L'ENVOI What is the moral? Who rides may read. When the night is thick and the tracks are blind A Friend at a a pinch is a friend indeed; but a fool to wait for the laggard behind; Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels fastest who travels alone.
White hands cling to the tightened rein, Slipping the spur from the booted heel, Tenderest voices cry, "Turn again." Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel. high hopes faint on a warm hearthstone -- He travels fastest who travels alone.
One may fall but he falls by himself -- Falls by himself with himself to blame; One may attain and to him is pelf, Loot of the city in Gold or Fame: Plunder of earth shall be all his own Who travels the fastest and travels alone.
Wherefore the more ye be holpen and stayed-- Stayed by a friend in the hour of toil, Sing the heretical song I have made-- His be the labor and yours be the spoil. Win by his aid and the aid disown-- He travels the fastest who travels alone. - Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1936, from "The College Survey of English Literature", (c)1942, Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Yes, the author's life plus 70 years has passed. Unfortunately I took this work from a compendium that owns the rights of reproduction that will persist well into the next century. This bit our our culture has been stolen from us by lawyers and sold legislators. Under current law there is no legal difference between you downloading Britney Spear's latest attempt at vocal rehab and your browser loading this poem written nearly a century ago on this page. That's wrong. That's very wrong.
And now you're a dirty information property stealing criminal. You should be ashamed of yourself.
If only we could find a way to abolish these Copyright and Patent issues we might have progress, which is what copyrights and patents are supposed to provide.
Yesterday while going through some old personal effects I found both the "White Book", and the "White Book" in the same box. Timeless Gems indeed.
Modern textbooks are written and rewritten every year to sell textbooks. If academia were as knowledgeable as they would have us believe, they would be able to filter the wheat from the chaff, the wine from the dregs. They would be able to select a book that were in print these last 20 years that would teach their students something of persistent value. And if we teach students something of transient and ephemeral worth that expires more frequently than they buy new shoes, what are we teaching them about the Truth, except that it, too, has value only for the next six weeks? That's teaching them to forget; that their investment in effort is transient. That is "not good." It's also a waste of money. I've long since despaired my local school district will offer something I consider education, so I teach my kids myself - but they still have to go to school because peer interaction is something I can't teach them.
Anyway, maybe that I found those two in the same box says more about me than about the books... Also in the box were "The College Survey of English Literature", 1951; "Operating Systems; A Systematic View" (Davis, 1992), and "Microprocessor Architecture, Programming and Applications (sub With the 8085/8080A)" (Gaonkar, 1984). Also ""An introduction to College Chemistry" (Briscoe, 1937), "David Macaulay's "The Way Things Work", and "77 One-Weekend Woodworking Projects" (Blandford, 1987). There was also "Alice's Adventure's In Wonderland" (Carroll). That last is probably a personal marker. I have like 12 copies, and I plant one in boxes I think are valuable for learning. It might have been there because I consider "Alice in Wonderland" a good programming manual. Anyway, I'm comfortable in the company of these books.
The box is at my feet now, and I'm looking at it. I learned these things long ago. These books have a few secrets left for me, but not many. But no, don't email me with a bid. I have young kids, and this is what I'd like them to know before they "graduate" high school so in addition to what their school teaches them, they'll know these useful things. Your kids? Teach them or not. Whatever.
Anyway, if you're a bizarre geek and you're worked your way through these, the top of the next box has "Trelawny" (Margaret Armstrong, 1940) which is a rollicking good read if you like pirates, adventures, or Byron.
A brillant battery idea, but it's not mine: Swap the battery rather than charging it in place. Replaceable battery modules can be swapped out quickly and recharged at leisure. Charging stations can have the infrastructure in place to robotically swap batteries in about the time it takes to pump gas. GPS systems can be programmed to route to swapping stations with an available battery for your vehicle. With reliably present battery swapping stations, road trips of any length become possible. It doesn't take a large surplus of batteries to make this work out given the statistical variation - and charging your battery with 220V AC is a good default solution. Forget 110V. That's not going to work. You're going to need more current than your typical wall outlet will provide.
