Bah, I followed this thread right down to here, but it's clearly just another counter-culture scam! I'll catch the bacon flu when it's popular like everyone else will, thank you very much.
First thing. The label you're looking for is "senescence." Not everyone has it. It only occurs in older people. It will develop in everyone, but the key processes involved in aging do not happen in the young. So, no. Not everyone is dying of something right now.
Second thing. You're so remarkably far away from reality that I'm just going to leave you with two words that you can google at your own leisure. Euthanasia. Suicide.
Web caching hasn't been a particularly useful way to reduce traffic for some years now. In 1998, yes, HTTP was over 60% of traffic by volume. It's 2009, though, and HTTP is down to 30%, while p2p network traffic is up to 60%. If you want to have a measurable impact on today's traffic, you need to cache bittorrent and ed2k traffic. It can be done, though.
Here in Australia, you can expect to have a monthly quota of around 10-15GB, at least until you're prepared to pay over $100/month on it. 10GB quota on a 100mbit FTTP link? What a fucking joke. Less than 20 minutes to blow the entire quota allocated for that 43,000 minute period? What. A. Fucking. Joke.
Spend the $48bn on a new international pipe so I can use the 5mbit/sec link I have now, please, Mr Rudd.
* 7.1 Obligations. Each party will: (a) protect the other party's Confidential Information with the same standard of care it uses to protect its own Confidential Information; and (b) not disclose the Confidential Information, except to affiliates, employees and agents who need to know it and who have agreed in writing to keep it confidential. Each party (and any affiliates, employees and agents to whom it has disclosed Confidential Information) may use Confidential Information only to exercise rights and fulfill obligations under this Agreement, while using reasonable care to protect it. Each party is responsible for any actions of its affiliates, employees and agents in violation of this Section.
Google claims they are obliged to protect your data hosted through their premium service with the same standard of care they apply to their own confidential information.
The decision to go with Google Apps or self-hosting should come down to three factors: (a) how well can you care for the data in-house; (b) how reliable do you think Google are at holding to their terms of service; and (c) how well do you think you'd fare in court if you had to challenge their obligations?
For most small businesses, outsourcing email and document stores is a big win. There's a security risk inherent in putting data onto a server no matter where it's hosted, but if you do it yourself the overhead costs are very large -- you need a backup strategy, system maintenance, and technical support. Ask an aggregate provider to do it and the overhead costs are quite low.
But seriously, good post. I just couldn't resist the "funny because they are true (or at least grounded in truth)" observations. Comics mostly suck nowadays, and children's entertainment is largely like nails on the chalkboard while having your brain sucked out through a straw.
Ah, yes, I much prefer the pleasantly erudite cornucopia of reality TV and CSI spin-offs that are the main-stay of adult 'entertainment.'
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that there's already black holes slowly destroying THE UNIVERSE. They're going to the whole thing eventually; there's a giant one busily destroying THE GALAXY right now. Maybe you're more concerned with the microscopically small part of THE UNIVERSE that is necessary to sustain your own life?
A glance at a world map should enlighten you. Japan is 750 miles from the coast of China, and 1,200 miles from Hong Kong. Laying an undersea cable from Japan to an IX in China or Hong Kong is a big operation, but one that is feasible for a fairly small consortium of backbone providers to undertake. Once on dry land, it is comparatively cheap to lay more cable to increase capacity between Asia and Europe, and there's a lot of cable between Europe and North America. Going direct to North America, it's 3,800 miles to Honolulu, and another 2,400 miles to San Francisco. Those are longer and more expensive to lay, and would require a large consortium of providers to manage.
From Australasia, you're going either north to China (4,700 miles) or north-east to California (9,500 miles). Either journey needs a large consortium. To make that consortium's life grand, the incumbent undersea cable operators have a tendency to slash prices on their cables before the new cables have even been laid, thus typically sinking the new venture before it gets out of the dock.
There's a new thick pipe being laid down from Guam at present, around 6,000 miles of cable being laid by two ships (4,200 miles in one, the rest in the other). That cable has already been paid for, more or less, so in the next year or two things may get a bit better. Google Pipe Networks for more info.
Connection fees aren't negligible. I'd say it's cheaper to buy any music or movies you want than it is to reconnect every few weeks, but I doubt you'll need to actually engage in unauthorised p2p transfers of copyright material in order to fall victim to this sort of law.
My bank sends an SMS to my phone with an authorisation number for most transactions (there are a small number of pre-approved recipients of transfers, and I can set up new ones pre-approved for my own account). It's out of band, cheap and easy to implement, and reasonably secure. No fuss, no muss, no mass mailout to existing customers.
