yeah it was not the hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg crash. It was something else. But H2 is what actually burned isn't it? Isn't that what caused the airship to explode and kill almost everyone? OK it wasn't the jetfuel that caused the Concorde to crash. That's comforting.
Blimps are such a dumbfuck idea as to be almost beyond comprehension. The weather has to be great you can't land ot take off in high wind (does anyone remember the photograph of the US Airship Los Angeles standing 700ft straight up, nose down from its mooring in a high wind?) Does anyone realized that almost every Helium US airship crashed and killed their crews? Uh, the Shenendoa, the Akron, the Macon? Almost all of the British airships like the R101 crashed and burned or just crashed?
Because they make a fortune with a guaranteed rate of return on analog service and they make an even bigger fortune selling or reselling T1, Frame Relay and similar service to businesses. Why else do you think that the 'business rate' for ADSL is 3x what the residential rate. Because customers would pay for it as long as it's cheaper than ~$1,500/month. Since even the business ADSL really has no associated SLA they can market it as a loss leader and entry point to their 'real' business services such as FracT1 and Frame Relay circuits. They know they can't stop cable. They simply don't care. All they worry about is preserving their own stranglehold on their own customers. The only going broadband businesses run by phone companies ARE cable companies like the cash cow that ATT just spun off. They knew they couldn't do any better so they might as well milk it for a huge bag of cash.
DSL like its ISDN ancestor are simply bullshit smokescreens that Bells pretend to offer so that they can claim unfair advantage of OTHERS in order to get rate protection. Don't you get it? Bells have no serious intention of offering broadband because they make too much money from low bandwidth analog phone lines. If they dick around for a 10 years or so putting up some fake DSL then they can claim that the reason it's all so hosed is because of the evil CLECs, ILX's and cable companies getting some bogus unfair advantage. Ergo the Bells, since they are the corporate underwriters of many Congresspersons, get to pressure their legislative suppliers with better rates and terms.
So it's the rule of brute force then?
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2
This article breaks down into the following:
Laws can be whatever governments and their corporate sponsors want them to be.
Any corporate body will prosecute whomever is easiest, closest, most convenient to prosecute.
Any attempt to circumvent that will marginalize you.
Let's think about that for a moment. Laws can be made to do whatever the people who paid the government to create them, what then to do. True enough, with the stroke of a pen Disney can write a check to get a law passed making it illegal to say the phrase "Mickey Mouse" without flipping a quarter to Michael Eisner. I don't see the relevance of that. That is precisely what brought us to this point - the OVERREACHING of music, video and other companies to put a lock on every last bit. So? How has that prevented at least the technology to unwind that so far?
Next, Our corporate masters can go after whatever is easiest to bite. Nothing new there. If you can't sue the company owner then sue the service provider or the electric company that powers the site or the guy who brings the pizzas. Make it so difficult to do business that they fold of their own 'volition'. So it's gunboat diplomacy. I get it. But that is the xenophobic fallacy of 'they can never build it better than us'. Who's to say the mercurial powers of the PRC wouldn't be willing to turn a blind eye to someting that weakens the US supremacy in intellectual property? Can you say industrial espionage? This is precisely where companies like MS lose billions in bootleg CD's for example so how is digital music and movies any different?
The last point is really hubris. You can't fight city hall. Maybe not. Maybe all you have to do is burn it down.
Take a piece of steel. Flatten it by hand under heat. Fold it in half. Flatten it again. Repeat 20 times. You wind up with 2^20 layers of alternating hard and soft steel joined by high carbon layers created on the outside of each fold. Reheat, finish and polish. What you get is a flexible spring that is incredibly resilient yet has an extremely hard edge.
Flying blimps to support wireless communications. Since it's already cheaper to run wireless facilities than to string cable across the Andes, for example and since blimps are cheaper to run than comsats, this is already being attempted.
