Now the fun starts - prepare for the rest of your life to get "Please come back to AOL" offers in the mail, unless you make a concerted effort to break the chain of postal mail addresses (or go into the witness protection program).
Actually, since Time Warner wrestled their company back from AOL, they do seem to be behaving in a more responsible manner in a lot of ways. As has been pointed out, they have opened up IMAP email access and are converting most of their proprietary content to standard HTML web sites. Time Warner sees more potential from advertisting and joint marketing arrangements that dialup subscription fees.
In addtion to the Netscape service (which is basically the remnants of Compuserve), AOL also offers a stripped down service called Wal*Mart Connect for $9.94 a month.
The single most disgusting thing AOL ever did was take Compu$erve and rebrand it as the entry level product for those people who were "not ready yet" for the advanced features of AOL.
Or how they stabbed Netscape in back by signing on with Microsoft the day after announcing a deal with Netscape...
On second thought, I guess there were lots of things they did that sucked...
>>Ahh, but if imaginary people, i.e. corporations, were not allowed to hold patents or copyrights...
That -is- the way patents work. A corporation cannot be an inventor on a patent application. The person(s) who did the work are named, and typically part of their employment contract assigns any patent rights to the employer - but the patent is still listing the employee as the inventor.
Something to keep in mind when "_____" history month rolls around and people cite patents as examples to build group self-esteem. The employer may just have named the person most willing to agree to turn over their invention claims to their employer. The real question is not whose name is on the invention, but who received the royalties.
Perhaps there should be an option (or maybe the default) that sorts the stories by the number of messages posted on the thread in the past "x" hours, rather than just based on time since submission.
It is kind of unfortunate that everyone is so focused on the story of the last 5 minutes - so issues that come up after a few hours are not followed up on - because the herd of/. lemmings has moved onto the next topic.
Just think how much easier it gets for city government (including law enforcement) to monitor its citizens if everyone is using a city built "Free" wi-fi network.
Although understanding the truth may not be the point, the proposed law talks about combining that list of words, not the individual words, for instance:
"Fly Acme Airlines to the 2012 games in London" "Go for the gold in 2012 with an Acme credit card" "Acme - the official fish and chips of the Summer Games"
Anyhow, the Olympics is about athletic competition, not the money (right?)
Somewhere on another thread, it was stated that (roughly) 1 gallon of gasoline = 34 Kwh of electricity. US Motor Gasoline consumption is (as of 2004) about 9 Million barrels/day. 1 Barrel = 42 gallons...
So the total energy consumption in the US used by gasoline powered vehicles is the equivalent of 12,852,000,000 Kwh/day (9 million bbl/day * 42 gal/bbl * 34kwh/bbl) - that's 12 Billion Kwh/day or 4,690 Billion Kwh per year. In 2003, the total electric production of the United States was 3,891 billion Khw / year.
In 2002, Nuclear made up 780 billion Kwh of that total...
So that means if we wanted to create only nuclear power to replace all gasoline powered vehicles, we need about 7x the current installed capacity of nuclear plants added.
I feel confident the ball park number above is off by a factor of 2 or 3, but how long would it take to build that kind of additional capacity? How much would demand increase during that period due to population growth?
(of course, the numbers above don't include diesel)
Looks like it's time for a JFK-like commitment to major investment and regulatory reform if this is going to happen. People are always whining about how there is so much partisanship in Washington. Perhaps this could be the issue to break the us-them mentality.
How much is it worth to us to tell the Saudis and Venezuela that we hope they enjoy drinking their oil..?
Don't forget he also has an attorney - although he doesn't have enough money to buy furniture.
There are also stores that rent furniture or let you pay for it over time - of course, they probably want to see a paystub to see you have a job in order to pay for it. Just one of those pesky things about becoming an adult and no longer living with Mommy and Daddy.
Well, originally the rationalization was that the shuttle could be used to fix satellites in space (for example Hubble) or even bring them back to earth for repair, which I seem to remember they did once in the early launches.
