Why in the world do we spend tax dollars to let native [sic] Americans surf porn...
and...
If the idea was to give them a better quality of life, maybe we should offer them education instead.
First of all, what makes you think their plan is to use WiFi to surf porn? Is that your primary Internet use other than trolling on Slashdot? In many rural areas (you must be a city dweller), educational opportunities are in fact taken advantage of over the Internet.
As to your other comments, of course they are pure bullshit, too. You seem bitter. Get turned down for the party school of you choice and have to go to Community College instead?
Doesn't that seem like an awful lot of money for...
2.8 Mill may seem like a lot of cash to you and me, but realistically, it doesn't buy a lot of IT these days. My guess is that building the facility and purchasing the 40 computers and associated equipment don't actually leave a whole lot for the wireless ISP end of the deal, which itself could consume 2.8 mill, easy. It's sad, but that kind of money is relativly minor for an IT investment of this type.
Of course, this being Slashdot, all patents are baaaaad! But if you put that aside, none of the information here is particularly specific about what exactly these patents are for. For example the article says these patents cover using radio frequencies in handheld devices to send and receive information. Well, that's a very vague, and obviously there is more to the patent than that. It's very likely that this is a silly patent, but it's hard to tell with nothing but pro and con sound bites. Most of the people here sputtering and spewing and frothing probably have no clue (just as I have no clue) what the real issues in this patent case are.
For job satisfaction, universities are the place to be for a PhD, but not the highest pay in many cases. But there are far more PhDs out there than universities can absorb, so many (perhaps mostly English Lit PhDs?) are forced out on the open market. In Seattle it's a joke that many of the Starbucks baristas are PhDs...
Leave the links, edit the text to read something like "worthless scumbag, scamming git, googlebomb, please die, low quality, boring" - and lock the page.
The point is that methods such as this require a lot of time on the part of the wiki webmaster. If you get a whole lot of this crap at your wiki / blog, what are the chances you are really going to want to spend a few hours *every* day to mess with the links by hand?
Someone who is a PhD is probably gone first chance they get, maybe even a month or two...
It is a sad fact that while there is a lot of "talk" about how new jobs are "up", most of these new jobs are not for PhDs and other highly educated people, or even average techies. These are mostly service industry jobs that pay in the $10 / hour or less range.
I think you will see a *lot* of PhDs willing to make a year long commitment to a $30k help desk job, rather than being unemployed. There is not a huge wave of employers looking for PhDs right now.
Most BB boards (including phpBB, upgrade!) and blogs (including Slashdot) now feature the visual security code for sign-up. But, of course, this does not prevent hand entry of spam...
You are so right. Look at the current uses of the internet: E-Mail, Instant Messaging, HTML Web, Games (a la Counter-Strike/Q3A), File Transfers (Ala FTP and P2P) and some upcoming technologies like VoIP.
You are thinking in terms of primarily consumer uses of the browser. But keep in mind, as applications in business , everything from POS to accounting, CRM applications, other process management tools, become "web based", the need for a more "sophisticated" user interface will grow.
What I think is going to happen (and funny, really), is that the browser will expand and expand until it's just a skin for the OS (err, that's what Windows is!), and then there will be a special application to access Internet sites!
I think the problem isn't that user's don't want it; it's that these technologies are totally unreliably and really don't work if you expect more than three different kinds of browsers visiting your site.
Well, stats show that in fact there really are not more than "three different kinds of browsers" being used these days. Honeslty, forget about Lynx, it's just not an issue. But very very very few people still use NN4x or IE4, and if they do, they have only themselves for not having support. If you use NN6/Mozilla 1 (and assorted Mozilla spin-offs)/IE5-6, you have no problems.
If you've got a Masters in any IS field and are applying for a $30k helpdesk position what are the chances of you sticking with me when that good job does come along?
I'm not really trying to crack a joke here, but honestly: What are the chances ANY competent person is going to stay with a Help Desk job for any significant period of time? The customers are often frustrating, the pace can be exhausting, the work rarely has long-term personal satisfaction associated with it... If you get some PhD, hire him / her and feel very lucky to have a (presumably) competent employee for the few months that they are with you.
Hiring is an investment and I need to be able to see a return on that investment.
Get use to the "would you like fries with that" crowd, then. Face it: Help Desk is no ones ideal job. Why would anyone stick around for an extended period of time?
