The main point is that you should get exactly what you pay for. It is not necessary for ISPs to use high-tech solutions to specifically target torrent traffic, etc. Instead, all they need do is implement a data cap (you have a choice of different caps, each costing more) that instead of being month-based, applies to the last 30 days. Therefore no network problems with the entire user-base trying to use up their download cap (that's a cap, not a target) within the first week of the month. Instead, it's balanced across time, and those who go over cap need only wait until their last heavy usage patch falls off the 30 day history, or indeed they can manage their usage themselves to avoid going over cap. The generousity of the cap will of course depend on market conditions, the indigenous infrastructure, and customer demand.
This scheme is used by one of the ISPs in Ireland, Digiweb, and is the fairest method of providing a service that is exactly what you have paid for, yet not only is easy to administer for the ISP, but also ensures less contention problems from high bandwidth users. The only people who don't like it are those who wish to download 100s of GB of data on a cheap ISP package; something that the ISP cannot possibly fund for such a price. In any case, even going over cap you are just reduced to 2x dialup speed, which does allow many ordinary Internet applications.
One of the Asian manufacturer CeBit stands had what seemed to me a rather politically sensitive tagline of "China price, Taiwan quality" advertising their wares.
Police officers are trained and take on the risks of the job whereas innocent bystanders have no recourse against misjudged police shootings. Calling in police firepower only where likely to be needed is a sound strategy, even if it does in some cases put the police officers at greater risk. Better that than the population at large being at greater risk. Even with the police forces who are not routinely armed there have been misjudged shootings (e.g. Republic of Ireland, UK). There's no way I would want the police routinely armed. They should of course all be trained in firearms and have access to the best kit available, with armed officers ready to react when needed. The situation we have in Ireland is pathetic with the police having to use old army facilities for training.
The US is however probably a lost cause for gun control anyway with the genie being out of the bottle so to speak. Nevertheless, even acknowledging that reality, the situation there is obviously insane to anyone outside the US. There should at the very least be ongoing research and strategising as to how to normalise the situation there. Having more guns than people is *not* a normal situation, it's just a recipe for disaster.
Ten years ago nevermind 20 I couldn't have imagined laptop computers being ubiquitous enough that in 2008 pretty much my entire family has one and can fill the kitchen table with them if everyone is using them at once. In fairness, that's pretty far out!
Nevermind mobile phones, which again, much more than 10 years ago and it seemed laughable that everyone would have one.
Sat-nav in the car is also the stuff of past "intellectual masturbation" as you term it.
Flat panel screens are another thing we take for granted, forgetting the feeling we had seeing them at an affordable price not much more than 5 years ago.
How about going from floppy disks to USB drives or microSD cards? Having storage cheap enough to fill it first with music, and now with video?
The concept of how pervasive the Internet is today is also surely the stuff of past "intellectual masturbation". It's a far cry from even ten years ago when dial-up first became commonly available here in Ireland.
Nope, 20 years ago, modern living and technology would have seemed a pipedream to most. To those who had the foresight to see clearly the way things would go (at least in general terms), most people would have laughed at them.
Besides, no flying cars but the cars of today are space-age compared to 20 years ago (which were little more than metal boxes on wheels with a primitive manually controlled entirely mechanical drive system). They even look like the seemingly absurd drawings of more than 20 years ago. In 20 years time, cars will be rather different to today.
Well, I do own the set in question:) The fan is indeed made of skis (part first appeared in Ice Planet back in 1994 or so, in transparent orange). They are mounted on a tube (technic pneumatic part, same diameter as Lego "pins", e.g. aerials, that the skis have holes for). There is some clever use of custom parts, e.g. the alcoves with the frog "gargoyles" are made from wheel arch bricks.
I think the problems Lego had (and still do in some sets, e.g. Mars Mission) are not due to custom parts, or even large custom parts. The poorer sets were, and are, sets where they use large parts to "bulk out" the set and make it look larger on the box. It isn't even about simpler construction for kids, it's about having sets "look big". Some sets that looked good despite this would then of course be priced too high (for those who could judge based not on the "size" but the bricks etc), Harry Potter being an infamous example (those had the licencing cost too). Having bought many of those second-hand, they are actually great parts in a lot of the sets, as well as capturing the feel of the books and some being quite well thought out sets. Of course, the less said about Town Junior and Jack Stone the better, those were indeed "juniorisation" with the complete vehicle chassis pieces that included the wheel pins and all manner of other horrors. Nevertheless, many custom parts, even large ones, are perfectly reasonable and even very useful (e.g. rock pieces, pillars).