I'll throw in some more thoughts from other posts because I want to go to bed and I don't want to hunt them all down. They're in no particular order.
Obviously some battery standards would help. Hell, even battery attachment and marking standards would help.
Algae can turn farm waste and garbage into biofuel. If we decide to go that route, we need to not think small. We'll need a huge area near the ocean (for water) with good road and fuel lines, which also happens to be below sea level. Lake Okeechobee, New Orleans and Death Valley spring to mind. There will be environmental consequences. The environmental consequences of burning every last trace of fossil fuels will be greater.
Thomas Malthus was right. There are too many of us, and that problem will not only persist: It will grow. Eventually we have to solve the Malthusian problem or we're doomed.
Who are Cereberus' investors? They own Chrysler. They're a private investment group and don't have to give us details about who owns them, or where their money comes from. Is Chrysler even an American car company? We don't know. We do know that Toyota makes cars in the US, as do several other "foreign" manufacturers. The last time I bought a new GM vehicle I discovered some months later it was built in Canada. The "buy American" idea that got us through WWII isn't going to help us in a global economy where a lot of retirement funds own stock and bonds in foreign corporations that make their products in the US. The fuzzing of the "domestic" vs "foreign" argument would be lamentable if it were not spilt milk. It's done and it can't be undone. The global economy was always here, but now it's so entrenched that there's no telling whether you buy your durable goods from a local or global manufacturer, or whether the profits go to Song Kim in Taiwan or pay into the benefits for your disabled neighbour Tim. In the end it doesn't matter. We're all in the same boat, and if it sinks we all walk home or drown.
All the world's nations are looking to suffer the least through this difficulty, so many are looking to shield themselves by comparatively spending less than their peers. Each of us is doing likewise, hoarding what resources we can and hoping that everybody else isn't as wise. Economically that's very very bad, both systemically and individually. We're all doing it wrong. The market crashed. Jobs crashed. Those are bad things. The thing is, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. There's a lot of opportunity here to buy and hold at the bottom of the curve, to wheel and deal with your local car dealer or real estate seller, to get more for your money than was ever possible before. If, as many suspect, runaway inflation occurs in the near future, durable goods bought right now at a fixed interest rate and distressed market price are the best deal ever. If you're free from your job, now is the time to change direction and do what you'ld rather do; live where you'ld rather live - preferably in some career and place where the conditions are better.
In the depression the people who bought gold and silver and hid it in the walls of their homes didn't become wealthy.
for example, I've seen a lot of people now say that UAC specifically is faster to pop up
I'm sure we're all eager to see that.
There had been a significant top-level management change, too (a while ago, actually, but it is only going to affect this release of Windows).
Are you referring to the sudden unexpected departure of Windows boss Kevin Johnson recently, or the sudden unexpected departure of Windows boss Jim Alchin on the eve of Vista's release? By now we know why Alchin fled to New Zealand. There are the emails, after all. So charming to leave a parting "got mine! c-ya!" email. Aren't courts wonderful? It may be a while before we find out about Johnson, but I suspect his problem was he couldn't make a lead balloon float.
Please re-read what I wrote. Fiber. To the premises. $100 installed, $60/month, Gigabit capacity and 100Mbps Full Duplex confirmed data rate. Waaaay out in cow country. That's not just do-able, that's profitable. Apparently the "power district" also has important rights of way, ditching equipment, institutional and geographical knowledge and other things that make their use for this project especially appropriate and economical.
If you want to get 5-7Mbps to the poor for free, yeah, what you wrote above has some merit. At least it does if your neighbor isn't running the above solution or is so rude as not to share it over wi-fi. And really that makes sense. After all, who would pay for 7Mbps?
Ok, maybe you have a point. WiMax wireless broadband for the poor for free, and the locally unconnected.
I'm going to go with you here. Offered is Keyboarding. Proposed is Wirth. Which might present a better foundation for further knowledge? Eh, I'm going to go with Wirth. That's been the safe bet for 50 years and I see nothing new to alter it.
Not a single country in the world - democratic or otherwise - had ever implemented what you propose.
