Which leads to a question- Would it be possible to set up a shell company, and claim infringement on every possible IP address? Then repeat 5 more times?
This is a lot of IP addresses, but it could probably be done. I haven't read the entire actual law but the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about punishments for false infringement claims.
As someone with a Chinese tablet (Ainol Novo 7 Flame) that runs android, I can safely say 2 things-
1. They are not knockoffs. The midrange to high end Chinese tablets often have better or more features than ones pushed by big american companies. Micro-SD slots, support for 3G dongles, HDMI out, front AND rear cameras at a non-stupid price etc. Sure, there are a lot of really horrible sub-$100 chinese tablets out there. But you can get a very nice device which is on par with the Nexus 7/10 for 70-80% of the price. Chinese companies push new and better versions much faster than American companies.
There are disadvantages (market fragmentation and model confusion, the low end is really low, questionable lifecycle support) and advantages (nobody pushing you to use "their" store, adding internal memory isn't stupidly expensive, micro-SD slots, bleeding-edge technology is available before anybody else, etc) to the Chinese tabletmaker approach. They are different devices for different people.
2. Chinese companies generally do whatever they feel like doing with the software and couldn't care less about what Google or any other american company would want them to do.
Many German cars do, or rather did as the restriction is becoming less common. Similar to the situation with the Japanese manufacturers that agreed to artificially limit their engines' power, the larger German companies agreed together to limit their cars to 155mph. I don't know what the reasons behind this were, but it may have something to do with the tyres available at that time or general driver safety.
With a 155mph limit, every carmaker can claim to sell the fastest car.
If you think Social Security has problems, it is nothing compared to the coming problems faced by China's pension system. It has worse demographics and the retirement age is much lower (55 for women, 60 for men) than in the U.S.
China's economy might be built on a house of cards, mostly in the form of housing, buildings, and infrastructure. I am not worried about their retirement plan collapsing their economy though. The personal savings rate in China is above 50%. The US's is around 6.5%, which is higher than it has been in almost 20 years. And the US savings rate is defined as "% of disposable income"- not gross income or net income. I don't know how China's is defined exactly but it doesn't matter- People in China are generally preparing for retirement, problematic life events, etc.
Plus their basic pension plan pays about $108 dollars a year per person.
Even if there are 500 million people in China on the plan (a staggering number, but possibly possible), it costs "only" $54 billion a year. In contrast, the US spent $615 billion in 2008 on SS and has about 20% of the population receiving such benefits. Even when you consider GDP differences (which are narrowing fast), this isn't an unreasonable burden on China.
North Korea is an inexcusable mess of a country that wouldn't even exist today without China's external backing. China actually disagrees with North Korea's policies, but the *idea* of communism (even though NK's implementation is the worst on Earth) still holds a lot of patriotic sway in China (being the only successful communist country). I personally can't wait for NK to actually do something stupid so China drops their support (do you really think China wants to be involved in some kind of war because the "ally" they babysit is misbehaving, hell no!) and that little country collapses in on itself.
I can't figure out if you mean North Korea is a successful communist country, or you mean that China is. Either point is wrong. China is not a communist country, and North Korea is not successful by any measure.
It could be that China sees North Korea's totalitarianism as echoing the totalitarianism of Mao, who is somehow seen as being a positive influence on the country by some older people in China. On this basis, the more totalitarian and crazy the North Korean government gets, the more some people like them (they become more like Mao) while at the same time being more "troublesome".
I am not of an expert on China to say when or if these competing forces (NK is like Mao, NK is troublesome) will become unbalanced, but there are plenty of old people in high government positions for the current situation to continue for quite some time yet.
TFA mentions that F22s would have been used in Lybia, if not for these communication issues. So there you have your answer.
Just like the B2 was used against Saddam in Iraq. Weapons the enemy doesn't have an answer to - that at least makes kinda sure your plane will come back unharmed, and that the mission will be accomplished. That doesn't mean a lesser aircraft could also have done the job, it's just making extra sure the job is done.
And that is part of the problem. We have engineered more and more expensive weapons so that the other guys die and our guys never take a scratch. But the weapons are so expensive a loss is basically unacceptable. And because a loss is unacceptable, the weapons become even more expensive. It is an endless cycle. Eventually there is a point when you are paying so much to play the game that the benefit is smaller than the cost. When that happens, most people realize that you would have better off not playing at all.
The part that really causes comments like yours make the bile swell up in my throat?
It's that when we began in Afghanistan, the people did support us. Unlike the Iraqi people who felt betrayed by us after Desert Storm, the Afghan people still thought of us as the folks who helped them kick out the Russians. With no love lost for the Taliban, they were actually on our side. At first.
