Wrongo. If it's true that US dollars spent abroad never come back to the US, why would anyone abroad perceive dollars to have any value at all? Don't say, "because you can convert US dollars to local currency!" This is an effect of the fact that foreigners perceive dollars as valuable, not a cause.
The ultimate value of a US dollar, anywhere in the world, comes from its power to buy goods and services from US businesses, period. Those dollars being spent overseas find their way back to the US. Perhaps indirectly, perhaps over many years, and perhaps passing through many hands (and foreign reserve banks) on the way. But if they weren't ultimately headed back into US pockets, nobody overseas would bother exchanging them.
Someone that actually has an understanding of economics commenting on a ridiculous economic theory? Sorry, we can't stand for this.
I will make one note; if there's to be any taxes I wouldn't mind seeing, it would be a tax on large inheritances. After all, this would also be, in my opinion, a disincentive for the recipient to actually work to achieve, since such inheritance would bypass the work part, and cut straight to achievement.
The problem with taxing inheritance is that such taxes destroy small businesses and family businesses. In particular this is a major issue with family farms in the United States. A typical family farm is comprised of non-liquid assets (land, barns, silos, tractors, combines, etc.) frequently worth several million dollars. Even with today's inheritance tax rates, John-boy has a hard time holding on to the farm when Pa dies.
Now take the case where urban sprawl has lead to the development of the area around the farm. When the land can be subdivided and sold off to builders for suburban McMansions, it can be worth tens of millions of dollars. John-boy's great-great-grand-pappy may have homesteaded that farm before the civil war, but now John-boy needs to come up with $5,000,000 to pay the tax bill. That doesn't seem fair.
And from the other side, if I've worked hard and earned something, why shouldn't I be able to do what I want with it, including give it to my kids. How is this any different than the tax man coming to my house Christmas morning, totaling up the value of the gifts each of my children opens, and asking each of them for a check? I earned it, I paid taxes on it once already, why should it be taxed again?
And pragmatically every time a tax is raised people are going to work harder to evade it, by legal and illegal means. Does it really help if we raise a tax, but then the people who are being taxed more move away? If we tax the rich, they'll move to the Bahamas. Then we're left with noone to tax.
I've been using the treo 600 for about 3 or 4 weeks now, and I agree with your observations about the battery. I'm in the habit of plugging it in whenever I sit at my desk for an extended period, and I charge it every night. Fortunately, the battery in the Treo is not degraded by shallow cycles.
I also purchased a retractable charge-n-sync cable from boxwave.com, which allows me to charge from a usb port. It is a great tool when using pdanet for extended periods, and it means I don't have to carry yet another wall wart while travelling. It is real nice to VPN into a customer site, attach to a server with VNC, and perform a software upgrade while sitting on the Long Island Rail Road heading home after a long day.
I use software from goodlink (www.good.com) for my email. It replaces the bundled email/notes/calendar/contact programs with an application that integrates with my company's Microsoft Exchange. Everything I do on a day to day basis in Outlook I can do from my Treo.
As a field engineer for an enterprise software firm, I spend most of my time at client sites. Many clients, due to policy or firewall configuration, won't allow me to access my corporate systems. With my treo, I can have an engineer email me a patch, download it to the SD card, put it onto a client system with a small USB reader like the Zio!, and apply it.
Machines which are not well suited to this benchmark, or do not have network technologies/topologies well matching linpacks requirements will perform poorly at it, but possibly very well for their chosen purpose.
In my experience, Sun does a very good job building servers for medium to large scale corporate computing. Rendering farms and supercomputers are not its thing. But if I'm building a database for a typical corporate application, or even a data warehouse, Sun/Oracle are going to be at the top of the heap - at least until I need to go to Terradata or some other exotic solution.
Lots of corporate applications are not processor intensive, but need high quality I/O gear. Databases need lots of RAM and the fastest disk arrays one can afford. Processors are relatively minor considerations in comparison.
I saw a documentary a few years ago where geologists where saying the next big Ice Age was supposed to happen now.
15000 years ago 1 km of ice covered Scandinavia and half of Germany..I dunno about the U.S., but it isn't cool.
