So wait, they don't have backup plants already.. so, a simple blackout would cripple a large part of our nation's intelligence?
"Simple" blackouts don't last long enough to really "cripple" it, but a prolonged one (such as the north-eastern seaboard gets about once a decade or so) would be bad, yes.
Your waste heat idea is a good point. So, anyone around here want to point all this out inside Fort Meade?
I'd think they'd only need to build two (one nuclear, as the primary source, and one fossil-fuel as a backup) because the public grid itself could be the second backup.
You might use it as the primary (say, if the design for the nuke plant proves a lemon), but I don't think you can readily throw a sudden 40MW(e) load onto the grid without repercussions... like, say, taking down the grid.
The non-comercial nature of this video, and the way in which the trademark is used is unlikely to create that sort of impression, so no trademark violation here.
While IAmNotALawyer, I believe that if (as alleged) the video was produced as paid propoganda, even if the distribution was non-commercial it would then be hard to argue in court that the use was non-commercial.
The image is also protected by copyright but the copyright owner says: "Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks." The key bit here being "if someone asks".
So (my puckish side chortles), if one calls the firm rumored to have done the work and ask them if they used this image in the video, it would seem they must either admit to doing so (which they apparently are loathe to do), or deny it... violating the use license and (ergo) copyright. That could be a problem....
Re-read the constitution, realize that Benjamin Franklin (the architect of that document) was a genius
Actually, as author of the Virginia Plan that was the de facto agenda for the Philadelphia convention, and one of the later authors of the Federalist Papers defending the final document, James Madison was the primary architect, and the one usually credited as "Father of the Constitution".
As for your modest proposal, I suggest you review your history of the French Revolution. Take them out and have them shot... but dot the legal i's and cross the t's first.
And the reason they don't just build a small power plant is...?
Powerplants aren't cheap, and a well-designed UPS solution is a bit more complicated than just a spare power cord.
Using ballpark numbers, $21M/yr and $0.07/kWh gives about 40MW(e) load for our "UPS". Since you always buy one with room for growth, and since this is even more of a PITA to swap out than your average lead brick, call it 100MW(e) design. But how do we make it uninterruptable? Remember, all powerplants have maintenance downtime, even without accidents. You ideally want three plants, any one of which can handle the full design load; this allows for one to be down for routine maintenance, one down for unexpected accident (say, a safety fault emergency shutdown), and one to keep the load going. You also want this as a "ready-swap" load, and a power plant does require a few minutes warm-up time (exact amount varying by type); so, you'll want to run them all regularly, and transfer surplus power to the grid, to offset (say) the Pentagon electric bill.
So, what kind of plant? Since we're doing three, I'd suggest using different types, so as not to put all the eggs in one basket, and further reduce the chance of a single-point of failure. I'll presume the Bolognium reactor from Area 51 is unavailable for this purpose.
Wind and solar are too unreliable for this. Hydroelectric doesn't have a convenient enough water source. Geothermal is laughable in this location... although it might be a factor to consider for the Fort Meade Mk II location. Fossil plants (oil, coal, NatGas) have some environmental considerations, but not unmanageable; if necessary, designing the plant to liquify the entire stack output shouldn't more than double the cost. Nukes are compact, but REALLY don't like fast startups; a nuke also will make for an even bigger target for terror attacks... but of course, adding any power plant is going to paint an even bigger target on Fort Meade than there already is. Since it's really only adding another ring or two to the existing target, and since I'm not even halfway familiar enough to address such security considerations, I'll just ignore them. Some other Slashdotter can comment on that design aspect.
So, I'd pick a small nuke plant for the primary Meade power plant, with a liquid natural gas or oil-fired for one backup plant. IIR, it's not hard to convert between those two fossil fuel sources, which might be advisable if there are supply issues. The third plant might be either one; I'm not sure whether the higher simultaneous event/design failure risk of the nuke plants would be better than the additional fuel transport and security headaches for steady fossil fuel supplies. For argument, call it one nuke, one oil, and one gas, with the latter two designed with convertability in mind. I think the coal transport/storage would be the worst of the fossil fuels, so we won't use that at all.
