, the docket is already jam packed with more pressing matters, such as the fiscal cliff and credible long term budget and tax reforms; not to mention the fact that the economy is still lousy for many Americans
That's now. The legislative split after the election is nearly the same as before and there's two more years until the next round. Plenty of time to get to it before then.
Hollywood really pulled out all the stops for Obama this time around, raising money and entertaining the President and their lefty friends in swanky mansions nestled in the Hollywood hills. They raised millions for Obama
Gee, I wonder why the Republicans are suddenly into copyright reform. B-)... and it would be very easy for him to help them out because he (Obama) could simply focus on the aforementioned tax, budget and economic concerns and let any proposed copyright reforms simply fall by the wayside.
If the Republicans play it right they might do this, but get publicly dinged for doing it.
Finally, on the Republican side, there is *zero* chance that they will elect to spend their precious remaining political capital on something as obtuse as copyright reform. They're saving all their chips for the budget round...
Power, when exercised, doesn't get "used up". It grows. (Favors might get used up, but more are generated as well. Also, favors across the aisle are trivial compared to both favors and common cause within a party or a faction of one.)
- Oracle v. Google was about whether using an API makes a work derivative of the API, creating a copyright violation if the API is copyrighted and the user did not have a license. The answer was a big "NO!"
- GPL is about using copyright to force derivative works of GPLed code to also remain open, by only licensing them on terms that include propagating the license. (The point is to prevent a pathology of releasing into public domain, which allows people to create derived works and copyright them, locking the authors and public out of the improvements to the original work.)
Because Oracle v. Google declares that using an API does not make a work derivative, it directly affects GPL: The precedent establishes that GPL does not propagate through the use of GPLed APIs, even though GPLed code was not at issue in the trial.
A downside to switching over to Uverse is that they'll try to sucker you into switching your phone service to it, as well, rather than continuing it as POTS. (They have a very good price for it - free features, cheap rates, great long distance flat rate - as part of the bundle.)
Trouble is, they don't mention that Uverse voice is VoIP over the insanely-high-speed short-range DSL to the Fiber-at-the-curb conversion, not POTS back to the Central Office on the baseband of the pair. The conversion to POTS standard for your house phones is done in a box they hang on your wall, which you power via your electric service, and it has a battery good for about two hour in an outage (when it's new, and it's your job to replace it as it ages). So if you have trouble with your personal electrical service, or your area experiences a long outage, your phone dies as well just a couple hours into it when your battery runs down. (I think the fiber/copper box within a block or so has a similar issue even if you provide backup power to the one in your house.) A POTS phone, on a DSL or otherwise copper line normally runs off the batteries in the CO, which are typically good for a couple days and likely to have a generator for backup - already onsite or brought in before the batteries run down. (Long outages and disaster situations have also been noted for having the cellphone systems go out, as well, while the POTS phones keep working - though dialtone may be deliberately slowed to keep them from saturating with non-emergency traffic.)
So if you plan to use your landline phone for service in emergencies, switching it to Uverse breaks it.
(VoIP normally isn't capable of carrying high speed dialup or FAX service, either. This is due to both audio data compression in CODECs, or issues with inaccurate timing in the local box if they use a full 64k bps A-law or mu-law CODEC. There are workarounds - such as running a DSP in the local box that figures out you're running a data or FAX modem, becoming its opposite number, and transporting the data directly. But I don't know if the Uverse box even attepmts this. {I aborted the switch-to-Uverse when I found out about the included switch-to-VoIP.})
As I read it, that means: For each job "created or saved" about five were destroyed. That's because the median income for the period was about a fifth of that number, and the value of the money spent "creating or saving" those jobs was sucked out of the private sector, thus destroying about that number of jobs.
The value was sucked in one of about three ways: Direct taxation, currency inflation (diluting the existing money in private hands), or borrowing from those with money to invest - in competition with other borrowers who would have used it to create actual productive economic activity. That third one costs several times, by the way: Once when the investment money is pulled out of the economy initially, again when it must be paid off out of tax money, along with years of interest.
A Keynsian would prattle about the "multiplier effect" of the created jobs creating more. But the destroyed jobs also have the same multiplier effect, so the created/destroyed ratio remains the same if multiplier effect jobs are included (and the total job loss is far higher than the direct job loss minus the direct job creation.)
