This is a law suit waiting to happen if there is no disclosure that the books will have these "flags" at the time of purchase.
Big fucking deal. If history is any guide, the affected consumers will get a credit for $0.99 off their next purchase from Amazon while the law firm who initiated the lawsuit will walk away with millions. Amazon will just write it off as a cost of doing business and go right on screwing their customers, albeit this time with a disclaimer about the DRM flags clearly displayed in a 2pt font.
The cybersecurity czar would more likely than not be mostly responsible for making sure that the public perceives that the feds are doing actually something while actually accomplishing very little other than to direct a few contracts to vendors who donated the right amount of money and/or were buddies of his while he was in school
Fixed that for you. Given the track record of the other "czar's" appointed by the Federal Government, you'll forgive me for my skepticism.
By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
Which begs the question, why aren't we building a new Hubble? My understanding is that the JWST won't have capabilities in the visual spectrum. We can spend hundreds of billions on a war and entitlements but can't find money for NASA while we fall further and further behind (soon to lose manned spaceflight capability altogether) our competitors in space? WTF is wrong with this picture?
My experience would suggest that the jitter is more to blame than the latency. It's kind of cool that it worked well enough to check your voicemail though. I'd probably be content with that -- who wants to be making a bunch of phone calls from the airplane anyway?
(BTW WildBlue is awesome compared to the dial-up rurals have to put up with:)
I hope it survives overcast skies and rainy days. My company had Hughesnet for a long time before we got sick of the limitations and finally ponied up for a T-1. We are too far out to get cable or DSL. The T-1 isn't really cost effective from a bandwidth point of view (my cable provider could give us five times the bandwidth for what we are paying now) but it's great from a reliability standpoint and WAY better than any satellite service I've ever seen.
Skype uses UDP rather than TCP (like normal web traffic). If I remember correctly, UDP packets are many small packets which may perform badly over connections of very high latency.
UDP shouldn't have anything to do with latency, nor is it limited to "many small packets". UDP is just a transport protocol that lacks the error checking/data integrity and ordering mechanism of TCP. If such features are important to you then you need to use TCP or build them into your application that uses UDP.
The advantage of UDP comes in time critical applications where it's probably better to lose a few packets (i.e: have a second or two of dead air during a phone call) than delay the transmission (conversation stops while it waits for the lost packets to be retransmitted). Latency really doesn't have anything to do with it, although latency is bad for VoIP for other reasons.
But it doesn't take long for the Bears and Badgers to make it from Moscow to the continental US, to use a slightly out-dated example.
Well yeah, but the GP didn't advocate getting rid of the Air Force. He didn't advocate getting rid of the Army either, just cutting it down to a smaller force tasked primarily with training and operating the more sophisticated weapons systems.
My main desire would be to see us abandon our interventionist policies. There's no reason that we need to maintain a global reach while acting as the world policemen.
The issue with that is that the Constitution was written in a time where 'invading another country' generally meant months of sea voyage, followed by years of campaigning.
And it doesn't still mean that? Yeah, the sea-voyage would take weeks instead of months now, but don't you think it would take a few years to conquer a country the size of the United States? The blitzkrieg failed miserably when it was attempted on a country with a decent size.....
Yeah, I agree with you. I would slice the standing army down to a small professional force tasked primarily with training, operating advanced weapons systems (air defense and artillery) and defending important American outposts that aren't attached to the mainland (Guam, the Mariana's and Hawaii come to mind).
I would keep the Navy largely as is but make it solely responsible for our nuclear deterrent. I don't see the point of keeping around expensive ICBMs that are easily located and destroyed when we can station our nuclear deterrent on submarines that are virtually impossible to locate. The Navy would be our first line of defense (what are the odds that Canada or Mexico invade us?) as well as the last line of defense (the aforementioned nuclear deterrent).
I'm also tempted to say that the Air Force should be folded back into the Army. It was spun off as a separate service because of the notion that strategic bombing alone would win wars. This notion has not been borne out in any of the wars we've ever fought. Boots on the ground win wars. The Air Force exists to ensure those boots fight under friendly skies while the the boots of the enemy don't. Why should it be a separate service? Fold it back in the Army and make it part of the professional force that would be maintained during peacetime.
The rest of our defense would fall to the organized militia (National Guard and State Defense Forces) and unorganized militia (everybody else) if the shit hit the fan. I would also advocate withdrawing from the world and letting them pay for their own national defense. We'll get involved in their disputes when and if those disputes pose a clear and present threat to the national security of the United States.
Mein Kampf wasn't very secret and outlined many of the ideas that were the foundation for that plan.
