Okay, I'm curious. By that point in the film I was wondering why the Hell I had ever rented the DVD in the first place. What might I have missed about the ending?
Good idea? The person responsible for the suger-fest that was A.I.? Watch out for the new Ghost In The Shell version where aliens give her a human body at the end and the bullets never actually hit anyone.
Not a silly gesture - I even bookmarked them myself. I'm not really in a position to purchase large quantities of cables, but who knows? Maybe, I will be at some future point.
I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds.
But I read the whole thing which is unusual for me as I like to skim read. I'd say it's also rare to find a Slashdot article where so many people actually read the linked story instead of just reading and replying to comments. I would like to publically thank Kurt Denke for giving me such a good laugh.
-H.
I agree that people should be cautious about feeling superior. People often give themselves too much credit for the circumstances in which they find themselves. If born to different parents, raised in a different environment, would they follow the same course of action as the heavy drug user? And if they answer that the question isn't valid because they would be a different person, then they must explain why they feel superior about being a product of a different set of circumstances.
But to answer your question of why it is better to get the feelings naturally rather than to shortcut them with drugs, e.g. your treadmill example, it is because these responses have a purpose that results in better living, health, reproductive rates, etc. To get the same feelings from drugs cheats the test and results in no actual gain to the individuals state. Only a perception of gain which is soon lost.
You find that next year your crop has gained some of the properties/genes of the GM version through airborne cross pollination. You think this is a good thing and keep growing it.
Bit of a bugger if you don't think it's a good thing though. For example if you're entire market is based on selling Organic Produce.
Kingston Communications was Hull's own telephone company and network. I don't know the history of it, though I expect it's interesting. And having not been to Hull for a few years, I don't know what the situation is today. But based on my experience with them, no-one ever complained because they were quite frankly very much better than the rest of the country.
As regards the poster who's saying net neutrality is already gone, there's room for it to get a whole Hell of a lot worse and we have to fight it till it's dead and it stays dead. He might say that the loss of Slashdotters as customers is not going to bother him, but I'm personally responsible for eight friends and one company's choice of provider just by myself. The IT community is not the community to piss off if you're an IT company.
Regardless of whether or not Monsanto sue, there's still a problem as Farmer Bob can no longer legitimately sell his crop as non-GM. The choice of us, as the purchasers, is taken away from us. Reduction of options is bad.
They also take a sort of "first one's free" approach to get people hooked. Through cheap rates or donated seed, they put whatever pressure or enticement or deceit they can to get people to the point where they no longer have stocks of unpatented seeds to grow. When that happens, you will see a gross change in policy because Monsanto will have patents on the food supply.
Aside from the ethics of patenting food, there are significant dangers to all of us. The spread of engineered crops removes the choice from the rest of us as we can no longer secure a "pure" alternative. Furthermore, Monsanto's aggresive pushing of its patented varieties brings about a homogenity of crops to a degree we've never seen before. Whilst the food supply is already more uniform than it used to be, the genetically identical crops being spread world wide by Monsanto go even further. Google for the Irish Potato Famine if you want a reminder of the dangers of putting all our eggs in one basket. Only in this scenario, it's world wide. And then there is the wider context to consider about what this technology actually offers us. For example, Monsanto's "Golden Rice" which is enriched with Vitamin A to help those who are deficient in it in the third world areas where they grow rice. The problem being that they are deficient only relatively recently since international agriculture business has forced them to only grow rice for commercial reasons. The Golden Rice looks like a good thing from a narrow perspective, consider the larger context and you realise it's comiong from the same root as what causes the problem in the first place. And all the issues about bio-diversity, establishment of monopoly, ethics of patenting food still stand.
Monsanto need to be stopped for all our sakes and I would love to do it.
Probably first order statistic is that few people from poor backgrounds are working as game designers with the statistic that there are few black people working as game designers reflecting this rather than anything else. Now if you wish to use this as an example that there is economic disparity between white and black americans, then it might be valid to do so though there are vastly better statistics that could be used to show that than number of black game developers (doctors, university graduates, etc). I doubt it's the case that black people are facing barriers in the game industry so much as there's a more general economic reason.