Thanks to years of idiotic management, that flippant attitude towards collateral damage you embody, and years of neglect due to being focused on Iraq, we lost both literal and figurative ground in Afghanistan. We squandered our advantage. Pissed it away. Turned the people against us.
Afghanistan is a completely different country from Iraq. Iraq has a history of being some kind of nation for the past 1000 years or so. Iraq had a strong national government in recent history (a bad government, but a strong one anyway). Afghanistan's borders are more of a collection of the borders of other countries. Afghanistan has never had a strong national government. There are few nationalistic tendencies. Politics are extremely local and based on small-time government and small-time lack of government. When Kabul tries to make policies, they might as well be England trying to administer the US in the 1700s. The distance is too far and nobody respects a power so far away and unrelated to the local politics.
Petraeus tried his Iraq strategy in Afghanistan and it was a complete failure.
I don't think the submitter is asking about the optical-stereo kind of 3d (like what you get with "3d movies" and "3d glasses"), but rather just geometric projections of 3d scenes onto a 2d viewing plane, like you get in Leonardo da Vinci paintings or Quake.
PDF can do this. Adobe's viewer can do it for sure. Chrome's internal PDF viewer seems to choke on it. Not sure about other software. It doesn't seem to be an Adobe-only feature. Digikey uses it for some of their parts. Digikey CP-102A-ND is a decent example.
The tax is a small problem these days, at least for me. Recently I needed some PTEX candles (ski repair plastic, basically). I drove to 3 different local stores and nobody had any. The retailer who was supposed to have it was out. I wasted 40 minutes of my time, and over $5 in gas. If I had ordered online, $5 shipping would have been well worth it.
Even if you have a 45MPG car, it is cheaper to slap a stamp on a letter and have it delivered for $0.45 if you destination more less than 2 or 3 miles away. Shipping is a bigger and bigger bargain the higher gas prices go.
Water that is absorbed by the ground and isn't directed into aquifers or similar structures is effectively lost. The rest is lost to the ocean or to evaporation. Granted, you could desalinate the ocean, but then the question becomes what to do with the leftover material, which is an environmental issue unto itself.
You sell it, duh!
Have you priced Sea Salt lately?
We still have operating salt ponds aorund the San Francisco Bay. Often easily identified by their giant piles of salt. Now if they trapped the water evaporated it would be a Win-Win.
These ponds are intended to collect salt, and the water is lost. You can't use a pond for desalination on an industrial scale*. One common method is to boil the water in a partial vacuum to obtain vapor, and discard the brine. Brine's boiling temperature increases the saltier it gets, so at some point it becomes uneconomical to extract the water. Plus transporting brine is easier than bulk damp salt- you just pump it. You could then put the brine in a pond and let nature run its course, but the amount of land required would probably be prohibitive since desalination on useful scales is BIG. It is much easier and cheaper to just pump the brine back to the sea and deal with the environmentalist complaints. Maybe in the future regulations will be stricter but the places that need this water the most are the kind of places that won't care about a saltier ocean.
Incidentally, most desalination processes use large amounts of energy, so that is why the easier water is used up first.
*you can desalinate using a pond or other small body of water on very small scales, but this is not economical on large scales. It is done in survival situations however.
Most of the CS profs aren't really programmers, but true computers scientists, and really computer science has very little to do with computers, or programming. Also, most of the professors have probably been around for a long time, and know what works and what doesn't work. They want you to hand in hard copies of stuff so that they don't have to deal with any excuses about how the system lost your assignment. The only problem I would really have with handing in hard copies is that nobody uses floppies anymore, which is what I used to hand in my assignments on, and USB sticks and SD cards are a little too expensive to be passing around to teachers for assignments. They really should make Low capacity SD cards for really cheap so that people can us them for passing data around in cases where you might not get the SD card back.
I think you missed the point entirely. A hard copy is a paper copy. The point of the hard copy is that you "open" it instantly. No inserting a CD and hoping that the student wrote the CD correctly, that their CD writer is compatable with your CD reader, that their media isn't garbage. No juggling a stack of flash cards or USB sticks and trying to figure out whose is whose. No having to deal with that guy who didn't cough up the money for version X of the software, and your version Y has several small but annoying compatability bugs. No having to juggle dozens of emails with attachments for each assignment.
Printed paper. The student's name is somewhere on the first page. You can start reading it instantly. Unless they really screwed up and used tiny or unreadable fonts, it is compatible with your eyes. Paper size is basically standard, and you can stack up all the papers and keep them together easily. Everybody can spend their time more productively doing better things.