This is the *little* guy against the giant and this time the little guy is looking for a free handout.
As opposed to what? The big fish like Microsoft who patent clicking a button two times? Big fish like Amazon who patent clicking a button once to check out? Other multi-nationals patenting silly things simply because they can? Look, these big fish are hardly acting altruistically here; they are acting because they don't want to pay licensing fees. But hey, just you little fish walk on one of their silly patents. Start a business that can significantly compete with Amazon, and watch them sue you for your check out button.
I spend a good 60-65% of my time at work doing my own projects (and, yesy, about 10-15% of that looking at Slashdot and sites like it). But, I work for the government, and there isn't much to do most of the time...
Honestly officer, just because I have 20 kilos of black tar in the trunk of my rental car deosn't mean I have any dristributing it or shooting up myself. I just thought, you know, it would be a good way to weight down the car's rear end...
My point is, we are hardly the people to be preaching about non-proliferation. Our own bio / nuke programs continue to expand while we tell the world that they should give up these evil tools and embrace "world peace". Shouldn't we be leading by example? To me, it seems like just another example of the US saying that the rules don't apply to us.
What you're gesturing about is Fort Dietrick where the Army's bio-weapons program isn't anymore.
Really. No more bio weapons at Fort Whatever? Sure, OK, I'll have to take your word for it. But the location is hardly the point. Call it Fort Secret Bio Lab, we still *are* in the business of developing bio weapons.
I don't believe the post to which you supplied said anything about the United States. Rather, it speculated that the new supercomputer would be used for nuclear weapons.
And I said, who are we (yes, not all Slashdotters are from the US, but most / many are in fact from the US) to tell China what to do with their supercomputer? Kettle, black, glass houses, and so forth...
Well, why should the United States be the sole keeper of Weapons of Mass Destruction? History has shown that we aren't exactly the most trustworthy of these things. Just exactly what do you suppose they are developing at Fort Mead? Vaccines to save the world?
99.99999% of the "deadenders" who sputter and spew "I... I'm gonna SUE!!!!" will not, and really have no clue about what it would tak or even if they have any real legal basis to "SUE!!!!"
It's cheap consumer electronics. Return it and get one that does not have this issue, then resume your life. No story here, move along.
"Which one do you think has more credibility, an article in a pro-Linux magazine saying "Linux is x" or a slick Microsoft advertisement saying "Microsoft is more x than Linux will ever be"?
These days, neither. The M$ hacks are paid-for prostitutes, the Linux hack are just whack-jobs. Neither, baby.
Honestly, do you actually feel that it is OK to have camcorders in movie theaters? Strangly, it is people like you who think it is OK to steal, but get pissed off when someone steals from you. I take it you have no problems handing over your cell / laptop / iPod / paycheck / wallet / cash to some mugger who thinks they need it more than you? Same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
and...
If the idea was to give them a better quality of life, maybe we should offer them education instead.
First of all, what makes you think their plan is to use WiFi to surf porn? Is that your primary Internet use other than trolling on Slashdot? In many rural areas (you must be a city dweller), educational opportunities are in fact taken advantage of over the Internet.
As to your other comments, of course they are pure bullshit, too. You seem bitter. Get turned down for the party school of you choice and have to go to Community College instead?
2.8 Mill may seem like a lot of cash to you and me, but realistically, it doesn't buy a lot of IT these days. My guess is that building the facility and purchasing the 40 computers and associated equipment don't actually leave a whole lot for the wireless ISP end of the deal, which itself could consume 2.8 mill, easy. It's sad, but that kind of money is relativly minor for an IT investment of this type.
Of course, this being Slashdot, all patents are baaaaad! But if you put that aside, none of the information here is particularly specific about what exactly these patents are for. For example the article says these patents cover using radio frequencies in handheld devices to send and receive information. Well, that's a very vague, and obviously there is more to the patent than that. It's very likely that this is a silly patent, but it's hard to tell with nothing but pro and con sound bites. Most of the people here sputtering and spewing and frothing probably have no clue (just as I have no clue) what the real issues in this patent case are.
Plug-in. Search the phpBB community board.
For job satisfaction, universities are the place to be for a PhD, but not the highest pay in many cases. But there are far more PhDs out there than universities can absorb, so many (perhaps mostly English Lit PhDs?) are forced out on the open market. In Seattle it's a joke that many of the Starbucks baristas are PhDs...