That ship already sailed. The decision on Obamacare blew out all the constitutional limits on what the Federal Government can regulate, provided they disguise the penalty for non-compliance as a tax. Five to four, and the swing vote was Roberts, the chief justice, appointed by George W. Bush.
This has been coming since the Marijuana Tax Act and the Federal Firearms Act of 1934. But National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius made it explicit, putting the stake firmly through the heart of Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co.
That happened a LONG time ago. WW I, the New Deal, and the creation of the Federal Reserve did it. The cancer has been growing since and, after a long and painful illness, it is finally killing the patient.
Romney could probably have gotten the Republican nomination fair-and-square, and if he had done it that way a bunch of people wouldn't have been alienated and abandoned the Republican party. Instead his people cheated blatantly and publicly and drove away, not just a few hundred thousand hardcore Ron Paul supporters, but a bunch of non-Paulite Rs. He lost FAR more than the margin by which he lost some key states in the general election.
The behavior of his people in the primary/caucus period proved they couldn't be trusted with government power. So they got what they deserved. And I'm proud to have been a part of it.
I've noticed a certain MS-centric viewpoint in many community college course on networking,. This probably has to do with MS giving schools a lot of resources.
Tell me about it.
I just started a database class at a full-blown 4-year-degree-granting college. The class requires the use of SQL Server 2008 Express (preferably R2) and its management studio. It's on a half-term, running at double speed to get done in eight weeks, so there's no time to even experiment with running parallel with MySQL, let alone attempting to do the assignments on it and falling back / testing on MS if something screws up. My home is now a pure unix/linux shop, so I (actually, my wife B-) ) configured up an XP system on a spare laptop just for this class. (We already have the firewall set up to provide a logically and physically separate "rednet" LAN to isolate any Microsoft machines - from when she had a similar situation at a community college.)
At first I wondered why the class couldn't use MySQL. It has about the same penetration as SQL server in the industry (and then there's Oracle, so MS is actually a small player in this pond), which means learning only the MS way may be carreer-limiting. MySQL is free, is open-source (so students could get under-the-hood if they wanted to see how the sausage is made), etc. Even asked The Prof if the school was considering switching over later - but answer was just that class is on it now. Then I cracked the book (From John Wiley & Sons), and it became clear:
"Now available to educational institutions adopting this Wiley textbook is a free 3-year membership in the MSDN Academic Alliance. The MSDN AA is designed to provide the easiest and most inexpensive way for academic departments to make the latest Microsoft software available in labs, classrooms, and student and on student and instructor PCs. Database software, including Access and SQL Server, is available though this Wiley and Microsoft publishing partnership, free of charge with the adoption of Gilleson's textbook.... Each copy of the software is the full version with no time limitation and can be used indefinitely for educational purposes."
Then in chapter 2: "The diagramming technique we will use is called the... E-R model.... there are many variations of the diagrams... We will use [the version] provided by Microsoft Visio..." And so on.
The schools are bribed with free, up-to-date, software and support IF they build their courses around the book. The publisher is bribed with a captive market into publishing a book that is designed to make students familiar only with the Microsoft ecosystem databases, documentation styles, and development tools. The students graduate ready to drop into a Microsoft-based operation but are left floundering and uncomfortable in a shop using other databases or documentation styles.
If two tools do similar jobs in the same use case, but one can be administered by someone who isn't a dedicated professional, and the other one requires a specialist, then within that use case, the easier to use tool is better.
Really? What if the one that doesn't require the specialist costs more than hiring or training up a specialist? What if the one that doesn't require a specialist has other costs - like lockin, single-source supplier dependency, higher vulnerability to attack, etc.
I'm not saying that is the case with AD vs Samba (especially samba4, which is NOT yet released for production use). I'm not in charge of deploying either and haven't had any reason to compare them. I'm just saying that administrator skill level is not the only cost to compare.
How the hell did the parent post get modded funny?
It said using channel 2 would REDUCE interference.
The channels in the bands used by WiFi (and other, narrower, systems) are 5 MHz wide. The WiFi signal is 25 MHz wide. So it uses five channels, starting with the one selected and going up. So to avoid overlap and interference, the selected channel number on two WiFi systems must differ by (at least) 5. In the U.S. the channel sets typically used for WiFi are channels 1-5 (select "1"), channels 6-10 (select "6"), and channels 11-15 (select "11").