I'm not from the US, but if you really wanted to pirate stuff, isn't just renting a proxy or doing ssh -D somewhere else outside the country enough?
Or is it one of those measures trying to prevent John Doe from using bittorrent? (and expecting he won't learn how to use a proxy)
it's to catch the people who aren't smart enough to protect themselves when copywronging.
I myself am using a torrent proxy, BTguard, but it's too slow, thinking of switching to a VPN.
I got me a cloaking device for when I am out on the interweb seas, raping, pillaging and copywronging. Arrr!
I had BTguard proxy but let my service expire. Too slow and it had problems with UDP trackers. I've been evaluating Ipredator, which is actually a branch of the Pirate Bay. Speeds are much higher than BTguard. I nearly maxed out my 20mbit connection on a well-seeded torrent (a legal one of course). They might not be the best service out there, but they are good enough for me to stop looking around. Trial accounts are available. Only downside is that when you have a computer on their VPN, everything goes through Sweden and thus the latency is not great. Only way around it is to play with the routing table or have separate computers (which I might have to start doing).
David Cenciotti noted that the plane featured “implausible aerodynamics and Hollywood sheen” and was laughably small for a fighter jet. He also commented thatthe cockpit was far too basic for a sophisticated aircraft, and appeared “similar to those equipping small private planes.... The nose section is so small almost no radar could fit in it... The air intakes are extremely small, whereas the engine section lacks any kind of nozzle: engine afterburners could melt the entire jet.... It looks like this pilot is in a miniature plane” and it appeared “nothing more than a large mock-up model.” Iran also broadcast video footage of the Qaher F-313 in flight, which Cenciotti said appeared to fly like a “radio-controlled scale model more than a modern fighter jet.” He also noted it was suspect that Tehran did not release takeoff and landing footage of its new aircraft.
I'm not saying the jet is real, but releasing takeoff and landing footage would give away some secret technical information about the aircraft. If you wanted to keep that information secret, not releasing the footage would be a good idea. For example- a video of a takeoff could be used to calculate minimum takeoff speed, thrust to weight ratio, etc. Probably more. A landing video might contain useful information also. For a country which is basically hostile to every other country in the world, keeping such a video secret is a good idea. Regardless of whether the plane is real or not.
No store I can think of allows returns of opened music or software for obvious reasons. Good luck convincing them that your reasons trump their policy, which is usually stated on the reciept, their return policy, and sometimes on special signs in the music/software sections of the store..
Don'y even bother switching next time. Usually you can get good results by haggling with the "customer retention" person. Keep it polite and friendly and good rates can be yours for only 1 phone call a year.
Well, there is also the problem that in most jobs the ones whom management considers the best workers are those who go through their work the fastest, not those who do the highest quality work.
Well then it's time to adjust the metrics. Simply add a huge negative factor for any accepted patent that was later invalidated in court for both the examiner AND his manager.
Won't work. The patent office is considered among most of the engineers that I know "a good place to start out and get experience, but a terrible place to make a career". Examiner retention is apparently quite low.
I have never worked there, but I can easily understand the work dynamic, having worked at a company which reviewed blueprints for compliance with the law. Work packages came in, you either accepted them or rejected them. This kind of work was repetitive and tedious. Add the horror of reading patents for 8 hours a day on top of it and I don't think any sane person would last more than 1 or 2 years. By the time the patent gets appealed the examiner is probably long gone, and maybe the supervisor too.
Sacramento light rail still requires/gets subsidies from gas tax money. I'll call it good when it breaks even on operating cost, we'll just call the capital costs sunk.
This suggests that road operating and maintenance costs are covered by gas taxes alone. They aren't. Not even close. If you are going to use this logic, I'm going to have to ask for the roads to operate without local, state, and federal tax dollars, which are paid by everyone.
Is this supposed to be funny? Architects do not design industrial buildings housing process equipment. Not for the last 60 years at least.. Architects design silly floor plans and building outlines. Engineers are the ones who turn that pile into something that can be actually be built. We skip the architect in industrial buildings and generally wrap the building around the equipment and integrate the heavier machinery foundations.
Re:The reason a "cyber Pearl Harbor" isn't imminen
on
The One Sided Cyber War
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There is a push for putting a power stabilization system* on every electrical generator. You can't do that with analog/manual controls.
*This is a Mitsubishi article, but it does a good job of explaining. I am not affiliated with Mitsubishi.