I live within a half mile of the terminal morraine. I'd have to move, but at least I could stay in the neighborhood.:)
A brief Synopsis - How Global Warming = Ice Age
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 4, Informative
The Gulf of Mexico is a large tropical sea with very warm water. A major ocean current, called the Gulf Stream, carries warm water from the Gulf up the east coast of the United States, starts to curve to the east as it passes Virginia, makes a sharper turn east near Cape Cod, heads straight for Ireland and Britain, turns south and heads down the French coast to Spain. The heat from the Gulf Stream warms northwestern Europe, and is the reason why London is as far north as Quebec and Moscow, but doesn't get 4 meters of snow every winter.
The mechanism that causes the Gulf Stream to flow is that cold water is denser than warm water. The arctic water up near Greenland and Iceland sinks and the warmer, less dense water from the Gulf of Mexico flows up to take its place.
However, salinity also affects water density. If enough fresh water from the ice cap melts and flows into the area around Newfoundland-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland, the water won't be dense enough to sink. Therefore the warm water will stop flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico.
Now London gets 4 meters of snow. Scandanavians laugh at them.
Of course, this will also cause the ice cap to stop melting in this area, but it will take quite a long time to "prime the pump", perhaps several thousand years. In the meantime, the northeastern United States and Northwestern Europe experience an "Ice Age" where their climate more closely resembles the climate of Russia at similar lattitudes.
It's wrong to say it 'has no legal weight' because it's never been in court. Almost every single contract in existence has never been in court, but that doesn't mean they have no legal weight.
...
The danger is that someone might find a loophole that basically lets them close-source work that sane people can see should be GPLed, basically turning the GPL into the LGPL for all intents and purposes. There is absolutely no danger that any court would ever find GPL=public domain. The legal system simply does not make decisions like that that are clearly not the intent of the license.
I'm not sure that the GPL is actually a contract. It is more accurately grant of rights that would otherwise be held by the copyright holder.
It would be tough to find a lawyer that would advise you that the GPL is invalid. The problem with enforcing the GPL is the problem of damages. In order to win a civil suit, the plaintiff would need to demonstrate both that the defendant infringed on their rights by not complying with the GPL (easy) and the plaintiff suffered some harm due to that non-infringement. In many cases, that proving that harm is difficult at best.
Honestly, IOmega screwed up the Zip drives in so many ways it's unbelievable. However, first I should mention what they did right:...
I'm right there with you. When the zip first came out, floppies were just becoming useless. Laptops still were too overpriced and underpowered to be effective desktop replacements. (For me, the IBM ThinkPad 600 was the first machine close enough to make me stop using a desktop.) The Zip 100 with the parallel port option was cheap enough and easy enough to use that I could move my work back and forth between my home and office PCs, or even go on a business trip and borrow a PC at the other end.
But a funny thing happened - the product never grew in any reasonable way. By the time the Zip 250 came out, the market had moved on. The Jazz drives were just incredibly expensive. Then CD-R, compact flash, and USB thumb drives made it all obsolete.
Flash memory, BTW, is a great way to save/move moderate amounts of data. I regularly back up my Quicken files, in case of a hard drive crash. I have a stack of small capacity flash cards that came packaged with cameras and such, but which were replaced with high capacity cards. A 32Meg CF card is a perfect device to save my quicken data and then bring it to work and leave it in a desk drawer. I don't expect or need "archival storage", I just want to get last week's work in case of problems require a reformat of my hard disk.
In the close air support environment, it seems to me that no amount of stealth or speed is going to let an aircraft get away without taking some serious lumps now and then. I don't see the single-engine JSF (or other potential CAS replacements) being designed to stand up to much punishment.
I agree on that 100%. No other aircraft I know of can fly the same mission profiles as an A-10. (Is the A-7 retired? Anyway I don't think it is as sturdy.)
Some of the missions can be accomplished with precision guided munitions delivered by another platform such as an F-16. But there is no way in hell that an F-16 can do everything that the A-10 does.
Has anyone studied whether an RPV equipped with Hellfires could fill in the gap? If not, someone ought to make sure that any A-10 replacement is built jsut as solid.
In day to day operations, the -15 and the -16 require about the same size ground crews. The -15 does need a little more backshop people, but nowhere near 5x.