Selecting channel 2 means you're using the top 4/5s of the first set and the bottom fifth of the second set. You will interfere with, and be degraded by, both those systems tuned to 1 AND those tuned to 6.
So "tune to channel 2 to reduce interference"? Ho ho ho!
Did you miss the part about this being in Canada? We don't have primaries, and the next federal election is several years off.
Yes I did miss it.
So run yourself. Parliamentary systems have the advantage that you can have real power without selling your soul to your pick of the top two parties. Let your neighbors get to know you and you might find it a lot easier than you think.
You can't win...they've got full time jobs doing this sorta thing.
Which is why you can't go to sleep after you win the first battle. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Tyrants are the moles in a very high stakes whack-a-mole game.
Thanks, EFF, for keeping track of these bloodsuckers.
By the time election round comes -- a) you forgot about the issues, b) the official got a cushy new job and will leave anyway and c) the competitor is even worse.
Why the hell are you waiting for the general election. You should be voting in the primaries, at least. Your rep doesn't vote the way you want? Deny him renomination for his party's slot on the ballot.
If you're really serious, get involved in a party's other activities. Become an officer, a delegate, etc. And be aware that it's a WAR, not a bunch of nice people playing by the rules. You have to hold their feet to the fire at all stages.
From the article, around $1,000 each and only for high risk patients.
That's for initial deployment. With Moore's law, economy of scale, and amortization of development and regulatory costs, it could get a LOT cheaper after a few years. Especially if it becomes widely adopted.
Why stop with breasts? A body stocking could search for hot spots across nearly the whole surface of a person. Knitting machines upgraded to include a distribution of sensors and their wiring could make such a device quite inexpensively. (The electronic package could be re-used with multiple "suits".)
Still, they don't don't have to be worn every day... what kind of granularity do you want? You could wear it once a week and still be way ahead of the game.
You could also lower a (wired) telephone for the person on the ground to discuss things with the aircraft crew, like what stuff needed to be delivered. Phone comes down, ground guy takes/makes call. Phone goes up. Cable with box comes down. Ground guy disconnects the snap. Cable goes back up. Rinse and repeat if you need more than one box.
Fly the aircraft high enough and it looks like a phone, or a box of stuff, is just being lowered by a cable out of the sky with no obvious source. And the craft has to be reasonably high for the cable to be stable, rather than circling, when it's near ground level.
I understand this was used by missionaries in remote locations. I wonder how careful they were to let the congregation know that they were talking to / getting stuff from other missionaries, rather than heaven. B -)
I hear you can also use it to raise (or lower) a guy in a harness.
The main disadvantage compared to skyhook is that the aircraft has to circle the landing zone for a half-hour or so - at radar-visible height. It's there long enough to shoot down, and puts a big target on whom/whatever you were interacting with on the ground. NOT what you want for a black op behind enemy lines. Skyhook just flies an airplane over the target, with nothing to distinguish that spot from anywhere else on the flight path.
Slashdot Mirror
No, seriously - other than churn out slightly-improved versions of the same product every 6 months, and attempt to sue their competitors into oblivion, what does Apple do?
Get their crowd of hypnotized tech fans and "because it's cool" hipsters to be early-adopters and drive THEIR version of "the next thing" into the position of being the first commercially successful version - creating the appearance that they came up with the concept (rather than just the first commercially successful design) - and leveraging this commercial success into enough perceived standing to sue the competition into oblivion.
Benefit for the rest of us: At least those with enough money and willingness to live in a walled garden, using only Apple's vision of how things should be done, get new stuff a little sooner.
Downside for the rest of us: Those of use who DON'T have the money, or AREN'T willing to live in a walled garden, end up waiting longer and paying more, or perhaps not getting the next-new-thing at all, due to Apple's litigiousness.
Dead on, Bob.
(Posting this rah-rah because I don't have mod points at the moment. Also: You just made my friends list.)
Now we are seeing the advent of high tech pump and dump.
I agree with pretty much everything you said except for having a minor issue with this point.