However, two things have happened since then - first, the shuttle's mission got hijacked to be a garbage truck and greyhound bus for the ISS. The other was that many of the other underlying assumptions were just wrong - the cost per flight was hugely over-optimistic - it is cheaper to replace Hubble with a "fixed" copy than to go up and attempt to repair it... (but not as much of a challenge for the engineers)
Another issue early on was that the shuttle was determined to be incapable of getting high enough in space to service most satellites.
And the American People (at least the media) are not prepared to accept the idea that each mission has a 1:40 chance of killing everyone on board. The notion now that some sort of "escape hatch" needs to be built should be the final chapter in shutting down this "designed by committee" failure. But as long as the people in Washington in both parties are spending like drunken sailors, look for more and more "fixes" to be made.
According to some "expert" on the radio (not Richard Hoagland!), it took almost a year to clean up Columbia after that landing - there is a lot of debris kicked up when landing at White Sands - it would be only a last choice if there was no other safe option - which gets back to the point that if you pass up an "in spec" landing option like they did last night, you're increasing the risk that you wind up forced to choose from non-optimal choices next time around.
On the morning of the second day (it was like a 2 AM Eastern), one of the first tasks they had to do after waking up was to have everyone on the shuttle close their copy of Outlook so they could Sync the mailboxes. After rebooting the PC that still "had Outlook open" and not clearing the problem, they had to reboot the email server.
Meanwhile the guy who was supposed to be testing out the robot arm was getting late, and it was close to causing a problem because they needed to do a burn to slow down the shuttle in order to gain altitude to line up with the space station... and the arm had to be stowed during the burn in order to not break it.
Anyone remember the Eastern Airlines plane in Charlotte NC that flew into the ground because the pilot and co-pilot were focused on a panel light that wasn't working?
Another really alarming thing was that as the folks on the ground had computed the burn time and angles, they relayed that information to the shuttle by having a human read a sequence of numbers over a voice channel about as choppy as a cell phone. I truly hope that I was seeing a "show" being put on for the public, and that the actual burn instructions were being sent computer to computer. Is this any way to run a shuttle?
Oh, and now that I remember it, they also lost time because the cameras on the arm weren't working because they neglected to throw a circuit breaker that was on their task list.
Ah - that came some close to getting the key point... but the key factor here is a really estoric feature of telecom in the U.S...
While Skype does have to pay a per minute charge to the local telco to call out into the PSTN, the opposite is also true. If an ILEC (Bell) customer dials your Skype number, then the ILEC has to pay what is called "Reciprocal compensation" to Skype for handling connecting the call to their Skype customer. That charge is not passed on to the ILEC customer, other than being paid out of the pool of local tariff revenues.
After the Telecomm Act of 1996, this entire concept blew up in the faces of the ILECs who imposed this compesation plan on the competitive local carriers (CLECs) to drive them out of business. But then on the way to that goal, a funny thing happened - most of the major dialup ISPs switched to CLECs and the ISP and/or its CLEC ends up getting paid by the ILEC for each minute their customer is making a "local" call to the CLEC/ISP access number.
So if significant numbers of Skype phone numbers are in circulation, then this revenue can offset the ILEC termination charges. Of course, Skype is international - so for international calls made from a US landline to a non-US Skpe user, the money is being sucked out of the US. As long as the calls are initiated that way, it becomes a cash cow (until the regulators finally throw in the towel and end termination charges - which is probably the real goal of this)
The reality is eventually going to sink in that there is no real difference between a local phone call and a non-local one once you introduce the internet....
100 years of regulatory nonsense is crashing down around the phone companies.... the one thing they still have on their side has been that government has grown to depend on taxes on phone calls, the ability to easily wiretap communications, and subpoena phone logs. All of that is "in play" with VoIP.
Since this entire experiement was the scientific equivalent of a political troll (and these threads confirm it worked), it is important to point out that saying the rats rear legs "had movement" is very different from saying they would ever have useful neurological function.
Take your IDE disk cable and cut it in half and then randomly solder all of the wires together and see how how well you can get data to and from the disk drive.
It's interesting to see what is possible, but way premature to declare that this is ultimately going to work in the end.