The prices are insanely more cheap. Here in Ireland, we changed over to Euros in 2002 at an exchange rate of IR£1=1.27 (i.e. numbers on prices are higher in euro). The prices for a given "size" of set are lesser numerically in euro than they were in IR£ in the mid 1980s. That's despite inflation of 5% or more each year even just around 2000-2003. An old UK catalogue shows that prices in £stg were the same numerically in the mid 1980s as they are today in euro for the same size set. The IR£ retail prices were higher again than the £stg ones.
The Space theme has definitely not returned to either the nostalgic "moon exploration" style of the old Space, or the fantastic themes of the early 1990s (M-tron, Blacktron, Space Police, Ice Planet). However, there's a simple reason. Lego Star Wars. The recent Mars Mission theme is deliberately arranged to be dissimilar to Star Wars, and thus, lacks the "feel" that a space theme should have. Ideally, a Space Theme relevant to today's kids should allow you to create the Star Wars environment, or any other such space fantasy, for oneself.
So for now, best just to enjoy the new Castle theme, that just in that way provides the generic "feel" that you need for creating ones own fantasy castle environment, with undead, dwarves and orcs! Sure slightly less useful for mediaeval building, but considering that was the focus for so long in the 80s/early 90s, I think it's a reasonable change. (The less said about the Knight's Kingdom themes, the better).
I suspect many of today's kids are pretty happy with the Star Wars lego. The sets are for the most part very well done, and offer great inspiration and parts for one's own creations. Just a pity they are higher priced because of the licensing, although despite that, Lego is cheaper than ever before.
Less of an issue with digital cameras and even cameraphones. Just about everyone has the means now to photograph one's creations as many times as one wants, and indeed then photograph at intermediate stages of construction, or perhaps more useful for step-by-step reconstruction, during deconstruction.
Plus it's awesome that nowadays you can share your creations far and wide for all time by publishing the photos online.
I mean, this is something that wasn't in many people's grasp 10 years ago, maybe even as little as 5 depending on the price-point for digital cameras that one considers facilitatory and how important one considers the advent of more widely available broadband.
Nonsense. The custom parts simply offer more possibilities (especially considering there is no shortage of traditional and small pieces in most new sets, or indeed you can just buy basic sets). They also allow for less creative kids to simply mix and match Lego sets. It offers the best of both worlds. The only drawback is that perhaps the partly creative but not greatly so may find it more difficult to incorporate custom parts into custom designs, and thus end up underutilising their Lego. However, this can be avoided by the simple rule of buying sets pertaining to the kind of models you are more likely to build from your own designs. Custom vehicle parts for vehicles, custom castle parts for castles, custom space parts for space.
However, the better designs online and from Lego themselves (the collector models) are inventive in using custom parts in interesting ways (e.g. wheel arches as building architectural feature).
One interesting tactic I have seen to create astounding designs is to start with a selection of "interesting" custom parts, and then envisage how they could be used as features, then incorporate most or all of these pre-selected custom parts into one's design that is otherwise built with standard bricks.
The set designs do offer some inspiration and a starting point. Plus they offer a more customisable play set for kids who aren't interested in building their own creations (and plus, they may end up doing so at a later stage). They also offer a useful way to get the right "kind" of bricks for one's creations. Space Lego sets are full of parts that are great for ones own creations. Castle sets are the same, even just down to having lots of grey bricks.
I think it is a positive thing that Lego sells to more of the market these days. The Lego Racers theme is a case in point. These can be just regarded as Lego matchbox cars and playsets. But for the more creative, they offer the joys of matchbox cars with the versatility of Lego. I had both Lego and matchbox cars as a kid, and I would have loved it for the latter to be constructed out of Lego bricks. I had Lego bricks to build cars, but they were just too clunky to drive around road layouts etc. like matchbox cars (they were of course great for Lego town play with minifigs, but that was a different universe to matchbox cars). These new Lego racers have the smaller pieces and custom parts that allow little car constructions as streamlined as matchbox cars.
The most worrying incident I heard of was someone being overtaken by an artic lorry, where the driver was steering using his elbows because he was using two mobile phones concurrently.
There was actual severe disruption to Estonia's online presence in the incident, and there was genuine sabre-rattling from Estonia as a result of them blaming Russia (they tried to get the EU to do something about it). It was a major enough current event here in Europe due to the political context (even amongst uninvolved Western EU countries the news reporting fed into the "Russia=evil" theme that people are picking up).
The fact of it turning out to be an Estonian student is in many ways, irrelevant. It could as easily have been someone in Russia, which is the scenario some seem to consider as being sci-fi or implausible.