To put that price in perspective, its the revenue from a third of a million iphone contracts
I prefer to look at it a simpler way-
$780 million purchase price divided by 585,000 customers is $1333.33 per customer (coincidence??). I am not a business major, but this should be the valuation of both the assets of the company plus their expected future earning potential. You can then make various assumptions about profit $/customer/year. Then you can guess at the value of all the company's assets divided by the number of customers ($ infrastructure/customer). $1333.33/customer seems high to me for this kind of business, but I am not in the business. Maybe the spectrum is just that valuable.
Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.
That's the story of the industrial revolution, which started in the late 1800s. Better quality, higher-paying jobs requiring higher skill take the place of unskilled or lightly skilled labor. I don't see this is as screwing the little guy. I see it as creating a better job and eliminating tedious and unpleasant tasks from society.
Of course, with this development, we might start questioning why we need quick-serve restaurants, or quick-serve restaurant managers, or quick-serve cashiers at all. We could probably replace the whole lot with vending machines within 10 years. We could probably replace them all today if we tried.
So does Crashplan. But with Crashplan I can find a buddy in another part of the country who I actually *trust* and swap encrypted deduplicated backups with them automatically. And why stop with just one buddy? I have over 2TB of mirrored local storage, but the irreplacable files are only about 200GB. If I play the "I give you 200GB of backup space for your 200GB of backup space" I can have backups all over the place for free and without trusting people who have a habit of having their servers seized. Crashplan friend backups are FREE.
I use the Crashplan paid cloud backup too, but I would not have bought it if it had not been dirt filthy cheap on Black Friday weekend. Its OK but transfer speeds to friends are faster. If I can't renew it next year at the filthy cheap price I won't be renewing.
I'm not sure I agree with all of your post. I would put forth a different argument than either this argument or the grandparent argument-
There are a lot of completely worthless 2 year degrees for white collar positions, just as there are worthless 4 year degrees. Apprenticeships seem tough (I have never done one) but generally don't lead to poverty. The real problem is that laying out a career path for the rest of your life is probably beyond the abilities of most 18-year olds. I did a good job of it, picking an in-demand field with high pay where I can advance and not be bored, but a lot of my peers did not choose wisely. Quality career counseling at the 16-18 year age would pay off for society. Problem is, the very people it would help the most would not see the value in it.
Physical copies of pictures is still the best solution when you're talking about 50 years later.
Nope. Despite storage under mostly controlled conditions, some of the color 35mm film my wife scanned in the '90s is visibly screwed up if rescanned in the '10s. Some kind of analysis would probably make a great kids science project.
Yeah yeah black and white on archival acid free paper with extremely careful processing (to prevent long term fixer stains) MIGHT be OK in 50 years, plus or minus water damage, etc. But I wouldn't bet on it, and I wouldn't bet on random color prints from the instant-photo-kiosk lasting very long. I've also seen some weird fading on inkjet prints.
The best solution is keep copying it. Keep that data live and always on the latest media.
The problem with digital media is that it is usually an all-or-nothing affair. Physical photos degrade, but even the earliest photos can still be deciphered. Put physical photos in an box and forget about them. They might fade over 50 years, but after that you will be dead and won't care anyway.
With digital media, you need to be vigilant, always copying the files from old media to new, periodically copying to/from the same media to make sure the data is still good, etc. It is a lot of effort. I keep a redundant onsite backup and an offsite backup as well, but is that enough? What if the originals become corrupted and I back up files which are useless because I didn't notice?
I have recently been making an effort to print out the best/most memorable photos in duplicate and stuffing them into albums. Giving away one copy to a close family member ensures that even if my house burns down the photos will still exist.
Most state already have a "smog-check" requirement where a licenced facility records the odometer reading so you can register your car. They could easily just add a mileage tax to your vehicle licencing fees as a requirement to register your car.
Thereby encouraging odometer fraud. The cost of a high odometer now is difficult to quantify. How much less is a 120,000mi car worth compared to a 90,000mi car? Difficult to say. If you are going to tax someone based on the odometer though, figuring out how much it is going to cost you is easy. Avoiding that tax would be a strong incentive to play with the odometer.
The gas tax might be regressive, but don't forget that the gas tax is intended to pay for the roads and related transportation projects. That is what it is (supposed to be) for. What causes the most damage to the roads? Weather, which is uncontrollable and untaxable, and heavy vehicles. The correlation of vehicle weight and road deterioration couldn't be more clear. Heavy vehicles are intrinsicly less fuel efficient. The tax on fuel helps to keep vehicle weight down if it is high enough. That helps the roads last longer and saves everybody money in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Which leads to a question- Would it be possible to set up a shell company, and claim infringement on every possible IP address? Then repeat 5 more times?