Carve up a big mainframe with 24 or so processors and bind the OS to a few of them. Get another mainframe and use it as a mezzanine backplane to gang together other mainframes each with their OS images bound to specific processors. Run all networking and IO through their own processors to offload the CECs. Add some more ASICs to handle crypto. Toss all console activity off to another 'special' processor. Run a hypervisor over the whole shebang to control all of the guest images.
Voila you've reinvented parallel sysplex with VM for Linux running on 'cheap' hardware.
Gee is that the ONLY way a space shuttle can look or the only way a stolen design can look?
Was that supposed to be funny?
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 2
Or just lame, yeah you know, the kind of stupidity that gives geekdom a bad name. It's nice to know some know nothing weenie crackhead from the LA times who probably got his job on all fours has something critical to say about computers.
It's not that this line or that is allowed. It's that as a scientific process the WH is determining the processes along which future investigation, unrelated or not, proceeds. So if we collect and use cells using process "A" and we know that process "A-prime" is not allowed then we will never be allowed to use process "A-prime". Consider that cells are used in different ways along the process and it is possible that some point we may be called to do this or that to cells or perform some process to them - but now we can't?!?!
What utter horseshit. Companies like Sun have whole divisions who do nothing but this. They scour the world looking for possible patent violations and then hold up the other party at legal gunpoint. My company does the same - it's a $400 million a year business to us. Listen to them whine they're just being pussies. Hey I think I'll send some lawyers over to them now.
They make the case for their own dumbness. Obviously some of the most effective websites are short term and might not be around the next time some advertising weenies get around to awarding trophies. Short term, immediate action, issue oriented stuff with a focus will never be permanently sitting there. Hell what about the Olympics?
-Archimedes I think said that. Point is, nothing is un-hackable. But do you want to? Well some of you do but most of us do it out of cheapness or some drive to build it just the way we want it and/or hate to see older perfectly good hardware go to waste.
Now today it isn't cheaper to build it yourself so that's a non-starter. There is still a reason to custom build, mostly upgrade kind high end stuff - ya know the kind of HW you simply can't get at Circuit City.
But I for one am perfectly willing to throw old HW out (recycle of course) instead of keeping it around hoping to save $19 some day by reusing it.
What I REALLY want is a half speed $99 disposable PC.
If I run WTS or Citrix on a server somewhere deep in the network and Jane sysadmin unplugs one of the SCSI drives for maintenance or because it broke and now I need to run XP-ish office apps off the network for 30+ people who log onto that server, then what?
Or 75 bucks for driving in Compton or $295 for parking in Liberty City, Miami too long and potentially getting our car stolen. From now on when you drive in those BAD neighborhoods we'll charge you extra. And even though you blew through that construction zone @54mph - 24mpn over the speed limit, weaved through the cones and almost killed someone we won't fine you because or self appointed guardian of decency technology doesn't work that way.
The flipside of all of this corporate sponsored information is that there is no way to tell what is information and what it PR. The great convergence is the one that combines: News, entertainment, sports, politics, opinion.
Audio Time Compression - keep it short !!!!!!
on
Yo - Pay Attention!
·
· Score: 4
I read an interview last year with some engineers who pioneered audio timeslice compression technology that's used in commercial audio editing. The basic problem was that they needed to insert a sound byte of 60 seconds or so into a segment 40 seconds long w/o chipmunking it. So they figured out a way to slice out every third millisecond and playback the segments seamlessly. The 40 second boundary was the limit of what people were going to pay attention to.
Similarly a big problem for channels like MTV, BET is that few people watch a video for more than 2 minutes so whatever product they have has to fit close to that or at least not be materially harmed from a commercial perspective if the audience only listens to the first 2 minutes - eg. people will still buy it.
People in the US have phones because there is a universal phone charge on the bill to collect money that goes into a fund to build out phoine service to rural and poor areas that can't afford it or where the telco doesn't want to. It sure wasn't because the silver haired angels at the phone company just wanted to out of the goodness of their hearts or because they thought they might make some money at it some day. In fact what is happening now in the US west is that USWEST and PacBel are pulling whole towns off the grid because of some 'changes' in the law that allows them to charge the 'full cost' for dragging service to some far off off village. When the phone company presents a $100,000 or so charge to a town of a 100 people they say 'Stuff It' and go wireless.
