you would probably have to extend the average working life to 100 or 120 years to prevent the economy becoming totally unbalanced
I hate to break it to you, but having 65 as a retirement age has ALREADY made the economy totally unbalanced.
Remember that the 65 retirement age was designed for a time when most people only lived to 50! If you made it to 65 you deserved a reward for actually surviving that long. Now almost everyone makes it to 65 and our Social support systems are taking up 50% (or more, depending on your country) of our GDP. Our economy all over the globe is in shambles trying to support a number of people the various welfare states were never designed to handle.
Frankly we need to raise the retirement age to 80 NOW. Make the boomers work for another 25 years or retire on their own money. But us Gen X and down shouldn't be paying for it. When people start living to 150 (or longer) you can bump it to first 100, then 125.
Assuming we haven't decided by then that the government just isn't properly equipped to take care of people in that manner and cancelled all the welfare programs. Or have slipped into a global social collapse and fallen back to 50 year lifespans and steam technology.
Well, informative discovery would probably be more correct. NOW we will see if this discovery will actually bear fruit in finding therapies or the ability to correct for certain early birth defects such as Spinda Bifida.
And the next time your cute-as-a-button 4 year old niece visits she walks up to your open laptop, presses the "on" button because she wants to watch The Wiggles like she does on mommy's laptop at home and...
More to the point, the idea that somehow the Medieval Cooling Period was caused by the discovery of the New World is yet another example of the kind of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" pseudo-science that passes itself off as climate science.
Most of it is now driven by either politics (IE: People with a socialist/communist/fascist agenda that want to use climate science as a convenient crisis under which they can obtain power. See: Harry "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Reid.) or by scientists attempting to obtain/increase their funding, much of which is obtained via the former group of power-mongers.
It's part of the "perfect circle" of deceit and corruption that is at the heart of the modern left and modern climate science. Most Americans have caught on to the game by now, which is why 70% (and rising) no longer believe a word from the climate scientists' mouths. People hear the words "Climate Change" or "Global Warming" (or whatever the term du jour is) and they just roll their eyes and stop listening.
The really sad part is that it has inculcated in large parts of the American populace a distrust of scientists in general, particularly if they are in any way connected with the climate science field.
Frankly, the climate science field has been nothing but a disaster for science as a whole. It needs a hard reset, with all current scientists retiring, and all existing data deleted. We need to start over on this and do it right. Now, whether that is actually possible, I don't know. Probably not. But I don't see any other way of making it trustworthy again.
has "The One" cared about his constitutionally mandated authority limits? The man violates the Constitution so often he makes GWB look like a rank amateur.
Expect him to tell Congress to take a flying leap, sign the evil thing, and then go back to playing golf with Soros et-al. It's not like Congress will do anything. Even if the Republicans try to impeach him, the Dems running the senate will stop it cold. Nobody else has the authority or will to stop him. So we will be stuck with this monstrosity (like all the others foisted upon us by him) until we can voted him and his buddies out and replace them with people who actually respect the Constitution.
Dunno about "faff around". Installing a new WM takes roughly 30 minutes, and you do it once. Then the "faffing" ends and the developer in question can get down to working.
Or are you telling me that you never alter any of the UI defaults when you set up a new PC or load up a new Distro?
If it's a big enough issue to whine about on/., it's a big enough issue to take a very small amount of time to make it the way you want.
And this really bugs me. They are the only Linux distro that uses animal names for their version names, they get to 'P' and they DON'T USE 'PENGUIN'? WTF???
Or, you know, since you are a developer and therefore technically savvy and willing, you could simply install the UI of your choice from the repositories. It's not like it's that hard to do.
The solution to Holocaust deniers is not to stifle everyone's freedom of speech. Let them say their piece, then let the rest of us refute, rebuke, and roundly mock.
Wholeheartedly agreed. The solution to bad speech is MORE speech, not less.
It always boggles my mind when I hear people from Canada and the various Euro-zone countries talk so proudly about their "hate speech" laws. They truly don't understand the prison they have put themselves in.
ArsTechnica!!!111 Fsck. Hell in a handbasket, I tell ya. Hell in a handbasket.