This is a lot of IP addresses, but it could probably be done. I haven't read the entire actual law but the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about punishments for false infringement claims.
But most of the cheap knockoffs *run* android.
As someone with a Chinese tablet (Ainol Novo 7 Flame) that runs android, I can safely say 2 things-
1. They are not knockoffs. The midrange to high end Chinese tablets often have better or more features than ones pushed by big american companies. Micro-SD slots, support for 3G dongles, HDMI out, front AND rear cameras at a non-stupid price etc. Sure, there are a lot of really horrible sub-$100 chinese tablets out there. But you can get a very nice device which is on par with the Nexus 7/10 for 70-80% of the price. Chinese companies push new and better versions much faster than American companies.
There are disadvantages (market fragmentation and model confusion, the low end is really low, questionable lifecycle support) and advantages (nobody pushing you to use "their" store, adding internal memory isn't stupidly expensive, micro-SD slots, bleeding-edge technology is available before anybody else, etc) to the Chinese tabletmaker approach. They are different devices for different people.
2. Chinese companies generally do whatever they feel like doing with the software and couldn't care less about what Google or any other american company would want them to do.
Many German cars do, or rather did as the restriction is becoming less common. Similar to the situation with the Japanese manufacturers that agreed to artificially limit their engines' power, the larger German companies agreed together to limit their cars to 155mph. I don't know what the reasons behind this were, but it may have something to do with the tyres available at that time or general driver safety.
With a 155mph limit, every carmaker can claim to sell the fastest car.
If you think Social Security has problems, it is nothing compared to the coming problems faced by China's pension system. It has worse demographics and the retirement age is much lower (55 for women, 60 for men) than in the U.S.
China's economy might be built on a house of cards, mostly in the form of housing, buildings, and infrastructure. I am not worried about their retirement plan collapsing their economy though. The personal savings rate in China is above 50%. The US's is around 6.5%, which is higher than it has been in almost 20 years. And the US savings rate is defined as "% of disposable income"- not gross income or net income. I don't know how China's is defined exactly but it doesn't matter- People in China are generally preparing for retirement, problematic life events, etc.
Plus their basic pension plan pays about $108 dollars a year per person.
Even if there are 500 million people in China on the plan (a staggering number, but possibly possible), it costs "only" $54 billion a year. In contrast, the US spent $615 billion in 2008 on SS and has about 20% of the population receiving such benefits. Even when you consider GDP differences (which are narrowing fast), this isn't an unreasonable burden on China.
North Korea is an inexcusable mess of a country that wouldn't even exist today without China's external backing. China actually disagrees with North Korea's policies, but the *idea* of communism (even though NK's implementation is the worst on Earth) still holds a lot of patriotic sway in China (being the only successful communist country). I personally can't wait for NK to actually do something stupid so China drops their support (do you really think China wants to be involved in some kind of war because the "ally" they babysit is misbehaving, hell no!) and that little country collapses in on itself.
I can't figure out if you mean North Korea is a successful communist country, or you mean that China is. Either point is wrong. China is not a communist country, and North Korea is not successful by any measure.
It could be that China sees North Korea's totalitarianism as echoing the totalitarianism of Mao, who is somehow seen as being a positive influence on the country by some older people in China. On this basis, the more totalitarian and crazy the North Korean government gets, the more some people like them (they become more like Mao) while at the same time being more "troublesome".
I am not of an expert on China to say when or if these competing forces (NK is like Mao, NK is troublesome) will become unbalanced, but there are plenty of old people in high government positions for the current situation to continue for quite some time yet.
TFA mentions that F22s would have been used in Lybia, if not for these communication issues. So there you have your answer.
Just like the B2 was used against Saddam in Iraq. Weapons the enemy doesn't have an answer to - that at least makes kinda sure your plane will come back unharmed, and that the mission will be accomplished. That doesn't mean a lesser aircraft could also have done the job, it's just making extra sure the job is done.
And that is part of the problem. We have engineered more and more expensive weapons so that the other guys die and our guys never take a scratch. But the weapons are so expensive a loss is basically unacceptable. And because a loss is unacceptable, the weapons become even more expensive. It is an endless cycle. Eventually there is a point when you are paying so much to play the game that the benefit is smaller than the cost. When that happens, most people realize that you would have better off not playing at all.
The part that really causes comments like yours make the bile swell up in my throat?
It's that when we began in Afghanistan, the people did support us. Unlike the Iraqi people who felt betrayed by us after Desert Storm, the Afghan people still thought of us as the folks who helped them kick out the Russians. With no love lost for the Taliban, they were actually on our side. At first.