Thanks for the correction. Maybe I heard that stat in relation to an F-4 or an F-111 or something. Or it could be that I'm just making stuff up again.:)
Replacing the A-10 has never made much sense to me. But then, I'm neither a military professional nor a defense contractor.
The A-10 does its job extremely well, so there would seem to be little need to update it. However when one digs deeper there are compelling reasons.
First, newer combat aircraft are all designed with some degree of stealthiness. As man-portable SAMs become more common, the A-10 becomes more vulnerable. Newer designs will reduce both the radar and infra-red signature, ultimately keeping the pilot safer.
Second, there is a strong emphesis on simplifying the maintenence requirements for newer aircraft. As an example, the F-15 IIRC requires a gorund crew of about 15 people. The F-16 in comparison, requires only 3 people. In peace time that means a fifth of the cost in salaries and such to operate a squadron of F-16s. In war that means only a fifth as many people need to leave their homes and go into harm's way. Smaller airfields are easier to secure, less equipment and provisions need to be shipped in, the benefits ripple throughout the military. I don't know what the requirements are to keep an A-10 flying, but I bet that a replacement aircraft would require a lot less manpower.
If spectrum is so limited, why is it filled so redundantly with the same junk? When there's a true shortage of something, it's human nature to use it more carefully.
Do yourself a favor and find a copy of "FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio" by Richard Neer. It'll answer the question. I'll try to summarize...
Once, due to both inertia and quirks in regulation, radio stations were cheap. Since they were cheap, a radio station owner could get a nice return by targeting a niche market. Management didn't care if they were number 1, in the middle of the pack, or at the bottom in terms of ratings. Everyone could still make a decent return on their investment.
Then, regulations were changed. Radio stations became expensive. The old owners all sold out and made huge profits. The new owners now needed to justify the huge prices they paid. No one could afford to run a station aimed at a niche market. Everyone needed to compete for the maximum ratings.
The radio station that was, for instance, fiftenth in the ratings looked at what the number one radio station was doing and thought "If we did the same thing, maybe we could be number one." Everyone started changing formats like wild. Diversity disappeared. Radio became a wasteland.
Today a commercial radio station can't afford to play anything that isn't main stream. Ownership put serious money on the line to buy the station, now they need to see profits to go with that investment. That money only comes from having a big audience.
Untill we get this Intellectual Property "saga" sorted out, we can pretty much count on any cool uses for tech like this being brought in through the "front door" getting the political axe.
There are no IP issues with operating a bona fide radio station. More accurately, the issues have long been worked out. Broadcast royalties for virtually all music other than your local garage bands are covered by ASCAP. A commercial station that primarily plays music and has gross revenue under $50,000 per year need only pay an annual fee of $450 for a license to broadcast ASCAP's entire portfolio. Non-commercial stations pay rates determined by the US copyright office. It is all in ASCAP's faq.
It's really much less to do with how much electricity is flowing through the circuit, and more about the potential at a given point. Of course currents flow, both leakage and when a gate changes state, but you will never understand the logic if you think in terms of currents rather than voltages.
If we are going to pick nits, lets really pick them.
While potential based digital circuits are likely more common, current oriented circuits do exist. Back in the olden days of yore, "current loop" was a common serial data protocol, until RS-232 became dominant for most applications. Google for "current loop" serial for some examples of digital current oriented interfaces.
AT&T's network is CDMA. Current AT&T phones won't work on Cingular networks, and vica versa. They wouldn't improve their coverage at all, instead they'll wind up slowly migrating all of their phones to one network, selling off the other set in the process.
Anyhow, I agree about this eventually benefitting customers. There are too many providers in the US with too many distinct formats, too many "regionalized" systems (in fact, AT&T didn't work in upstate new york at all until about two months ago), This makes it harder to have true choice in providers like in Japan or Europe. I didn't want to go Verizon, but I had to...the calling area is just so much better than with any of the others. Better to slowly build a universal network on a single standard, chip away at the others until they "Betamax" (since none of them is necessarily "better" than the others, the choice will be somewhat arbitrary) and get everybody on the same network with the same towers. Then it'll also be easier for start-ups to penetrate the market.