In any case, your idea wouldn't be politically viable in any nation (let alone Stalinist Russia) that I'm aware of. Do you honestly think that an American President would take to the hills and leave the majority of the American population and industrial plant under enemy occupation in the hopes that the occupying power would be bled over time?
You've won me over, now when asked about the best governments of all time, The Vichy government will be at the top of my list.
You forgot about the part where the Vichy Government implemented their own racial laws, stripped Jews of their French citizenship and established internment camps.
and hardly any of them are high-capacity semi-automatics and virtually none select fire. So our weapons are further from being militarily useful than they were.
Some studies I've seen of the Soviet intervention of Afghanistan suggest that the resistance fighters were largely armed with old Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles during the first part of the conflict. Eventually they managed to capture Soviet weapons and received outside support but even then the bolt actions still had their place. I wouldn't underestimate the ability of a population to make an invaders life a living nightmare just with civilian style firearms.
I'd feel better if we had more military-style rifles, though.
Make sure you tell your elected representatives that. Taking away the "military-style" rifles seems to be objective #1 of the gun control crowd.
I've often pondered the idea that we should gut our military down to a smaller level and rely on the 'rifle behind every blade of grass' concept to deter invasions of the homeland. We'd probably want to keep our nuclear deterrent in such a scenario. If the Swiss can manage not to get invaded without nuclear weapons why couldn't we manage to do the same with the nuclear deterrent and an armed population?
They could have retreated into Siberia and let the weather kill the invaders, like they did with Napoleon
Did Napoleon have plans to starve the majority of the Slavs out of existence while keeping a token amount alive as slave laborers? Would you have left your population at the mercy of such an invasion force or would you have fought that invasion force with every means at your disposal?
The only wars we should get involved in are defense of our borders, or defense of allied borders, and we should be very, very picky about who we call "ally".
The only ones that I would call "ally" are the ones whose conquest would pose a direct threat to the United States of America. I.e: We should probably get involved if someone tries to conquer Canada or Mexico.
The government-issued arms and ammunition would have been the preferred choice, but millions of old.30-30 deer rifles and.45-70 buffalo/elk guns could have been pressed into service at an instant.
And you don't think that fighting such an action would result in higher casualties than the neat set-piece battles we got to fight on the Western Front? The battles that we fought with full benefit of aerial supremacy, attacks on the rear area Axis logistical network and an Ally to the East that had already been bleeding the German Army for three years?
I'm a big fan of the "rifle behind every blade of grass" concept but I don't think for a moment that it wouldn't have been every bit as desperate and bloody as the Eastern Front was.
In Stalin's case, how about not purging Red Army leadership in the 1930s?
Well, yeah, Stalin bears a lot (most of?) the blame for the poor performance of the Red Army. But that still doesn't change my underlying point. The Anglo-American alliance largely got to decide when and where they would fight. We had the luxury of waiting until we had achieved air superiority before we committed our armies to battle. We had the luxury of not fighting the war on our own soil (yeah, the UK was bombed, but bombing != invasion).
The Russians and Chinese didn't have any of those luxuries.
What should they have done differently? Given up because they lacked the resources and training to effectively fight their opponents when the war started? We had the luxury of two oceans between us and time to build up and train our forces. We had the luxury of choosing when we would fight.
You don't have those luxuries when your country is invaded. You fight back as effectively as possible and do what needs to be done to drive the invaders from your homeland. Do you really think we would have done it any differently if someone was invading our soil?
Germany suffered around 3.6 million KIAs on the Eastern Front. She suffered around 5.5 million KIAs in the entire war. The Eastern Front contributed to well over half of Germany's military losses.
The fact that the Soviets and Chinese died in far greater numbers doesn't mean their contribution was greater.
You wouldn't see it that way if you were a Russian;) There are a number of different battles (Stalingrad) and sieges (Leningrad) where the Russians absorbed more deaths than the British and Americans did during the entire war. I really don't think you can make the claim that their contribution wasn't important and I find it questionable that the Allies could have won without them. The US might have been able to defeat Germany but do you really think we would have walked away with a "mere" 418,000 KIAs if we had faced them alone?
Slashdot Mirror
At least I have 2 Senators.
One of whom consumes as much TV time as 50 other US Senators ;)
The most dangerous place to be in Washington is between Charles Schumer and a TV camera......
This is a law suit waiting to happen if there is no disclosure that the books will have these "flags" at the time of purchase.