Thanks to years of idiotic management, that flippant attitude towards collateral damage you embody, and years of neglect due to being focused on Iraq, we lost both literal and figurative ground in Afghanistan. We squandered our advantage. Pissed it away. Turned the people against us.
Afghanistan is a completely different country from Iraq. Iraq has a history of being some kind of nation for the past 1000 years or so. Iraq had a strong national government in recent history (a bad government, but a strong one anyway). Afghanistan's borders are more of a collection of the borders of other countries. Afghanistan has never had a strong national government. There are few nationalistic tendencies. Politics are extremely local and based on small-time government and small-time lack of government. When Kabul tries to make policies, they might as well be England trying to administer the US in the 1700s. The distance is too far and nobody respects a power so far away and unrelated to the local politics.
Petraeus tried his Iraq strategy in Afghanistan and it was a complete failure.
I don't think the submitter is asking about the optical-stereo kind of 3d (like what you get with "3d movies" and "3d glasses"), but rather just geometric projections of 3d scenes onto a 2d viewing plane, like you get in Leonardo da Vinci paintings or Quake.
PDF can do this. Adobe's viewer can do it for sure. Chrome's internal PDF viewer seems to choke on it. Not sure about other software. It doesn't seem to be an Adobe-only feature. Digikey uses it for some of their parts. Digikey CP-102A-ND is a decent example.
The tax is a small problem these days, at least for me. Recently I needed some PTEX candles (ski repair plastic, basically). I drove to 3 different local stores and nobody had any. The retailer who was supposed to have it was out. I wasted 40 minutes of my time, and over $5 in gas. If I had ordered online, $5 shipping would have been well worth it.
Even if you have a 45MPG car, it is cheaper to slap a stamp on a letter and have it delivered for $0.45 if you destination more less than 2 or 3 miles away. Shipping is a bigger and bigger bargain the higher gas prices go.
Water that is absorbed by the ground and isn't directed into aquifers or similar structures is effectively lost. The rest is lost to the ocean or to evaporation. Granted, you could desalinate the ocean, but then the question becomes what to do with the leftover material, which is an environmental issue unto itself.
You sell it, duh!
Have you priced Sea Salt lately?
We still have operating salt ponds aorund the San Francisco Bay. Often easily identified by their giant piles of salt. Now if they trapped the water evaporated it would be a Win-Win.
These ponds are intended to collect salt, and the water is lost. You can't use a pond for desalination on an industrial scale*. One common method is to boil the water in a partial vacuum to obtain vapor, and discard the brine. Brine's boiling temperature increases the saltier it gets, so at some point it becomes uneconomical to extract the water. Plus transporting brine is easier than bulk damp salt- you just pump it. You could then put the brine in a pond and let nature run its course, but the amount of land required would probably be prohibitive since desalination on useful scales is BIG. It is much easier and cheaper to just pump the brine back to the sea and deal with the environmentalist complaints. Maybe in the future regulations will be stricter but the places that need this water the most are the kind of places that won't care about a saltier ocean.
Incidentally, most desalination processes use large amounts of energy, so that is why the easier water is used up first.
*you can desalinate using a pond or other small body of water on very small scales, but this is not economical on large scales. It is done in survival situations however.
Most of the CS profs aren't really programmers, but true computers scientists, and really computer science has very little to do with computers, or programming. Also, most of the professors have probably been around for a long time, and know what works and what doesn't work. They want you to hand in hard copies of stuff so that they don't have to deal with any excuses about how the system lost your assignment. The only problem I would really have with handing in hard copies is that nobody uses floppies anymore, which is what I used to hand in my assignments on, and USB sticks and SD cards are a little too expensive to be passing around to teachers for assignments. They really should make Low capacity SD cards for really cheap so that people can us them for passing data around in cases where you might not get the SD card back.
I think you missed the point entirely. A hard copy is a paper copy. The point of the hard copy is that you "open" it instantly. No inserting a CD and hoping that the student wrote the CD correctly, that their CD writer is compatable with your CD reader, that their media isn't garbage. No juggling a stack of flash cards or USB sticks and trying to figure out whose is whose. No having to deal with that guy who didn't cough up the money for version X of the software, and your version Y has several small but annoying compatability bugs. No having to juggle dozens of emails with attachments for each assignment.
Printed paper. The student's name is somewhere on the first page. You can start reading it instantly. Unless they really screwed up and used tiny or unreadable fonts, it is compatible with your eyes. Paper size is basically standard, and you can stack up all the papers and keep them together easily. Everybody can spend their time more productively doing better things.
I'm not from the US, but if you really wanted to pirate stuff, isn't just renting a proxy or doing ssh -D somewhere else outside the country enough?