A very large part of the US/Canada trade statistics are US made auto parts that are shipped into Canada for final assembly in Canadian plants (Chrylser - Bramalea, Windsor, Brampton) (Ford - Windsor, Oakville, St Thomas) (GM - Oshawa) - and the cars then sent back to the United States.
Just as an example, the Oshawa plant assembled 923,871 vehicles in 2004 (and another 131,204 from CAMI (subaru J/V)... of that, 900,000 were exported back out of Canada.
Since the valuation of the individual parts used in building an automobile are entirely arbitrary with internal transactions within the company that eventually offset each other, the result can be a significant distortion in trade statistics and finances of the company - if the net Canadian content was shown, those figures get substantially smaller and more reflect what is really going on.
To make the point simpler, let's say I create a car company... I create a subsidiary in Canada... I take my one car back and forth across the border - I sell it to my Canadian subsidiary for $10k... I then send the car back to the US and sell it back to the US Subsidiary for $15k... repeat and rinse.
Net result: I can now tell my UAW workers that I'm losing $5k per US car, and my Canadian plant is making $5k per car. With some good accountants, I can probably tell the opposite story to the Canadian tax man.
>>...holes in software that ships with Windows and Linux,... [...] Windows is not the only operating system at risk. A survey of the Linux 2.6.9 kernel code performed by automated-code-checking software maker Coverity found that, while the overall quality of the code had increased significantly, more than 50 per cent of flaws appeared in device drivers [...] So much for today's Microsoft bashing...
Not to worry - Redhat will have patches out for Redhat 7.2 any day now...
Yes, it is a scam.... but the goods being sent isn't the scam.
What they'll do is say... order $1 million in merchandise, and then "accidentally" send you a cashier's check for $1,050,000... and ask that you return the $50k they overpaid you.
Even if you never send the merchandise, in a few weeks the bank will inform you that the Cashier's Check was bogus and charge back the full amount to you... so you're out the $50k you wired to Nigeria.
Of course, if you actually sent any merchandise, you're out that as well.
If your bank remotely has a clue, they'll inform you of the probability that the "Cashiers Check" will probably come back as fraudulent and suggest you consult law enforcement and/or your attorney before taking any action.
Legitamite export trade normally uses a different process called "Letters of Credit". The buyer's bank forwards the Letter of Credit to your bank stating the terms of what is being purchased and under what terms the money should be released. When the shipment of your goods arrive at the designated warehouse or other delivery point, the buyer's bank releases the funds to your bank. This is a "bank to bank" transaction done using SWIFT or CHIPS or some other international funds clearing where the transactions are significantly protected from fraud.
On another story, it was pointed out that Google uses the domain registration information as one of the factors to consider whether a web site is "good" or part of a SEO make reputation fast scheme... Web sites that have a large number of links suddenly appear also flag the site as suspect.
It would seem to me that one factor in a "spam" algorithm would be noting how long ago the domain was registered... if the pattern of email is consistent with the age of the domain..., etc...
If a spammer had to pre-register domains and hold them for 6 months before they could send over 1 email an hour to AOL (even with valid SPF records), that would make their job a lot harder.
Perhaps we should also give a look at making it a tiny bit harder to set up a domain, also. ICANN also might want to track statistics of which Domain Registrars seem to have large numbers of these fly-by-night domains and lean on them to tighten their procedures on authenticating the owner of the domain.
In the event that some real, high quality domain just shows up out of nowhere (perhaps one promoting a movie about to be released), that's what the "Not Spam" button is for.
Slashdot Mirror
CNN is owned by the same company (Time Warner) that owns AOL. Is that helpful?
and men don't turn on the dishwasher until they've used all of the measuring cups.
Now the fun starts - prepare for the rest of your life to get "Please come back to AOL" offers in the mail, unless you make a concerted effort to break the chain of postal mail addresses (or go into the witness protection program).
Actually, since Time Warner wrestled their company back from AOL, they do seem to be behaving in a more responsible manner in a lot of ways. As has been pointed out, they have opened up IMAP email access and are converting most of their proprietary content to standard HTML web sites. Time Warner sees more potential from advertisting and joint marketing arrangements that dialup subscription fees.