Just to put these statistics in perspective anyway, Wikipedia tells me that black people make up about 12% of the US poopulation. So we're looking at 2% related to this.
Networking hardware uses very little electrical power whether it is passing data or not."
I don't buy that. Using my own PC as example, it uses only 60 watts when idle, but 200 watts when downloading at 1000 kilobits/sec. It's the result of all the transistors switching on-and-off rapidly between different states, and a network server would be no different.
The network server is not relevant here as we are discussing the costs of routing data, not serving it. The BBC has no issue with running their servers and the ISPs are not criticising them for that. It's a question of the cost of running the wires in between. The fact that your PC consumes more power when it is downloading files at 1,000Kb/s has to do with a number of factors, certainly not the least of which being the processing on that file that the CPU is doing and the accompanying disk and RAM activity. If you want a closer analogy to the actual infrastructure in your home, you should be asking how much more power your router is using when you are downloading that file. You will find two things: Firstly, the difference in power consumption between your busy router and your idle router is very, very low. Secondly, even when kept busy, electrical costs are similar in comparison to things you use without thinking such as lightbulbs.
The notion that the main cost of data transfer has to do with electricity costs is one easily disproved. It has to do with limited infrastructure.
The U.S. was never the "greatest" country (the European global empires (like the UK) were much greater than we ever were).
The GP did say "greatest..." not "greatest ever..." so there's nothing to pull him or her up on in what was said, though in terms of economic might, the USA was right up there with the best of them historically. But in the context (Advertising Standards) it's pretty clear we're talking about representation of the people, not international might. And at times, the USA truly was magnificent in this regard. But you're losing it fast if you don't do anything to hold on to it.
A network moving bits is going to use a lot, lot more power than a network sitting idle (which of course will increase the ISP's electric bill; and that trickles down to us).
Networking hardware uses very little electrical power whether it is passing data or not. I'd be interested to see you show figures that say otherwise. The costs we are charged for our bandwidth have very little to do with the cost of the electricity used to run the hardware and almost everything to do with the amount the infrastructure owners can charge the ISPs for a limited resource. And it is limited not because it requires requires effort to produce units of like power, gas or water, but because initial infrastructure is not sufficiently developed.
I don't get why yourself and others are busy posting what you think is a good pricing model for different caps when if you realise the biggest issue is at the infrastructure level, not the ISP level, we can see that it would be possible to have (effectively) unlimited capacity for all of us for an initial outlay and minimal maintenance costs thereafter.
You're right it's not so simple, but I think it might be as the parent says and it's a result of lack of competition... except it's not a lack of competition at the ISP level, but at the level of those that charge X pence per megabit at the infrastructure level. Whichever ISP you're with, they all seem to be re-selling the old BT lines and getting charged the same price for it. That leaves ISPs in the position of marketing support or juggling their finances around to see what they can get away with offering and still make a profit. Usage of the network infrastructure is essentially free in terms of real physical costs. Maintenance is low and the same regardless of whether it's in use all the time or sitting idle. Only creating the infrastructure is really costly. And there's no competition there. If there were, then we might move from a toll model (charging the ISPs per megabit) to a lease model (the ISP buys X bandwidth to use or not as they please). That would free the ISPs up to sell more cheaply and in fact, they would welcome increased usage such as from the BBC, because they would charge people for fatter bandwidth.
There's an important difference with utilities such as electricity: They require resource to sustain. If I demand a 1,000KWh from my local power station, it has to send 1,000KWh down the line at me (more given resistance, but ignore that). With data, there is only the initial outlay on infrastructure and afterwards the same minimal cost to run it whether it's sitting idle or if it's feeding me High Definition movies all day long. The running costs are a false scarcity created by poor infrastructure and a pricing model that allows the infrastructure owners to charge ISPs per Mbit, rather than leasing capacity. This wouldn't be Slashdot without a car analogy, so consider your electricity cost to be the goods that are being delivered to you by someone in a car. Consider the data cost to be the toll extracted by the owners of the road irrespective of any cost to maintain the road which is negligible.