It's like the rural electrification program which I'm sure some blockhead Libertarian would say is bad because if people WANT electricity they should move to the city.
The real problem is that countries like the US and the UK for example auction off G3 spectrum to the highest bidder and the phone companies spent more money to snap it up than it would have cost to actually provide broadband service to every household in the country. This is true of the UK at least. So in order to keep the services away from you or I they buy the bandwidth and put it on a shelf. This protects their oligopolies in local and long distance service and keeps the other providers from encroaching through the wireless space. Oh an BTW since the auctions cost so much money the telcos get to petition for rate increases for all of the other services because now they're so leveraged.
Probably the only way to turn it on is to also enable Smart Tags. At least that's my theory.
Maybe they're just jumpstarting the militias
on
Carnivore To Die?
·
· Score: 2
Hey numbbot - the FBI works in this country on domestic and counterterrorism and the last terrorist wasn't some goat humping raghead. He was ummm...yeah a white american male. Does anyone see a correlation between Ashcroft and some relaxation on the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus, etc. in an attempt to restart the Christian Identity movement?
Well I do - so before you go all "it's muthfukin' Clinton's fault" remember who the Justice Department represents...
The site you refer to prides itself on "hardhitting" "nobullshit" Bill O'Reilly in- your-face I-dare-you-to-differ-with-me news all served up on a platter for people who can't distinguish or don't want to, editorial from news. Apart from the political slant which you nailed squarely. Else The Nation would be the hottest website in the world. Which its not because like it or not, sites like The Nation require the reader to think whereas The Free Republic merely requires the reader to have an opinion and type.
BTW two of the biggest columnists @ Salon are David Horowitz and Camille Paglia neither of which are very far to the left of Ghengis Khan.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah it was not the hydrogen that caused the Hindenburg crash. It was something else. But H2 is what actually burned isn't it? Isn't that what caused the airship to explode and kill almost everyone? OK it wasn't the jetfuel that caused the Concorde to crash. That's comforting.
Blimps are such a dumbfuck idea as to be almost beyond comprehension. The weather has to be great you can't land ot take off in high wind (does anyone remember the photograph of the US Airship Los Angeles standing 700ft straight up, nose down from its mooring in a high wind?) Does anyone realized that almost every Helium US airship crashed and killed their crews? Uh, the Shenendoa, the Akron, the Macon? Almost all of the British airships like the R101 crashed and burned or just crashed?
Because they make a fortune with a guaranteed rate of return on analog service and they make an even bigger fortune selling or reselling T1, Frame Relay and similar service to businesses. Why else do you think that the 'business rate' for ADSL is 3x what the residential rate. Because customers would pay for it as long as it's cheaper than ~$1,500/month. Since even the business ADSL really has no associated SLA they can market it as a loss leader and entry point to their 'real' business services such as FracT1 and Frame Relay circuits. They know they can't stop cable. They simply don't care. All they worry about is preserving their own stranglehold on their own customers. The only going broadband businesses run by phone companies ARE cable companies like the cash cow that ATT just spun off. They knew they couldn't do any better so they might as well milk it for a huge bag of cash.
DSL like its ISDN ancestor are simply bullshit smokescreens that Bells pretend to offer so that they can claim unfair advantage of OTHERS in order to get rate protection. Don't you get it? Bells have no serious intention of offering broadband because they make too much money from low bandwidth analog phone lines. If they dick around for a 10 years or so putting up some fake DSL then they can claim that the reason it's all so hosed is because of the evil CLECs, ILX's and cable companies getting some bogus unfair advantage. Ergo the Bells, since they are the corporate underwriters of many Congresspersons, get to pressure their legislative suppliers with better rates and terms.
This article breaks down into the following:
Laws can be whatever governments and their corporate sponsors want them to be.
Any corporate body will prosecute whomever is easiest, closest, most convenient to prosecute.
Any attempt to circumvent that will marginalize you.
