I would think it is a little bit more than that. Building a major distribution centre away from a city gives you better traffic access and egress. You can place it where it is central to several major towns and cities. Land cost will be significantly reduced. The most subtle one is of course leverage, when you a by far the major employer in a small town it gives you a lot of leverage, no taxes, priority on all services, local government priority including police and fire and the community will myopically defend you. Even if there isn't a town you can work to create a totally dependent one. Amazon wouldn't really like the RV crowd as they can simply pack up and leave rather than being tied to a property investment.
The permanently mobile by choice population is also interesting. I wonder how they handle the digital communications and whether camp grounds are starting to provide broadband connections. I wonder if caravan towing services will become more popular, allowing your the simple use of a more efficient vehicle, rather than having it when not necessary, especially when your caravan spends months at one location.
What about if the whole webcam border watch, was all about flagging people who have an interest in US border operations. I wonder how many people who wish to cross borders illegally couldn't resist a quick perv even if it required registration and gives away your IP address.
When your searches are being recorded and analysed, and your email is recorded and analyses, and your mobile calls are recorded and analysed and, well basically anything you do across the web can be added to a database and probed. Well, adding in a few extra bits of digital bait help to create a more accurate profile of whom to target and who not to waste resources on can be a very effective, hmm, phishing technique.
With open source everything is open. There are many ways to contribute to open source beyond coding the software. There is promotion, simply provide honest personal recommendations for the product, distribution when making recommendation offer to supply a copy on disc and assist with installation, artwork if your coding sucks but you have flair on the creative side assist with icons, web art, themes etc., documentation assist in writing manuals and guides and of course forum participation providing assistance to newer users.
All of that counts far more than buying a hand full of minor support contracts. Help yourself, by helping others, that is what drives the growth of open source software products, the reality is more often than not your personal time and skills are worth far more to open source than your money and, of course don't forget to have fun while doing it, it's the FOSS way;).
Dang, you must be young. At the moment I am watching a particular movie collection, you have obviously never heard of it or the associated merchandising that was targeted at children and even at adults, "James Bond".
PS if you choose to watch this particular collection I recommend you watch it in order from newest to oldest, special effects are no substitute for quality movie making, hmm, much like "Star Wars" or even "Star Trek".
It doesn't really matter, the big game 'is' to be an ISP and pretend one of your customers is the culprit, so the pseudo customer gets pursued, while you simply pretend another shady customer has opened up an account. There were quite a few smaller ISPs who had a real reputation for being enablers of digital crimes, so this tactic is really nothing new.
The whole idea is to hide and make your presence felt, big noisy operations are just targets. Besides the biggest culprits will be intelligence services in corrupt countries creating their own business side line on the 'companies' already shady servers.
I thought Emperor Constantine had a bigger hand in rewriting the bible than anybody else, in fact a fist if it contained anything he was unhappy with and lead to the contradiction, much like in modern days, where someone who didn't believe at all was using the religion for political convenience and to maintain power. In fact the Roman cult of Sol seems to feature more prominently in his beliefs, hence a particular day of worship was required, I think you all can guess which day that was;).
As to copyright ownership, as every copy in existence is in fact an altered and techinically infringing work and there are no original copies available, it would be more accurate to say it is well and truly in the public domain, including all of it's symbolism, especially the pagan (as well a numerous other all ready existing religions) elements of the Christian religion and of course all of it's derivatives.
As for trademark infringements apparently the Christian religion was also a little naughty in that regard, turning prior religions gods and prophets into devils and demons and their symbolism into marks of evil as a 'er' missionary strategy and, quite often for far nastier purposes. So perhaps they mind need to tidy up some elements before claiming sole ownership.
In reality the real decision is not whether to PHP or C++ but, whether to add a compiler to PHP. The performance of any compiled code is bound to the quality of the compiler and what it can do with the wild interpretive code you feed it.
Interesting thing about Firefox though, I can bet that it will never remain the most popular browser but don't expect any real threat from IE what ever version. The biggest threat to Firefox will be other Mozilla browsers, some of which might even be produced by Firefox.com.
As the underlying open source code for Firefox becomes more popular expect more parallel development, specialised versions for particular uses, branded versions and of course tweaked versions to suit specific online strategies, but all of the basically being compatible in terms of web content connect ability, hmm, the wonderful world of open standards (real competition, greater innovation and better end user relations).