I've been an AT&T customer for about 5 years. I've been generally satisfied. There are gaps in the coverage in my area (metro NYC), but the best local competitor (Verizon) has an equal amount of gaps, just in different areas. Nothing beats actually trying the phone in the areas that you intend to use it.
AT&T traditionally runs a TDMA system. Verizon, Sprint, and MCI run CDMA systems. TDMA, however, has no future. AT&T has been transitioning to GSM for several years. It will probably require several more years before the transition is complete.
The costs of building out a cellular system are very high. I've seen reference that it costs a provider roughly $1,200 per customer to build the system. Obviously, too many seperate redundant systems will hurt the consumers because the providers need to recoup the cost of building out seperate systems. Equally obvious, without competition the providers will gouge their customers. In the long run, the US consumer will probably be best served by consolidating to three carriers. Verizon/Sprint/MCI would operate a national CDMA network. AT&T/Cingular/T-Mobile would operate a national GSM network. Nextel would operate their own proprietary network.
You realize, of course, that there is significant pressure to eliminate the grounding system we currently have and replace it with all ground-fault breakers? This change would prevent the chassis of an appliance from becoming energized when there's a short on the circuit. It also protects against electrocution, naturally. It raises breaker cost but reduces wire cost, since you only need to run 2 conductors instead of three.
The use of GFCI devices in place of an equipment ground is only recommended in residential locations, not commercial or industrial. The reason is that a GFCI device will prevent electrocution, but will not prevent a person from receiving a shock. That shock could, for instance, knock a person off a ladder. Therefore grounding is still needed in commercial and industrial locations where odds are the shock will be more dangerous.
Dowling published previously unreleased recordings of Elvis Presley. He neither owned the copyright, nor did he have an appropriate license. He shipped a shipment of the LPs across state lines. He was criminally convicted under a federal law for transporting stolen goods across state lines. He appealed this part of the conviction, but did not appeal counts of copyright infringement.
A earlier 9th Circuit decision, United States v. Belmont held that interstate transportation of videotape cassettes containing unauthorized copies of copyrighted motion pictures involved stolen goods within the meaning of the statute. The court reasoned that the rights of copyright owners in their protected property were indistinguishable from ownership interests in other types of property and were equally deserving of protection under the statute.
Here are some pertinent excerpts directly from the decision...I've added some important emphasis.
Dowling does not contest that he caused the shipment of goods in interstate commerce, or that the shipments had sufficient value to meet the monetary requirement. He argues, instead, that the goods shipped were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud." In response, the Government does not suggest that Dowling wrongfully came by the phonorecords actually shipped or the physical materials from which they were made; nor does it contend that the objects that Dowling caused to be shipped, the bootleg phonorecords, were "the same" as the copyrights in the musical compositions that he infringed by unauthorized distribution of Presley performances of those compositions. The Government argues, however, that the shipments come within the reach of 2314 because the phonorecords physically [473 U.S. 207, 215] embodied performances of musical compositions that Dowling had no legal right to distribute. According to the Government, the unauthorized use of the musical compositions rendered the phonorecords "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" within the meaning of the statute.
In contrast, the Government's theory here would make theft, conversion, or fraud equivalent to wrongful appropriation of statutorily protected rights in copyright. The copyright owner, however, holds no ordinary chattel. A copyright, like other intellectual property, comprises a series of carefully defined and carefully delimited interests to which the law affords correspondingly exact protections. "Section 106 of the Copyright Act confers a bundle of exclusive rights [473 U.S. 207, 217] to the owner of the copyright," which include the rights "to publish, copy, and distribute the author's work." Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539, 546 -547 (1985). See 17 U.S.C. 106. However, "[t]his protection has never accorded the copyright owner complete control over all possible uses of his work." Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 432 (1984); id., at 462-463 (dissenting opinion). For example, 107 of the Copyright Act "codifies the traditional privilege of other authors to make `fair use' of an earlier writer's work." Harper & Row, supra, at 547. Likewise, 115 grants compulsory licenses in nondramatic musical works. Thus, the property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," for the copyright holder's dominion is subjected to precisely defined limits.
It follows that interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: "`Anyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner,' that is, anyone who trespasses into his exclusive domain by using or authorizing the use of the copyrighted work in one of the five ways set forth in the statute, `is an infringer of the copyright.