Big fucking deal. If history is any guide, the affected consumers will get a credit for $0.99 off their next purchase from Amazon while the law firm who initiated the lawsuit will walk away with millions. Amazon will just write it off as a cost of doing business and go right on screwing their customers, albeit this time with a disclaimer about the DRM flags clearly displayed in a 2pt font.
Call me cynical.....
and considering we have a fucking nuke missing
???
The cybersecurity czar would more likely than not be mostly responsible for making sure that the public perceives that the feds are doing actually something while actually accomplishing very little other than to direct a few contracts to vendors who donated the right amount of money and/or were buddies of his while he was in school
Fixed that for you. Given the track record of the other "czar's" appointed by the Federal Government, you'll forgive me for my skepticism.
By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
Which begs the question, why aren't we building a new Hubble? My understanding is that the JWST won't have capabilities in the visual spectrum. We can spend hundreds of billions on a war and entitlements but can't find money for NASA while we fall further and further behind (soon to lose manned spaceflight capability altogether) our competitors in space? WTF is wrong with this picture?
For the safety and convenience of motorists, of course.
Don't forget the children. You gotta think of them.
It's done nothing but storm for a week here
You live in Central New York? ;)
Sounds like they have a better service than Hughesnet. Hughes would die on days with heavy cloud cover, no rain required.
My experience would suggest that the jitter is more to blame than the latency. It's kind of cool that it worked well enough to check your voicemail though. I'd probably be content with that -- who wants to be making a bunch of phone calls from the airplane anyway?
Tinfoil hat theory: they could throttle Skype packets just enough to "make it look like an accident" that it doesn't work.
I knew there was a reason why I route all my traffic through a VPN when I use connections I don't own......
(BTW WildBlue is awesome compared to the dial-up rurals have to put up with :)
I hope it survives overcast skies and rainy days. My company had Hughesnet for a long time before we got sick of the limitations and finally ponied up for a T-1. We are too far out to get cable or DSL. The T-1 isn't really cost effective from a bandwidth point of view (my cable provider could give us five times the bandwidth for what we are paying now) but it's great from a reliability standpoint and WAY better than any satellite service I've ever seen.
Skype uses UDP rather than TCP (like normal web traffic). If I remember correctly, UDP packets are many small packets which may perform badly over connections of very high latency.
UDP shouldn't have anything to do with latency, nor is it limited to "many small packets". UDP is just a transport protocol that lacks the error checking/data integrity and ordering mechanism of TCP. If such features are important to you then you need to use TCP or build them into your application that uses UDP.
The advantage of UDP comes in time critical applications where it's probably better to lose a few packets (i.e: have a second or two of dead air during a phone call) than delay the transmission (conversation stops while it waits for the lost packets to be retransmitted). Latency really doesn't have anything to do with it, although latency is bad for VoIP for other reasons.
But it doesn't take long for the Bears and Badgers to make it from Moscow to the continental US, to use a slightly out-dated example.
Well yeah, but the GP didn't advocate getting rid of the Air Force. He didn't advocate getting rid of the Army either, just cutting it down to a smaller force tasked primarily with training and operating the more sophisticated weapons systems.
My main desire would be to see us abandon our interventionist policies. There's no reason that we need to maintain a global reach while acting as the world policemen.
The issue with that is that the Constitution was written in a time where 'invading another country' generally meant months of sea voyage, followed by years of campaigning.
And it doesn't still mean that? Yeah, the sea-voyage would take weeks instead of months now, but don't you think it would take a few years to conquer a country the size of the United States? The blitzkrieg failed miserably when it was attempted on a country with a decent size.....
Yeah, I agree with you. I would slice the standing army down to a small professional force tasked primarily with training, operating advanced weapons systems (air defense and artillery) and defending important American outposts that aren't attached to the mainland (Guam, the Mariana's and Hawaii come to mind).
I would keep the Navy largely as is but make it solely responsible for our nuclear deterrent. I don't see the point of keeping around expensive ICBMs that are easily located and destroyed when we can station our nuclear deterrent on submarines that are virtually impossible to locate. The Navy would be our first line of defense (what are the odds that Canada or Mexico invade us?) as well as the last line of defense (the aforementioned nuclear deterrent).
I'm also tempted to say that the Air Force should be folded back into the Army. It was spun off as a separate service because of the notion that strategic bombing alone would win wars. This notion has not been borne out in any of the wars we've ever fought. Boots on the ground win wars. The Air Force exists to ensure those boots fight under friendly skies while the the boots of the enemy don't. Why should it be a separate service? Fold it back in the Army and make it part of the professional force that would be maintained during peacetime.
