I don't see anything misleading about it. It seems to me like a 100-foot wave could easily run up to 1700 feet on an incline if the wave has enough momentum. All that water moving at such a high speed isn't just going to stop when it hits the short unless the shore is a vertical wall of stone. So it's going to slosh up the incline until it decelerates to zero.
You can see this effect yourself by putting a four-year-old in a bathtub and instructing him to make waves by sliding back and forth in the tub. Although the wave height will never exceed the height of the tub, the water will go over the side and get the floor very wet. (OK, no one told me to do it, but it was great fun until Mom caught me.)
Point taken. The problem of oil pricing has many more dimensions. I was thinking simplistically of the financial relationship between the buyers and sellers. However, your comment reminds me of another similarity between oil prices and SMS prices: in both cases, the buyers have the option of reducing their reliance on the commodity. I didn't have to buy my minivan; I could have reduced the amount of crap I take with me on vacation. (But it also gives me a good excuse to bike to work.) I don't generally use text messaging because I've already paid for voice minutes that I probably won't be able to use up.
If I may throw in a tangential remark, I'd like to point out that while the parent said "Same as gas", it's really "same as oil". The refiners and the poor cuss who runs the corner gas station are squeezed in the middle between customers angry over $4 gasoline and oil extractors who want to maximize the profit on their labors.
Have you been following the news about oil prices worldwide? It is a rather different situation to the price of an SMS bit in the market...
Not really. Same game, just different players. Well, maybe not entirely. The oil producing nations don't have an infinite supply of oil, while the phone companies have bandwidth as long as they have electricity to power the transmitters. But both are charging what they think the market will bear, and they are getting it.
Despite good job prospects, graduates think that a job in IT would be boring.
The first line of TFA:
Non-IT graduates think a job in IT would be "boring," despite its good career prospects, according to the Career Development Organisation (CDO).
Maybe that's why they're non-IT graduates. Why in heck would someone want to study for a profession that is not interesting? My God, we've got enough people who are miserable in their jobs; why try to convince more of them to do the same?
TFA doesn't examine another type of aggressive driver, the guy who worships his car. He won't put any bumper stickers on it because that would damage the finish, and he washes it weekly. He is far more territorial about his car than the guy with bumper stickers, but there is nothing about the car to warn you that he has this personality type.
I'm not sure where the corruption comes in. We are where we are thanks to democracy and the more-or-less free market. In the 1970's, we had two nasty oil crunches, and people in the U.S. responded by reducing the size of their cars -- for a while. But oil prices -- pretty cheap by world standards -- went down, and consumers started demanding more powerful and larger cars. When we bought our minivan 11 years ago, gasoline prices were pretty low, and within a year or so, they were so low in constant dollars that there was no economic justification for me to keep my old VW around. People responded by buying even bigger motor vehicles and building houses farther out. We voted out the regulators in 1994 and elected people who told us we could have our cake and eat it, too.
Now the rest of the world wants to live like Americans, and fuel prices are through the roof. I think it's really a matter of the chickens coming home to roost. Remember Mencken:
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
When/if fuel prices go down again, expect large car sales to rise again. As a species, we are quick to forget lessons learned.
Lest anyone write me off as being a car nut, I'll point out that I biked to work this morning and have commuted by bicycle when possible for my entire working life.
I am sorry for your losses. I hope to God I never know pain like what you have experienced. The closest I can come is to say that my daughter's teacher lost a daughter at Virginia Tech -- mindless terrorism, as opposed to fanatical terrorism. In the wake of Virginia Tech, some of us are looking more closely at gun control laws, and there is resistance because there is a constitutional principle -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" -- at stake.
The U.S. Constitution also guarantees us freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. In the case of Customs, people are being searched, detained, and occasionally arrested for stuff completely unrelated to terrorism. Is it reasonable to strip search every person coming into the U.S. just to catch a few who are into pornography? Why not allow the government to examine every computer plugged into the Internet? After all, remember that the Oklahoma City bombing was the act of U.S. citizens.
A smart terrorist isn't going to put anything on his computer or cell phone that would be found in a digital "strip search" at the border. He's going to get it into the U.S. using other means. There is really no way to stop that. But I may have pictures on my computer that are embarrassing, not meant to be shared with others but not illegal. It really isn't the government's business to be snooping in there.
And there's another thing. It's not just privacy or protecting intellectual property. Today, they're not (as far as I know) looking for people in the political opposition, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future. Suppose a president comes into office who decides to issue an executive order instructing Customs agents to detain and harass people of the political opposition. Sen. Ted Kennedy has already been on the no-fly list once, in an apparent mistake -- or was it? People have been kicked off of planes just for reading Arabic materials. All of this hassle isn't providing the protection it's intended to provide, and at great cost in terms of time, inconvenience, and world opinion.