We have to ask ourselves in this analogy what is more sensible when traffic increases on the road: To try and keep traffic down by charging more per car, or to add a few more lanes? Clearly for society, the gain is in building more roads unless the cost to build them is higher than the gain from them. I think it is reasonable to say that they are not.
That is the debate we should be having - how much new infrastructure we can afford to build, not how much extra ISPs can squeeze out of the traffic by charging both ends of a connection or charging different amounts according to the type of car, uh, packet.
All valid points. It would, however, have made good sense for the USA to invest in much better public transport infrastructure at nearly any point in the past fifty years. That's an example of short-sightedness that would be having positive effects right now. Just illustrating an example where decisions should have been made some time ago. Not disputing your general point.
That's an interesting example of wishing to filter the visitors to your site. I fully agree with your logic... though it's backfired in this one instance as you've just had a curious Slashdotter wander in their via your Homepage link.;)
It's very different to the poster I was replying to however, who was trying to make the case that they wished to filter out IE6 users as a business model. That was hard to justify even in the weird example they gave and it was clearly a mask for either not wishing to take time to support all user preferences or finding it difficult to do so. You are filtering on your customer demographic which makes perfect sense.
But you're right - I could have phrased my point more carefully.
I've read large chunks of the "PHP Cookbook" and it's not bad. There's useful information in there, though the tome is a little indigestible. The absolute best book I've read of this kind is the Python Cookbook. Admittedly, I was still learning Python at the time and so I was enjoying all the little discoveries about the language, but it's a seriously good book and in an age of convenient online references and tutorials, is maybe one of the few programming books that is absolutely worth buying. Absolutely great book both in the full writing and the clever techniques and theory.
I don't think you'll need to. You seriously think writing off 1 in 4 visitors to your site is acceptable business sense? Even in your contrived example of selling Firefox manuals, you'd be driving away business as (a) you'd get people interested in Firefox who are currently using IE at home or browsing from an Internet Café or library or University or work and (b) people such as myself who would think to themselves - if the guy finds it so difficult to make some changes for compatibility then why would I want to read a technical manual from him? And this is ignoring that your Firefox Manual selling site is hardly what you'll be asked to do in the real world as a web designer.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'm curious. By that point in the film I was wondering why the Hell I had ever rented the DVD in the first place. What might I have missed about the ending?
Good idea? The person responsible for the suger-fest that was A.I.? Watch out for the new Ghost In The Shell version where aliens give her a human body at the end and the bullets never actually hit anyone.
Not a silly gesture - I even bookmarked them myself. I'm not really in a position to purchase large quantities of cables, but who knows? Maybe, I will be at some future point.
I liked this part:
But I read the whole thing which is unusual for me as I like to skim read. I'd say it's also rare to find a Slashdot article where so many people actually read the linked story instead of just reading and replying to comments. I would like to publically thank Kurt Denke for giving me such a good laugh.
-H.
I agree that people should be cautious about feeling superior. People often give themselves too much credit for the circumstances in which they find themselves. If born to different parents, raised in a different environment, would they follow the same course of action as the heavy drug user? And if they answer that the question isn't valid because they would be a different person, then they must explain why they feel superior about being a product of a different set of circumstances.
But to answer your question of why it is better to get the feelings naturally rather than to shortcut them with drugs, e.g. your treadmill example, it is because these responses have a purpose that results in better living, health, reproductive rates, etc. To get the same feelings from drugs cheats the test and results in no actual gain to the individuals state. Only a perception of gain which is soon lost.
Thank you. That is a much better example and I will remember it.
Cheers,
-H.
Bit of a bugger if you don't think it's a good thing though. For example if you're entire market is based on selling Organic Produce.
Kingston Communications was Hull's own telephone company and network. I don't know the history of it, though I expect it's interesting. And having not been to Hull for a few years, I don't know what the situation is today. But based on my experience with them, no-one ever complained because they were quite frankly very much better than the rest of the country.