So, we need three plants, each around 100MWe. My Googling suggests a pricetag of 100-200 M$ apiece for those; if you can find better numbers, feel free to note them. We need to arrange for steady suppies of fuel. We need to arrange for additional physical security. We need to find plant operators for all of them... every one of whom will probably need at least a Secret level clearance, to be confident a background check turns up anything nasty. We need to do some environmental work-up, since it's an urban area; "National Security" gets you only so far in Baltimore — although it might be enough to put a gag on the inevitable NIMBY idiots who'll turn out against anything.
So, we're probably talking half a billion dollars for the building of it, plus additional annual expenses including higher than average salaries for plant workers due to the need for a clearance. This isn't peanuts, even with the NSA budget. It's not a bad idea... but it's not the no-brainer it looks at first pass.
OpenOffice's equanimity is similarly unchanged if you do inserts from the Necronomicon. (User sanity is appreciably affected if you do, but not so much as merely caused by using MSWord.)
Consider, for example, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; only one of them is left, wich gives us a 14.2% success rate.
Over a 5000 year scale, I could accept that. More important is that the Colossus of Rhodes stood less than a century, and most lasted only a few centuries.
On the other hand, two (the Great Pyramid and the Lighthouse of Alexandria) made it past the thousand-year mark... which is quite respectible. With most candidates for any list of Modern Wonders, once you rule out those already a millenium old, it would be astounding if any last another thousand years... depending on how you define a Wonder of the World.
I have spent HOURS search for this kind of specific information and it is incredibly difficult to find. Tons of treatises on the rights of a corporation, but no clear explication of its history.
First hit is about the Railroad case. Wikipedia is another good place to start research on a topic, especially any theory ranted about by any crackpot fringe; there's a good article on the topic about Corporate Personhood there. From there, links at The US corporate case law category gives you the Ford case, along with several others where the rulings may be of interest. (EG: the Black dissent in I had a shortcut to the Ford reference, recalling that it was a case about Ford's obligation to shareholders.
Obviously, the Web (and especially Wikipedia) should never be the endpoint for serious research. However, it's not a bad starting point before going on to other references. On legal matters, the web will often have copies of the primary source cases, but seldom the important legal commentaties on how these cases are generally interpreted.
IAmNotALawyer. If you need legal advice, see a lawyer. If you get your legal advice from the web, you should also probably see a psychiatrist.
I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps?
Second, it really wasn't decided by a judge as part of the case; it was merely a remark from one inserted into the decision by a court reporter.
Third, that wasn't the ultimate toll of doom. The real problem was Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in 1919, in which the Michigan Supreme Court first ruled that a corporation had no obligation to society other than seeking profit for its shareholders... a case oft cited by the SCOTUS since.
And thus, we have an entity with most of the legal rights of a person, and the legal obligation to act like a sociopath to whatever degree permitted by law.
The bad news is that there really isn't any good path to fixing the problem. Most of the suggestions to "repeal" this are ill-considered knee-jerk responses to the problem, without considering the reasons that led to corporations, nor the impact of changing the rules.
AFAIK, the government has always gotten "national security" cases such as this thrown out of court, this change represents a very good historical first!
However, as the judge notes:
But no case dismissed because its "very subject matter" was a state secret involved ongoing, widespread violations of individual constitutional rights, as plaintiffs allege here.
Or in other words, even the privilege of "state secrets" has limits, Mr. President. No, wait... not "in other words":
But it is important to note that even the state secrets privilege has its limits. While the court recognizes and respects the executive's constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it. [...] To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired.
You mean the President can't just lie to the public and tell us to shut up?
[I]f the government has not been truthful, the state secrets privilege should not serve as a shield for its false public statements.