Well, an awful lot of retail kit still seems to be IBM, front end (tills etc.) as well as back end. There are also still a lot of situations where IBM traditional backend is more suitable than the alternatives. They still sell a lot of servers and mainframes in addition to the support they provide that really it wouldn't be sane for companies to take in-house.
Certainly only a couple years ago they were again expanding their server production division here in Ireland.
It's interesting how the various anti-piracy groups complete ignore national laws. Copyright warnings on films here in Ireland for example still state how public performance is illegal, including schools, etc. Except that under Irish copyright law, schools have an exemption (which remains even in the latest version of the law that is designed to implement EU directives on copyright). It is entirely legal to screen an ordinary film in a school here in Ireland.
That sounds sort of like the model we have here in Ireland with "Social Partnership". One of the most common terms in political discourse here in Ireland is "vested interests".
Here in Ireland we use Proportional Representation with Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) which is pretty nifty (and apart from anything else, makes election counts a whole lot of fun and a spectator sport that can last for a week).
The problem however is that no matter what system, we are voting for politicians. Our past election saw the Greens (a small minority party) get into government coalition with the main party here. They've already shown themselves to be well able to play the political game; and I don't mean that as praise.
I do something even more novel. I turn off my phone when I'm sleeping or not in a situation where I wish to receive calls (e.g. cinema, church, concerts, lectures).
At least if you are in the European Union you've a choice of living and working in any of 27 countries, with most problems varying from country to country. Add to that the fact that at the least you can cheaply and easily travel between them to get a break from the problems of the particular country you've settled in. Admittedly it's awkward that Ireland and the UK aren't in the Schengen agreement (passport/border-free travel), and that apart from the Irish border, the free travel area between the two states is effectively dead.
That's no excuse for not making a choice about who is right though, whether individually or as a society. There are consequences, but that has to be accepted. From the mistakes we should learn to make better choices, rather than learn to avoid making choices.
Slashdot Mirror
The main point is that you should get exactly what you pay for. It is not necessary for ISPs to use high-tech solutions to specifically target torrent traffic, etc. Instead, all they need do is implement a data cap (you have a choice of different caps, each costing more) that instead of being month-based, applies to the last 30 days. Therefore no network problems with the entire user-base trying to use up their download cap (that's a cap, not a target) within the first week of the month. Instead, it's balanced across time, and those who go over cap need only wait until their last heavy usage patch falls off the 30 day history, or indeed they can manage their usage themselves to avoid going over cap. The generousity of the cap will of course depend on market conditions, the indigenous infrastructure, and customer demand.
This scheme is used by one of the ISPs in Ireland, Digiweb, and is the fairest method of providing a service that is exactly what you have paid for, yet not only is easy to administer for the ISP, but also ensures less contention problems from high bandwidth users. The only people who don't like it are those who wish to download 100s of GB of data on a cheap ISP package; something that the ISP cannot possibly fund for such a price. In any case, even going over cap you are just reduced to 2x dialup speed, which does allow many ordinary Internet applications.
One of the Asian manufacturer CeBit stands had what seemed to me a rather politically sensitive tagline of "China price, Taiwan quality" advertising their wares.
Police officers are trained and take on the risks of the job whereas innocent bystanders have no recourse against misjudged police shootings. Calling in police firepower only where likely to be needed is a sound strategy, even if it does in some cases put the police officers at greater risk. Better that than the population at large being at greater risk. Even with the police forces who are not routinely armed there have been misjudged shootings (e.g. Republic of Ireland, UK). There's no way I would want the police routinely armed. They should of course all be trained in firearms and have access to the best kit available, with armed officers ready to react when needed. The situation we have in Ireland is pathetic with the police having to use old army facilities for training.
The US is however probably a lost cause for gun control anyway with the genie being out of the bottle so to speak. Nevertheless, even acknowledging that reality, the situation there is obviously insane to anyone outside the US. There should at the very least be ongoing research and strategising as to how to normalise the situation there. Having more guns than people is *not* a normal situation, it's just a recipe for disaster.
They both use the same flag, thus adding to the confusion. The Council of Europe created it though.
Ten years ago nevermind 20 I couldn't have imagined laptop computers being ubiquitous enough that in 2008 pretty much my entire family has one and can fill the kitchen table with them if everyone is using them at once. In fairness, that's pretty far out!
Nevermind mobile phones, which again, much more than 10 years ago and it seemed laughable that everyone would have one.
Sat-nav in the car is also the stuff of past "intellectual masturbation" as you term it.