No, Greece did it. It didn't end well, but they did it. Shortly thereafter some folks with opposing viewpoints defeated their arguments. With spears, the barbarians!
It's not a conglomeration of network connections and protocols. It's not the aggregation of carriage agreements.
It's an idea.
It's the disembodied idea of the perfect communication vehicle, that automatically heals damage to its communication network.
Monitoring is damage. Censorship is damage. The important part of realizing the power of the Internet is to realize that it's not automatic by itself. You are part of the Internet, and if you want to communicate you have to help it route around these types of damage. If you're in a hostility free zone, host some desktops. Host a proxy. Help some freedom impaired people get and share information about what's happening in their restricted zone.
They can stop a printing press. They can kill a speaker. They can neither stop nor kill an idea. As long as we resist the limiting of the Internet, we preserve the hope that our favored ideas can escape our hearts and take root elsewhere.
A surplus of efficiency is not to be wished. In the modern era if each person were maximally efficient in his work we would need 1% of the population. What would the rest of us do?
Ok, I'm going to advance a novel economic theory here. We've produced more than we need. We've built more houses, mined more coal, built more cars and produced more food than we must have. Our system has grown too efficient. Now many people must become idle because government has not done its job of depleting the surplus productivity. To compensate for this, our populace must suffer from a surfeit of leisure until our governments compensate for this by expending far more than they previously would have.
I know that sounds sick. Write it down anyway. One day you might be tickled to know you were there when the answer was found.
I think they covered that in Greece, ca 700 BCE. The senate met, argued, and decided that in their enlightened society there need be only one law: "If it harm none, do what you will." Unfortunately they forgot to provide for the common defense; even to compel that if the populace were unwilling. Other than that, it was a Golden Age. Because of that, we now don't speak Greek.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statue nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert Heinlein, Life-line, 1939
Ah, a few days from now that quote will be 70 years old. Nothing I have ever said will be so timeless.
Have you seen the cameras on the traffic lights? What do you think those are for? Why do you think the government would actually need video cameras on every traffic intersection?
1984 is here, at least in terms of monitoring. It's well known the Internet in the US is thoroughly monitored. If you're up to something embarrassing or fiscal, encrypt your communications. If you're publishing free press type stuff, go offshore. If you're a kiddy diddler, you need to google the relevant links, but make sure you check out the anarchist cookbook and Guns & Ammo as well so you're thoroughly versed in the relevant legal issues. Oh, and if you're prepping an insurrection and using a monitored network to do it, you're doing it wrong.
I've done this topic to death, but apparently some of you still haven't heard the word.
In lovely and bucolic Ephrata, WA you can get fiber to the premises for under $100 installed and $60/month through the local power utility. It's actually gigabit, but your ISP will probably rate limit to a bidirectional 100Mbps. Zoom out on that map and see if you can find a big city nearby. The surrounding farmland is greater than the total area of Japan or England.
In a far more urban setting I'm paying twice that for a 7Mbps down, 1Mbps up from Comcast. In other places rates at greater than dialup are unavailable at any price, and that's just wrong.
The power utility in Ephrata is actually turning an embarrassing profit at these prices. This is not the only area where this is available. For example, you can get this rate in Shelton, Wa. Although the far more urban state capital is barely 20 miles away the installation cost of 100Mbps there starts at $10,000 and if you have to ask the monthly rate, you can't afford it.
The density argument is bunk. It has been bunk for 15 years. Fiber municipal broadband changes everything. That argument is completely dead. Please stop using it.
This is Slashdot. If you're not already encrypting your Internet communications with SSL, if you're not using offshore hosting for your politically or legally ambiguous experiments, you've got no credibility here. The people here know better. Or at least they did once.
You don't really think your private Internet Provider isn't piping an echo to the federal government, do you? I really thought we covered that long ago.
We do need to have some harsh regulations so that assholes like Comcast and the telecom cartels don't abuse us. But that is another story...