High tech pump-and-dump has been with us for a while. It was a major component of the "dotcom bubble" and has even been operated successfully (until busted) by juveniles on the comment features of stock ticker websites (such as Yahoo's).
What is new (if it really is new, rather than just the first one widely reported) is doing the "pump" part by suckering PRWeb into publishing a blatant forgery.
PRWeb, a subsidiary of Vocus, is in business to publish, for a fee, press releases from company PR departments, as a way of bringing them to the attention of the media and other interested parties. While the content of the press releases is the responsibility of their customers, they do (or should) have a responsibility to vet that each release is actually from the company it purports to be from.
If the cops have nothing to hide...then they have nothing to fear by being taped.
Isn't that pretty much what "the authorities" usually want to tell Joe Citizen?
Yes.
But, because the police are acting as agents of the state, it is appropriate to hold them to a stricter standard in this matter.
kudos to the first motherboard (and/or case) manufacturer that 'solves' this by adding a socket/slot mechanism that you solder the cpu to so you can still swap them out easily
Isn't the Intel chip a BGA? Aren't there already a plethora of high-signal-integrity sockets that accept chips in BGA carriers?
This may actually be a non-issue.
sounds like more of a cost cutting measure for intel... after all, they're in the business of making chips, not putting them in to a nice plug'n'play package for easy swapping.
Cost-cutting and/or signal integrity. Signal speeds are getting into microwave frequencies now and getting those through a connector and/or across an extra inch of PC board to get to it (running near and over/under other such signals) is a royal PITA that degrades, slows, and increases the rate of errors in data even when done right.
This doesn't necessarily mean there WON'T be a socketed version. It just means that Intel is punting the socket-and-baby-board design issues downstream rather than imposing their design choices on board manufacturers. Maybe the latter will all solder the chips to the mother boards. Maybe some will design proprietary baby board/socket combos. Maybe some of 'em will come up with a standard. (Maybe AMD will promulgate a standard that includes the ability to mount Intel chips - in order to encourage MOBO makers to build boards that will also accept AMD CPUs.) It's not Intel's problem any more.
... in fact I'd prefer soldered (as long as it had a good fan), since besides heat, the enemy of electronics is corrosion and bad connections.
Not to mention that sockets are EXPEN$IVE, even when bought in bulk.
And getting modern microwave-frequency data signals across an extra inch of board and through a connector (especially the latter) is very difficult. With the rising speeds, getting a connector out of the path can produce a substantial improvement in signal integrity.
The majority of reply-alls can be replaced by using mailing lists.
That requires someone to administer the mailing lists, or to set up a process to let it be administered automatically. Reply-all, on the other hand, empowers small ad-hoc groups to form instantly around an issue, without red tape delay or extra expense that might provoke middle-management nipping-in-the-bud.
I've just started a contract at a very small company. (My work there is unrelated to I.T.) They contract their system administration from an individual supplier. Getting anything done is extra cost, so it doesn't happen unless it's critical.
On the project where I'm working we're in the early design discussions. Everybody on the project is in on everything. Reply all works just fine for what we need. (Indeed, the early problems with it were OMISSION of people who SHOULD have been on it.) Removing reply all would just mean most of the people in the group would spend extra time copying email addresses (and occasionally drop one, interfering with communication). Yes we might end up with a "please drop me" later in the project. But for now we're far better off with reply-all than without it.
I've been in companies where reply-all explosions were a problem. The solution was not to kill reply-all, but to create mailing list aliases and procedurally restrict who could mail to them. Then doing a reply-all to a message on a department-wide or division-wide mailing resulted in a bounce on mail to the big list and/or a reply just to the originator of the mail. Problem solved.
firefox+adblock plus+flashblock +noscript
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions.
It's not some right of the advertisers that's at issue. It's about whether the author/publisher of the original work containing the link to the ads has the right to demand you view the ads that pay him if you view his work, or whether your right to cut out the ads and only view the remainder takes precedence.
Now if the advertisers and the authors really wanted to get you to see the ads, they could literally embed the text of the ad in the text of the work, rather than embedding an easy-to-filter link. (This could be done automagically at the server.) Then you'd need some serious A.I. to do the cutting. But that would also make it harder for the advertiser to track how often the ad was seen (he'd have to trust the server) and eliminate the obnoxious graphic and animated ads.