Or is it one of those measures trying to prevent John Doe from using bittorrent? (and expecting he won't learn how to use a proxy)
it's to catch the people who aren't smart enough to protect themselves when copywronging.
I myself am using a torrent proxy, BTguard, but it's too slow, thinking of switching to a VPN.
I got me a cloaking device for when I am out on the interweb seas, raping, pillaging and copywronging. Arrr!
I had BTguard proxy but let my service expire. Too slow and it had problems with UDP trackers. I've been evaluating Ipredator, which is actually a branch of the Pirate Bay. Speeds are much higher than BTguard. I nearly maxed out my 20mbit connection on a well-seeded torrent (a legal one of course). They might not be the best service out there, but they are good enough for me to stop looking around. Trial accounts are available. Only downside is that when you have a computer on their VPN, everything goes through Sweden and thus the latency is not great. Only way around it is to play with the routing table or have separate computers (which I might have to start doing).
I love these guys: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iran/qaher-313.htm
David Cenciotti noted that the plane featured “implausible aerodynamics and Hollywood sheen” and was laughably small for a fighter jet. He also commented thatthe cockpit was far too basic for a sophisticated aircraft, and appeared “similar to those equipping small private planes. ... The nose section is so small almost no radar could fit in it ... The air intakes are extremely small, whereas the engine section lacks any kind of nozzle: engine afterburners could melt the entire jet. ... It looks like this pilot is in a miniature plane” and it appeared “nothing more than a large mock-up model.” Iran also broadcast video footage of the Qaher F-313 in flight, which Cenciotti said appeared to fly like a “radio-controlled scale model more than a modern fighter jet.” He also noted it was suspect that Tehran did not release takeoff and landing footage of its new aircraft.
I'm not saying the jet is real, but releasing takeoff and landing footage would give away some secret technical information about the aircraft. If you wanted to keep that information secret, not releasing the footage would be a good idea. For example- a video of a takeoff could be used to calculate minimum takeoff speed, thrust to weight ratio, etc. Probably more. A landing video might contain useful information also. For a country which is basically hostile to every other country in the world, keeping such a video secret is a good idea. Regardless of whether the plane is real or not.
No store I can think of allows returns of opened music or software for obvious reasons. Good luck convincing them that your reasons trump their policy, which is usually stated on the reciept, their return policy, and sometimes on special signs in the music/software sections of the store..
Don'y even bother switching next time. Usually you can get good results by haggling with the "customer retention" person. Keep it polite and friendly and good rates can be yours for only 1 phone call a year.
Well, there is also the problem that in most jobs the ones whom management considers the best workers are those who go through their work the fastest, not those who do the highest quality work.
Well then it's time to adjust the metrics. Simply add a huge negative factor for any accepted patent that was later invalidated in court for both the examiner AND his manager.
Won't work. The patent office is considered among most of the engineers that I know "a good place to start out and get experience, but a terrible place to make a career". Examiner retention is apparently quite low.
I have never worked there, but I can easily understand the work dynamic, having worked at a company which reviewed blueprints for compliance with the law. Work packages came in, you either accepted them or rejected them. This kind of work was repetitive and tedious. Add the horror of reading patents for 8 hours a day on top of it and I don't think any sane person would last more than 1 or 2 years. By the time the patent gets appealed the examiner is probably long gone, and maybe the supervisor too.
Sacramento light rail still requires/gets subsidies from gas tax money. I'll call it good when it breaks even on operating cost, we'll just call the capital costs sunk.
This suggests that road operating and maintenance costs are covered by gas taxes alone. They aren't. Not even close. If you are going to use this logic, I'm going to have to ask for the roads to operate without local, state, and federal tax dollars, which are paid by everyone.
Somebody get an Architect we need a new building.
Is this supposed to be funny? Architects do not design industrial buildings housing process equipment. Not for the last 60 years at least.. Architects design silly floor plans and building outlines. Engineers are the ones who turn that pile into something that can be actually be built. We skip the architect in industrial buildings and generally wrap the building around the equipment and integrate the heavier machinery foundations.
There is a push for putting a power stabilization system* on every electrical generator. You can't do that with analog/manual controls.
*This is a Mitsubishi article, but it does a good job of explaining. I am not affiliated with Mitsubishi.
To put that price in perspective, its the revenue from a third of a million iphone contracts
I prefer to look at it a simpler way-
$780 million purchase price divided by 585,000 customers is $1333.33 per customer (coincidence??). I am not a business major, but this should be the valuation of both the assets of the company plus their expected future earning potential. You can then make various assumptions about profit $/customer/year. Then you can guess at the value of all the company's assets divided by the number of customers ($ infrastructure/customer). $1333.33/customer seems high to me for this kind of business, but I am not in the business. Maybe the spectrum is just that valuable.