Diebold's business model is based on making several products, only one of which is the voting machine. They provide the ATMs for many banks in several countries, for instance. They will, like all businesses, do what they can to not be legally liable for problems in their products: for ATMs you can be reasonably sure that most banks will play hard-ball in demanding quality assurances. For voting machines, it appears that the purchaser(s) didn't much care to press the quality issue far.
Science is the process of applying explanations to observable phenomena, making predictions based on those explanations, devising experiments to observe the accuracy of those predictions, and applying the knowledge learned in that observation to refine or redefine explanations.
Gravity is an excellent example. For millennia, the best explanation humanity had for gravity was that the weight of an object caused it to fall. When science was invented, this theory made a prediction: heavier items should fall faster than light items. The prediction was tested (on a decline, not as a fall) and it was shown that downwards acceleration is independent of weight. This lead to Newton's theory of gravity, which served admirably well to explain all observable phenomena at the time.
Measurements got better, though, and some observations no longer matched up with Newtonian gravity. There were slight differences, most notably with the orbit of Mercury, that could not be explained by Newton's theory. Hooray for us, along came General Relativity, which explained everything Newtonian gravity did, as well as the new observations. It made new predictions which were measured and shown to be correct (such as the expansion of the universe, which Hubble confirmed in '29).
Again, measurements got better -- down to the sub-atomic level. Quantum theory turned out to be incompatible with General Relativity, besides which, General Relativity can't explain what happens inside a black hole, so there are again observable phenomena which do not match the most likely explanation.
This brings us to the cutting edge of physics research -- M theory. M theory suggests there are more dimensions than those that we can currently observe, and gravity is affected by those dimensions. A lot of tortuous thinking lead people to believe that, if you smash two sub-atomic particles together at around 99.9% of the speed of light, the gravity contained in those extra dimensions should provide enough additional energy on top of what you already put in to collapse the two particles together so densely that they form a black hole. This is testable. The Large Hadron Collider at Geneva is, amongst other things, designed to test this.
So, at present, the most likely explanation of gravity is M theory.
And I cannot ever prove it to you, only show that its predictions match up to all observable phenomena we can lay our measuring devices on.
Like the GP said, that's playing semantic games. Strictly speaking, knowledge is justified and demonstrable belief in a truth -- but it's still belief. Just like calling evolution a theory seeks to apply the vernacular interpretation of "theory" to the scientific expression of a testable idea, calling belief something unrelated to reason isn't helping anything.
Of course, since religious belief has not so far been justified or demonstrated as true to any reasonable standard of justify or demonstrate, it is fair to say that religious belief is apparently arbitrary, and reject it.
Because some dickweeb thought it would be a good idea to give droids personalities -- and not just quirky cheerful goofball "personalities" but full strength, industrial grade personalities and emotions, including fear, greed, cowardice, avarice, and kinship. Droids in the Star Wars universe are a slave race: they're intelligent, conscious, and regularly mind wiped to keep them obedient and in line.
Droids, therefore, have mechanical maintenance costs AND human (alien, lifeform, whatever) resources management costs. Overall, humans are probably cheaper labour: bacta is more readily available than durasteel, after all.
Huh, never even considered that. Might be different laws in Oz, but we do have shipping laws about dangerous goods. Eh well, I'm not in jail, clearly I didn't blow up some hapless postman.
Yes, so I understand. But then, I don't care, or need to care, who made what part of my MBP. If it breaks, Apple fix it. Same goes for Dell, Gateway (do they still exist?) and other brand manufacturers. They brand it and package it, they take the responsibility for it working as per the terms of the warranty, they all usually do a reasonable job of fulfilling those terms. The GP should've called Apple, is all I'm saying.:)
I had that on my first edition MBP. I called Apple, they said there was a recall on that brand of battery, they had a new one shipped to me in two days, no cost as long as I returned the warped one via the included shipping box.
Debarring them, stripping them of their pensions, and sending them, judges, to jail... should be deterrence enough. You think a pair of judges are going to have a good time in jail? I would imagine they'll be spending all their prison time living in fear of shivs, right up until the point that fear proves to have been justified.
American politics are remarkably polar. There are inexhaustible supplies of people willing to assign all blame for every problem to one party or the other, and very few people willing to realise that any politician who is not willing to sell America for a few thousand dollars can't afford to run in the media circus that is a U.S. election.
Rudd is a prat. He's clearly a prat. He's always been a prat. He'll always be a prat. If you voted for a prat because you didn't like a greaseball taking over from a monkey, ok, but you still voted for a prat. He's the PM, but he still looks like he expects the school bullies to push him into the women's bathroom, and isn't afraid to misuse his school monitor's ribbon to give detention to anyone who talks to the girl he likes.
Don't blame me, I voted [1] Donkey. Well, I voted for an independent, but that's pretty much the same result. And also the only way to send the message that I do not support a two-party system.