Yeah, I was going to say, isn't the Catholic church infringing on Gods copyright, unless of course they are declaring Papal supremacy.
Personally I would have thought they would have wanted to get their symbolism out there as much as possible and only react if it was being used negatively.
Personally I think they are heading down the dangerous and disgusting territory of exploitative corporate religion for profit ala scientology, rather than religion for charity and the furtherance of positive human social 'evolution'.
Face it the patent is disgusting, "The physiological data can be gleaned from a third party health data collection repository, a healthcare smart card, a real-time physiological sensor" it is so mind bogglingly privacy invasive that truly only M$ could have come up with it, especially for that line alone.
Why is M$ going out of it's way to make itself look stupid, clumsy and downright evil. There seems to be this major disconnect going on in Redmond between what they think is acceptable and what the rest of the planet thinks is acceptable. Ballmer driven patents, patent as much crap as you can, count the number of patents pat yourself on the back for a job well done and ignore the money you've wasted on patenting useless ideas, ignore the marketing damage done to the companies image as everyone discusses those patents.
Seriously the stupid patent goes even further "In addition, the physical characteristics can include psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc. Such information can be useful in enhancing social interaction as well as adjusting how an avatar performs in a competitive virtual environment." you really couldn't make up a story where a company would be stupid enough to put that into a patent. So, what does that mean, if your a gay, overweight, atheist, who votes socialist, you are pretty much fucked and will not win any game ever or what ever else marketing dollars decide is the ultra consumerist lifestyle.
That of course was not the way it was working. In most cases people where only interested in the bit of information they were after. So do the search, find the paragraph and you have your answer, no need to buy the whole bloody way overpriced textbook. Now this sounds bigger than it really was, often the paragraph rarely answered you full question, however it did reinforce the habit in searching the internet to find your answers and never buying text books (the answer you seek is always somewhere on the internet you just have to find it).
Now if you where writing something you could find your accurate answers say on Wikipedia, use them and then use google book search to find reference able quotes to justify those answers and yeah, you only need the one paragraph, page number, book and author and year of publishing (all based upon your referencing style). Of course that is also becoming largely redundant as more quality, referenced and open information sources are becoming available online, all of course self published.
Hmm, self publishing, it is cheap, it is open, it is really useful across the board (writers as proof of skills, readers for answering questions and industry to demonstrate expertise and government to inform their citizens) and of course it totally fucks over existing profit bloated middle man for profit publishers. Face it, corporate publishers are 20th century dinosaurs, they should just STFU and die already, they are not needed any more and no longer provide any real benefit in the 21st century internet age.
Going back to twelve inches was inevitable. It was all about price points and artificially inflated profit margins. You had the weirdness of 15 inch notebooks being significantly cheaper than smaller "road warrior" (what a load of marketing crap to feed the egos idiot executives so they would pay the inflated prices) ultra portable notebooks. You couldn't very well have netbooks come in at the twelve inch size range and bugger up the PR and ego infested world of high profit ultra portable note books.
Nothing of course lasts for ever. So netbooks are now likely to settle of a few screen sizes say 12, 10 and 8. The size would largely be driven by age, with older people going for the larger screens and younger people going for smaller screens, so eye ball capability ie. screen real estate and of course font size is the decider.
The differences between sizes will be largely screen size, keyboard size and storage capacity (simply more space available) as performance capability will be much the same across all sizes (with PR=B$ variations for price differentiation and profit enhancement).
Now would that be a country with 50 states and, for 49 of them closed standards are nothing more than an expensive overhead. Which in turns means that the federal government of that country in continuing to maintain closed standards means they are creating a bias in the system by penalising 49 states to fund 1 state. The reality is as standards open up so does employment and business opportunities. Closed standards just result in monopolies and bloated profits for a handful whilst the rest of the economy suffers.
It is wildly inappropriate for one company to define and change at will the document standards for a whole country, at this stage of computer industry development it has been corruption that has allowed this craziness to last as long as it has.
Preparation and planning are required. Otherwise some bright idiot will manage to turn an asteroid into a radioactive dust cloud, then on it's next orbit or even it's current one it will settle upon the whole earth's surface. Prevent one serious calamity only to turn it into a far worse event. Whilst it wont have the same 'impact' it would certainly mutate life especially, the microscopic variety well beyond the ability of more complex forms to adapt to the altered biosphere.