In addtion to the Netscape service (which is basically the remnants of Compuserve), AOL also offers a stripped down service called Wal*Mart Connect for $9.94 a month.
The single most disgusting thing AOL ever did was take Compu$erve and rebrand it as the entry level product for those people who were "not ready yet" for the advanced features of AOL.
Or how they stabbed Netscape in back by signing on with Microsoft the day after announcing a deal with Netscape...
On second thought, I guess there were lots of things they did that sucked...
>>Ahh, but if imaginary people, i.e. corporations, were not allowed to hold patents or copyrights...
That -is- the way patents work. A corporation cannot be an inventor on a patent application. The person(s) who did the work are named, and typically part of their employment contract assigns any patent rights to the employer - but the patent is still listing the employee as the inventor.
Something to keep in mind when "_____" history month rolls around and people cite patents as examples to build group self-esteem. The employer may just have named the person most willing to agree to turn over their invention claims to their employer. The real question is not whose name is on the invention, but who received the royalties.
Perhaps there should be an option (or maybe the default) that sorts the stories by the number of messages posted on the thread in the past "x" hours, rather than just based on time since submission.
/. lemmings has moved onto the next topic.
It is kind of unfortunate that everyone is so focused on the story of the last 5 minutes - so issues that come up after a few hours are not followed up on - because the herd of
Just think how much easier it gets for city government (including law enforcement) to monitor its citizens if everyone is using a city built "Free" wi-fi network.
>>The right to privacy is not forbidden and is alluded to in the 4th and 9th amendments. Ergo, you have that right. QED
By that logic, I claim I have right to free chocolate ice cream.
Although understanding the truth may not be the point, the proposed law talks about combining that list of words, not the individual words, for instance:
"Fly Acme Airlines to the 2012 games in London"
"Go for the gold in 2012 with an Acme credit card"
"Acme - the official fish and chips of the Summer Games"
Anyhow, the Olympics is about athletic competition, not the money (right?)
And how much fresh water would 6 billion large oak trees consume in that evaporative cooling process?
Somewhere on another thread, it was stated that (roughly) 1 gallon of gasoline = 34 Kwh of electricity. US Motor Gasoline consumption is (as of 2004) about 9 Million barrels/day. 1 Barrel = 42 gallons...
c .html
So the total energy consumption in the US used by gasoline powered vehicles is the equivalent of 12,852,000,000 Kwh/day (9 million bbl/day * 42 gal/bbl * 34kwh/bbl) - that's 12 Billion Kwh/day or 4,690 Billion Kwh per year. In 2003, the total electric production of the United States was 3,891 billion Khw / year.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/electri
In 2002, Nuclear made up 780 billion Kwh of that total...
So that means if we wanted to create only nuclear power to replace all gasoline powered vehicles, we need about 7x the current installed capacity of nuclear plants added.
I feel confident the ball park number above is off by a factor of 2 or 3, but how long would it take to build that kind of additional capacity? How much would demand increase during that period due to population growth?
(of course, the numbers above don't include diesel)
Looks like it's time for a JFK-like commitment to major investment and regulatory reform if this is going to happen. People are always whining about how there is so much partisanship in Washington. Perhaps this could be the issue to break the us-them mentality.
How much is it worth to us to tell the Saudis and Venezuela that we hope they enjoy drinking their oil..?
Don't forget he also has an attorney - although he doesn't have enough money to buy furniture.
There are also stores that rent furniture or let you pay for it over time - of course, they probably want to see a paystub to see you have a job in order to pay for it. Just one of those pesky things about becoming an adult and no longer living with Mommy and Daddy.
Perhaps you didn't press the F1 key?
Well, originally the rationalization was that the shuttle could be used to fix satellites in space (for example Hubble) or even bring them back to earth for repair, which I seem to remember they did once in the early launches.