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Bah, I followed this thread right down to here, but it's clearly just another counter-culture scam! I'll catch the bacon flu when it's popular like everyone else will, thank you very much.
First thing. The label you're looking for is "senescence." Not everyone has it. It only occurs in older people. It will develop in everyone, but the key processes involved in aging do not happen in the young. So, no. Not everyone is dying of something right now.
Second thing. You're so remarkably far away from reality that I'm just going to leave you with two words that you can google at your own leisure. Euthanasia. Suicide.
Web caching hasn't been a particularly useful way to reduce traffic for some years now. In 1998, yes, HTTP was over 60% of traffic by volume. It's 2009, though, and HTTP is down to 30%, while p2p network traffic is up to 60%. If you want to have a measurable impact on today's traffic, you need to cache bittorrent and ed2k traffic. It can be done, though.
Here in Australia, you can expect to have a monthly quota of around 10-15GB, at least until you're prepared to pay over $100/month on it. 10GB quota on a 100mbit FTTP link? What a fucking joke. Less than 20 minutes to blow the entire quota allocated for that 43,000 minute period? What. A. Fucking. Joke.
Spend the $48bn on a new international pipe so I can use the 5mbit/sec link I have now, please, Mr Rudd.
... wait, this is only partly an april fools? gawd.
From Google Apps terms of service:
Google claims they are obliged to protect your data hosted through their premium service with the same standard of care they apply to their own confidential information.
The decision to go with Google Apps or self-hosting should come down to three factors: (a) how well can you care for the data in-house; (b) how reliable do you think Google are at holding to their terms of service; and (c) how well do you think you'd fare in court if you had to challenge their obligations?
For most small businesses, outsourcing email and document stores is a big win. There's a security risk inherent in putting data onto a server no matter where it's hosted, but if you do it yourself the overhead costs are very large -- you need a backup strategy, system maintenance, and technical support. Ask an aggregate provider to do it and the overhead costs are quite low.
Real omnipotent beings don't need revision control.
It's art if you still like it after you ejaculate, right?
But seriously, good post. I just couldn't resist the "funny because they are true (or at least grounded in truth)" observations. Comics mostly suck nowadays, and children's entertainment is largely like nails on the chalkboard while having your brain sucked out through a straw.
Ah, yes, I much prefer the pleasantly erudite cornucopia of reality TV and CSI spin-offs that are the main-stay of adult 'entertainment.'
I'm sorry to be the one to tell you that there's already black holes slowly destroying THE UNIVERSE. They're going to the whole thing eventually; there's a giant one busily destroying THE GALAXY right now. Maybe you're more concerned with the microscopically small part of THE UNIVERSE that is necessary to sustain your own life?
Yours in Pedantry,
Ekhben
And the correct word is viruses (of which, I've never had one under Windows).
I've never had one either -- they hunt in packs!
(Not getting involved in the pointless debate of how relatively easy it is to do X on system Y).
A glance at a world map should enlighten you. Japan is 750 miles from the coast of China, and 1,200 miles from Hong Kong. Laying an undersea cable from Japan to an IX in China or Hong Kong is a big operation, but one that is feasible for a fairly small consortium of backbone providers to undertake. Once on dry land, it is comparatively cheap to lay more cable to increase capacity between Asia and Europe, and there's a lot of cable between Europe and North America. Going direct to North America, it's 3,800 miles to Honolulu, and another 2,400 miles to San Francisco. Those are longer and more expensive to lay, and would require a large consortium of providers to manage.
From Australasia, you're going either north to China (4,700 miles) or north-east to California (9,500 miles). Either journey needs a large consortium. To make that consortium's life grand, the incumbent undersea cable operators have a tendency to slash prices on their cables before the new cables have even been laid, thus typically sinking the new venture before it gets out of the dock.
There's a new thick pipe being laid down from Guam at present, around 6,000 miles of cable being laid by two ships (4,200 miles in one, the rest in the other). That cable has already been paid for, more or less, so in the next year or two things may get a bit better. Google Pipe Networks for more info.
Connection fees aren't negligible. I'd say it's cheaper to buy any music or movies you want than it is to reconnect every few weeks, but I doubt you'll need to actually engage in unauthorised p2p transfers of copyright material in order to fall victim to this sort of law.
My bank sends an SMS to my phone with an authorisation number for most transactions (there are a small number of pre-approved recipients of transfers, and I can set up new ones pre-approved for my own account). It's out of band, cheap and easy to implement, and reasonably secure. No fuss, no muss, no mass mailout to existing customers.
Diebold's business model is based on making several products, only one of which is the voting machine. They provide the ATMs for many banks in several countries, for instance. They will, like all businesses, do what they can to not be legally liable for problems in their products: for ATMs you can be reasonably sure that most banks will play hard-ball in demanding quality assurances. For voting machines, it appears that the purchaser(s) didn't much care to press the quality issue far.