Not to worry, given a couple of hundred thousand years, the radioactivity will settle down enough to allow life to evolve under more stable conditions once again, baring any future impacts of course.
Hmm, now is that a recommendation for.net or a warning because it seems as a result of becoming specialised in.net you are always looking for a new job. Does that mean when coding employers think.net might be a good idea, once they have got it in place and start trying to be productive with it and with.net coders, they soon find it is a waste forcing those.net specialists to look for another job with another company also sucked in by.net advertising;D.
Democracy is not a 'fait accompli' it is a work in progress and that's what it takes a lot of work by it's citizens. Are Obama and the Democrats perfect, of course not but they are a significant improvement upon the previous bunch of flagrant crooks and deceivers and that is the point. Each cycle you work to achieve a better government than the last time around.
Globally pretty much every democratic society dropped the bundle over the last twenty years as they fell into the mass media morass of lies and public relations, as corporate executives via marketing dollars effectively distorted the political system and defined and controlled public debate, so that those same corporate executives could basically steal from the rich and poor alike and, of course strip mine the middle class. The unyielding reality of the episode is that millions of people died to enrich a bunch of corporate executives, lobbyists, corrupt politicians and of course not to forget their quisling running dog, talking heads, the news and opinion presenters who will tell any lie they are paid to.
You want better government put in more effort, no party illusions of perfection, pay attention and when disingenuous corrupt politicians turn up, regardless of political parties toss them out and replace them, hopefully with someone better and repeat and repeat and repeat (a life's work for responsible citizens). It really does not take all that much effort especially with the power of the web to discover and disseminate information of genuine public interest and when it comes to voting, vote red, blue or green(the new third choice) or even independent, based on how well the previous sitting member performed and how likely it is that the other possible choice's are going to perform better.
It took twenty to thirty years to pretty much fuck things up and, don't be surprised if it takes that long to really fix it, hell, the US has twenty odd thousand lobbyists that it has to cull and that slimy lot will tell every imaginable lie and provide every possible vice in order to preserve their corruptive influence and their source of profit and power.
What this is, is a patent on the M$ viewpoint of the world. Basically influential people will lie about the quality of product if the get a lower price, much the same as M$ marketing will tell any lie necessary as long as the profits exceed the penalties. It really is sad that they think influential people are so easily bought, basically for a handful of pretty beads.
So what is the payoff, M$ consider you 'special' they sell product to you at a special price but, watch out if your influence does not align with their current marketing promotions as you'll lose you 'special' status and discounts. It really is rather petty that M$ management believes that the rest of societies honour and integrity is up for sale just like theirs and truly strange that they think that concept is patentable.
Not that there aren't quite a few people out their who have no qualms recommending crap products when they get a kick back for the referrals but, the reality is the influence doesn't have any real lasting value as people soon learn the true value of their recommendations, worthless, just like the products they recommend.
That of course brings up another question. Should anything be legally treated as a trade secret. Does not the end user, the potential victim of malfeasance have a right to make knowledgeable choices. Should not every citizens be entitled to the truth of what they are purchasing, is the government betraying it's own citizens when it allows companies to with hold information from the public that would likely alter their choice to select a product.
The reality is, in the 21st century there is no longer any room for trade secrets. It is obscene the greed is put ahead of people's ability to make a knowledgeable choice and it is even worse the governments seek to protect that greed at the behest of a deceitful minority.
That is rather more accurate than you intended. If libraries and adult based pornography sections then they would be banned, no if children could not be effectively banned from those sections of the library then they would be banned from the whole library.
The same pretty much holds true for the internet, it is fundamentally and adults only networks, no just in the sexual sense but in the legal contractual context. The legal contractual context is very important in the fundamental nature of operation of the internet, of responsible adults establishing and making use of digital network connections and in doing so establishing contractual obligations for the safe and fair use of those connections.
So banning children the requires adult responsibility to use and is based around adult communications is fair and reasonable. Quite simply create another internet, a child safer internet, one where everyone who connects needs to be identified, an internet that has been classified child appropriate for each age group and one that is monitored and controlled to prevent abuse by adults and naturally by other children.
The only catch with TIVO that makes it a dud, is you can't do anything else with it. You can turn it into a file server, a mail server, even an answering service, all while still being a media centre and running FOSS software you can do the lot for less than the price of a TIVO. I also typically prefer twin DVD drives and it is really important to be able to shift the content from DVDs to large hdisk drives for a lazier media jukebox.