However, two things have happened since then - first, the shuttle's mission got hijacked to be a garbage truck and greyhound bus for the ISS. The other was that many of the other underlying assumptions were just wrong - the cost per flight was hugely over-optimistic - it is cheaper to replace Hubble with a "fixed" copy than to go up and attempt to repair it... (but not as much of a challenge for the engineers)
Another issue early on was that the shuttle was determined to be incapable of getting high enough in space to service most satellites.
And the American People (at least the media) are not prepared to accept the idea that each mission has a 1:40 chance of killing everyone on board. The notion now that some sort of "escape hatch" needs to be built should be the final chapter in shutting down this "designed by committee" failure. But as long as the people in Washington in both parties are spending like drunken sailors, look for more and more "fixes" to be made.
If you can figure out how to make the Earth rotate 100 times for each orbit around the Sun, then you have an idea!
According to some "expert" on the radio (not Richard Hoagland!), it took almost a year to clean up Columbia after that landing - there is a lot of debris kicked up when landing at White Sands - it would be only a last choice if there was no other safe option - which gets back to the point that if you pass up an "in spec" landing option like they did last night, you're increasing the risk that you wind up forced to choose from non-optimal choices next time around.
On the morning of the second day (it was like a 2 AM Eastern), one of the first tasks they had to do after waking up was to have everyone on the shuttle close their copy of Outlook so they could Sync the mailboxes. After rebooting the PC that still "had Outlook open" and not clearing the problem, they had to reboot the email server.
Meanwhile the guy who was supposed to be testing out the robot arm was getting late, and it was close to causing a problem because they needed to do a burn to slow down the shuttle in order to gain altitude to line up with the space station... and the arm had to be stowed during the burn in order to not break it.
Anyone remember the Eastern Airlines plane in Charlotte NC that flew into the ground because the pilot and co-pilot were focused on a panel light that wasn't working?
Another really alarming thing was that as the folks on the ground had computed the burn time and angles, they relayed that information to the shuttle by having a human read a sequence of numbers over a voice channel about as choppy as a cell phone. I truly hope that I was seeing a "show" being put on for the public, and that the actual burn instructions were being sent computer to computer. Is this any way to run a shuttle?
Oh, and now that I remember it, they also lost time because the cameras on the arm weren't working because they neglected to throw a circuit breaker that was on their task list.
Nah, if "content providers" weren't such greedy bloodsucking parasites, then there'd be no need for DRM.
So Michael Jackson (who owns half interest in the Beatles catalog) is a greedy bloodsucking parasite?
Ah - that came some close to getting the key point... but the key factor here is a really estoric feature of telecom in the U.S...
While Skype does have to pay a per minute charge to the local telco to call out into the PSTN, the opposite is also true. If an ILEC (Bell) customer dials your Skype number, then the ILEC has to pay what is called "Reciprocal compensation" to Skype for handling connecting the call to their Skype customer. That charge is not passed on to the ILEC customer, other than being paid out of the pool of local tariff revenues.
After the Telecomm Act of 1996, this entire concept blew up in the faces of the ILECs who imposed this compesation plan on the competitive local carriers (CLECs) to drive them out of business. But then on the way to that goal, a funny thing happened - most of the major dialup ISPs switched to CLECs and the ISP and/or its CLEC ends up getting paid by the ILEC for each minute their customer is making a "local" call to the CLEC/ISP access number.
So if significant numbers of Skype phone numbers are in circulation, then this revenue can offset the ILEC termination charges. Of course, Skype is international - so for international calls made from a US landline to a non-US Skpe user, the money is being sucked out of the US. As long as the calls are initiated that way, it becomes a cash cow (until the regulators finally throw in the towel and end termination charges - which is probably the real goal of this)
The reality is eventually going to sink in that there is no real difference between a local phone call and a non-local one once you introduce the internet....
100 years of regulatory nonsense is crashing down around the phone companies.... the one thing they still have on their side has been that government has grown to depend on taxes on phone calls, the ability to easily wiretap communications, and subpoena phone logs. All of that is "in play" with VoIP.
Since this entire experiement was the scientific equivalent of a political troll (and these threads confirm it worked), it is important to point out that saying the rats rear legs "had movement" is very different from saying they would ever have useful neurological function.