(And they ARE obnoxious. I just started a new contract and the customer's I.T. department deployed Chrome with substantially less ad protection than the firefox+adblock plus+flashblock I'm used to. Popups/overs/unders are supposedly blocked, but the animated garbage and the mouse-over stuff that pops out and covers the screen I'm trying to read are horribly annoying, and they HAVE to be sucking up a lot of network bandwidth. If advertisers had just stuck to still images scattered around the page it wouldn't have attracted so much work on countermeasures.)
First off, the docket is already jam packed with more pressing matters, such as the fiscal cliff and credible long term budget and tax reforms; not to mention the fact that the economy is still lousy for many Americans
That's now. The legislative split after the election is nearly the same as before and there's two more years until the next round. Plenty of time to get to it before then.
Hollywood really pulled out all the stops for Obama this time around, raising money and entertaining the President and their lefty friends in swanky mansions nestled in the Hollywood hills. They raised millions for Obama
Gee, I wonder why the Republicans are suddenly into copyright reform. B-) ... and it would be very easy for him to help them out because he (Obama) could simply focus on the aforementioned tax, budget and economic concerns and let any proposed copyright reforms simply fall by the wayside.
If the Republicans play it right they might do this, but get publicly dinged for doing it.
Finally, on the Republican side, there is *zero* chance that they will elect to spend their precious remaining political capital on something as obtuse as copyright reform. They're saving all their chips for the budget round ...
Power, when exercised, doesn't get "used up". It grows. (Favors might get used up, but more are generated as well. Also, favors across the aisle are trivial compared to both favors and common cause within a party or a faction of one.)
Oracle v. Google was not about GPL.
Yes, it WAS about GPL, in a roundabout way.
- Oracle v. Google was about whether using an API makes a work derivative of the API, creating a copyright violation if the API is copyrighted and the user did not have a license. The answer was a big "NO!"
- GPL is about using copyright to force derivative works of GPLed code to also remain open, by only licensing them on terms that include propagating the license. (The point is to prevent a pathology of releasing into public domain, which allows people to create derived works and copyright them, locking the authors and public out of the improvements to the original work.)
Because Oracle v. Google declares that using an API does not make a work derivative, it directly affects GPL: The precedent establishes that GPL does not propagate through the use of GPLed APIs, even though GPLed code was not at issue in the trial.
A downside to switching over to Uverse is that they'll try to sucker you into switching your phone service to it, as well, rather than continuing it as POTS. (They have a very good price for it - free features, cheap rates, great long distance flat rate - as part of the bundle.)
Trouble is, they don't mention that Uverse voice is VoIP over the insanely-high-speed short-range DSL to the Fiber-at-the-curb conversion, not POTS back to the Central Office on the baseband of the pair. The conversion to POTS standard for your house phones is done in a box they hang on your wall, which you power via your electric service, and it has a battery good for about two hour in an outage (when it's new, and it's your job to replace it as it ages). So if you have trouble with your personal electrical service, or your area experiences a long outage, your phone dies as well just a couple hours into it when your battery runs down. (I think the fiber/copper box within a block or so has a similar issue even if you provide backup power to the one in your house.) A POTS phone, on a DSL or otherwise copper line normally runs off the batteries in the CO, which are typically good for a couple days and likely to have a generator for backup - already onsite or brought in before the batteries run down. (Long outages and disaster situations have also been noted for having the cellphone systems go out, as well, while the POTS phones keep working - though dialtone may be deliberately slowed to keep them from saturating with non-emergency traffic.)
So if you plan to use your landline phone for service in emergencies, switching it to Uverse breaks it.
(VoIP normally isn't capable of carrying high speed dialup or FAX service, either. This is due to both audio data compression in CODECs, or issues with inaccurate timing in the local box if they use a full 64k bps A-law or mu-law CODEC. There are workarounds - such as running a DSP in the local box that figures out you're running a data or FAX modem, becoming its opposite number, and transporting the data directly. But I don't know if the Uverse box even attepmts this. {I aborted the switch-to-Uverse when I found out about the included switch-to-VoIP.})
Re sig: "Government "economic stimulus" programs destroy more jobs than they create." Can you present concrete evidence of this?