I agree with your "another story", and I have the "harsh regulation" you're looking for:
A public utility district is authorized to provide telecommunications services. - (PDF) WA SB 6102 2007
That's all it takes. Ten little words. Surely an idea so simple could get some support? Are not "telecommunications services" a "public utility"? Do they not own the poles, the rights of way? And are those essential infrastructure components not of necessity amply provided with the power elements needed to power the IT infrastructure? Do they not have ample resources for funding and implementing Internet as a public utility like power or water? Several successful projects have been completed, delivering 100Mbps or better bandwidth at nominal cost - and turning an embarrassing profit in the mean time.
The only problem is the incumbent providers. They will sue. That needs to be nipped right in the bud, harshly and completely. They can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress.
As I have been saying here for years, the Internet is the Post Road of the 21st century. It is both the road to the market and a path for interstate commerce. It is too important to allow private enterprises to decide who is entitled to this road and who is not by virtue of which market can pay the most. It's essential for everybody -- more so since more and more government services are provided through it, including even paying income taxes.
It's high time the federal government told the incumbent providers that "if you won't provide broadband to everybody, we will".
Assembler is the cusp where the electronics meet the software. It is a doorway to the underlying electrical concepts in one direction and algorithms and data structures in the other.
When we teach children history, we start at the cusps, the seminal events that change everything, and work both backwards and forwards so they can understand both the causes and the results. I don't see why IT learning should be different.
For grades 3-5 though, I'd make a game of it. That's how I learned it. We started with a pretend machine - a black box, and magic beans we fed it with. If you fed the beans in the right order, special things happened. It became a puzzle to figure out why the box worked in that way, and the best way to feed the beans. Gradually the game became more complex. There were other puzzles too. I remember one, when I was 7, that was a round puzzle box with eight levers. There were discs inside the puzzle box. You could move only one lever at a time, either toward the center or the outside. The thing was, the discs were so arranged so that you could move the levers in a binary pattern. In order to complete the puzzle you had to actually count from 0 to 255 in a form of binary called Gray code, though that wasn't apparent to me until much later. After a few days I could accomplish this in under a minute. Apparently this device is no longer in production, so a sample would need to be found and licensed.
I really need a copy of this "The Brain Puzzle" for my son, so if you have a source, even second hand, I would appreciate it.
I wouldn't expect this sort of major features to appear in Win7 now - it's really more of an incremental release.
And this major feature is used in MS apps outside of the core OS, then I'm sure it's well documented somewhere, so competing developers can apply it, right?
Right? Because otherwise that's a continuing antitrust issue.
Thanks for confirming that Win7 is an incremental release from Vista. That's probably not going to help the product's marketing any, but at least you can be forthright about that. For a while there I was afraid MS might have gone with a marketing strategy more like "this thing is NOTHING like that other one that you hate so much." Now that we know it's Vista++, we know ahead of time how to feel about it. The other strategy might have had a chance, even if it was less honest.
I'll take vulnerabilities in the new API for $200, Alex.
That feature sounds neat. Let's hope they manage to get that to ship instead of laying off the team. It sounds like getting definitive testing of that feature would require quite a long time to do right. It would be a drag if a lot of work got lost because the system lost track of a commit or something like that.
Is in our estimate of the students. You may be right. I do think a few of them would be able to handle it by the 8th grade. You probably have a point about the rest of the students.
You do realize, don't you, that we're talking about K-12 here, not college?
They can't learn until they can think. Knuth is a good start on that.
They used to teach a lot of things in elementary school that people these days think are college level: grammar, spelling, latin, greek, algebra, basic chemistry, debate, logic.
I'd give that list a 10 points out of 10. Nicely done.
I doubt that would ever happen, about the closest would be North Korea but as far as we know they only have slightly long range misses, not ICBMs, and because North Korea is so poor, I doubt they would have the capability to build one especially with international pressure along with resource constraints.
North Korea is pretty well understood to have a good source of money.
Why should I have to pay in part for a billion dollar exploration mission to Pluto?
Look, not everybody has a problem with the space program. Some of us are quite fond of it, even if all we see are pictures. The hairless ape is a curious beast, forever poking his nose into things. If you don't like Nasa, that's fine, but there are better things in the budget to cut. Certainly hiring these American companies to do this is better than continuing to hire Russia. Rumor has it Russia's commitment to international cooperation in space and other things might not be permanent.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just invented a new business model. Did you think to patent that?