As for the PS/2/USB debate (yeah, not sure how else to write that)
We need some kind of grouping symbol. Parentheses and brackets are used regularly in ordinary text, but those little curly braces languish unused except by, say, TeX. S, shout it proudly: {PS/2}/USB debate!
What kind of a geek are you? Just use the backslash to escape the slash character - PS\/2/USB debate! Now it is intuitively obvious exactly what is meant.:)
I'm still looking for a keyboard that puts the function keys where the belong - in two columns left of the alphabetic section of the keyboard.
I use an a IBM Wireless Navigator Pro. The keys have a real nice tactile feel - almost like the old IBM keyboards. It has an integrated pointing device - a thumb joystick in the upper right corner, with mouse buttons in the upper left. The numeric keypad has been removed, so it sits in my lap comfortably.
I didn't like it at first. It took about a day or two to adjust to it. I've grown very comfortable with it, however.
Sorry, you're mistaken. Under US law, creators of art and technology do not own their work. They are granted, through authority of the US government a temporary monopoly on the work they produced as an incentive to continue making similiar works. Nowhere in US law is are copyright or patent rights refered to as property. IANAL, but I do know what I'm talking about, or at least so far as the inception of copyright/patent laws go. If I'm wrong, its a recent change in the law and might not even pass constitutional muster.
So I'm sorry, you can't use property rights to fight this, you CAN however use copyright law and patent law.
The day we all accept that IP is, indeed "Property" is the day we have lost to the corperations.
Jesus H. Christ! Do we have to get into this pendantry every time the word copyright is mentioned on Slashdot?
Yes, you're right. I am mistaken. Authors don't own their work. They do have an time limited exclusive right to their work. That copyright can be bought, sold, leased, traded, given away, mortgaged, or held. In other words, they have a property interest. They don't own the work, but they do own the time limited exclusive right to the work. That copyright is in fact and in law property.
The Supreme Court of the United States has seen fit to describe a copyright as being property. Note carefully that the copyright is property separate and distinct from the work. One interesting case to look at would be Dowling vs. United States.
Although some slashdotters may diagree with the underlying premise, the way to fight this is by making a private property argument.
A developer who writes a piece of software, like any author, "owns" his work. It is the fundamental right of every American to dispose of their own property however they wish. This includes the right to give it away.
McBride argues that congress should essentially sieze any property that is not being used for "conventional" economic gain. This is quite a socialist agenda, and regardless would be prohibited by the fifth amendment of the Constitution.
Property arguments are very persuasive in the halls of power, and given this argument no congressmen would give Darl the time of day.
But a Subaru is practically an SUV, they are now starting to classify their sedans as light trucks.
The Subarus I am familiar with still sit low, and so have the same handling and stability qualities as a car. Therefore they're not as dangerous to other motorists as SUVs. I'd be interested to know if Subara wants to be a light truck so they could duck fuel economy of safety requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone that actually has an understanding of economics commenting on a ridiculous economic theory? Sorry, we can't stand for this.
The problem with taxing inheritance is that such taxes destroy small businesses and family businesses. In particular this is a major issue with family farms in the United States. A typical family farm is comprised of non-liquid assets (land, barns, silos, tractors, combines, etc.) frequently worth several million dollars. Even with today's inheritance tax rates, John-boy has a hard time holding on to the farm when Pa dies.
Now take the case where urban sprawl has lead to the development of the area around the farm. When the land can be subdivided and sold off to builders for suburban McMansions, it can be worth tens of millions of dollars. John-boy's great-great-grand-pappy may have homesteaded that farm before the civil war, but now John-boy needs to come up with $5,000,000 to pay the tax bill. That doesn't seem fair.
And from the other side, if I've worked hard and earned something, why shouldn't I be able to do what I want with it, including give it to my kids. How is this any different than the tax man coming to my house Christmas morning, totaling up the value of the gifts each of my children opens, and asking each of them for a check? I earned it, I paid taxes on it once already, why should it be taxed again?