Let's think about that for a moment. Laws can be made to do whatever the people who paid the government to create them, what then to do. True enough, with the stroke of a pen Disney can write a check to get a law passed making it illegal to say the phrase "Mickey Mouse" without flipping a quarter to Michael Eisner. I don't see the relevance of that. That is precisely what brought us to this point - the OVERREACHING of music, video and other companies to put a lock on every last bit. So? How has that prevented at least the technology to unwind that so far?
Next, Our corporate masters can go after whatever is easiest to bite. Nothing new there. If you can't sue the company owner then sue the service provider or the electric company that powers the site or the guy who brings the pizzas. Make it so difficult to do business that they fold of their own 'volition'. So it's gunboat diplomacy. I get it. But that is the xenophobic fallacy of 'they can never build it better than us'. Who's to say the mercurial powers of the PRC wouldn't be willing to turn a blind eye to someting that weakens the US supremacy in intellectual property? Can you say industrial espionage? This is precisely where companies like MS lose billions in bootleg CD's for example so how is digital music and movies any different?
The last point is really hubris. You can't fight city hall. Maybe not. Maybe all you have to do is burn it down.
Take a piece of steel. Flatten it by hand under heat. Fold it in half. Flatten it again. Repeat 20 times. You wind up with 2^20 layers of alternating hard and soft steel joined by high carbon layers created on the outside of each fold. Reheat, finish and polish. What you get is a flexible spring that is incredibly resilient yet has an extremely hard edge.
Flying blimps to support wireless communications. Since it's already cheaper to run wireless facilities than to string cable across the Andes, for example and since blimps are cheaper to run than comsats, this is already being attempted.
Carve up a big mainframe with 24 or so processors and bind the OS to a few of them. Get another mainframe and use it as a mezzanine backplane to gang together other mainframes each with their OS images bound to specific processors. Run all networking and IO through their own processors to offload the CECs. Add some more ASICs to handle crypto. Toss all console activity off to another 'special' processor. Run a hypervisor over the whole shebang to control all of the guest images.
Voila you've reinvented parallel sysplex with VM for Linux running on 'cheap' hardware.
Except how cheap do they expect it to be?
Gee is that the ONLY way a space shuttle can look or the only way a stolen design can look?
Or just lame, yeah you know, the kind of stupidity that gives geekdom a bad name. It's nice to know some know nothing weenie crackhead from the LA times who probably got his job on all fours has something critical to say about computers.
It's not that this line or that is allowed. It's that as a scientific process the WH is determining the processes along which future investigation, unrelated or not, proceeds. So if we collect and use cells using process "A" and we know that process "A-prime" is not allowed then we will never be allowed to use process "A-prime". Consider that cells are used in different ways along the process and it is possible that some point we may be called to do this or that to cells or perform some process to them - but now we can't?!?!
Sit on a Physioball instead of a chair - it's better for your body, posture and strength.
I have a circular slide rule too.
I can scratch little marks in the dirt with a stick.
I have fingers and toes.
Beat that ya pussies!
What utter horseshit. Companies like Sun have whole divisions who do nothing but this. They scour the world looking for possible patent violations and then hold up the other party at legal gunpoint. My company does the same - it's a $400 million a year business to us. Listen to them whine they're just being pussies. Hey I think I'll send some lawyers over to them now.
They make the case for their own dumbness. Obviously some of the most effective websites are short term and might not be around the next time some advertising weenies get around to awarding trophies. Short term, immediate action, issue oriented stuff with a focus will never be permanently sitting there. Hell what about the Olympics?
-Archimedes I think said that. Point is, nothing is un-hackable. But do you want to? Well some of you do but most of us do it out of cheapness or some drive to build it just the way we want it and/or hate to see older perfectly good hardware go to waste.
Now today it isn't cheaper to build it yourself so that's a non-starter. There is still a reason to custom build, mostly upgrade kind high end stuff - ya know the kind of HW you simply can't get at Circuit City.