I think I like this judge. The procedural stuff in part III of the ruling (link FTA) is also quite clever: he's proposed appointing an expert to help him determine whether keeping something secret is really important, or just White House horseshit. Now as long as Specter's bill doesn't get through and force tranfer of this to the FISA court, this has some interesting possibilities.
Mind you, it still doesn't look good for the EFF. The judge emphasizes that nothing in his ruling should be taken to mean that they have a case, nor that they will get access to classified materials. This just means that the EFF deserves a chance to show they have one, from the non-classified materials... with perhaps the Judge telling the government that trying to classify this or that is idiotic. And if the EFF can't pull together a case, the judge's ruling explicitly allows for either the Government or AT&T from renewing the motions to get the case laughed out of court.
That was one of the points raised in the essay, yes. Thus, Niven's essay focuses on the only recipe he could see that gave a society: both transmitter and reciever stations required.
It occurs to me that all this attention to security detail will come to naught in the Star Trek future - they could just use the transporter and beam into any secure area, all they need are the coordinates and blammo, they're in.
I refer you over to Larry Niven's essay, "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation", collected in All The Myriad Ways; you'll probably need to check used bookstores or libraries for it. However, as my memory serves, he characterized that type of teleportation (both recieve-to-device-from-anywhere and send-from-device-to-anywhere) as "you don't get a society, you get a short war".
When I complained to the online editor, he said that he regarded Wikipedia as authoritative, and pointed me at their definition, which indeed was ridiculously expansive. So I went and edited it to something more reasonable, and told him. He then circulated email to all the bloggers saying Wikipedia's definition of "enterprise applications" had changed, and since that was authoritative, their usage should conform to the new definition.
And that wouldn't have anything at all to do with PayPal being a property of eBay and further lining their pockets.;-)
Ooooh, while IAmNotALawyer, I remember this one from the Microsoft case:
Tying arrangements. Sellers with more than one product may seek to tie the sale of one (which the customer presumably desires) with that of another (which it presumably does not want). Such tie-ins are governed not only by the general language of the Sherman Act, but the more particular provisions of Section 3 of the Clayton Act, which prohibits such arrangements if the likely result is substantially to lessen competition. Tie-ins are per se unlawful if the seller possesses sufficient market power in the tying product, and coerces the buyer to take the tied product as a condition to obtaining the desired product.
While I for one am NOT AT ALL HAPPY at the moment with the security on the Google payment system, I think this is a major mistake by Ebay. The only clause that I see that gives eBay any grounds for banning Google checkout is "Whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)"... which may make matters worse. Such terms can be portrayed in court as purely a restrictive practive intended as a barrier to entry to help protect PayPal's near monopoly by leveraging eBay's de facto monopoly.
I wonder how many lawyers eBay has on staff at the moment....
[...]the bandwidth is never really the issue. The issue is latency.
Durn, I keep forgetting latency issues any time I do first pass back-of-the-headers numbers. You're absolutely right. And while bandwidth is getting better relatively quickly, latency is a much harder problem. Again, it might be workable on a good small sized home LAN, but not over the internet.
Actually, as someone with asthma, I'm more bothered by pot smoking. Of course, pot smoke doesn't bother me any more (or less) than the generally legal tobacco smoke.
Well, he did specify a consumer grade Pentium, not P3 or P4. So, I suppose that's referring to some of the original Pentium dells still in service with Windows 95 on a 4.3 GB 4000RPM ATA33 hard drive, which probably has only around a tenth the sustained R/W speed of current setups. Still vastly faster than network speeds.