It's called "Owned by Conde-Nast publications". Can you REALLY expect hard-hitting technology journalism from a travel magazine company?
Ars has been turning into puff-piece ad-driven central for over a year now. I stopped going there regularly during the "ad-blocker" fiasco, and occasional returns haven't convinced me I was wrong to leave in the first place.
TFA doesn't say. Although this may be informative:
Frugal to a fault, Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors.
I suspect we may never know how he died, but I'm guessing the lack of seeing qualified medical professionals may have contributed to him dying at 64.
Don't get me wrong; Project Gutenberg is an inspired idea. I can also understand wanting to restrict the amount of manufactured chemicals (drugs) one takes in. But not EVER seeing a doctor? That's ridiculous. Not even "Eccentricity" is an excuse for that.
My apologies to those that were friends of his, but really, didn't you care enough about him to make him go see a doctor once in awhile? The man died at SIXTY FOUR for crying out loud! How much more good work could he have done if some of his friends had just convinced him to see a doctor now and again? Geez!
RIP Michael S. Hart The world is a poorer place without you.
Right and entering a 20-40 character email address on a number pad is fun
Number pad? What, your Multifunction Printer doesn't pull up a virtual keyboard when you tap into a text box on it's touchscreen interface? What kind of a crap printer are you using? I suppose you complain about sending texts on your flip-phone too?
In all seriousness, in most businesses in the US companies have switched to mid-range and high-end Multifunction printers and away from the antiquated lone fax machine. Yes, the "MFP" is more expensive, but is does many other things too, and at a lower price "per print" than having smaller, standalone units for printing, faxing, and scanning. Not to mention it's usually built to a far higher standard of robustness.
Also, the MFP allows you to, as the other poster noted, scan a document and then email it directly from the machine (Syncing contacts is also possible) or even act as a fax relay by allowing you to email documents to the machine which it then holds for you to fax later. I understand some models will also allow you to fax from your desk via an HTML interface as well. So in those cases it's "create document, open browser and log into MFP Faxing interface, select document (from anywhere on your network) and click "OK" to fax it. Get up and go get coffee.
To answer the article's question; The "fax" concept exists because the legal profession in most countries revolves around physical documents with actual signatures rather than digital documents with digital signatures. Until you change the legal profession, you won't get rid of the need for faxes.
if anything, i would think it LESS likely to be perfect due to tidal stresses on it because of it's close orbit to it's parent star.
Frankly, I don't understand why it's being called a "planet" at all. It seems quite clear to me that the only known way to obtain a pure carbon body of this size is via thermonuclear fusion over long periods of time. It's the only way to obtain enough heat and pressure to turn the entire body into a diamond. IE: This "planet" is almost certainly the husk of a dead star, orbiting the husk of another dead star.
It's more creepy than beautiful when you think of it. Two corpses orbiting one another as they drift through space. Depressing.
Isn't ICE supposed to be dealing with illegal immigrants? Oh, right. I forgot. This is the Barry administration, where the Justice Department doesn't prosecute the Black Panthers for voter intimidation (even though they already won the case) and ICE has been tasked with ensuring that illegals are allowed to remain here, as long as they are registered Democrats.
Actually, Netbooks like the Acer eeepc 10 incher are excellent for using in your lap. They are light, don't get really hot, and run craploads of applications. Oh, and if you have Chrome browser, you can even load "apps" into it.
Tablets, while lighter and thinner are a PITA to type on. The iPad doesn't run Flash, so most of the web is broken on it, and have no serious business uses. (No, even the photo editing isn't that great. Good for a tablet with no keyboard, mouse, or wacom stylus, but not great.)
Showing people photos? Really? How often do you walk around showing off your photos to people? Overshare much?
And reading... Go get a Kindle or a Nook. they are better than either a tablet OR a notebook, because neither a tablet or a notebook have e-ink screens.
Simply put, the iPad, as beautiful as it is, is a toy for rich hipsters to show off how much cooler they are than the rest of us. Modern netbooks and small laptops are for people who actually want to get something done.