The big reason for a FOSS only solution, I'm not interested in paying fix upgrades, I don't want to get stuck with corporate forced rule changes, I want it to be secure and I only ever stream free and then buy it, if it is good enough for local storage. I want to set it and forget it for a decade and not have to deal with corporate ass hat marketing executives and the latest how can we scam and monetize the customers with what ever privacy invasive or nickel and dimeing scheme they can come up with this time. Definitely no M$ solutions, somehow the reality always falls far short of the marketing hype, especially on forums and they're always changing the rules.
So if you live in a cold climate, where heat and light are required simultaneously, then technically speaking the extra energy put into manufacturing more complex LEDs and CFLs makes them more energy inefficient than long life incandescent light fixtures as you are making use of the heat. Always a tricky question in warm climates, which is more energy efficient trying to cool the additional heat load of natural lighting ie. big windows, or making use of energy efficient LED's and sticking to highly insulated solid walls.
The cooling design for data centres needs to shift from an office cooling design to an industrial design. Once you get to that size data units should be shifted to auto-pick racks so you can run the whole facility beyond human comfort levels in the mid 30s centigrade. That way you only pre-condition fresh air and then exhaust rather than recycle. This allows you to adjust your cooling air from 100% fresh, to ground water cooling, to evaporative to refrigerated(ammonia) as external ambient conditions and heat sink capacity dictate.
You basically use to auto pick system to pick bad units from the rack, replace it with a functioning unit and return the defective unit to the service area via an airlock, where tech personal operating in the human comfort zone low 20s versus the server farm's mid 30s. So smart server farm re-design followed by an adjustable fully variable air 'conditioning' system which supplies air within the temperature, velocity and humidity ranges required to keep the hardware operating at near maximum safe operating temperatures.
There is a definitive difference in a Hotel providing free wifi to it's customers, rather than a typical end users unsecure service. Much like playing a radio in a hotel in order to attract customers so wifi is doing the same thing, even if it is legal internet radio.
Hmm, although technically the hotel is already paying those required fees for juke boxes, live bands and of course radio and tv. Now as it is likely that what ever content was being down loaded was likely be played free to air some where on this world, than the Hotel as already paid the blanket full coverage fee, this story is logically likely PR=B$.
With USB memory sticks rapidly heading to a dollar a gigabyte swapping terabytes of content is likely going to be quicker and easier via sneaker net. New net service, localised pub meets for data exchange, adults only, no infectious content allowed, argh me harty a pub full o pirates, music, movies and beer.
Well actually is does have a impact, as they other products they are likely to buy are live entertainment where the performers get the bulk of the money and of course many other necessary products like food, clothing and accommodation. Publishers are likely to be starved out of a business that add pretty much nothing to except of course corruption, drugs, civil suits, sexual exploitation, greed and of course an endless stream of marketing lies.
The question here then is which is more important to Australia's future and the future of it's citizens the free and open digital exchange of information or feeding the bloated lusts of a self serving minority. So on one hand the development and growth of a whole new system of inclusive democracy or providing yet another mansion, mega yacht or private jet for drunken drugged up minstrels or other pseudo celebrities. So digital freedom of expression for an entire culture's citizens or the locked in and controlled mass media empire's engines of deception.
Actually one word or, acronym to be precise, the DMCA. Once the work is encrypted unless you are the person legally entitled to decrypt it or a law enforcement agency operating under a warrant, you are committing a criminal act by breaking the encryption of protected content. Juts because you can decrypt it doesn't mean your are legally allowed to do so.
The same goes for Virgin this is all about testing the legality of monitoring all digital transmission for commercial purposes. All your privacy bough and sold, all your children's digital thoughts exposed to highly skilled adult marketing paedophiles who will twist them into the obedient consumer addicts of the 21st century.
Virgin is feeling the economic growth pinch brought on by the recession and is spreading it's wings into become the perverse version of big brother who will monitor all your digitals thoughts to more effectively target you with the a subtle and subconsciously driven 24/7 marketing assault.
The executives at Virgin will decide for you what you should or shouldn't see and they'll monitor you to ensure that you adhere to their approved thoughts any failure will result in guilt by accusation for what ever crime they decide you are guilty of.