On the other hand, you're assuming that the data needs to be moved around in local storage. If everything is kept on the One Universal Server, most of the time you "only" need to match transfer speeds for user I/O: Keyboard/Mouse/Video and the like. You'd want a "network" boot, and enough on-board RAM to store drivers for NIC, Video adapter, Keyboard, and Mouse. (Tablet perverts can go play on a Mac.) Keyboard and mouse is nigh trivial; if you have better than a 14.4 kbps typing speed, I'll give you my lunch money. Video, on the other hand, would modestly want at least 16 bits of color for 768*1024 pixels at a refresh rate of 24 Hz, which Google says is 36 Megabytes per second. Ouch; barely doable within a good home LAN from a local server, but no hope of working over home grade (or most business-grade) "high speed" uplinks. Oh, and I suppose sound would be in order, too, but a 128 kbps channel for that would be a comparative drop in the bucket. You might get a more reasonable value using a compressed video codec... but most will make the end-user video fuzzier, and require more CPU work for the same response time. And with increasing screen sizes and modern color palettes, those are LOW end figures... and ignore the work needed on the Googleplex end of the system.
In the end, there's no hope for the Augean Stables to reclaim its legendary title from the article's author.
Inheritance gets whatever he had left + life insurance benefits (which I bet is a pretty good chunk of any state budget)
IANAL, either; however, I believe a finding of "guilty" by a jury in criminal court may be admissible in civil court. (A plea of guilty would be as well; I understand this is the main distinction between that and a plea of "nolo contendere" — a NC plea is inadmissable in other proceedings.) The class-action vultures will probably be targeting his estate on behalf of Enron shareholders and pensioners soon enough. The heirs in his will shouldn't plan to spend their new inheritance any time soon.
As an Atheist, I get no satisfaction from him keeling over.
Yeah; believers at least have the hope that he might be facing a more lasting sentence from a Higher Court; I doubt his heart would be lighter than a Shu feather.
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So wait, they don't have backup plants already.. so, a simple blackout would cripple a large part of our nation's intelligence?
"Simple" blackouts don't last long enough to really "cripple" it, but a prolonged one (such as the north-eastern seaboard gets about once a decade or so) would be bad, yes.
Your waste heat idea is a good point. So, anyone around here want to point all this out inside Fort Meade?
I'd think they'd only need to build two (one nuclear, as the primary source, and one fossil-fuel as a backup) because the public grid itself could be the second backup.
You might use it as the primary (say, if the design for the nuke plant proves a lemon), but I don't think you can readily throw a sudden 40MW(e) load onto the grid without repercussions... like, say, taking down the grid.
The non-comercial nature of this video, and the way in which the trademark is used is unlikely to create that sort of impression, so no trademark violation here.
While IAmNotALawyer, I believe that if (as alleged) the video was produced as paid propoganda, even if the distribution was non-commercial it would then be hard to argue in court that the use was non-commercial.
The image is also protected by copyright but the copyright owner says: "Permission to use and/or modify this image is granted provided you acknowledge me lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP if someone asks." The key bit here being "if someone asks".
So (my puckish side chortles), if one calls the firm rumored to have done the work and ask them if they used this image in the video, it would seem they must either admit to doing so (which they apparently are loathe to do), or deny it... violating the use license and (ergo) copyright. That could be a problem....
Re-read the constitution, realize that Benjamin Franklin (the architect of that document) was a genius
Actually, as author of the Virginia Plan that was the de facto agenda for the Philadelphia convention, and one of the later authors of the Federalist Papers defending the final document, James Madison was the primary architect, and the one usually credited as "Father of the Constitution".
As for your modest proposal, I suggest you review your history of the French Revolution. Take them out and have them shot... but dot the legal i's and cross the t's first.
Oh, and "put down the crack pipe", troll.
funny how "anonymous coward" supports not hiding.
Yeah, but for $100 and a good bottle of scotch, you can probably get CowboyNeil to fish his IP address out of the Slashdot server logs.
It costs $8 billion dollars to get the NSA to budge? Give me half that and I'll poke them with a stick until they move.
The key with moving an elephant, or any large entity, is to know exactly where it feels pain... but be sure you want its full attention.
"Power corrupts, but we need the electricity."
And the reason they don't just build a small power plant is...?
Powerplants aren't cheap, and a well-designed UPS solution is a bit more complicated than just a spare power cord.
