Not exactly, but you're on the right track. A hardware spec is kind of useless—hardware changes too fast. But a BIOS spec that supports open source would be worth defining, even if it's largely what we have right now. This would allow manufacturers to badge their machines as supporting Linux, which I would expect to be a key feature in the server hardware business, and a viable niche feature in desktops and laptops.
The long term outcome of this might actually be a serious win for the open source community, because it would create market differentiation where before we've been skating on vague hopes of compatibility.
The right question is, how do we arrange to have the oversight process for nuclear power plants, should we build them, actually work to keep them safe? How do we avoid regulatory capture? Can we build nuclear plants economically if they have to purchase insurance, or is it really necessary for nearby homeowners to take on the risk associated with these plants? If these plants can't be funded through the normal investment process, does it really make sense for the government to intervene in the market by offering low-interest guaranteed loans?
The military has demonstrated in Hanford that they are not the best organization to put in charge of building reactors, but the civilian nuclear industry hasn't covered itself with glory either.
The thing that makes Danish tempting to me is the different consonants. When Sofie Gråbøl talks, it sounds like she's got bees in her mouth. It's quite fascinating. Plus, there are a lot of cognates with German words I'm familiar with. So it seems like it might be possible to learn it. The trouble is, I doubt I'll ever go to Denmark (I travel too much to do it just for fun), so what's the point?
Dutch and German are superficially similar, but the vocabularies are fairly disjoint, so it's not as easy as all that. But you're right that German is a language that gets you access to a pretty big market. Denmark is quite small by comparison, and you will need to learn some very difficult consonants that don't even have close english equivalents. But they have really good TV shows...
Yes, there are, but that's not my point. It's certainly helpful to be able to communicate in english. But it's not necessary to have perfect english in order to do so. Journals have editors.
Bollocks. In my role as an IETF working group chair, I work on a regular basis with geeks from India and China and Europe. All of them speak better english than my Chinese, or Hindi, or Turkic, or French, or Finnish, or Swedish. As a result of their imperfect english, they are able to do useful work, and engage constructively with other geeks, both native english speakers and not. The IETF has an RFC editor who fixes their english to be more canonical once the technical work is complete. Not speaking perfect Queen's English is not a handicap in this profession.
As an english-speaking geek, there is no real point in learning another language just for the purpose of improving your ability to do your work. Choose a foreign language you are attracted to speaking, regardless of whether it will be obviously useful. Maybe it'll be useful, maybe it won't. I would suggest French, German, Swedish, Dutch, or even Danish. If you want a hard language to learn, not an easy one, consider Chinese or Japanese. But plan to put a _lot_ of work into it—learning to read and write in Chinese or Japanese is _much_ harder than learning to read and write english, and involves a shit ton of memorization.
wiktionary.org has lists of the thousand most common words in quite a few languages. Memorize the list, and learn the meaning of the words, and then avail yourself of available online media. German and Danish TV are available online (e.g., tagesschau). French is harder, unfortunately. I haven't actively looked for Swedish or Dutch. There's a lot of Chinese TV available online as well, and of course if you decide on Japanese you can watch anime.:)
How would you like it if you put up panels and they caught your roof on fire, or caused your roof to rot? Putting up panels isn't a no-brainer—they weigh a _lot_, and your roof and the rest of the structure of your house may not be able to support them. If you live in a fairly modern house, they calculated the load the roof could carry when they did the structural engineering, and they probably didn't overbuild the roof by very much, because doing so is expensive. If you live in an older house, nobody ever did any load calculations.
Fire is a real possibility—solar panels generate a lot of power, and a bad install could easily cause an electrical fire. Remember the Breezy Point fire after hurricane Sandy? It would suck if you put in a bad solar install and lost your house and burned down a couple of neighbor's houses as well, wouldn't it?