Flat panel screens are another thing we take for granted, forgetting the feeling we had seeing them at an affordable price not much more than 5 years ago.
How about going from floppy disks to USB drives or microSD cards? Having storage cheap enough to fill it first with music, and now with video?
The concept of how pervasive the Internet is today is also surely the stuff of past "intellectual masturbation". It's a far cry from even ten years ago when dial-up first became commonly available here in Ireland.
Nope, 20 years ago, modern living and technology would have seemed a pipedream to most. To those who had the foresight to see clearly the way things would go (at least in general terms), most people would have laughed at them.
Besides, no flying cars but the cars of today are space-age compared to 20 years ago (which were little more than metal boxes on wheels with a primitive manually controlled entirely mechanical drive system). They even look like the seemingly absurd drawings of more than 20 years ago. In 20 years time, cars will be rather different to today.
You can get Warcraft III for €7 or so.
They do not produce cent coins, but cent coins are legal tender there.
Well, I do own the set in question :) The fan is indeed made of skis (part first appeared in Ice Planet back in 1994 or so, in transparent orange). They are mounted on a tube (technic pneumatic part, same diameter as Lego "pins", e.g. aerials, that the skis have holes for). There is some clever use of custom parts, e.g. the alcoves with the frog "gargoyles" are made from wheel arch bricks.
I think the problems Lego had (and still do in some sets, e.g. Mars Mission) are not due to custom parts, or even large custom parts. The poorer sets were, and are, sets where they use large parts to "bulk out" the set and make it look larger on the box. It isn't even about simpler construction for kids, it's about having sets "look big". Some sets that looked good despite this would then of course be priced too high (for those who could judge based not on the "size" but the bricks etc), Harry Potter being an infamous example (those had the licencing cost too). Having bought many of those second-hand, they are actually great parts in a lot of the sets, as well as capturing the feel of the books and some being quite well thought out sets. Of course, the less said about Town Junior and Jack Stone the better, those were indeed "juniorisation" with the complete vehicle chassis pieces that included the wheel pins and all manner of other horrors. Nevertheless, many custom parts, even large ones, are perfectly reasonable and even very useful (e.g. rock pieces, pillars).
They're 2x1 flat tiles, used for just about anything, and mounted to "headlamp" 1x1 bricks, used all over the place for mounting bricks sideways.
Admittedly, 60+ of those headlamp bricks in brown is a tad excessive, but having so many flat tiles is fantastic.
The prices are insanely more cheap. Here in Ireland, we changed over to Euros in 2002 at an exchange rate of IR£1=1.27 (i.e. numbers on prices are higher in euro). The prices for a given "size" of set are lesser numerically in euro than they were in IR£ in the mid 1980s. That's despite inflation of 5% or more each year even just around 2000-2003. An old UK catalogue shows that prices in £stg were the same numerically in the mid 1980s as they are today in euro for the same size set. The IR£ retail prices were higher again than the £stg ones.
The Space theme has definitely not returned to either the nostalgic "moon exploration" style of the old Space, or the fantastic themes of the early 1990s (M-tron, Blacktron, Space Police, Ice Planet). However, there's a simple reason. Lego Star Wars. The recent Mars Mission theme is deliberately arranged to be dissimilar to Star Wars, and thus, lacks the "feel" that a space theme should have. Ideally, a Space Theme relevant to today's kids should allow you to create the Star Wars environment, or any other such space fantasy, for oneself.
So for now, best just to enjoy the new Castle theme, that just in that way provides the generic "feel" that you need for creating ones own fantasy castle environment, with undead, dwarves and orcs! Sure slightly less useful for mediaeval building, but considering that was the focus for so long in the 80s/early 90s, I think it's a reasonable change. (The less said about the Knight's Kingdom themes, the better).
I suspect many of today's kids are pretty happy with the Star Wars lego. The sets are for the most part very well done, and offer great inspiration and parts for one's own creations. Just a pity they are higher priced because of the licensing, although despite that, Lego is cheaper than ever before.
Less of an issue with digital cameras and even cameraphones. Just about everyone has the means now to photograph one's creations as many times as one wants, and indeed then photograph at intermediate stages of construction, or perhaps more useful for step-by-step reconstruction, during deconstruction.
Plus it's awesome that nowadays you can share your creations far and wide for all time by publishing the photos online.
I mean, this is something that wasn't in many people's grasp 10 years ago, maybe even as little as 5 depending on the price-point for digital cameras that one considers facilitatory and how important one considers the advent of more widely available broadband.
Times are changing so quickly.