And pragmatically every time a tax is raised people are going to work harder to evade it, by legal and illegal means. Does it really help if we raise a tax, but then the people who are being taxed more move away? If we tax the rich, they'll move to the Bahamas. Then we're left with noone to tax.
I've been using the treo 600 for about 3 or 4 weeks now, and I agree with your observations about the battery. I'm in the habit of plugging it in whenever I sit at my desk for an extended period, and I charge it every night. Fortunately, the battery in the Treo is not degraded by shallow cycles.
I also purchased a retractable charge-n-sync cable from boxwave.com, which allows me to charge from a usb port. It is a great tool when using pdanet for extended periods, and it means I don't have to carry yet another wall wart while travelling. It is real nice to VPN into a customer site, attach to a server with VNC, and perform a software upgrade while sitting on the Long Island Rail Road heading home after a long day.
I use software from goodlink (www.good.com) for my email. It replaces the bundled email/notes/calendar/contact programs with an application that integrates with my company's Microsoft Exchange. Everything I do on a day to day basis in Outlook I can do from my Treo.
As a field engineer for an enterprise software firm, I spend most of my time at client sites. Many clients, due to policy or firewall configuration, won't allow me to access my corporate systems. With my treo, I can have an engineer email me a patch, download it to the SD card, put it onto a client system with a small USB reader like the Zio!, and apply it.
In my experience, Sun does a very good job building servers for medium to large scale corporate computing. Rendering farms and supercomputers are not its thing. But if I'm building a database for a typical corporate application, or even a data warehouse, Sun/Oracle are going to be at the top of the heap - at least until I need to go to Terradata or some other exotic solution.
Lots of corporate applications are not processor intensive, but need high quality I/O gear. Databases need lots of RAM and the fastest disk arrays one can afford. Processors are relatively minor considerations in comparison.
And a meta-troll shows its head. Doppler shift! Very good try. I salute you.
I live within a half mile of the terminal morraine. I'd have to move, but at least I could stay in the neighborhood. :)
The Gulf of Mexico is a large tropical sea with very warm water. A major ocean current, called the Gulf Stream, carries warm water from the Gulf up the east coast of the United States, starts to curve to the east as it passes Virginia, makes a sharper turn east near Cape Cod, heads straight for Ireland and Britain, turns south and heads down the French coast to Spain. The heat from the Gulf Stream warms northwestern Europe, and is the reason why London is as far north as Quebec and Moscow, but doesn't get 4 meters of snow every winter.
The mechanism that causes the Gulf Stream to flow is that cold water is denser than warm water. The arctic water up near Greenland and Iceland sinks and the warmer, less dense water from the Gulf of Mexico flows up to take its place.
However, salinity also affects water density. If enough fresh water from the ice cap melts and flows into the area around Newfoundland-Greenland-Iceland-Scotland, the water won't be dense enough to sink. Therefore the warm water will stop flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico.
Now London gets 4 meters of snow. Scandanavians laugh at them.
Of course, this will also cause the ice cap to stop melting in this area, but it will take quite a long time to "prime the pump", perhaps several thousand years. In the meantime, the northeastern United States and Northwestern Europe experience an "Ice Age" where their climate more closely resembles the climate of Russia at similar lattitudes.
I'm not sure that the GPL is actually a contract. It is more accurately grant of rights that would otherwise be held by the copyright holder.
It would be tough to find a lawyer that would advise you that the GPL is invalid. The problem with enforcing the GPL is the problem of damages. In order to win a civil suit, the plaintiff would need to demonstrate both that the defendant infringed on their rights by not complying with the GPL (easy) and the plaintiff suffered some harm due to that non-infringement. In many cases, that proving that harm is difficult at best.
Honestly, IOmega screwed up the Zip drives in so many ways it's unbelievable. However, first I should mention what they did right:...
I'm right there with you. When the zip first came out, floppies were just becoming useless. Laptops still were too overpriced and underpowered to be effective desktop replacements. (For me, the IBM ThinkPad 600 was the first machine close enough to make me stop using a desktop.) The Zip 100 with the parallel port option was cheap enough and easy enough to use that I could move my work back and forth between my home and office PCs, or even go on a business trip and borrow a PC at the other end.