Now, whether your local building department actually does a good job at evaluating the various problems that can occur with a solar install is hard to know, but if they do do a good job, it's worth them doing it. And if they don't, you should get them fired, because your safety depends not only on them doing a good job of inspecting the work done on your house, but on your neighbors' houses as well.
As for this proposal, though, if you want to be able to run independent of the grid, you need batteries. This blows the budget out the window. Batteries are expensive. Solar prices that are competitive are for grid-tie systems. These are a really good idea anyway—if every house in Long Island and New Jersey installed them, it would make a huge difference in terms of how much fossil and nuclear generation capacity was needed in the greater New York area. But it wouldn't help much in the aftermath of a hurricane.
I know writing headlines is hard, but this one seems to imply that earth took evasive action. The less exciting "earth does not collide with pair of asteroids" would be a touch less misleading.
It's worth noting that with the FiOS bandwidth caps and the high speed of the service, you could blow through your entire month's allotment in about an hour. It's not deeply surprising to me that this didn't turn out to be popular.
You might want to read this article. This is an article about what happens when private industry takes money from people to built faster broadband infrastructure. Executive summary: they pocket the money, and don't build the infrastructure.
It may be that government would do the same, but this is an unsubstantiated assertion on your part. How's about you provide some citations to support your claim? Because as far as I know, there have been a lot of successes with municipal broadband, and very few failures (indeed, I know of only one).
The fiber is paid for. You'd still have to pay for transit, and for the running costs of the routing infrastructure. It would be wise to pay into a fund to cover wear and tear over time on the fiber. But Internet service clearly doesn't cost as much as we're paying for it in the U.S. If it did, it would cost the same in other countries like Japan, Korea and Sweden.
Then why have the telcos and cable companies spent so much money preventing it from happening? To get it outlawed in every major market? If it's impossible for government to do it, then surely all of that lobbying and all those laws were an unnecessary waste of time.
No, in reality, it's better to lay fiber once to every house and then sell transit on the fiber to ISPs. That's something that a city government can do quite effectively. The reason it hasn't been done is that it would create competition, and ISPs don't want competition. They want to own the market. In my town it's Comcast or nothing. Nothing personal against Comcast, but I'm paying a lot for fairly crappy connectivity. If I had a choice, I'd take it.
When I first started working, it was common for employees to have a certain number of sick days and a certain number of vacation days. If you got sick, you took sick days; if you didn't get sick, you didn't take them. Obviously this was ripe for abuse, but it had the virtue of meaning that employees who got sick could go home and get better rather than infecting the whole office with their bug.
Nowadays, we have PTO (paid time off), which is a combination of sick days and vacation days. Typically, PTO is the same number of days that you used to get for vacation back in the day. So now, whenever you take a sick day, you are losing a vacation day. So duh, of course people come in when they are sick, or else work from home; if they didn't, they'd be burning vacation days. If you ever wonder why the burger-flipper behind the counter at McDonalds sneezed in your burger, this is also why. It still shocks me to see people in food service jobs sneezing, but that's the brave new world we live in.
I think most 20-something and 30-something workers in the U.S. never experienced "sick days." So maybe this all seems puzzling to you, but it's dead obvious to me: if you want employees to go home sick when they are sick, don't dock their vacation time.
Of course, I'm completely glossing over the fact that lots of employees are part-time and don't even *get* vacation time. We have really impoverished ourselves over the past thirty years, with the invention of "PTO," with the rise of part-time work as a way to avoid paying benefits, with the rise of lifetime minimum wage employment, and a variety of other innovations.
Good heavens no! I am very much opposed to the ITU's attempt to take over control of the internet! I just hate it when people advance bad reasons for opposing things—a bad argument in favor of something for which there are good arguments does harm, not good, because people may only hear the bad argument, recognize it as a bad argument, and conclude that the proposition being argued for is wrong.