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I would think it is a little bit more than that. Building a major distribution centre away from a city gives you better traffic access and egress. You can place it where it is central to several major towns and cities. Land cost will be significantly reduced. The most subtle one is of course leverage, when you a by far the major employer in a small town it gives you a lot of leverage, no taxes, priority on all services, local government priority including police and fire and the community will myopically defend you. Even if there isn't a town you can work to create a totally dependent one. Amazon wouldn't really like the RV crowd as they can simply pack up and leave rather than being tied to a property investment.
The permanently mobile by choice population is also interesting. I wonder how they handle the digital communications and whether camp grounds are starting to provide broadband connections. I wonder if caravan towing services will become more popular, allowing your the simple use of a more efficient vehicle, rather than having it when not necessary, especially when your caravan spends months at one location.
What about if the whole webcam border watch, was all about flagging people who have an interest in US border operations. I wonder how many people who wish to cross borders illegally couldn't resist a quick perv even if it required registration and gives away your IP address.
When your searches are being recorded and analysed, and your email is recorded and analyses, and your mobile calls are recorded and analysed and, well basically anything you do across the web can be added to a database and probed. Well, adding in a few extra bits of digital bait help to create a more accurate profile of whom to target and who not to waste resources on can be a very effective, hmm, phishing technique.
With open source everything is open. There are many ways to contribute to open source beyond coding the software. There is promotion, simply provide honest personal recommendations for the product, distribution when making recommendation offer to supply a copy on disc and assist with installation, artwork if your coding sucks but you have flair on the creative side assist with icons, web art, themes etc., documentation assist in writing manuals and guides and of course forum participation providing assistance to newer users.
All of that counts far more than buying a hand full of minor support contracts. Help yourself, by helping others, that is what drives the growth of open source software products, the reality is more often than not your personal time and skills are worth far more to open source than your money and, of course don't forget to have fun while doing it, it's the FOSS way ;).
Dang, you must be young. At the moment I am watching a particular movie collection, you have obviously never heard of it or the associated merchandising that was targeted at children and even at adults, "James Bond".
PS if you choose to watch this particular collection I recommend you watch it in order from newest to oldest, special effects are no substitute for quality movie making, hmm, much like "Star Wars" or even "Star Trek".
It doesn't really matter, the big game 'is' to be an ISP and pretend one of your customers is the culprit, so the pseudo customer gets pursued, while you simply pretend another shady customer has opened up an account. There were quite a few smaller ISPs who had a real reputation for being enablers of digital crimes, so this tactic is really nothing new.
The whole idea is to hide and make your presence felt, big noisy operations are just targets. Besides the biggest culprits will be intelligence services in corrupt countries creating their own business side line on the 'companies' already shady servers.
I thought Emperor Constantine had a bigger hand in rewriting the bible than anybody else, in fact a fist if it contained anything he was unhappy with and lead to the contradiction, much like in modern days, where someone who didn't believe at all was using the religion for political convenience and to maintain power. In fact the Roman cult of Sol seems to feature more prominently in his beliefs, hence a particular day of worship was required, I think you all can guess which day that was ;).
As to copyright ownership, as every copy in existence is in fact an altered and techinically infringing work and there are no original copies available, it would be more accurate to say it is well and truly in the public domain, including all of it's symbolism, especially the pagan (as well a numerous other all ready existing religions) elements of the Christian religion and of course all of it's derivatives.
As for trademark infringements apparently the Christian religion was also a little naughty in that regard, turning prior religions gods and prophets into devils and demons and their symbolism into marks of evil as a 'er' missionary strategy and, quite often for far nastier purposes. So perhaps they mind need to tidy up some elements before claiming sole ownership.
In reality the real decision is not whether to PHP or C++ but, whether to add a compiler to PHP. The performance of any compiled code is bound to the quality of the compiler and what it can do with the wild interpretive code you feed it.
Examples are of course http://www.phpcompiler.org/ and http://www.roadsend.com/home/index.php. So are larger web companies wasting resources and energy simply by failing to pre compile PHP rather than sticking to on the fly compilation.
Interesting thing about Firefox though, I can bet that it will never remain the most popular browser but don't expect any real threat from IE what ever version. The biggest threat to Firefox will be other Mozilla browsers, some of which might even be produced by Firefox.com.
As the underlying open source code for Firefox becomes more popular expect more parallel development, specialised versions for particular uses, branded versions and of course tweaked versions to suit specific online strategies, but all of the basically being compatible in terms of web content connect ability, hmm, the wonderful world of open standards (real competition, greater innovation and better end user relations).