If you can read this, you're now a criminal.
Yes, the author's life plus 70 years has passed. Unfortunately I took this work from a compendium that owns the rights of reproduction that will persist well into the next century. This bit our our culture has been stolen from us by lawyers and sold legislators. Under current law there is no legal difference between you downloading Britney Spear's latest attempt at vocal rehab and your browser loading this poem written nearly a century ago on this page. That's wrong. That's very wrong.
And now you're a dirty information property stealing criminal. You should be ashamed of yourself.
If only we could find a way to abolish these Copyright and Patent issues we might have progress, which is what copyrights and patents are supposed to provide.
Yesterday while going through some old personal effects I found both the "White Book", and the "White Book" in the same box. Timeless Gems indeed.
Modern textbooks are written and rewritten every year to sell textbooks. If academia were as knowledgeable as they would have us believe, they would be able to filter the wheat from the chaff, the wine from the dregs. They would be able to select a book that were in print these last 20 years that would teach their students something of persistent value. And if we teach students something of transient and ephemeral worth that expires more frequently than they buy new shoes, what are we teaching them about the Truth, except that it, too, has value only for the next six weeks? That's teaching them to forget; that their investment in effort is transient. That is "not good." It's also a waste of money. I've long since despaired my local school district will offer something I consider education, so I teach my kids myself - but they still have to go to school because peer interaction is something I can't teach them.
Anyway, maybe that I found those two in the same box says more about me than about the books... Also in the box were "The College Survey of English Literature", 1951; "Operating Systems; A Systematic View" (Davis, 1992), and "Microprocessor Architecture, Programming and Applications (sub With the 8085/8080A)" (Gaonkar, 1984). Also ""An introduction to College Chemistry" (Briscoe, 1937), "David Macaulay's "The Way Things Work", and "77 One-Weekend Woodworking Projects" (Blandford, 1987). There was also "Alice's Adventure's In Wonderland" (Carroll). That last is probably a personal marker. I have like 12 copies, and I plant one in boxes I think are valuable for learning. It might have been there because I consider "Alice in Wonderland" a good programming manual. Anyway, I'm comfortable in the company of these books.
The box is at my feet now, and I'm looking at it. I learned these things long ago. These books have a few secrets left for me, but not many. But no, don't email me with a bid. I have young kids, and this is what I'd like them to know before they "graduate" high school so in addition to what their school teaches them, they'll know these useful things. Your kids? Teach them or not. Whatever.
Anyway, if you're a bizarre geek and you're worked your way through these, the top of the next box has "Trelawny" (Margaret Armstrong, 1940) which is a rollicking good read if you like pirates, adventures, or Byron.
This is going to be a little random.
A brillant battery idea, but it's not mine: Swap the battery rather than charging it in place. Replaceable battery modules can be swapped out quickly and recharged at leisure. Charging stations can have the infrastructure in place to robotically swap batteries in about the time it takes to pump gas. GPS systems can be programmed to route to swapping stations with an available battery for your vehicle. With reliably present battery swapping stations, road trips of any length become possible. It doesn't take a large surplus of batteries to make this work out given the statistical variation - and charging your battery with 220V AC is a good default solution. Forget 110V. That's not going to work. You're going to need more current than your typical wall outlet will provide.
I'll throw in some more thoughts from other posts because I want to go to bed and I don't want to hunt them all down. They're in no particular order.
Obviously some battery standards would help. Hell, even battery attachment and marking standards would help.
Algae can turn farm waste and garbage into biofuel. If we decide to go that route, we need to not think small. We'll need a huge area near the ocean (for water) with good road and fuel lines, which also happens to be below sea level. Lake Okeechobee, New Orleans and Death Valley spring to mind. There will be environmental consequences. The environmental consequences of burning every last trace of fossil fuels will be greater.
Thomas Malthus was right. There are too many of us, and that problem will not only persist: It will grow. Eventually we have to solve the Malthusian problem or we're doomed.