I should know. My company just finished up a 6 month study on using tablets in our enterprise. We were hoping that we could replace our bulky full-sized business laptops with Tablets for some of our high mobility users.
It was an abject flop, and the iPad was the worst of all of them. It had NO redeeming "Business oriented" qualities at all. The only one that showed any promise whatsoever was (ironically) the HP Touchpad. And we all know what just happened there.
So my company is (for now) rejecting all tablets for use in the enterprise and instead focusing on buying smaller and lighter netbook style laptops for our high mobility people. They just work better.
Well, given how close this thing is to it's parent star, perhaps as a defense mechanism?
Think of an ordinary roughly Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of a main sequence yellow star much like our own Sun. Now imagine a large gravitational mass (such as a black hole or rogue Gas Giant) passes close enough to perturb the orbit of the planet, causing it to slow down and fall inwards towards it's sun.
If the inhabitants of such a planet were more advanced than us, but not yet advanced enough to have developed a reliable form of long-range space travel, they would be able to determine that the final orbit of their world would be far too close to their sun for life to survive.
Given that they would have some time before final orbit was reached, they might construct just such a sphere as a shield against the massive heat of their sun so that their race could survive long enough to develop the previously mentioned space travel capability.
Actually, that would make a very interesting book.
What reward? Karma? Pfft. That's so easy to get it's laughable.
Besides: Editing your comment wouldn't have to undo a moderation. So If you make a really bad comment and get modded down to -1 for it, changing the comment won't necessarily improve your score in time to change the moderation.
Also, why can't a time limit be put on it? Say, 4 hours. So if you fire off a hasty flame post, but then calm down later and realize how stupid you sound, you can go back a bit later and change it. I think that's a great idea. Prevents stupid flame posts from staying up without moderators having to waste points on it, and raises the overall dialog level.
The only really "exploitable" thing I could see was if someone put up a really good post, got a +5 for it, and then edited it to be a spam post or a link to a virus or something along those lines. But since the high-marked posters are fairly well known, I don't see that as being a huge issue.
1. HP does this with ALL it's products. They release a new product line. and then about a month after release toss a big discount out there to further stimulate interest beyond the early adopters.
2. Staples has sold out of it's stock of 16GB Touchpads. Stop right there and let that sink in for a minute... Who, other than Apple, has been able to SELL OUT of a tablet device in stores across America in a single weekend? Samsung with it's much-vaunted Galaxy Tab? Nope. Blackberry's Playbook? Nope. ONLY THE TOUCHPAD has been able to come close to Apple's sales figures. All they needed to do was price it competitively, which as per point #1, is par for the course for HP. One last item of note; Staples was one of the larger Touchpad partners and had a VERY large stock. It's all sold now.
3. On a personal level, I am hearing from completely non-techie people how "That Touchpad thing is really cool looking." and "The Touchpad looks like it's one of the better ones." This is from the older ladies that work in my office and from neighbors who I know aren't tech people. The kind of people who normally say things like "Does that 'iTab' thing do Kindle books from Barnes and Noble?" (Yes, one of them actually said that to me. Yes, it nearly broke my brain.)
The point is, the only people who are saying that "WebOS is dead" are people who have some kind of vested interest (IE: Astrotrufers or True Believers) in one of the other platforms. Is WebOS struggling? No doubt. A couple years of bad or non-existent advertising and a company buyout will do that to a platform. Is it dead? Not by a long shot. HP is just getting warmed up. They're betting big on WebOS, and they didn't get to be the single largest PC maker on the planet by making bad bets.
I don't know if people are really conflating the two.
I think it's completely non-conflationary to state that general throttling is just plain bad. However I would agree that it is conflationary to state that generalized non-specific throttling is non-neutral. It certainly is neutral, but it's still very very bad.
Slashdot Mirror
you would probably have to extend the average working life to 100 or 120 years to prevent the economy becoming totally unbalanced
I hate to break it to you, but having 65 as a retirement age has ALREADY made the economy totally unbalanced.
Remember that the 65 retirement age was designed for a time when most people only lived to 50! If you made it to 65 you deserved a reward for actually surviving that long. Now almost everyone makes it to 65 and our Social support systems are taking up 50% (or more, depending on your country) of our GDP. Our economy all over the globe is in shambles trying to support a number of people the various welfare states were never designed to handle.