I didn't suggest that CERN was responsible for building the Internet. What I suggested was the truth: without CERN, the Internet wouldn't be the thing that people want to use. Of course, somebody else probably would have implemented something like HTML—it's not as if hypertext was a new idea at that time—but to say that the Internet as it is now is purely a U.S. invention is nonsense.
Are you trolling, or do you just not understand how the Internet works? They don't need to "make their own internet." Do you think that their traffic goes through the U.S.? That would be really expensive! They already _have_ their own internet, and all the services you are accustomed to using here in the U.S. would remain if they severed ties with us—Google would keep working, Spotify would keep working, iTunes would keep working, Amazon would keep working, Skype would keep working. Slashdot might go off the air, but that's about it. They can just ignore us, and let us disconnect our part of the internet from theirs if we want. But of course this will never happen.
That was fifteen years ago. The majority of "the Internet" is now in other countries, and internet service in many countries is significantly better than it is in the U.S.
They've developed a pretty strong allergy to repeating SOPA and PIPA. When they floated a trial balloon a while back to try to add something spooky to the new privacy bill, there was a massive and immediate blowback, and they dropped it like a hot potato. My senator, Senator Leahy, recently sent a letter to the USTR telling them to slow down on TPP and try to make the process more open. Remember Pat Leahy, sponsor of PIPA? A strongly worded letter has no force of law, but it's something he never would have done even a year ago.
We are seeing the beginnings of a new understanding of this issue in Congress. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years—whether they keep floating trial balloons, or whether they get it that there is now a permanent constituency for internet freedom watching their every move. It will also be interesting to see if we can extend this third rail effect to nearby issues like copyright maximalism and patent maximalism.
Yup, right now the U.S. notionally has access to the DNSSEC root key. It would definitely improve the situation if more countries had access to the DNSSEC root key. Definitely.
Slashdot Mirror
Not exactly, but you're on the right track. A hardware spec is kind of useless—hardware changes too fast. But a BIOS spec that supports open source would be worth defining, even if it's largely what we have right now. This would allow manufacturers to badge their machines as supporting Linux, which I would expect to be a key feature in the server hardware business, and a viable niche feature in desktops and laptops.
The long term outcome of this might actually be a serious win for the open source community, because it would create market differentiation where before we've been skating on vague hopes of compatibility.
No, men are vain and insecure in completely different ways, because they have spent their lives being judged for things other than their beauty.
The right question is, how do we arrange to have the oversight process for nuclear power plants, should we build them, actually work to keep them safe? How do we avoid regulatory capture? Can we build nuclear plants economically if they have to purchase insurance, or is it really necessary for nearby homeowners to take on the risk associated with these plants? If these plants can't be funded through the normal investment process, does it really make sense for the government to intervene in the market by offering low-interest guaranteed loans?
The military has demonstrated in Hanford that they are not the best organization to put in charge of building reactors, but the civilian nuclear industry hasn't covered itself with glory either.
The thing that makes Danish tempting to me is the different consonants. When Sofie Gråbøl talks, it sounds like she's got bees in her mouth. It's quite fascinating. Plus, there are a lot of cognates with German words I'm familiar with. So it seems like it might be possible to learn it. The trouble is, I doubt I'll ever go to Denmark (I travel too much to do it just for fun), so what's the point?
Dutch and German are superficially similar, but the vocabularies are fairly disjoint, so it's not as easy as all that. But you're right that German is a language that gets you access to a pretty big market. Denmark is quite small by comparison, and you will need to learn some very difficult consonants that don't even have close english equivalents. But they have really good TV shows...
Yes, there are, but that's not my point. It's certainly helpful to be able to communicate in english. But it's not necessary to have perfect english in order to do so. Journals have editors.
Bollocks. In my role as an IETF working group chair, I work on a regular basis with geeks from India and China and Europe. All of them speak better english than my Chinese, or Hindi, or Turkic, or French, or Finnish, or Swedish. As a result of their imperfect english, they are able to do useful work, and engage constructively with other geeks, both native english speakers and not. The IETF has an RFC editor who fixes their english to be more canonical once the technical work is complete. Not speaking perfect Queen's English is not a handicap in this profession.