Using ballpark numbers, $21M/yr and $0.07/kWh gives about 40MW(e) load for our "UPS". Since you always buy one with room for growth, and since this is even more of a PITA to swap out than your average lead brick, call it 100MW(e) design. But how do we make it uninterruptable? Remember, all powerplants have maintenance downtime, even without accidents. You ideally want three plants, any one of which can handle the full design load; this allows for one to be down for routine maintenance, one down for unexpected accident (say, a safety fault emergency shutdown), and one to keep the load going. You also want this as a "ready-swap" load, and a power plant does require a few minutes warm-up time (exact amount varying by type); so, you'll want to run them all regularly, and transfer surplus power to the grid, to offset (say) the Pentagon electric bill.
So, what kind of plant? Since we're doing three, I'd suggest using different types, so as not to put all the eggs in one basket, and further reduce the chance of a single-point of failure. I'll presume the Bolognium reactor from Area 51 is unavailable for this purpose. Wind and solar are too unreliable for this. Hydroelectric doesn't have a convenient enough water source. Geothermal is laughable in this location... although it might be a factor to consider for the Fort Meade Mk II location. Fossil plants (oil, coal, NatGas) have some environmental considerations, but not unmanageable; if necessary, designing the plant to liquify the entire stack output shouldn't more than double the cost. Nukes are compact, but REALLY don't like fast startups; a nuke also will make for an even bigger target for terror attacks... but of course, adding any power plant is going to paint an even bigger target on Fort Meade than there already is. Since it's really only adding another ring or two to the existing target, and since I'm not even halfway familiar enough to address such security considerations, I'll just ignore them. Some other Slashdotter can comment on that design aspect.
So, I'd pick a small nuke plant for the primary Meade power plant, with a liquid natural gas or oil-fired for one backup plant. IIR, it's not hard to convert between those two fossil fuel sources, which might be advisable if there are supply issues. The third plant might be either one; I'm not sure whether the higher simultaneous event/design failure risk of the nuke plants would be better than the additional fuel transport and security headaches for steady fossil fuel supplies. For argument, call it one nuke, one oil, and one gas, with the latter two designed with convertability in mind. I think the coal transport/storage would be the worst of the fossil fuels, so we won't use that at all.
So, we need three plants, each around 100MWe. My Googling suggests a pricetag of 100-200 M$ apiece for those; if you can find better numbers, feel free to note them. We need to arrange for steady suppies of fuel. We need to arrange for additional physical security. We need to find plant operators for all of them... every one of whom will probably need at least a Secret level clearance, to be confident a background check turns up anything nasty. We need to do some environmental work-up, since it's an urban area; "National Security" gets you only so far in Baltimore — although it might be enough to put a gag on the inevitable NIMBY idiots who'll turn out against anything.
So, we're probably talking half a billion dollars for the building of it, plus additional annual expenses including higher than average salaries for plant workers due to the need for a clearance. This isn't peanuts, even with the NSA budget. It's not a bad idea... but it's not the no-brainer it looks at first pass.
Works just fine in OpenOffice though! ;)
OpenOffice's equanimity is similarly unchanged if you do inserts from the Necronomicon. (User sanity is appreciably affected if you do, but not so much as merely caused by using MSWord.)
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn....
Consider, for example, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World; only one of them is left, wich gives us a 14.2% success rate.
Over a 5000 year scale, I could accept that. More important is that the Colossus of Rhodes stood less than a century, and most lasted only a few centuries.
On the other hand, two (the Great Pyramid and the Lighthouse of Alexandria) made it past the thousand-year mark... which is quite respectible. With most candidates for any list of Modern Wonders, once you rule out those already a millenium old, it would be astounding if any last another thousand years... depending on how you define a Wonder of the World.
Meh. Zango isn't that bad... if you're clever enough to only install it on a Virtual PC. There's some nice pr0nz viewable that way....
I have spent HOURS search for this kind of specific information and it is incredibly difficult to find. Tons of treatises on the rights of a corporation, but no clear explication of its history.
Your Google-Fu is weak.