As regards the poster who's saying net neutrality is already gone, there's room for it to get a whole Hell of a lot worse and we have to fight it till it's dead and it stays dead. He might say that the loss of Slashdotters as customers is not going to bother him, but I'm personally responsible for eight friends and one company's choice of provider just by myself. The IT community is not the community to piss off if you're an IT company.
Regardless of whether or not Monsanto sue, there's still a problem as Farmer Bob can no longer legitimately sell his crop as non-GM. The choice of us, as the purchasers, is taken away from us. Reduction of options is bad.
They also take a sort of "first one's free" approach to get people hooked. Through cheap rates or donated seed, they put whatever pressure or enticement or deceit they can to get people to the point where they no longer have stocks of unpatented seeds to grow. When that happens, you will see a gross change in policy because Monsanto will have patents on the food supply.
Aside from the ethics of patenting food, there are significant dangers to all of us. The spread of engineered crops removes the choice from the rest of us as we can no longer secure a "pure" alternative. Furthermore, Monsanto's aggresive pushing of its patented varieties brings about a homogenity of crops to a degree we've never seen before. Whilst the food supply is already more uniform than it used to be, the genetically identical crops being spread world wide by Monsanto go even further. Google for the Irish Potato Famine if you want a reminder of the dangers of putting all our eggs in one basket. Only in this scenario, it's world wide. And then there is the wider context to consider about what this technology actually offers us. For example, Monsanto's "Golden Rice" which is enriched with Vitamin A to help those who are deficient in it in the third world areas where they grow rice. The problem being that they are deficient only relatively recently since international agriculture business has forced them to only grow rice for commercial reasons. The Golden Rice looks like a good thing from a narrow perspective, consider the larger context and you realise it's comiong from the same root as what causes the problem in the first place. And all the issues about bio-diversity, establishment of monopoly, ethics of patenting food still stand.
Monsanto need to be stopped for all our sakes and I would love to do it.
Probably first order statistic is that few people from poor backgrounds are working as game designers with the statistic that there are few black people working as game designers reflecting this rather than anything else. Now if you wish to use this as an example that there is economic disparity between white and black americans, then it might be valid to do so though there are vastly better statistics that could be used to show that than number of black game developers (doctors, university graduates, etc). I doubt it's the case that black people are facing barriers in the game industry so much as there's a more general economic reason.
Just to put these statistics in perspective anyway, Wikipedia tells me that black people make up about 12% of the US poopulation. So we're looking at 2% related to this.
The network server is not relevant here as we are discussing the costs of routing data, not serving it. The BBC has no issue with running their servers and the ISPs are not criticising them for that. It's a question of the cost of running the wires in between. The fact that your PC consumes more power when it is downloading files at 1,000Kb/s has to do with a number of factors, certainly not the least of which being the processing on that file that the CPU is doing and the accompanying disk and RAM activity. If you want a closer analogy to the actual infrastructure in your home, you should be asking how much more power your router is using when you are downloading that file. You will find two things: Firstly, the difference in power consumption between your busy router and your idle router is very, very low. Secondly, even when kept busy, electrical costs are similar in comparison to things you use without thinking such as lightbulbs.
The notion that the main cost of data transfer has to do with electricity costs is one easily disproved. It has to do with limited infrastructure.
Not here in the UK where the story is from.
This requires more testing. Send lawyers and rockets, now.
Limit your profits, why don't you?
The GP did say "greatest
Networking hardware uses very little electrical power whether it is passing data or not. I'd be interested to see you show figures that say otherwise. The costs we are charged for our bandwidth have very little to do with the cost of the electricity used to run the hardware and almost everything to do with the amount the infrastructure owners can charge the ISPs for a limited resource. And it is limited not because it requires requires effort to produce units of like power, gas or water, but because initial infrastructure is not sufficiently developed.