Who are Cereberus' investors? They own Chrysler. They're a private investment group and don't have to give us details about who owns them, or where their money comes from. Is Chrysler even an American car company? We don't know. We do know that Toyota makes cars in the US, as do several other "foreign" manufacturers. The last time I bought a new GM vehicle I discovered some months later it was built in Canada. The "buy American" idea that got us through WWII isn't going to help us in a global economy where a lot of retirement funds own stock and bonds in foreign corporations that make their products in the US. The fuzzing of the "domestic" vs "foreign" argument would be lamentable if it were not spilt milk. It's done and it can't be undone. The global economy was always here, but now it's so entrenched that there's no telling whether you buy your durable goods from a local or global manufacturer, or whether the profits go to Song Kim in Taiwan or pay into the benefits for your disabled neighbour Tim. In the end it doesn't matter. We're all in the same boat, and if it sinks we all walk home or drown.
All the world's nations are looking to suffer the least through this difficulty, so many are looking to shield themselves by comparatively spending less than their peers. Each of us is doing likewise, hoarding what resources we can and hoping that everybody else isn't as wise. Economically that's very very bad, both systemically and individually. We're all doing it wrong. The market crashed. Jobs crashed. Those are bad things. The thing is, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. There's a lot of opportunity here to buy and hold at the bottom of the curve, to wheel and deal with your local car dealer or real estate seller, to get more for your money than was ever possible before. If, as many suspect, runaway inflation occurs in the near future, durable goods bought right now at a fixed interest rate and distressed market price are the best deal ever. If you're free from your job, now is the time to change direction and do what you'ld rather do; live where you'ld rather live - preferably in some career and place where the conditions are better.
In the depression the people who bought gold and silver and hid it in the walls of their homes didn't become wealthy.
for example, I've seen a lot of people now say that UAC specifically is faster to pop up
I'm sure we're all eager to see that.
There had been a significant top-level management change, too (a while ago, actually, but it is only going to affect this release of Windows).
Are you referring to the sudden unexpected departure of Windows boss Kevin Johnson recently, or the sudden unexpected departure of Windows boss Jim Alchin on the eve of Vista's release? By now we know why Alchin fled to New Zealand. There are the emails, after all. So charming to leave a parting "got mine! c-ya!" email. Aren't courts wonderful? It may be a while before we find out about Johnson, but I suspect his problem was he couldn't make a lead balloon float.
Good morning, and Merry Christmans, MtViewGuy.
No. No. No.
Please re-read what I wrote. Fiber. To the premises. $100 installed, $60/month, Gigabit capacity and 100Mbps Full Duplex confirmed data rate. Waaaay out in cow country. That's not just do-able, that's profitable. Apparently the "power district" also has important rights of way, ditching equipment, institutional and geographical knowledge and other things that make their use for this project especially appropriate and economical.
If you want to get 5-7Mbps to the poor for free, yeah, what you wrote above has some merit. At least it does if your neighbor isn't running the above solution or is so rude as not to share it over wi-fi. And really that makes sense. After all, who would pay for 7Mbps?
Ok, maybe you have a point. WiMax wireless broadband for the poor for free, and the locally unconnected.
I'm going to go with you here. Offered is Keyboarding. Proposed is Wirth. Which might present a better foundation for further knowledge? Eh, I'm going to go with Wirth. That's been the safe bet for 50 years and I see nothing new to alter it.
Not a single country in the world - democratic or otherwise - had ever implemented what you propose.
No, Greece did it. It didn't end well, but they did it. Shortly thereafter some folks with opposing viewpoints defeated their arguments. With spears, the barbarians!
Not to take away from your well cited examples, but...
Some of us have done better. It's possible to do this well and efficiently with a public mandate, but without graning a private subsidy.
It's not a conglomeration of network connections and protocols. It's not the aggregation of carriage agreements.
It's an idea.
It's the disembodied idea of the perfect communication vehicle, that automatically heals damage to its communication network.