As an english-speaking geek, there is no real point in learning another language just for the purpose of improving your ability to do your work. Choose a foreign language you are attracted to speaking, regardless of whether it will be obviously useful. Maybe it'll be useful, maybe it won't. I would suggest French, German, Swedish, Dutch, or even Danish. If you want a hard language to learn, not an easy one, consider Chinese or Japanese. But plan to put a _lot_ of work into it—learning to read and write in Chinese or Japanese is _much_ harder than learning to read and write english, and involves a shit ton of memorization.
wiktionary.org has lists of the thousand most common words in quite a few languages. Memorize the list, and learn the meaning of the words, and then avail yourself of available online media. German and Danish TV are available online (e.g., tagesschau). French is harder, unfortunately. I haven't actively looked for Swedish or Dutch. There's a lot of Chinese TV available online as well, and of course if you decide on Japanese you can watch anime. :)
Oh come on, you're really going to bring a graduated cylinder to the gas station and check the pump _ever_? What if they aren't cheating that day?
How would you like it if you put up panels and they caught your roof on fire, or caused your roof to rot? Putting up panels isn't a no-brainer—they weigh a _lot_, and your roof and the rest of the structure of your house may not be able to support them. If you live in a fairly modern house, they calculated the load the roof could carry when they did the structural engineering, and they probably didn't overbuild the roof by very much, because doing so is expensive. If you live in an older house, nobody ever did any load calculations.
Fire is a real possibility—solar panels generate a lot of power, and a bad install could easily cause an electrical fire. Remember the Breezy Point fire after hurricane Sandy? It would suck if you put in a bad solar install and lost your house and burned down a couple of neighbor's houses as well, wouldn't it?
Now, whether your local building department actually does a good job at evaluating the various problems that can occur with a solar install is hard to know, but if they do do a good job, it's worth them doing it. And if they don't, you should get them fired, because your safety depends not only on them doing a good job of inspecting the work done on your house, but on your neighbors' houses as well.
As for this proposal, though, if you want to be able to run independent of the grid, you need batteries. This blows the budget out the window. Batteries are expensive. Solar prices that are competitive are for grid-tie systems. These are a really good idea anyway—if every house in Long Island and New Jersey installed them, it would make a huge difference in terms of how much fossil and nuclear generation capacity was needed in the greater New York area. But it wouldn't help much in the aftermath of a hurricane.
I know writing headlines is hard, but this one seems to imply that earth took evasive action. The less exciting "earth does not collide with pair of asteroids" would be a touch less misleading.
It's worth noting that with the FiOS bandwidth caps and the high speed of the service, you could blow through your entire month's allotment in about an hour. It's not deeply surprising to me that this didn't turn out to be popular.
You might want to read this article. This is an article about what happens when private industry takes money from people to built faster broadband infrastructure. Executive summary: they pocket the money, and don't build the infrastructure.
It may be that government would do the same, but this is an unsubstantiated assertion on your part. How's about you provide some citations to support your claim? Because as far as I know, there have been a lot of successes with municipal broadband, and very few failures (indeed, I know of only one).
The fiber is paid for. You'd still have to pay for transit, and for the running costs of the routing infrastructure. It would be wise to pay into a fund to cover wear and tear over time on the fiber. But Internet service clearly doesn't cost as much as we're paying for it in the U.S. If it did, it would cost the same in other countries like Japan, Korea and Sweden.
Mod parent up please.
Then why have the telcos and cable companies spent so much money preventing it from happening? To get it outlawed in every major market? If it's impossible for government to do it, then surely all of that lobbying and all those laws were an unnecessary waste of time.