First hit is about the Railroad case. Wikipedia is another good place to start research on a topic, especially any theory ranted about by any crackpot fringe; there's a good article on the topic about Corporate Personhood there. From there, links at The US corporate case law category gives you the Ford case, along with several others where the rulings may be of interest. (EG: the Black dissent in I had a shortcut to the Ford reference, recalling that it was a case about Ford's obligation to shareholders.
Obviously, the Web (and especially Wikipedia) should never be the endpoint for serious research. However, it's not a bad starting point before going on to other references. On legal matters, the web will often have copies of the primary source cases, but seldom the important legal commentaties on how these cases are generally interpreted.
IAmNotALawyer. If you need legal advice, see a lawyer. If you get your legal advice from the web, you should also probably see a psychiatrist.
I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps?
Try thinking positively?
One of the worst days in human history was the day in 1849 when a U.S. Federal judge declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals.
First, you've the date wrong. The case cited is Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886).
Second, it really wasn't decided by a judge as part of the case; it was merely a remark from one inserted into the decision by a court reporter.
Third, that wasn't the ultimate toll of doom. The real problem was Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in 1919, in which the Michigan Supreme Court first ruled that a corporation had no obligation to society other than seeking profit for its shareholders... a case oft cited by the SCOTUS since.
And thus, we have an entity with most of the legal rights of a person, and the legal obligation to act like a sociopath to whatever degree permitted by law.
The bad news is that there really isn't any good path to fixing the problem. Most of the suggestions to "repeal" this are ill-considered knee-jerk responses to the problem, without considering the reasons that led to corporations, nor the impact of changing the rules.Law abiding, God fearing citizens should be proud of people knowing what they're doing.
The key problem is that the government is trying to make me more afraid of them than of God.
AFAIK, the government has always gotten "national security" cases such as this thrown out of court, this change represents a very good historical first!
However, as the judge notes:
But no case dismissed because its "very subject matter" was a state secret involved ongoing, widespread violations of individual constitutional rights, as plaintiffs allege here.
Or in other words, even the privilege of "state secrets" has limits, Mr. President. No, wait... not "in other words":
But it is important to note that even the state secrets privilege has its limits. While the court recognizes and respects the executive's constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it. [...] To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdicate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired.
You mean the President can't just lie to the public and tell us to shut up?
[I]f the government has not been truthful, the state secrets privilege should not serve as a shield for its false public statements.
I think I like this judge. The procedural stuff in part III of the ruling (link FTA) is also quite clever: he's proposed appointing an expert to help him determine whether keeping something secret is really important, or just White House horseshit. Now as long as Specter's bill doesn't get through and force tranfer of this to the FISA court, this has some interesting possibilities.
Mind you, it still doesn't look good for the EFF. The judge emphasizes that nothing in his ruling should be taken to mean that they have a case, nor that they will get access to classified materials. This just means that the EFF deserves a chance to show they have one, from the non-classified materials... with perhaps the Judge telling the government that trying to classify this or that is idiotic. And if the EFF can't pull together a case, the judge's ruling explicitly allows for either the Government or AT&T from renewing the motions to get the case laughed out of court.
But it's a start.
And it could even be used as a weapon of war.
That was one of the points raised in the essay, yes. Thus, Niven's essay focuses on the only recipe he could see that gave a society: both transmitter and reciever stations required.
It occurs to me that all this attention to security detail will come to naught in the Star Trek future - they could just use the transporter and beam into any secure area, all they need are the coordinates and blammo, they're in.
I refer you over to Larry Niven's essay, "The Theory and Practice of Teleportation", collected in All The Myriad Ways; you'll probably need to check used bookstores or libraries for it. However, as my memory serves, he characterized that type of teleportation (both recieve-to-device-from-anywhere and send-from-device-to-anywhere) as "you don't get a society, you get a short war".
"Viral marketing gone wrong?" Sounds like it's doing exactly what it was designed and intended to do.