Monitoring is damage. Censorship is damage. The important part of realizing the power of the Internet is to realize that it's not automatic by itself. You are part of the Internet, and if you want to communicate you have to help it route around these types of damage. If you're in a hostility free zone, host some desktops. Host a proxy. Help some freedom impaired people get and share information about what's happening in their restricted zone.
They can stop a printing press. They can kill a speaker. They can neither stop nor kill an idea. As long as we resist the limiting of the Internet, we preserve the hope that our favored ideas can escape our hearts and take root elsewhere.
In a sense, You are the Internet.
To "deplete the surplus productivity" and so avoid a surfeit of leisure is the purpose of modern government. It's easy enough to argue they do their job too well at some times and not well enough at others. Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship." - Harry S. Truman
A surplus of efficiency is not to be wished. In the modern era if each person were maximally efficient in his work we would need 1% of the population. What would the rest of us do?
Ok, I'm going to advance a novel economic theory here. We've produced more than we need. We've built more houses, mined more coal, built more cars and produced more food than we must have. Our system has grown too efficient. Now many people must become idle because government has not done its job of depleting the surplus productivity. To compensate for this, our populace must suffer from a surfeit of leisure until our governments compensate for this by expending far more than they previously would have.
I know that sounds sick. Write it down anyway. One day you might be tickled to know you were there when the answer was found.
I think they covered that in Greece, ca 700 BCE. The senate met, argued, and decided that in their enlightened society there need be only one law: "If it harm none, do what you will." Unfortunately they forgot to provide for the common defense; even to compel that if the populace were unwilling. Other than that, it was a Golden Age. Because of that, we now don't speak Greek.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statue nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert Heinlein, Life-line, 1939
Ah, a few days from now that quote will be 70 years old. Nothing I have ever said will be so timeless.
Have you seen the cameras on the traffic lights? What do you think those are for? Why do you think the government would actually need video cameras on every traffic intersection?
1984 is here, at least in terms of monitoring. It's well known the Internet in the US is thoroughly monitored. If you're up to something embarrassing or fiscal, encrypt your communications. If you're publishing free press type stuff, go offshore. If you're a kiddy diddler, you need to google the relevant links, but make sure you check out the anarchist cookbook and Guns & Ammo as well so you're thoroughly versed in the relevant legal issues. Oh, and if you're prepping an insurrection and using a monitored network to do it, you're doing it wrong .
I've done this topic to death, but apparently some of you still haven't heard the word.
In lovely and bucolic Ephrata, WA you can get fiber to the premises for under $100 installed and $60/month through the local power utility. It's actually gigabit, but your ISP will probably rate limit to a bidirectional 100Mbps. Zoom out on that map and see if you can find a big city nearby. The surrounding farmland is greater than the total area of Japan or England.
In a far more urban setting I'm paying twice that for a 7Mbps down, 1Mbps up from Comcast. In other places rates at greater than dialup are unavailable at any price, and that's just wrong.
The power utility in Ephrata is actually turning an embarrassing profit at these prices. This is not the only area where this is available. For example, you can get this rate in Shelton, Wa. Although the far more urban state capital is barely 20 miles away the installation cost of 100Mbps there starts at $10,000 and if you have to ask the monthly rate, you can't afford it.
The density argument is bunk. It has been bunk for 15 years. Fiber municipal broadband changes everything. That argument is completely dead. Please stop using it.
This is Slashdot. If you're not already encrypting your Internet communications with SSL, if you're not using offshore hosting for your politically or legally ambiguous experiments, you've got no credibility here. The people here know better. Or at least they did once.
You don't really think your private Internet Provider isn't piping an echo to the federal government, do you? I really thought we covered that long ago.
We do need to have some harsh regulations so that assholes like Comcast and the telecom cartels don't abuse us. But that is another story...
I agree with your "another story", and I have the "harsh regulation" you're looking for:
A public utility district is authorized to provide telecommunications services. - (PDF) WA SB 6102 2007
That's all it takes. Ten little words. Surely an idea so simple could get some support? Are not "telecommunications services" a "public utility"? Do they not own the poles, the rights of way? And are those essential infrastructure components not of necessity amply provided with the power elements needed to power the IT infrastructure? Do they not have ample resources for funding and implementing Internet as a public utility like power or water? Several successful projects have been completed, delivering 100Mbps or better bandwidth at nominal cost - and turning an embarrassing profit in the mean time.