Frankly we need to raise the retirement age to 80 NOW. Make the boomers work for another 25 years or retire on their own money. But us Gen X and down shouldn't be paying for it. When people start living to 150 (or longer) you can bump it to first 100, then 125.
Assuming we haven't decided by then that the government just isn't properly equipped to take care of people in that manner and cancelled all the welfare programs. Or have slipped into a global social collapse and fallen back to 50 year lifespans and steam technology.
whoo-eee! Fruitful discovery./quote.
Well, informative discovery would probably be more correct. NOW we will see if this discovery will actually bear fruit in finding therapies or the ability to correct for certain early birth defects such as Spinda Bifida.
Yeah...
And the next time your cute-as-a-button 4 year old niece visits she walks up to your open laptop, presses the "on" button because she wants to watch The Wiggles like she does on mommy's laptop at home and...
C4 and laptops, baaaaaaad combination.
More to the point, the idea that somehow the Medieval Cooling Period was caused by the discovery of the New World is yet another example of the kind of "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" pseudo-science that passes itself off as climate science.
Most of it is now driven by either politics (IE: People with a socialist/communist/fascist agenda that want to use climate science as a convenient crisis under which they can obtain power. See: Harry "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Reid.) or by scientists attempting to obtain/increase their funding, much of which is obtained via the former group of power-mongers.
It's part of the "perfect circle" of deceit and corruption that is at the heart of the modern left and modern climate science. Most Americans have caught on to the game by now, which is why 70% (and rising) no longer believe a word from the climate scientists' mouths. People hear the words "Climate Change" or "Global Warming" (or whatever the term du jour is) and they just roll their eyes and stop listening.
The really sad part is that it has inculcated in large parts of the American populace a distrust of scientists in general, particularly if they are in any way connected with the climate science field.
Frankly, the climate science field has been nothing but a disaster for science as a whole. It needs a hard reset, with all current scientists retiring, and all existing data deleted. We need to start over on this and do it right. Now, whether that is actually possible, I don't know. Probably not. But I don't see any other way of making it trustworthy again.
I love how my perfectly on-topic and utterly correct post get's modded down to 0-Troll in 5 minutes.
Remember kids: -1 Troll does NOT mean "I disagree with you."
has "The One" cared about his constitutionally mandated authority limits? The man violates the Constitution so often he makes GWB look like a rank amateur.
Expect him to tell Congress to take a flying leap, sign the evil thing, and then go back to playing golf with Soros et-al. It's not like Congress will do anything. Even if the Republicans try to impeach him, the Dems running the senate will stop it cold. Nobody else has the authority or will to stop him. So we will be stuck with this monstrosity (like all the others foisted upon us by him) until we can voted him and his buddies out and replace them with people who actually respect the Constitution.
Actually, I need to correct myself. Installing Gnome takes about 30 SECONDS not 30 minutes.
http://www.liberiangeek.net/2011/08/return-to-ubuntu-classic-desktop-in-ubuntu-11-10/
From a post further down. It's stupidly simple to get GNOME back in 11.10.
*shrug*
Dunno about "faff around". Installing a new WM takes roughly 30 minutes, and you do it once. Then the "faffing" ends and the developer in question can get down to working.
Or are you telling me that you never alter any of the UI defaults when you set up a new PC or load up a new Distro?
If it's a big enough issue to whine about on /., it's a big enough issue to take a very small amount of time to make it the way you want.
And this really bugs me. They are the only Linux distro that uses animal names for their version names, they get to 'P' and they DON'T USE 'PENGUIN'? WTF???
Or, you know, since you are a developer and therefore technically savvy and willing, you could simply install the UI of your choice from the repositories. It's not like it's that hard to do.
Wholeheartedly agreed. The solution to bad speech is MORE speech, not less.
It always boggles my mind when I hear people from Canada and the various Euro-zone countries talk so proudly about their "hate speech" laws. They truly don't understand the prison they have put themselves in.