The rest of our defense would fall to the organized militia (National Guard and State Defense Forces) and unorganized militia (everybody else) if the shit hit the fan. I would also advocate withdrawing from the world and letting them pay for their own national defense. We'll get involved in their disputes when and if those disputes pose a clear and present threat to the national security of the United States.
Mein Kampf wasn't very secret and outlined many of the ideas that were the foundation for that plan.
In any case, your idea wouldn't be politically viable in any nation (let alone Stalinist Russia) that I'm aware of. Do you honestly think that an American President would take to the hills and leave the majority of the American population and industrial plant under enemy occupation in the hopes that the occupying power would be bled over time?
You've won me over, now when asked about the best governments of all time, The Vichy government will be at the top of my list.
You forgot about the part where the Vichy Government implemented their own racial laws, stripped Jews of their French citizenship and established internment camps.
and hardly any of them are high-capacity semi-automatics and virtually none select fire. So our weapons are further from being militarily useful than they were.
Some studies I've seen of the Soviet intervention of Afghanistan suggest that the resistance fighters were largely armed with old Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles during the first part of the conflict. Eventually they managed to capture Soviet weapons and received outside support but even then the bolt actions still had their place. I wouldn't underestimate the ability of a population to make an invaders life a living nightmare just with civilian style firearms.
I'd feel better if we had more military-style rifles, though.
Make sure you tell your elected representatives that. Taking away the "military-style" rifles seems to be objective #1 of the gun control crowd.
Well thankfully we'll never have to find out.
I've often pondered the idea that we should gut our military down to a smaller level and rely on the 'rifle behind every blade of grass' concept to deter invasions of the homeland. We'd probably want to keep our nuclear deterrent in such a scenario. If the Swiss can manage not to get invaded without nuclear weapons why couldn't we manage to do the same with the nuclear deterrent and an armed population?
They could have retreated into Siberia and let the weather kill the invaders, like they did with Napoleon
Did Napoleon have plans to starve the majority of the Slavs out of existence while keeping a token amount alive as slave laborers? Would you have left your population at the mercy of such an invasion force or would you have fought that invasion force with every means at your disposal?
The only wars we should get involved in are defense of our borders, or defense of allied borders, and we should be very, very picky about who we call "ally".
The only ones that I would call "ally" are the ones whose conquest would pose a direct threat to the United States of America. I.e: We should probably get involved if someone tries to conquer Canada or Mexico.
Yup. Ask the women of Berlin who lived during the time. If they'll speak about it. Soviets pretty much raped the entire population.
I guess they should have thought about that before they launched a war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
The government-issued arms and ammunition would have been the preferred choice, but millions of old .30-30 deer rifles and .45-70 buffalo/elk guns could have been pressed into service at an instant.
And you don't think that fighting such an action would result in higher casualties than the neat set-piece battles we got to fight on the Western Front? The battles that we fought with full benefit of aerial supremacy, attacks on the rear area Axis logistical network and an Ally to the East that had already been bleeding the German Army for three years?
I'm a big fan of the "rifle behind every blade of grass" concept but I don't think for a moment that it wouldn't have been every bit as desperate and bloody as the Eastern Front was.
In Stalin's case, how about not purging Red Army leadership in the 1930s?
Well, yeah, Stalin bears a lot (most of?) the blame for the poor performance of the Red Army. But that still doesn't change my underlying point. The Anglo-American alliance largely got to decide when and where they would fight. We had the luxury of waiting until we had achieved air superiority before we committed our armies to battle. We had the luxury of not fighting the war on our own soil (yeah, the UK was bombed, but bombing != invasion).
The Russians and Chinese didn't have any of those luxuries.
What should they have done differently? Given up because they lacked the resources and training to effectively fight their opponents when the war started? We had the luxury of two oceans between us and time to build up and train our forces. We had the luxury of choosing when we would fight.
You don't have those luxuries when your country is invaded. You fight back as effectively as possible and do what needs to be done to drive the invaders from your homeland. Do you really think we would have done it any differently if someone was invading our soil?
Germany suffered around 3.6 million KIAs on the Eastern Front. She suffered around 5.5 million KIAs in the entire war. The Eastern Front contributed to well over half of Germany's military losses.
The fact that the Soviets and Chinese died in far greater numbers doesn't mean their contribution was greater.
You wouldn't see it that way if you were a Russian ;) There are a number of different battles (Stalingrad) and sieges (Leningrad) where the Russians absorbed more deaths than the British and Americans did during the entire war. I really don't think you can make the claim that their contribution wasn't important and I find it questionable that the Allies could have won without them. The US might have been able to defeat Germany but do you really think we would have walked away with a "mere" 418,000 KIAs if we had faced them alone?