Welcome to scientific understanding.
Science is the process of applying explanations to observable phenomena, making predictions based on those explanations, devising experiments to observe the accuracy of those predictions, and applying the knowledge learned in that observation to refine or redefine explanations.
Gravity is an excellent example. For millennia, the best explanation humanity had for gravity was that the weight of an object caused it to fall. When science was invented, this theory made a prediction: heavier items should fall faster than light items. The prediction was tested (on a decline, not as a fall) and it was shown that downwards acceleration is independent of weight. This lead to Newton's theory of gravity, which served admirably well to explain all observable phenomena at the time.
Measurements got better, though, and some observations no longer matched up with Newtonian gravity. There were slight differences, most notably with the orbit of Mercury, that could not be explained by Newton's theory. Hooray for us, along came General Relativity, which explained everything Newtonian gravity did, as well as the new observations. It made new predictions which were measured and shown to be correct (such as the expansion of the universe, which Hubble confirmed in '29).
Again, measurements got better -- down to the sub-atomic level. Quantum theory turned out to be incompatible with General Relativity, besides which, General Relativity can't explain what happens inside a black hole, so there are again observable phenomena which do not match the most likely explanation.
This brings us to the cutting edge of physics research -- M theory. M theory suggests there are more dimensions than those that we can currently observe, and gravity is affected by those dimensions. A lot of tortuous thinking lead people to believe that, if you smash two sub-atomic particles together at around 99.9% of the speed of light, the gravity contained in those extra dimensions should provide enough additional energy on top of what you already put in to collapse the two particles together so densely that they form a black hole. This is testable. The Large Hadron Collider at Geneva is, amongst other things, designed to test this.
So, at present, the most likely explanation of gravity is M theory.
And I cannot ever prove it to you, only show that its predictions match up to all observable phenomena we can lay our measuring devices on.
Like the GP said, that's playing semantic games. Strictly speaking, knowledge is justified and demonstrable belief in a truth -- but it's still belief. Just like calling evolution a theory seeks to apply the vernacular interpretation of "theory" to the scientific expression of a testable idea, calling belief something unrelated to reason isn't helping anything.
Of course, since religious belief has not so far been justified or demonstrated as true to any reasonable standard of justify or demonstrate, it is fair to say that religious belief is apparently arbitrary, and reject it.
Because some dickweeb thought it would be a good idea to give droids personalities -- and not just quirky cheerful goofball "personalities" but full strength, industrial grade personalities and emotions, including fear, greed, cowardice, avarice, and kinship. Droids in the Star Wars universe are a slave race: they're intelligent, conscious, and regularly mind wiped to keep them obedient and in line.
Droids, therefore, have mechanical maintenance costs AND human (alien, lifeform, whatever) resources management costs. Overall, humans are probably cheaper labour: bacta is more readily available than durasteel, after all.
Huh, never even considered that. Might be different laws in Oz, but we do have shipping laws about dangerous goods. Eh well, I'm not in jail, clearly I didn't blow up some hapless postman.
Yes, so I understand. But then, I don't care, or need to care, who made what part of my MBP. If it breaks, Apple fix it. Same goes for Dell, Gateway (do they still exist?) and other brand manufacturers. They brand it and package it, they take the responsibility for it working as per the terms of the warranty, they all usually do a reasonable job of fulfilling those terms. The GP should've called Apple, is all I'm saying. :)
I had that on my first edition MBP. I called Apple, they said there was a recall on that brand of battery, they had a new one shipped to me in two days, no cost as long as I returned the warped one via the included shipping box.
Yeah -- the American penal population is over 10% of the total Australian population, we'd oppose needing to feed that many new mouths!
Debarring them, stripping them of their pensions, and sending them, judges, to jail... should be deterrence enough. You think a pair of judges are going to have a good time in jail? I would imagine they'll be spending all their prison time living in fear of shivs, right up until the point that fear proves to have been justified.
American politics are remarkably polar. There are inexhaustible supplies of people willing to assign all blame for every problem to one party or the other, and very few people willing to realise that any politician who is not willing to sell America for a few thousand dollars can't afford to run in the media circus that is a U.S. election.
Bravo.
Rudd is a prat. He's clearly a prat. He's always been a prat. He'll always be a prat. If you voted for a prat because you didn't like a greaseball taking over from a monkey, ok, but you still voted for a prat. He's the PM, but he still looks like he expects the school bullies to push him into the women's bathroom, and isn't afraid to misuse his school monitor's ribbon to give detention to anyone who talks to the girl he likes.
Don't blame me, I voted [1] Donkey. Well, I voted for an independent, but that's pretty much the same result. And also the only way to send the message that I do not support a two-party system.