The only problem is the incumbent providers. They will sue. That needs to be nipped right in the bud, harshly and completely. They can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress.
Let me introduce you to it.
As I have been saying here for years, the Internet is the Post Road of the 21st century. It is both the road to the market and a path for interstate commerce. It is too important to allow private enterprises to decide who is entitled to this road and who is not by virtue of which market can pay the most. It's essential for everybody -- more so since more and more government services are provided through it, including even paying income taxes.
It's high time the federal government told the incumbent providers that "if you won't provide broadband to everybody, we will".
Assembler is the cusp where the electronics meet the software. It is a doorway to the underlying electrical concepts in one direction and algorithms and data structures in the other.
When we teach children history, we start at the cusps, the seminal events that change everything, and work both backwards and forwards so they can understand both the causes and the results. I don't see why IT learning should be different.
For grades 3-5 though, I'd make a game of it. That's how I learned it. We started with a pretend machine - a black box, and magic beans we fed it with. If you fed the beans in the right order, special things happened. It became a puzzle to figure out why the box worked in that way, and the best way to feed the beans. Gradually the game became more complex. There were other puzzles too. I remember one, when I was 7, that was a round puzzle box with eight levers. There were discs inside the puzzle box. You could move only one lever at a time, either toward the center or the outside. The thing was, the discs were so arranged so that you could move the levers in a binary pattern. In order to complete the puzzle you had to actually count from 0 to 255 in a form of binary called Gray code, though that wasn't apparent to me until much later. After a few days I could accomplish this in under a minute. Apparently this device is no longer in production, so a sample would need to be found and licensed.
I really need a copy of this "The Brain Puzzle" for my son, so if you have a source, even second hand, I would appreciate it.
I wouldn't expect this sort of major features to appear in Win7 now - it's really more of an incremental release.
And this major feature is used in MS apps outside of the core OS, then I'm sure it's well documented somewhere, so competing developers can apply it, right?
Right? Because otherwise that's a continuing antitrust issue.
Thanks for confirming that Win7 is an incremental release from Vista. That's probably not going to help the product's marketing any, but at least you can be forthright about that. For a while there I was afraid MS might have gone with a marketing strategy more like "this thing is NOTHING like that other one that you hate so much." Now that we know it's Vista++, we know ahead of time how to feel about it. The other strategy might have had a chance, even if it was less honest.
I'll take vulnerabilities in the new API for $200, Alex.
That feature sounds neat. Let's hope they manage to get that to ship instead of laying off the team. It sounds like getting definitive testing of that feature would require quite a long time to do right. It would be a drag if a lot of work got lost because the system lost track of a commit or something like that.
Is in our estimate of the students. You may be right. I do think a few of them would be able to handle it by the 8th grade. You probably have a point about the rest of the students.
You do realize, don't you, that we're talking about K-12 here, not college?
They can't learn until they can think. Knuth is a good start on that.
They used to teach a lot of things in elementary school that people these days think are college level: grammar, spelling, latin, greek, algebra, basic chemistry, debate, logic.
I'd give that list a 10 points out of 10. Nicely done.
I doubt that would ever happen, about the closest would be North Korea but as far as we know they only have slightly long range misses, not ICBMs, and because North Korea is so poor, I doubt they would have the capability to build one especially with international pressure along with resource constraints.
North Korea is pretty well understood to have a good source of money.
Why should I have to pay in part for a billion dollar exploration mission to Pluto?
Look, not everybody has a problem with the space program. Some of us are quite fond of it, even if all we see are pictures. The hairless ape is a curious beast, forever poking his nose into things. If you don't like Nasa, that's fine, but there are better things in the budget to cut. Certainly hiring these American companies to do this is better than continuing to hire Russia. Rumor has it Russia's commitment to international cooperation in space and other things might not be permanent.