I don't get why yourself and others are busy posting what you think is a good pricing model for different caps when if you realise the biggest issue is at the infrastructure level, not the ISP level, we can see that it would be possible to have (effectively) unlimited capacity for all of us for an initial outlay and minimal maintenance costs thereafter.
You're right it's not so simple, but I think it might be as the parent says and it's a result of lack of competition... except it's not a lack of competition at the ISP level, but at the level of those that charge X pence per megabit at the infrastructure level. Whichever ISP you're with, they all seem to be re-selling the old BT lines and getting charged the same price for it. That leaves ISPs in the position of marketing support or juggling their finances around to see what they can get away with offering and still make a profit. Usage of the network infrastructure is essentially free in terms of real physical costs. Maintenance is low and the same regardless of whether it's in use all the time or sitting idle. Only creating the infrastructure is really costly. And there's no competition there. If there were, then we might move from a toll model (charging the ISPs per megabit) to a lease model (the ISP buys X bandwidth to use or not as they please). That would free the ISPs up to sell more cheaply and in fact, they would welcome increased usage such as from the BBC, because they would charge people for fatter bandwidth.
You realised it.
There's an important difference with utilities such as electricity: They require resource to sustain. If I demand a 1,000KWh from my local power station, it has to send 1,000KWh down the line at me (more given resistance, but ignore that). With data, there is only the initial outlay on infrastructure and afterwards the same minimal cost to run it whether it's sitting idle or if it's feeding me High Definition movies all day long. The running costs are a false scarcity created by poor infrastructure and a pricing model that allows the infrastructure owners to charge ISPs per Mbit, rather than leasing capacity. This wouldn't be Slashdot without a car analogy, so consider your electricity cost to be the goods that are being delivered to you by someone in a car. Consider the data cost to be the toll extracted by the owners of the road irrespective of any cost to maintain the road which is negligible.
We have to ask ourselves in this analogy what is more sensible when traffic increases on the road: To try and keep traffic down by charging more per car, or to add a few more lanes? Clearly for society, the gain is in building more roads unless the cost to build them is higher than the gain from them. I think it is reasonable to say that they are not.
That is the debate we should be having - how much new infrastructure we can afford to build, not how much extra ISPs can squeeze out of the traffic by charging both ends of a connection or charging different amounts according to the type of car, uh, packet.
All valid points. It would, however, have made good sense for the USA to invest in much better public transport infrastructure at nearly any point in the past fifty years. That's an example of short-sightedness that would be having positive effects right now. Just illustrating an example where decisions should have been made some time ago. Not disputing your general point.
That's an interesting example of wishing to filter the visitors to your site. I fully agree with your logic... though it's backfired in this one instance as you've just had a curious Slashdotter wander in their via your Homepage link.
It's very different to the poster I was replying to however, who was trying to make the case that they wished to filter out IE6 users as a business model. That was hard to justify even in the weird example they gave and it was clearly a mask for either not wishing to take time to support all user preferences or finding it difficult to do so. You are filtering on your customer demographic which makes perfect sense.
But you're right - I could have phrased my point more carefully.
Regards,
-H.
Happiness is mandatory. Haven't you heard?
I've read large chunks of the "PHP Cookbook" and it's not bad. There's useful information in there, though the tome is a little indigestible. The absolute best book I've read of this kind is the Python Cookbook. Admittedly, I was still learning Python at the time and so I was enjoying all the little discoveries about the language, but it's a seriously good book and in an age of convenient online references and tutorials, is maybe one of the few programming books that is absolutely worth buying. Absolutely great book both in the full writing and the clever techniques and theory.
I don't think you'll need to. You seriously think writing off 1 in 4 visitors to your site is acceptable business sense? Even in your contrived example of selling Firefox manuals, you'd be driving away business as (a) you'd get people interested in Firefox who are currently using IE at home or browsing from an Internet Café or library or University or work and (b) people such as myself who would think to themselves - if the guy finds it so difficult to make some changes for compatibility then why would I want to read a technical manual from him? And this is ignoring that your Firefox Manual selling site is hardly what you'll be asked to do in the real world as a web designer.