Depends on what you would accept as "proof".
Consider this article: "Obama's Economists: 'Stimulus' Has Cost $278,000 per Job." No doubt that's an underestimate, too, but let's take it as accurate.
As I read it, that means: For each job "created or saved" about five were destroyed. That's because the median income for the period was about a fifth of that number, and the value of the money spent "creating or saving" those jobs was sucked out of the private sector, thus destroying about that number of jobs.
The value was sucked in one of about three ways: Direct taxation, currency inflation (diluting the existing money in private hands), or borrowing from those with money to invest - in competition with other borrowers who would have used it to create actual productive economic activity. That third one costs several times, by the way: Once when the investment money is pulled out of the economy initially, again when it must be paid off out of tax money, along with years of interest.
A Keynsian would prattle about the "multiplier effect" of the created jobs creating more. But the destroyed jobs also have the same multiplier effect, so the created/destroyed ratio remains the same if multiplier effect jobs are included (and the total job loss is far higher than the direct job loss minus the direct job creation.)
For a classic explanation of how this happens see the broken window falacy.
That ship already sailed. The decision on Obamacare blew out all the constitutional limits on what the Federal Government can regulate, provided they disguise the penalty for non-compliance as a tax. Five to four, and the swing vote was Roberts, the chief justice, appointed by George W. Bush.
This has been coming since the Marijuana Tax Act and the Federal Firearms Act of 1934. But National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius made it explicit, putting the stake firmly through the heart of Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co.
And so ends america as our fathers knew it.
That happened a LONG time ago. WW I, the New Deal, and the creation of the Federal Reserve did it. The cancer has been growing since and, after a long and painful illness, it is finally killing the patient.
Romney could probably have gotten the Republican nomination fair-and-square, and if he had done it that way a bunch of people wouldn't have been alienated and abandoned the Republican party. Instead his people cheated blatantly and publicly and drove away, not just a few hundred thousand hardcore Ron Paul supporters, but a bunch of non-Paulite Rs. He lost FAR more than the margin by which he lost some key states in the general election.
The behavior of his people in the primary/caucus period proved they couldn't be trusted with government power. So they got what they deserved. And I'm proud to have been a part of it.
Take that, Neocons!
I've noticed a certain MS-centric viewpoint in many community college course on networking,. This probably has to do with MS giving schools a lot of resources.
Tell me about it.
I just started a database class at a full-blown 4-year-degree-granting college. The class requires the use of SQL Server 2008 Express (preferably R2) and its management studio. It's on a half-term, running at double speed to get done in eight weeks, so there's no time to even experiment with running parallel with MySQL, let alone attempting to do the assignments on it and falling back / testing on MS if something screws up. My home is now a pure unix/linux shop, so I (actually, my wife B-) ) configured up an XP system on a spare laptop just for this class. (We already have the firewall set up to provide a logically and physically separate "rednet" LAN to isolate any Microsoft machines - from when she had a similar situation at a community college.)
At first I wondered why the class couldn't use MySQL. It has about the same penetration as SQL server in the industry (and then there's Oracle, so MS is actually a small player in this pond), which means learning only the MS way may be carreer-limiting. MySQL is free, is open-source (so students could get under-the-hood if they wanted to see how the sausage is made), etc. Even asked The Prof if the school was considering switching over later - but answer was just that class is on it now. Then I cracked the book (From John Wiley & Sons), and it became clear:
"Now available to educational institutions adopting this Wiley textbook is a free 3-year membership in the MSDN Academic Alliance. The MSDN AA is designed to provide the easiest and most inexpensive way for academic departments to make the latest Microsoft software available in labs, classrooms, and student and on student and instructor PCs. Database software, including Access and SQL Server, is available though this Wiley and Microsoft publishing partnership, free of charge with the adoption of Gilleson's textbook. ... Each copy of the software is the full version with no time limitation and can be used indefinitely for educational purposes."
Then in chapter 2: "The diagramming technique we will use is called the ... E-R model. ... there are many variations of the diagrams ... We will use [the version] provided by Microsoft Visio ..." And so on.