Yeah, I was going to say, isn't the Catholic church infringing on Gods copyright, unless of course they are declaring Papal supremacy.
Personally I would have thought they would have wanted to get their symbolism out there as much as possible and only react if it was being used negatively.
Personally I think they are heading down the dangerous and disgusting territory of exploitative corporate religion for profit ala scientology, rather than religion for charity and the furtherance of positive human social 'evolution'.
Face it the patent is disgusting, "The physiological data can be gleaned from a third party health data collection repository, a healthcare smart card, a real-time physiological sensor" it is so mind bogglingly privacy invasive that truly only M$ could have come up with it, especially for that line alone.
Why is M$ going out of it's way to make itself look stupid, clumsy and downright evil. There seems to be this major disconnect going on in Redmond between what they think is acceptable and what the rest of the planet thinks is acceptable. Ballmer driven patents, patent as much crap as you can, count the number of patents pat yourself on the back for a job well done and ignore the money you've wasted on patenting useless ideas, ignore the marketing damage done to the companies image as everyone discusses those patents.
Seriously the stupid patent goes even further "In addition, the physical characteristics can include psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc. Such information can be useful in enhancing social interaction as well as adjusting how an avatar performs in a competitive virtual environment." you really couldn't make up a story where a company would be stupid enough to put that into a patent. So, what does that mean, if your a gay, overweight, atheist, who votes socialist, you are pretty much fucked and will not win any game ever or what ever else marketing dollars decide is the ultra consumerist lifestyle.
That of course was not the way it was working. In most cases people where only interested in the bit of information they were after. So do the search, find the paragraph and you have your answer, no need to buy the whole bloody way overpriced textbook. Now this sounds bigger than it really was, often the paragraph rarely answered you full question, however it did reinforce the habit in searching the internet to find your answers and never buying text books (the answer you seek is always somewhere on the internet you just have to find it).
Now if you where writing something you could find your accurate answers say on Wikipedia, use them and then use google book search to find reference able quotes to justify those answers and yeah, you only need the one paragraph, page number, book and author and year of publishing (all based upon your referencing style). Of course that is also becoming largely redundant as more quality, referenced and open information sources are becoming available online, all of course self published.
Hmm, self publishing, it is cheap, it is open, it is really useful across the board (writers as proof of skills, readers for answering questions and industry to demonstrate expertise and government to inform their citizens) and of course it totally fucks over existing profit bloated middle man for profit publishers. Face it, corporate publishers are 20th century dinosaurs, they should just STFU and die already, they are not needed any more and no longer provide any real benefit in the 21st century internet age.
Going back to twelve inches was inevitable. It was all about price points and artificially inflated profit margins. You had the weirdness of 15 inch notebooks being significantly cheaper than smaller "road warrior" (what a load of marketing crap to feed the egos idiot executives so they would pay the inflated prices) ultra portable notebooks. You couldn't very well have netbooks come in at the twelve inch size range and bugger up the PR and ego infested world of high profit ultra portable note books.
Nothing of course lasts for ever. So netbooks are now likely to settle of a few screen sizes say 12, 10 and 8. The size would largely be driven by age, with older people going for the larger screens and younger people going for smaller screens, so eye ball capability ie. screen real estate and of course font size is the decider.
The differences between sizes will be largely screen size, keyboard size and storage capacity (simply more space available) as performance capability will be much the same across all sizes (with PR=B$ variations for price differentiation and profit enhancement).
Now would that be a country with 50 states and, for 49 of them closed standards are nothing more than an expensive overhead. Which in turns means that the federal government of that country in continuing to maintain closed standards means they are creating a bias in the system by penalising 49 states to fund 1 state. The reality is as standards open up so does employment and business opportunities. Closed standards just result in monopolies and bloated profits for a handful whilst the rest of the economy suffers.
It is wildly inappropriate for one company to define and change at will the document standards for a whole country, at this stage of computer industry development it has been corruption that has allowed this craziness to last as long as it has.
Preparation and planning are required. Otherwise some bright idiot will manage to turn an asteroid into a radioactive dust cloud, then on it's next orbit or even it's current one it will settle upon the whole earth's surface. Prevent one serious calamity only to turn it into a far worse event. Whilst it wont have the same 'impact' it would certainly mutate life especially, the microscopic variety well beyond the ability of more complex forms to adapt to the altered biosphere.