Why would this make us more obese, this won't make more fat food then we already have, just a new way of doing it. It will just put a few low paid cooks out of a job and leaves one job for some guy that fixes the machine.
That's the story of the industrial revolution, which started in the late 1800s. Better quality, higher-paying jobs requiring higher skill take the place of unskilled or lightly skilled labor. I don't see this is as screwing the little guy. I see it as creating a better job and eliminating tedious and unpleasant tasks from society.
Of course, with this development, we might start questioning why we need quick-serve restaurants, or quick-serve restaurant managers, or quick-serve cashiers at all. We could probably replace the whole lot with vending machines within 10 years. We could probably replace them all today if we tried.
glacier, dropbox, s3
None of those encrypt your data by default.
MegaUpload does so automatically.
So does Crashplan. But with Crashplan I can find a buddy in another part of the country who I actually *trust* and swap encrypted deduplicated backups with them automatically. And why stop with just one buddy? I have over 2TB of mirrored local storage, but the irreplacable files are only about 200GB. If I play the "I give you 200GB of backup space for your 200GB of backup space" I can have backups all over the place for free and without trusting people who have a habit of having their servers seized. Crashplan friend backups are FREE.
I use the Crashplan paid cloud backup too, but I would not have bought it if it had not been dirt filthy cheap on Black Friday weekend. Its OK but transfer speeds to friends are faster. If I can't renew it next year at the filthy cheap price I won't be renewing.
I'm not sure I agree with all of your post. I would put forth a different argument than either this argument or the grandparent argument-
There are a lot of completely worthless 2 year degrees for white collar positions, just as there are worthless 4 year degrees. Apprenticeships seem tough (I have never done one) but generally don't lead to poverty. The real problem is that laying out a career path for the rest of your life is probably beyond the abilities of most 18-year olds. I did a good job of it, picking an in-demand field with high pay where I can advance and not be bored, but a lot of my peers did not choose wisely. Quality career counseling at the 16-18 year age would pay off for society. Problem is, the very people it would help the most would not see the value in it.
Physical copies of pictures is still the best solution when you're talking about 50 years later.
Nope. Despite storage under mostly controlled conditions, some of the color 35mm film my wife scanned in the '90s is visibly screwed up if rescanned in the '10s. Some kind of analysis would probably make a great kids science project.
Yeah yeah black and white on archival acid free paper with extremely careful processing (to prevent long term fixer stains) MIGHT be OK in 50 years, plus or minus water damage, etc. But I wouldn't bet on it, and I wouldn't bet on random color prints from the instant-photo-kiosk lasting very long. I've also seen some weird fading on inkjet prints.
The best solution is keep copying it. Keep that data live and always on the latest media.
The problem with digital media is that it is usually an all-or-nothing affair. Physical photos degrade, but even the earliest photos can still be deciphered. Put physical photos in an box and forget about them. They might fade over 50 years, but after that you will be dead and won't care anyway.
With digital media, you need to be vigilant, always copying the files from old media to new, periodically copying to/from the same media to make sure the data is still good, etc. It is a lot of effort. I keep a redundant onsite backup and an offsite backup as well, but is that enough? What if the originals become corrupted and I back up files which are useless because I didn't notice?
I have recently been making an effort to print out the best/most memorable photos in duplicate and stuffing them into albums. Giving away one copy to a close family member ensures that even if my house burns down the photos will still exist.
I strongly disagree with you on two points-
Most state already have a "smog-check" requirement where a licenced facility records the odometer reading so you can register your car. They could easily just add a mileage tax to your vehicle licencing fees as a requirement to register your car.
Thereby encouraging odometer fraud. The cost of a high odometer now is difficult to quantify. How much less is a 120,000mi car worth compared to a 90,000mi car? Difficult to say. If you are going to tax someone based on the odometer though, figuring out how much it is going to cost you is easy. Avoiding that tax would be a strong incentive to play with the odometer.
The gas tax might be regressive, but don't forget that the gas tax is intended to pay for the roads and related transportation projects. That is what it is (supposed to be) for. What causes the most damage to the roads? Weather, which is uncontrollable and untaxable, and heavy vehicles. The correlation of vehicle weight and road deterioration couldn't be more clear. Heavy vehicles are intrinsicly less fuel efficient. The tax on fuel helps to keep vehicle weight down if it is high enough. That helps the roads last longer and saves everybody money in the long run.