But a funny thing happened - the product never grew in any reasonable way. By the time the Zip 250 came out, the market had moved on. The Jazz drives were just incredibly expensive. Then CD-R, compact flash, and USB thumb drives made it all obsolete.
Flash memory, BTW, is a great way to save/move moderate amounts of data. I regularly back up my Quicken files, in case of a hard drive crash. I have a stack of small capacity flash cards that came packaged with cameras and such, but which were replaced with high capacity cards. A 32Meg CF card is a perfect device to save my quicken data and then bring it to work and leave it in a desk drawer. I don't expect or need "archival storage", I just want to get last week's work in case of problems require a reformat of my hard disk.
In the close air support environment, it seems to me that no amount of stealth or speed is going to let an aircraft get away without taking some serious lumps now and then. I don't see the single-engine JSF (or other potential CAS replacements) being designed to stand up to much punishment.
I agree on that 100%. No other aircraft I know of can fly the same mission profiles as an A-10. (Is the A-7 retired? Anyway I don't think it is as sturdy.)
Some of the missions can be accomplished with precision guided munitions delivered by another platform such as an F-16. But there is no way in hell that an F-16 can do everything that the A-10 does.
Has anyone studied whether an RPV equipped with Hellfires could fill in the gap? If not, someone ought to make sure that any A-10 replacement is built jsut as solid.
In day to day operations, the -15 and the -16 require about the same size ground crews. The -15 does need a little more backshop people, but nowhere near 5x.
Thanks for the correction. Maybe I heard that stat in relation to an F-4 or an F-111 or something. Or it could be that I'm just making stuff up again. :)
Replacing the A-10 has never made much sense to me. But then, I'm neither a military professional nor a defense contractor.
The A-10 does its job extremely well, so there would seem to be little need to update it. However when one digs deeper there are compelling reasons.
First, newer combat aircraft are all designed with some degree of stealthiness. As man-portable SAMs become more common, the A-10 becomes more vulnerable. Newer designs will reduce both the radar and infra-red signature, ultimately keeping the pilot safer.
Second, there is a strong emphesis on simplifying the maintenence requirements for newer aircraft. As an example, the F-15 IIRC requires a gorund crew of about 15 people. The F-16 in comparison, requires only 3 people. In peace time that means a fifth of the cost in salaries and such to operate a squadron of F-16s. In war that means only a fifth as many people need to leave their homes and go into harm's way. Smaller airfields are easier to secure, less equipment and provisions need to be shipped in, the benefits ripple throughout the military. I don't know what the requirements are to keep an A-10 flying, but I bet that a replacement aircraft would require a lot less manpower.
Well, what are the Californians supposed to do when the Nevadan National Guard invades?
Do yourself a favor and find a copy of "FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio" by Richard Neer. It'll answer the question. I'll try to summarize...
Once, due to both inertia and quirks in regulation, radio stations were cheap. Since they were cheap, a radio station owner could get a nice return by targeting a niche market. Management didn't care if they were number 1, in the middle of the pack, or at the bottom in terms of ratings. Everyone could still make a decent return on their investment.
Then, regulations were changed. Radio stations became expensive. The old owners all sold out and made huge profits. The new owners now needed to justify the huge prices they paid. No one could afford to run a station aimed at a niche market. Everyone needed to compete for the maximum ratings.
The radio station that was, for instance, fiftenth in the ratings looked at what the number one radio station was doing and thought "If we did the same thing, maybe we could be number one." Everyone started changing formats like wild. Diversity disappeared. Radio became a wasteland.
Today a commercial radio station can't afford to play anything that isn't main stream. Ownership put serious money on the line to buy the station, now they need to see profits to go with that investment. That money only comes from having a big audience.
There are no IP issues with operating a bona fide radio station. More accurately, the issues have long been worked out. Broadcast royalties for virtually all music other than your local garage bands are covered by ASCAP. A commercial station that primarily plays music and has gross revenue under $50,000 per year need only pay an annual fee of $450 for a license to broadcast ASCAP's entire portfolio. Non-commercial stations pay rates determined by the US copyright office. It is all in ASCAP's faq.
If we are going to pick nits, lets really pick them.
While potential based digital circuits are likely more common, current oriented circuits do exist. Back in the olden days of yore, "current loop" was a common serial data protocol, until RS-232 became dominant for most applications. Google for "current loop" serial for some examples of digital current oriented interfaces.