It's called "Owned by Conde-Nast publications". Can you REALLY expect hard-hitting technology journalism from a travel magazine company?
Ars has been turning into puff-piece ad-driven central for over a year now. I stopped going there regularly during the "ad-blocker" fiasco, and occasional returns haven't convinced me I was wrong to leave in the first place.
This is how it begins...
Being upset over losing one of literature's leading lights because of a preventable issue != "going crazy over other people's problems."
Have some perspective.
TFA doesn't say. Although this may be informative:
Frugal to a fault, Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors.
I suspect we may never know how he died, but I'm guessing the lack of seeing qualified medical professionals may have contributed to him dying at 64.
Don't get me wrong; Project Gutenberg is an inspired idea. I can also understand wanting to restrict the amount of manufactured chemicals (drugs) one takes in. But not EVER seeing a doctor? That's ridiculous. Not even "Eccentricity" is an excuse for that.
My apologies to those that were friends of his, but really, didn't you care enough about him to make him go see a doctor once in awhile? The man died at SIXTY FOUR for crying out loud! How much more good work could he have done if some of his friends had just convinced him to see a doctor now and again? Geez!
RIP Michael S. Hart The world is a poorer place without you.
Right and entering a 20-40 character email address on a number pad is fun
Number pad? What, your Multifunction Printer doesn't pull up a virtual keyboard when you tap into a text box on it's touchscreen interface? What kind of a crap printer are you using? I suppose you complain about sending texts on your flip-phone too?
In all seriousness, in most businesses in the US companies have switched to mid-range and high-end Multifunction printers and away from the antiquated lone fax machine. Yes, the "MFP" is more expensive, but is does many other things too, and at a lower price "per print" than having smaller, standalone units for printing, faxing, and scanning. Not to mention it's usually built to a far higher standard of robustness.
Also, the MFP allows you to, as the other poster noted, scan a document and then email it directly from the machine (Syncing contacts is also possible) or even act as a fax relay by allowing you to email documents to the machine which it then holds for you to fax later. I understand some models will also allow you to fax from your desk via an HTML interface as well. So in those cases it's "create document, open browser and log into MFP Faxing interface, select document (from anywhere on your network) and click "OK" to fax it. Get up and go get coffee.
To answer the article's question; The "fax" concept exists because the legal profession in most countries revolves around physical documents with actual signatures rather than digital documents with digital signatures. Until you change the legal profession, you won't get rid of the need for faxes.
Why would it be more likely to be perfect?
if anything, i would think it LESS likely to be perfect due to tidal stresses on it because of it's close orbit to it's parent star.
Frankly, I don't understand why it's being called a "planet" at all. It seems quite clear to me that the only known way to obtain a pure carbon body of this size is via thermonuclear fusion over long periods of time. It's the only way to obtain enough heat and pressure to turn the entire body into a diamond. IE: This "planet" is almost certainly the husk of a dead star, orbiting the husk of another dead star.
It's more creepy than beautiful when you think of it. Two corpses orbiting one another as they drift through space. Depressing.
Isn't ICE supposed to be dealing with illegal immigrants? Oh, right. I forgot. This is the Barry administration, where the Justice Department doesn't prosecute the Black Panthers for voter intimidation (even though they already won the case) and ICE has been tasked with ensuring that illegals are allowed to remain here, as long as they are registered Democrats.
Welcome to the United States of Chicago politics.
Actually, Netbooks like the Acer eeepc 10 incher are excellent for using in your lap. They are light, don't get really hot, and run craploads of applications. Oh, and if you have Chrome browser, you can even load "apps" into it.
Tablets, while lighter and thinner are a PITA to type on. The iPad doesn't run Flash, so most of the web is broken on it, and have no serious business uses. (No, even the photo editing isn't that great. Good for a tablet with no keyboard, mouse, or wacom stylus, but not great.)
Showing people photos? Really? How often do you walk around showing off your photos to people? Overshare much?
And reading... Go get a Kindle or a Nook. they are better than either a tablet OR a notebook, because neither a tablet or a notebook have e-ink screens.
Simply put, the iPad, as beautiful as it is, is a toy for rich hipsters to show off how much cooler they are than the rest of us. Modern netbooks and small laptops are for people who actually want to get something done.