I believe that "wrong" is intended in a moral sense, not a functional sense. English is such a fuzzy language....
When I complained to the online editor, he said that he regarded Wikipedia as authoritative, and pointed me at their definition, which indeed was ridiculously expansive. So I went and edited it to something more reasonable, and told him. He then circulated email to all the bloggers saying Wikipedia's definition of "enterprise applications" had changed, and since that was authoritative, their usage should conform to the new definition.
Sounds like Wikipedia needs a short "authoritative" entry about him suggesting that he'll be next in line after the Sirius Cybernetics marketing division when the revolution comes.
And that wouldn't have anything at all to do with PayPal being a property of eBay and further lining their pockets. ;-)
Ooooh, while IAmNotALawyer, I remember this one from the Microsoft case:
While I for one am NOT AT ALL HAPPY at the moment with the security on the Google payment system, I think this is a major mistake by Ebay. The only clause that I see that gives eBay any grounds for banning Google checkout is "Whether the payment service has a substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services (new services without such a track record generally cannot be promoted on eBay)"... which may make matters worse. Such terms can be portrayed in court as purely a restrictive practive intended as a barrier to entry to help protect PayPal's near monopoly by leveraging eBay's de facto monopoly.
I wonder how many lawyers eBay has on staff at the moment....
[...]the bandwidth is never really the issue. The issue is latency.
Durn, I keep forgetting latency issues any time I do first pass back-of-the-headers numbers. You're absolutely right. And while bandwidth is getting better relatively quickly, latency is a much harder problem. Again, it might be workable on a good small sized home LAN, but not over the internet.
just like pot
Actually, as someone with asthma, I'm more bothered by pot smoking. Of course, pot smoke doesn't bother me any more (or less) than the generally legal tobacco smoke.
Well, he did specify a consumer grade Pentium, not P3 or P4. So, I suppose that's referring to some of the original Pentium dells still in service with Windows 95 on a 4.3 GB 4000RPM ATA33 hard drive, which probably has only around a tenth the sustained R/W speed of current setups. Still vastly faster than network speeds.
On the other hand, you're assuming that the data needs to be moved around in local storage. If everything is kept on the One Universal Server, most of the time you "only" need to match transfer speeds for user I/O: Keyboard/Mouse/Video and the like. You'd want a "network" boot, and enough on-board RAM to store drivers for NIC, Video adapter, Keyboard, and Mouse. (Tablet perverts can go play on a Mac.) Keyboard and mouse is nigh trivial; if you have better than a 14.4 kbps typing speed, I'll give you my lunch money. Video, on the other hand, would modestly want at least 16 bits of color for 768*1024 pixels at a refresh rate of 24 Hz, which Google says is 36 Megabytes per second. Ouch; barely doable within a good home LAN from a local server, but no hope of working over home grade (or most business-grade) "high speed" uplinks. Oh, and I suppose sound would be in order, too, but a 128 kbps channel for that would be a comparative drop in the bucket. You might get a more reasonable value using a compressed video codec... but most will make the end-user video fuzzier, and require more CPU work for the same response time. And with increasing screen sizes and modern color palettes, those are LOW end figures... and ignore the work needed on the Googleplex end of the system.
In the end, there's no hope for the Augean Stables to reclaim its legendary title from the article's author.
Inheritance gets whatever he had left + life insurance benefits (which I bet is a pretty good chunk of any state budget)
IANAL, either; however, I believe a finding of "guilty" by a jury in criminal court may be admissible in civil court. (A plea of guilty would be as well; I understand this is the main distinction between that and a plea of "nolo contendere" — a NC plea is inadmissable in other proceedings.) The class-action vultures will probably be targeting his estate on behalf of Enron shareholders and pensioners soon enough. The heirs in his will shouldn't plan to spend their new inheritance any time soon.
As an Atheist, I get no satisfaction from him keeling over.
Yeah; believers at least have the hope that he might be facing a more lasting sentence from a Higher Court; I doubt his heart would be lighter than a Shu feather.