But I for one am perfectly willing to throw old HW out (recycle of course) instead of keeping it around hoping to save $19 some day by reusing it.
What I REALLY want is a half speed $99 disposable PC.
If I run WTS or Citrix on a server somewhere deep in the network and Jane sysadmin unplugs one of the SCSI drives for maintenance or because it broke and now I need to run XP-ish office apps off the network for 30+ people who log onto that server, then what?
Or 75 bucks for driving in Compton or $295 for parking in Liberty City, Miami too long and potentially getting our car stolen. From now on when you drive in those BAD neighborhoods we'll charge you extra. And even though you blew through that construction zone @54mph - 24mpn over the speed limit, weaved through the cones and almost killed someone we won't fine you because or self appointed guardian of decency technology doesn't work that way.
The flipside of all of this corporate sponsored information is that there is no way to tell what is information and what it PR. The great convergence is the one that combines: News, entertainment, sports, politics, opinion.
I read an interview last year with some engineers who pioneered audio timeslice compression technology that's used in commercial audio editing. The basic problem was that they needed to insert a sound byte of 60 seconds or so into a segment 40 seconds long w/o chipmunking it. So they figured out a way to slice out every third millisecond and playback the segments seamlessly. The 40 second boundary was the limit of what people were going to pay attention to.
Similarly a big problem for channels like MTV, BET is that few people watch a video for more than 2 minutes so whatever product they have has to fit close to that or at least not be materially harmed from a commercial perspective if the audience only listens to the first 2 minutes - eg. people will still buy it.
People in the US have phones because there is a universal phone charge on the bill to collect money that goes into a fund to build out phoine service to rural and poor areas that can't afford it or where the telco doesn't want to. It sure wasn't because the silver haired angels at the phone company just wanted to out of the goodness of their hearts or because they thought they might make some money at it some day. In fact what is happening now in the US west is that USWEST and PacBel are pulling whole towns off the grid because of some 'changes' in the law that allows them to charge the 'full cost' for dragging service to some far off off village. When the phone company presents a $100,000 or so charge to a town of a 100 people they say 'Stuff It' and go wireless.
It's like the rural electrification program which I'm sure some blockhead Libertarian would say is bad because if people WANT electricity they should move to the city.
The real problem is that countries like the US and the UK for example auction off G3 spectrum to the highest bidder and the phone companies spent more money to snap it up than it would have cost to actually provide broadband service to every household in the country. This is true of the UK at least. So in order to keep the services away from you or I they buy the bandwidth and put it on a shelf. This protects their oligopolies in local and long distance service and keeps the other providers from encroaching through the wireless space. Oh an BTW since the auctions cost so much money the telcos get to petition for rate increases for all of the other services because now they're so leveraged.
Screw the speeding ding which by the way is totally arbitrary. Why do they collect for this and how did they arrive at this figure?
The big problem is that they went and paid themselves with his money w/o asking him.
Pepsi
Oracle
AOL
Nike
McDonalds
Disney
Nokia
Sony
How does this fuck with AOL?
How does this benefit MS directly?
Probably the only way to turn it on is to also enable Smart Tags. At least that's my theory.
Hey numbbot - the FBI works in this country on domestic and counterterrorism and the last terrorist wasn't some goat humping raghead. He was ummm...yeah a white american male. Does anyone see a correlation between Ashcroft and some relaxation on the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus, etc. in an attempt to restart the Christian Identity movement?
Well I do - so before you go all "it's muthfukin' Clinton's fault" remember who the Justice Department represents...
The site you refer to prides itself on "hardhitting" "nobullshit" Bill O'Reilly in- your-face I-dare-you-to-differ-with-me news all served up on a platter for people who can't distinguish or don't want to, editorial from news. Apart from the political slant which you nailed squarely. Else The Nation would be the hottest website in the world. Which its not because like it or not, sites like The Nation require the reader to think whereas The Free Republic merely requires the reader to have an opinion and type.
BTW two of the biggest columnists @ Salon are David Horowitz and Camille Paglia neither of which are very far to the left of Ghengis Khan.