Not to worry, given a couple of hundred thousand years, the radioactivity will settle down enough to allow life to evolve under more stable conditions once again, baring any future impacts of course.
Hmm, now is that a recommendation for .net or a warning because it seems as a result of becoming specialised in .net you are always looking for a new job. Does that mean when coding employers think .net might be a good idea, once they have got it in place and start trying to be productive with it and with .net coders, they soon find it is a waste forcing those .net specialists to look for another job with another company also sucked in by .net advertising ;D.
Democracy is not a 'fait accompli' it is a work in progress and that's what it takes a lot of work by it's citizens. Are Obama and the Democrats perfect, of course not but they are a significant improvement upon the previous bunch of flagrant crooks and deceivers and that is the point. Each cycle you work to achieve a better government than the last time around.
Globally pretty much every democratic society dropped the bundle over the last twenty years as they fell into the mass media morass of lies and public relations, as corporate executives via marketing dollars effectively distorted the political system and defined and controlled public debate, so that those same corporate executives could basically steal from the rich and poor alike and, of course strip mine the middle class. The unyielding reality of the episode is that millions of people died to enrich a bunch of corporate executives, lobbyists, corrupt politicians and of course not to forget their quisling running dog, talking heads, the news and opinion presenters who will tell any lie they are paid to.
You want better government put in more effort, no party illusions of perfection, pay attention and when disingenuous corrupt politicians turn up, regardless of political parties toss them out and replace them, hopefully with someone better and repeat and repeat and repeat (a life's work for responsible citizens). It really does not take all that much effort especially with the power of the web to discover and disseminate information of genuine public interest and when it comes to voting, vote red, blue or green(the new third choice) or even independent, based on how well the previous sitting member performed and how likely it is that the other possible choice's are going to perform better.
It took twenty to thirty years to pretty much fuck things up and, don't be surprised if it takes that long to really fix it, hell, the US has twenty odd thousand lobbyists that it has to cull and that slimy lot will tell every imaginable lie and provide every possible vice in order to preserve their corruptive influence and their source of profit and power.
What this is, is a patent on the M$ viewpoint of the world. Basically influential people will lie about the quality of product if the get a lower price, much the same as M$ marketing will tell any lie necessary as long as the profits exceed the penalties. It really is sad that they think influential people are so easily bought, basically for a handful of pretty beads.
So what is the payoff, M$ consider you 'special' they sell product to you at a special price but, watch out if your influence does not align with their current marketing promotions as you'll lose you 'special' status and discounts. It really is rather petty that M$ management believes that the rest of societies honour and integrity is up for sale just like theirs and truly strange that they think that concept is patentable.
Not that there aren't quite a few people out their who have no qualms recommending crap products when they get a kick back for the referrals but, the reality is the influence doesn't have any real lasting value as people soon learn the true value of their recommendations, worthless, just like the products they recommend.
That of course brings up another question. Should anything be legally treated as a trade secret. Does not the end user, the potential victim of malfeasance have a right to make knowledgeable choices. Should not every citizens be entitled to the truth of what they are purchasing, is the government betraying it's own citizens when it allows companies to with hold information from the public that would likely alter their choice to select a product.
The reality is, in the 21st century there is no longer any room for trade secrets. It is obscene the greed is put ahead of people's ability to make a knowledgeable choice and it is even worse the governments seek to protect that greed at the behest of a deceitful minority.
That is rather more accurate than you intended. If libraries and adult based pornography sections then they would be banned, no if children could not be effectively banned from those sections of the library then they would be banned from the whole library.
The same pretty much holds true for the internet, it is fundamentally and adults only networks, no just in the sexual sense but in the legal contractual context. The legal contractual context is very important in the fundamental nature of operation of the internet, of responsible adults establishing and making use of digital network connections and in doing so establishing contractual obligations for the safe and fair use of those connections.
So banning children the requires adult responsibility to use and is based around adult communications is fair and reasonable. Quite simply create another internet, a child safer internet, one where everyone who connects needs to be identified, an internet that has been classified child appropriate for each age group and one that is monitored and controlled to prevent abuse by adults and naturally by other children.