I've been an AT&T customer for about 5 years. I've been generally satisfied. There are gaps in the coverage in my area (metro NYC), but the best local competitor (Verizon) has an equal amount of gaps, just in different areas. Nothing beats actually trying the phone in the areas that you intend to use it.
AT&T traditionally runs a TDMA system. Verizon, Sprint, and MCI run CDMA systems. TDMA, however, has no future. AT&T has been transitioning to GSM for several years. It will probably require several more years before the transition is complete.
The costs of building out a cellular system are very high. I've seen reference that it costs a provider roughly $1,200 per customer to build the system. Obviously, too many seperate redundant systems will hurt the consumers because the providers need to recoup the cost of building out seperate systems. Equally obvious, without competition the providers will gouge their customers. In the long run, the US consumer will probably be best served by consolidating to three carriers. Verizon/Sprint/MCI would operate a national CDMA network. AT&T/Cingular/T-Mobile would operate a national GSM network. Nextel would operate their own proprietary network.
The use of GFCI devices in place of an equipment ground is only recommended in residential locations, not commercial or industrial. The reason is that a GFCI device will prevent electrocution, but will not prevent a person from receiving a shock. That shock could, for instance, knock a person off a ladder. Therefore grounding is still needed in commercial and industrial locations where odds are the shock will be more dangerous.
The case is pretty interesting. I'll summerize...
Dowling published previously unreleased recordings of Elvis Presley. He neither owned the copyright, nor did he have an appropriate license. He shipped a shipment of the LPs across state lines. He was criminally convicted under a federal law for transporting stolen goods across state lines. He appealed this part of the conviction, but did not appeal counts of copyright infringement.
A earlier 9th Circuit decision, United States v. Belmont held that interstate transportation of videotape cassettes containing unauthorized copies of copyrighted motion pictures involved stolen goods within the meaning of the statute. The court reasoned that the rights of copyright owners in their protected property were indistinguishable from ownership interests in other types of property and were equally deserving of protection under the statute.
Here are some pertinent excerpts directly from the decision...I've added some important emphasis.
I'm still looking for a keyboard that puts the function keys where the belong - in two columns left of the alphabetic section of the keyboard.
I use an a IBM Wireless Navigator Pro. The keys have a real nice tactile feel - almost like the old IBM keyboards. It has an integrated pointing device - a thumb joystick in the upper right corner, with mouse buttons in the upper left. The numeric keypad has been removed, so it sits in my lap comfortably.
I didn't like it at first. It took about a day or two to adjust to it. I've grown very comfortable with it, however.
Jesus H. Christ! Do we have to get into this pendantry every time the word copyright is mentioned on Slashdot?
Yes, you're right. I am mistaken. Authors don't own their work. They do have an time limited exclusive right to their work. That copyright can be bought, sold, leased, traded, given away, mortgaged, or held. In other words, they have a property interest. They don't own the work, but they do own the time limited exclusive right to the work. That copyright is in fact and in law property.
The Supreme Court of the United States has seen fit to describe a copyright as being property. Note carefully that the copyright is property separate and distinct from the work. One interesting case to look at would be Dowling vs. United States.
Although some slashdotters may diagree with the underlying premise, the way to fight this is by making a private property argument.
A developer who writes a piece of software, like any author, "owns" his work. It is the fundamental right of every American to dispose of their own property however they wish. This includes the right to give it away.
McBride argues that congress should essentially sieze any property that is not being used for "conventional" economic gain. This is quite a socialist agenda, and regardless would be prohibited by the fifth amendment of the Constitution.
Property arguments are very persuasive in the halls of power, and given this argument no congressmen would give Darl the time of day.
That was a thing of beauty! You flipped a Monty Python reference into Mel Brooks reference! F'ing brilliant!
But a Subaru is practically an SUV, they are now starting to classify their sedans as light trucks.
The Subarus I am familiar with still sit low, and so have the same handling and stability qualities as a car. Therefore they're not as dangerous to other motorists as SUVs. I'd be interested to know if Subara wants to be a light truck so they could duck fuel economy of safety requirements.