Nonsense. The custom parts simply offer more possibilities (especially considering there is no shortage of traditional and small pieces in most new sets, or indeed you can just buy basic sets). They also allow for less creative kids to simply mix and match Lego sets. It offers the best of both worlds. The only drawback is that perhaps the partly creative but not greatly so may find it more difficult to incorporate custom parts into custom designs, and thus end up underutilising their Lego. However, this can be avoided by the simple rule of buying sets pertaining to the kind of models you are more likely to build from your own designs. Custom vehicle parts for vehicles, custom castle parts for castles, custom space parts for space.
However, the better designs online and from Lego themselves (the collector models) are inventive in using custom parts in interesting ways (e.g. wheel arches as building architectural feature).
One interesting tactic I have seen to create astounding designs is to start with a selection of "interesting" custom parts, and then envisage how they could be used as features, then incorporate most or all of these pre-selected custom parts into one's design that is otherwise built with standard bricks.
The set designs do offer some inspiration and a starting point. Plus they offer a more customisable play set for kids who aren't interested in building their own creations (and plus, they may end up doing so at a later stage). They also offer a useful way to get the right "kind" of bricks for one's creations. Space Lego sets are full of parts that are great for ones own creations. Castle sets are the same, even just down to having lots of grey bricks.
I think it is a positive thing that Lego sells to more of the market these days. The Lego Racers theme is a case in point. These can be just regarded as Lego matchbox cars and playsets. But for the more creative, they offer the joys of matchbox cars with the versatility of Lego. I had both Lego and matchbox cars as a kid, and I would have loved it for the latter to be constructed out of Lego bricks. I had Lego bricks to build cars, but they were just too clunky to drive around road layouts etc. like matchbox cars (they were of course great for Lego town play with minifigs, but that was a different universe to matchbox cars). These new Lego racers have the smaller pieces and custom parts that allow little car constructions as streamlined as matchbox cars.
The most worrying incident I heard of was someone being overtaken by an artic lorry, where the driver was steering using his elbows because he was using two mobile phones concurrently.
There was actual severe disruption to Estonia's online presence in the incident, and there was genuine sabre-rattling from Estonia as a result of them blaming Russia (they tried to get the EU to do something about it). It was a major enough current event here in Europe due to the political context (even amongst uninvolved Western EU countries the news reporting fed into the "Russia=evil" theme that people are picking up).
The fact of it turning out to be an Estonian student is in many ways, irrelevant. It could as easily have been someone in Russia, which is the scenario some seem to consider as being sci-fi or implausible.
Well, an awful lot of retail kit still seems to be IBM, front end (tills etc.) as well as back end. There are also still a lot of situations where IBM traditional backend is more suitable than the alternatives. They still sell a lot of servers and mainframes in addition to the support they provide that really it wouldn't be sane for companies to take in-house.
Certainly only a couple years ago they were again expanding their server production division here in Ireland.
It's interesting how the various anti-piracy groups complete ignore national laws. Copyright warnings on films here in Ireland for example still state how public performance is illegal, including schools, etc. Except that under Irish copyright law, schools have an exemption (which remains even in the latest version of the law that is designed to implement EU directives on copyright). It is entirely legal to screen an ordinary film in a school here in Ireland.
That sounds sort of like the model we have here in Ireland with "Social Partnership". One of the most common terms in political discourse here in Ireland is "vested interests".
The memes are irrelevant. Reality is what's relevant.
The EU doesn't act on the basis of slashdot memes.
Teaching kids subjects such as reading, writing and arithmetic isn't too bad of an idea either. I know, I know, it's a bit unorthodox.
Here in Ireland we use Proportional Representation with Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV) which is pretty nifty (and apart from anything else, makes election counts a whole lot of fun and a spectator sport that can last for a week).
The problem however is that no matter what system, we are voting for politicians. Our past election saw the Greens (a small minority party) get into government coalition with the main party here. They've already shown themselves to be well able to play the political game; and I don't mean that as praise.
I do something even more novel. I turn off my phone when I'm sleeping or not in a situation where I wish to receive calls (e.g. cinema, church, concerts, lectures).
At least if you are in the European Union you've a choice of living and working in any of 27 countries, with most problems varying from country to country. Add to that the fact that at the least you can cheaply and easily travel between them to get a break from the problems of the particular country you've settled in. Admittedly it's awkward that Ireland and the UK aren't in the Schengen agreement (passport/border-free travel), and that apart from the Irish border, the free travel area between the two states is effectively dead.
That's no excuse for not making a choice about who is right though, whether individually or as a society. There are consequences, but that has to be accepted. From the mistakes we should learn to make better choices, rather than learn to avoid making choices.