Take your IDE disk cable and cut it in half and then randomly solder all of the wires together and see how how well you can get data to and from the disk drive.
It's interesting to see what is possible, but way premature to declare that this is ultimately going to work in the end.
A very large part of the US/Canada trade statistics are US made auto parts that are shipped into Canada for final assembly in Canadian plants (Chrylser - Bramalea, Windsor, Brampton) (Ford - Windsor, Oakville, St Thomas) (GM - Oshawa) - and the cars then sent back to the United States.
:)
Just as an example, the Oshawa plant assembled 923,871 vehicles in 2004 (and another 131,204 from CAMI (subaru J/V)... of that, 900,000 were exported back out of Canada.
Since the valuation of the individual parts used in building an automobile are entirely arbitrary with internal transactions within the company that eventually offset each other, the result can be a significant distortion in trade statistics and finances of the company - if the net Canadian content was shown, those figures get substantially smaller and more reflect what is really going on.
To make the point simpler, let's say I create a car company... I create a subsidiary in Canada... I take my one car back and forth across the border - I sell it to my Canadian subsidiary for $10k... I then send the car back to the US and sell it back to the US Subsidiary for $15k... repeat and rinse.
Net result: I can now tell my UAW workers that I'm losing $5k per US car, and my Canadian plant is making $5k per car. With some good accountants, I can probably tell the opposite story to the Canadian tax man.
International trade is very nuanced
>> ...holes in software that ships with Windows and Linux,...
[...]
Windows is not the only operating system at risk. A survey of the Linux 2.6.9 kernel code performed by automated-code-checking software maker Coverity found that, while the overall quality of the code had increased significantly, more than 50 per cent of flaws appeared in device drivers
[...]
So much for today's Microsoft bashing...
Not to worry - Redhat will have patches out for Redhat 7.2 any day now...
Ah, but you overlook that Congress in 1996 declared that cartoon sex is the same as real sex!
[The US Supreme Court fortunately corrected their misimpression in 2002]
If the ieee was involved, why didn't they go metric and make it 100 volts?
Yes, it is a scam.... but the goods being sent isn't the scam.
What they'll do is say... order $1 million in merchandise, and then "accidentally" send you a cashier's check for $1,050,000... and ask that you return the $50k they overpaid you.
Even if you never send the merchandise, in a few weeks the bank will inform you that the Cashier's Check was bogus and charge back the full amount to you... so you're out the $50k you wired to Nigeria.
Of course, if you actually sent any merchandise, you're out that as well.
If your bank remotely has a clue, they'll inform you of the probability that the "Cashiers Check" will probably come back as fraudulent and suggest you consult law enforcement and/or your attorney before taking any action.
Legitamite export trade normally uses a different process called "Letters of Credit". The buyer's bank forwards the Letter of Credit to your bank stating the terms of what is being purchased and under what terms the money should be released. When the shipment of your goods arrive at the designated warehouse or other delivery point, the buyer's bank releases the funds to your bank. This is a "bank to bank" transaction done using SWIFT or CHIPS or some other international funds clearing where the transactions are significantly protected from fraud.
On another story, it was pointed out that Google uses the domain registration information as one of the factors to consider whether a web site is "good" or part of a SEO make reputation fast scheme... Web sites that have a large number of links suddenly appear also flag the site as suspect.
It would seem to me that one factor in a "spam" algorithm would be noting how long ago the domain was registered... if the pattern of email is consistent with the age of the domain..., etc...
If a spammer had to pre-register domains and hold them for 6 months before they could send over 1 email an hour to AOL (even with valid SPF records), that would make their job a lot harder.
Perhaps we should also give a look at making it a tiny bit harder to set up a domain, also. ICANN also might want to track statistics of which Domain Registrars seem to have large numbers of these fly-by-night domains and lean on them to tighten their procedures on authenticating the owner of the domain.
In the event that some real, high quality domain just shows up out of nowhere (perhaps one promoting a movie about to be released), that's what the "Not Spam" button is for.