I should know. My company just finished up a 6 month study on using tablets in our enterprise. We were hoping that we could replace our bulky full-sized business laptops with Tablets for some of our high mobility users.
It was an abject flop, and the iPad was the worst of all of them. It had NO redeeming "Business oriented" qualities at all. The only one that showed any promise whatsoever was (ironically) the HP Touchpad. And we all know what just happened there.
So my company is (for now) rejecting all tablets for use in the enterprise and instead focusing on buying smaller and lighter netbook style laptops for our high mobility people. They just work better.
Well, given how close this thing is to it's parent star, perhaps as a defense mechanism?
Think of an ordinary roughly Earth-sized planet within the habitable zone of a main sequence yellow star much like our own Sun. Now imagine a large gravitational mass (such as a black hole or rogue Gas Giant) passes close enough to perturb the orbit of the planet, causing it to slow down and fall inwards towards it's sun.
If the inhabitants of such a planet were more advanced than us, but not yet advanced enough to have developed a reliable form of long-range space travel, they would be able to determine that the final orbit of their world would be far too close to their sun for life to survive.
Given that they would have some time before final orbit was reached, they might construct just such a sphere as a shield against the massive heat of their sun so that their race could survive long enough to develop the previously mentioned space travel capability.
Actually, that would make a very interesting book.
Because they don't exist. Unless you care to share a link to a verifiable source?
What reward? Karma? Pfft. That's so easy to get it's laughable.
Besides: Editing your comment wouldn't have to undo a moderation. So If you make a really bad comment and get modded down to -1 for it, changing the comment won't necessarily improve your score in time to change the moderation.
Also, why can't a time limit be put on it? Say, 4 hours. So if you fire off a hasty flame post, but then calm down later and realize how stupid you sound, you can go back a bit later and change it. I think that's a great idea. Prevents stupid flame posts from staying up without moderators having to waste points on it, and raises the overall dialog level.
The only really "exploitable" thing I could see was if someone put up a really good post, got a +5 for it, and then edited it to be a spam post or a link to a virus or something along those lines. But since the high-marked posters are fairly well known, I don't see that as being a huge issue.
Really? Somehow I doubt that.
1. HP does this with ALL it's products. They release a new product line. and then about a month after release toss a big discount out there to further stimulate interest beyond the early adopters.
2. Staples has sold out of it's stock of 16GB Touchpads. Stop right there and let that sink in for a minute... Who, other than Apple, has been able to SELL OUT of a tablet device in stores across America in a single weekend? Samsung with it's much-vaunted Galaxy Tab? Nope. Blackberry's Playbook? Nope. ONLY THE TOUCHPAD has been able to come close to Apple's sales figures. All they needed to do was price it competitively, which as per point #1, is par for the course for HP. One last item of note; Staples was one of the larger Touchpad partners and had a VERY large stock. It's all sold now.
3. On a personal level, I am hearing from completely non-techie people how "That Touchpad thing is really cool looking." and "The Touchpad looks like it's one of the better ones." This is from the older ladies that work in my office and from neighbors who I know aren't tech people. The kind of people who normally say things like "Does that 'iTab' thing do Kindle books from Barnes and Noble?" (Yes, one of them actually said that to me. Yes, it nearly broke my brain.)
The point is, the only people who are saying that "WebOS is dead" are people who have some kind of vested interest (IE: Astrotrufers or True Believers) in one of the other platforms. Is WebOS struggling? No doubt. A couple years of bad or non-existent advertising and a company buyout will do that to a platform. Is it dead? Not by a long shot. HP is just getting warmed up. They're betting big on WebOS, and they didn't get to be the single largest PC maker on the planet by making bad bets.
I don't know if people are really conflating the two.
I think it's completely non-conflationary to state that general throttling is just plain bad. However I would agree that it is conflationary to state that generalized non-specific throttling is non-neutral. It certainly is neutral, but it's still very very bad.
Ummm The paper WAS peer reviewed.
Oh, I'm sorry I forgot. This is /. Naturally, you didn't RTFA.