The point is that methods such as this require a lot of time on the part of the wiki webmaster. If you get a whole lot of this crap at your wiki / blog, what are the chances you are really going to want to spend a few hours *every* day to mess with the links by hand?
It is a sad fact that while there is a lot of "talk" about how new jobs are "up", most of these new jobs are not for PhDs and other highly educated people, or even average techies. These are mostly service industry jobs that pay in the $10 / hour or less range.
I think you will see a *lot* of PhDs willing to make a year long commitment to a $30k help desk job, rather than being unemployed. There is not a huge wave of employers looking for PhDs right now.
Most BB boards (including phpBB, upgrade!) and blogs (including Slashdot) now feature the visual security code for sign-up. But, of course, this does not prevent hand entry of spam...
You are thinking in terms of primarily consumer uses of the browser. But keep in mind, as applications in business , everything from POS to accounting, CRM applications, other process management tools, become "web based", the need for a more "sophisticated" user interface will grow.
What I think is going to happen (and funny, really), is that the browser will expand and expand until it's just a skin for the OS (err, that's what Windows is!), and then there will be a special application to access Internet sites!
Well, stats show that in fact there really are not more than "three different kinds of browsers" being used these days. Honeslty, forget about Lynx, it's just not an issue. But very very very few people still use NN4x or IE4, and if they do, they have only themselves for not having support. If you use NN6/Mozilla 1 (and assorted Mozilla spin-offs)/IE5-6, you have no problems.
I'm not really trying to crack a joke here, but honestly: What are the chances ANY competent person is going to stay with a Help Desk job for any significant period of time? The customers are often frustrating, the pace can be exhausting, the work rarely has long-term personal satisfaction associated with it... If you get some PhD, hire him / her and feel very lucky to have a (presumably) competent employee for the few months that they are with you.
Hiring is an investment and I need to be able to see a return on that investment.
Get use to the "would you like fries with that" crowd, then. Face it: Help Desk is no ones ideal job. Why would anyone stick around for an extended period of time?
As opposed to what? The big fish like Microsoft who patent clicking a button two times? Big fish like Amazon who patent clicking a button once to check out? Other multi-nationals patenting silly things simply because they can? Look, these big fish are hardly acting altruistically here; they are acting because they don't want to pay licensing fees. But hey, just you little fish walk on one of their silly patents. Start a business that can significantly compete with Amazon, and watch them sue you for your check out button.
I spend a good 60-65% of my time at work doing my own projects (and, yesy, about 10-15% of that looking at Slashdot and sites like it). But, I work for the government, and there isn't much to do most of the time...
Honestly officer, just because I have 20 kilos of black tar in the trunk of my rental car deosn't mean I have any dristributing it or shooting up myself. I just thought, you know, it would be a good way to weight down the car's rear end...
How about recursive Pig Latin? Every time you need to change it, just keep running it through your Pig Latin algorithm.
The World's Most Dangerous Password
My point is, we are hardly the people to be preaching about non-proliferation. Our own bio / nuke programs continue to expand while we tell the world that they should give up these evil tools and embrace "world peace". Shouldn't we be leading by example? To me, it seems like just another example of the US saying that the rules don't apply to us.
Really. No more bio weapons at Fort Whatever? Sure, OK, I'll have to take your word for it. But the location is hardly the point. Call it Fort Secret Bio Lab, we still *are* in the business of developing bio weapons.
Good point. Why is the parent modded "troll"?
And I said, who are we (yes, not all Slashdotters are from the US, but most / many are in fact from the US) to tell China what to do with their supercomputer? Kettle, black, glass houses, and so forth...
Well, why should the United States be the sole keeper of Weapons of Mass Destruction? History has shown that we aren't exactly the most trustworthy of these things. Just exactly what do you suppose they are developing at Fort Mead? Vaccines to save the world?
It's cheap consumer electronics. Return it and get one that does not have this issue, then resume your life. No story here, move along.
Cute. But you still are not in Mensa.
These days, neither. The M$ hacks are paid-for prostitutes, the Linux hack are just whack-jobs. Neither, baby.
Honestly, do you actually feel that it is OK to have camcorders in movie theaters? Strangly, it is people like you who think it is OK to steal, but get pissed off when someone steals from you. I take it you have no problems handing over your cell / laptop / iPod / paycheck / wallet / cash to some mugger who thinks they need it more than you? Same thing.