No, in reality, it's better to lay fiber once to every house and then sell transit on the fiber to ISPs. That's something that a city government can do quite effectively. The reason it hasn't been done is that it would create competition, and ISPs don't want competition. They want to own the market. In my town it's Comcast or nothing. Nothing personal against Comcast, but I'm paying a lot for fairly crappy connectivity. If I had a choice, I'd take it.
You don't live in the U.S., do you?
When I first started working, it was common for employees to have a certain number of sick days and a certain number of vacation days. If you got sick, you took sick days; if you didn't get sick, you didn't take them. Obviously this was ripe for abuse, but it had the virtue of meaning that employees who got sick could go home and get better rather than infecting the whole office with their bug.
Nowadays, we have PTO (paid time off), which is a combination of sick days and vacation days. Typically, PTO is the same number of days that you used to get for vacation back in the day. So now, whenever you take a sick day, you are losing a vacation day. So duh, of course people come in when they are sick, or else work from home; if they didn't, they'd be burning vacation days. If you ever wonder why the burger-flipper behind the counter at McDonalds sneezed in your burger, this is also why. It still shocks me to see people in food service jobs sneezing, but that's the brave new world we live in.
I think most 20-something and 30-something workers in the U.S. never experienced "sick days." So maybe this all seems puzzling to you, but it's dead obvious to me: if you want employees to go home sick when they are sick, don't dock their vacation time.
Of course, I'm completely glossing over the fact that lots of employees are part-time and don't even *get* vacation time. We have really impoverished ourselves over the past thirty years, with the invention of "PTO," with the rise of part-time work as a way to avoid paying benefits, with the rise of lifetime minimum wage employment, and a variety of other innovations.
Good heavens no! I am very much opposed to the ITU's attempt to take over control of the internet! I just hate it when people advance bad reasons for opposing things—a bad argument in favor of something for which there are good arguments does harm, not good, because people may only hear the bad argument, recognize it as a bad argument, and conclude that the proposition being argued for is wrong.
I didn't suggest that CERN was responsible for building the Internet. What I suggested was the truth: without CERN, the Internet wouldn't be the thing that people want to use. Of course, somebody else probably would have implemented something like HTML—it's not as if hypertext was a new idea at that time—but to say that the Internet as it is now is purely a U.S. invention is nonsense.
Because without the www, the Internet would be comparatively useless. Remember archie and gopher?
Are you trolling, or do you just not understand how the Internet works? They don't need to "make their own internet." Do you think that their traffic goes through the U.S.? That would be really expensive! They already _have_ their own internet, and all the services you are accustomed to using here in the U.S. would remain if they severed ties with us—Google would keep working, Spotify would keep working, iTunes would keep working, Amazon would keep working, Skype would keep working. Slashdot might go off the air, but that's about it. They can just ignore us, and let us disconnect our part of the internet from theirs if we want. But of course this will never happen.
That was fifteen years ago. The majority of "the Internet" is now in other countries, and internet service in many countries is significantly better than it is in the U.S.
They've developed a pretty strong allergy to repeating SOPA and PIPA. When they floated a trial balloon a while back to try to add something spooky to the new privacy bill, there was a massive and immediate blowback, and they dropped it like a hot potato. My senator, Senator Leahy, recently sent a letter to the USTR telling them to slow down on TPP and try to make the process more open. Remember Pat Leahy, sponsor of PIPA? A strongly worded letter has no force of law, but it's something he never would have done even a year ago.
We are seeing the beginnings of a new understanding of this issue in Congress. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next couple of years—whether they keep floating trial balloons, or whether they get it that there is now a permanent constituency for internet freedom watching their every move. It will also be interesting to see if we can extend this third rail effect to nearby issues like copyright maximalism and patent maximalism.
Really? Cool! I didn't know that you could remotely control people using the Internet. Is this a new IPv6 feature or something?
Yup, right now the U.S. notionally has access to the DNSSEC root key. It would definitely improve the situation if more countries had access to the DNSSEC root key. Definitely.