The only catch with TIVO that makes it a dud, is you can't do anything else with it. You can turn it into a file server, a mail server, even an answering service, all while still being a media centre and running FOSS software you can do the lot for less than the price of a TIVO. I also typically prefer twin DVD drives and it is really important to be able to shift the content from DVDs to large hdisk drives for a lazier media jukebox.
The big reason for a FOSS only solution, I'm not interested in paying fix upgrades, I don't want to get stuck with corporate forced rule changes, I want it to be secure and I only ever stream free and then buy it, if it is good enough for local storage. I want to set it and forget it for a decade and not have to deal with corporate ass hat marketing executives and the latest how can we scam and monetize the customers with what ever privacy invasive or nickel and dimeing scheme they can come up with this time. Definitely no M$ solutions, somehow the reality always falls far short of the marketing hype, especially on forums and they're always changing the rules.
So if you live in a cold climate, where heat and light are required simultaneously, then technically speaking the extra energy put into manufacturing more complex LEDs and CFLs makes them more energy inefficient than long life incandescent light fixtures as you are making use of the heat. Always a tricky question in warm climates, which is more energy efficient trying to cool the additional heat load of natural lighting ie. big windows, or making use of energy efficient LED's and sticking to highly insulated solid walls.
The cooling design for data centres needs to shift from an office cooling design to an industrial design. Once you get to that size data units should be shifted to auto-pick racks so you can run the whole facility beyond human comfort levels in the mid 30s centigrade. That way you only pre-condition fresh air and then exhaust rather than recycle. This allows you to adjust your cooling air from 100% fresh, to ground water cooling, to evaporative to refrigerated(ammonia) as external ambient conditions and heat sink capacity dictate.
You basically use to auto pick system to pick bad units from the rack, replace it with a functioning unit and return the defective unit to the service area via an airlock, where tech personal operating in the human comfort zone low 20s versus the server farm's mid 30s. So smart server farm re-design followed by an adjustable fully variable air 'conditioning' system which supplies air within the temperature, velocity and humidity ranges required to keep the hardware operating at near maximum safe operating temperatures.
There is a definitive difference in a Hotel providing free wifi to it's customers, rather than a typical end users unsecure service. Much like playing a radio in a hotel in order to attract customers so wifi is doing the same thing, even if it is legal internet radio.
Hmm, although technically the hotel is already paying those required fees for juke boxes, live bands and of course radio and tv. Now as it is likely that what ever content was being down loaded was likely be played free to air some where on this world, than the Hotel as already paid the blanket full coverage fee, this story is logically likely PR=B$.
With USB memory sticks rapidly heading to a dollar a gigabyte swapping terabytes of content is likely going to be quicker and easier via sneaker net. New net service, localised pub meets for data exchange, adults only, no infectious content allowed, argh me harty a pub full o pirates, music, movies and beer.
Well actually is does have a impact, as they other products they are likely to buy are live entertainment where the performers get the bulk of the money and of course many other necessary products like food, clothing and accommodation. Publishers are likely to be starved out of a business that add pretty much nothing to except of course corruption, drugs, civil suits, sexual exploitation, greed and of course an endless stream of marketing lies.
The question here then is which is more important to Australia's future and the future of it's citizens the free and open digital exchange of information or feeding the bloated lusts of a self serving minority. So on one hand the development and growth of a whole new system of inclusive democracy or providing yet another mansion, mega yacht or private jet for drunken drugged up minstrels or other pseudo celebrities. So digital freedom of expression for an entire culture's citizens or the locked in and controlled mass media empire's engines of deception.
Actually one word or, acronym to be precise, the DMCA. Once the work is encrypted unless you are the person legally entitled to decrypt it or a law enforcement agency operating under a warrant, you are committing a criminal act by breaking the encryption of protected content. Juts because you can decrypt it doesn't mean your are legally allowed to do so.
The same goes for Virgin this is all about testing the legality of monitoring all digital transmission for commercial purposes. All your privacy bough and sold, all your children's digital thoughts exposed to highly skilled adult marketing paedophiles who will twist them into the obedient consumer addicts of the 21st century.
Virgin is feeling the economic growth pinch brought on by the recession and is spreading it's wings into become the perverse version of big brother who will monitor all your digitals thoughts to more effectively target you with the a subtle and subconsciously driven 24/7 marketing assault.
The executives at Virgin will decide for you what you should or shouldn't see and they'll monitor you to ensure that you adhere to their approved thoughts any failure will result in guilt by accusation for what ever crime they decide you are guilty of.