The schools are bribed with free, up-to-date, software and support IF they build their courses around the book. The publisher is bribed with a captive market into publishing a book that is designed to make students familiar only with the Microsoft ecosystem databases, documentation styles, and development tools. The students graduate ready to drop into a Microsoft-based operation but are left floundering and uncomfortable in a shop using other databases or documentation styles.
If two tools do similar jobs in the same use case, but one can be administered by someone who isn't a dedicated professional, and the other one requires a specialist, then within that use case, the easier to use tool is better.
Really? What if the one that doesn't require the specialist costs more than hiring or training up a specialist? What if the one that doesn't require a specialist has other costs - like lockin, single-source supplier dependency, higher vulnerability to attack, etc.
I'm not saying that is the case with AD vs Samba (especially samba4, which is NOT yet released for production use). I'm not in charge of deploying either and haven't had any reason to compare them. I'm just saying that administrator skill level is not the only cost to compare.
How the hell did the parent post get modded funny?
It said using channel 2 would REDUCE interference.
The channels in the bands used by WiFi (and other, narrower, systems) are 5 MHz wide. The WiFi signal is 25 MHz wide. So it uses five channels, starting with the one selected and going up. So to avoid overlap and interference, the selected channel number on two WiFi systems must differ by (at least) 5. In the U.S. the channel sets typically used for WiFi are channels 1-5 (select "1"), channels 6-10 (select "6"), and channels 11-15 (select "11").
Selecting channel 2 means you're using the top 4/5s of the first set and the bottom fifth of the second set. You will interfere with, and be degraded by, both those systems tuned to 1 AND those tuned to 6.
So "tune to channel 2 to reduce interference"? Ho ho ho!
Did you miss the part about this being in Canada? We don't have primaries, and the next federal election is several years off.
Yes I did miss it.
So run yourself. Parliamentary systems have the advantage that you can have real power without selling your soul to your pick of the top two parties. Let your neighbors get to know you and you might find it a lot easier than you think.
You can't win...they've got full time jobs doing this sorta thing.
Which is why you can't go to sleep after you win the first battle. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Tyrants are the moles in a very high stakes whack-a-mole game.
Thanks, EFF, for keeping track of these bloodsuckers.
By the time election round comes -- a) you forgot about the issues, b) the official got a cushy new job and will leave anyway and c) the competitor is even worse.
Why the hell are you waiting for the general election. You should be voting in the primaries, at least. Your rep doesn't vote the way you want? Deny him renomination for his party's slot on the ballot.
If you're really serious, get involved in a party's other activities. Become an officer, a delegate, etc. And be aware that it's a WAR, not a bunch of nice people playing by the rules. You have to hold their feet to the fire at all stages.
From the article, around $1,000 each and only for high risk patients.
That's for initial deployment. With Moore's law, economy of scale, and amortization of development and regulatory costs, it could get a LOT cheaper after a few years. Especially if it becomes widely adopted.
Why stop with breasts? A body stocking could search for hot spots across nearly the whole surface of a person. Knitting machines upgraded to include a distribution of sensors and their wiring could make such a device quite inexpensively. (The electronic package could be re-used with multiple "suits".)
Still, they don't don't have to be worn every day... what kind of granularity do you want? You could wear it once a week and still be way ahead of the game.
Agree.
You could also lower a (wired) telephone for the person on the ground to discuss things with the aircraft crew, like what stuff needed to be delivered. Phone comes down, ground guy takes/makes call. Phone goes up. Cable with box comes down. Ground guy disconnects the snap. Cable goes back up. Rinse and repeat if you need more than one box.
Fly the aircraft high enough and it looks like a phone, or a box of stuff, is just being lowered by a cable out of the sky with no obvious source. And the craft has to be reasonably high for the cable to be stable, rather than circling, when it's near ground level.
I understand this was used by missionaries in remote locations. I wonder how careful they were to let the congregation know that they were talking to / getting stuff from other missionaries, rather than heaven. B -)
I hear you can also use it to raise (or lower) a guy in a harness.
The main disadvantage compared to skyhook is that the aircraft has to circle the landing zone for a half-hour or so - at radar-visible height. It's there long enough to shoot down, and puts a big target on whom/whatever you were interacting with on the ground. NOT what you want for a black op behind enemy lines. Skyhook just flies an airplane over the target, with nothing to distinguish that spot from anywhere else on the flight path.