To return to the Virginia Tech shootings a moment: would it be a reasonable response to make gun ownership illegal and go door-to-door collecting guns? Maybe we could prevent all sorts of shootings, but it would be at a great cost to our personal liberty.
Several times a year, we honor the thousands of men and women who wore a uniform and defended the U.S. and our way of life -- particularly the Constitution. They believed it was worth risking their lives for. I believe it's more than just words.
Again, I don't intend to try and minimize your losses. But one of the things I mourned on 9/11, along with the thousands of people who died and suffered, was that our way of life had suffered a serious blow. The slope from democracy to tyranny is slippery, and every item in the Constitution is something to hold onto to keep us from sliding. I don't want to go down without a fight.
By way of a shameless plug, I will ask everyone who is concerned about this to write their congressman. Venting on/. may feel good, but it doesn't change things.
I like these things most about real, hardcopy books:
Real books don't become obsolete. I can read a book printed hundreds of years ago, and, if the paper holds up, my great, great grandkids will be able to read a book printed today.
When the copyright on a book expires, I still have the text as long as I have the paper copy. With DRM'd books, they can yank it back or change it.
I don't know about How to Program Linux, but there's this record in my library's catalog for Linux programming by example, by Kurt Wall (2000), and here's The Linux Kernel Book, by Remy Card, Eric Dumas, and Franck Mevel (1998).
Actually, they can seize the computer.
It's happened before, and you can be sure it's going to continue happening until the law is changed. I don't have any international travel plans, nor any pornography on my computer, but you can be sure I'm going to think long and hard before taking my computer, cell phone, or other electronic devices out of the country.
Naturally, you shouldn't just be concerned about U.S. customs agents when crossing borders: other nations' agents may do the same, and unless you have dual citizenship, you don't even have the claim of a citizen when entering a foreign country.
Rule one in litigating for profit is to go after a defendant deep pockets. The plaintiff's attorneys are clearly trying to earn whatever equivalent there is that the bar association has.
Can't blame British Rail for this one. TFA now says they made a mistake:
A note regarding our findings: Further experiments have led us to believe that our initial conclusions that indicated Comcast's responsibility for dropping TCP SYN packets and forging TCP SYN, ACK and RST (reset) packets was incorrect. Our experiments were conducted from behind a network address translator (NAT). The anomalous packets were generated when the outbound TCP SYN packets exceeded the NAT's resources available in it's state table. In this case, TCP SYN, ACK and RST packets were sent. We would like to thank Don Bowman, Robb Topolski, Neal Krawetz, and Comcast engineers for bringing this to our attention. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this posting may have caused.
I don't see where T-mobile has a leg to stand on. I can see a difference between Engadget's magenta and T-mobile's magenta, and I'm mildly color-blind.
Nearly all the engineering profs and engineers I have met in life have been friendly, fun, and interesting people, and I say that having given up on engineering for a liberal arts degree because I couldn't pass second-semester calculus.
Here's something all the paranoid little shits need to understand: after the next terrorist attack on the United States, your blood will be flowing in the streets. It was exactly this kind of legalistic barratry which allowed 9/11 to happen. Now that the Dummycrat party is back in power, all they have done is make America less safe.
The Dummycrats caused 9/11, and they are working on the next 9/11. Americans will be forced to defend ourselves from Dummycrats. We will call it pre-emptive self-defense, and it will be a lot of fun.
It's the "Dummycratic party", or "Dummycrats", not "Dummycrat party". Get it right, or you'll sound like an idiot.
The last time I checked, the president was a Republican, and the Republican party controlled the House of Representatives. The Democratic majority in the Senate is slim. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was appointed by this administration, and any liberal tilt in that court is waning. I don't see how that counts as the Democrats controlling things. Or are you already conceding the coming election?
I don't see where you get that it was the Democrats that caused 9/11. It was extremist Islamic terrorists -- the same group that made the first attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993, only a month after Clinton took office. I don't think they whipped it up in a month, and the GOP held the presidency for the three preceding terms. The GOP also controlled both houses of Congress from 1994-2006, but they did little toward fighting terrorism until after the Twin Towers fell. And invading Iraq, where Al Qaeda was not until after we had been there, seems to be breeding terrorists faster than we can kill them off. Abu Grahib (sp?) and Guantanamo have done wonders for terrorist recruitment.
The reason we paranoid people are paranoid, however, isn't just the eavesdropping. It's the fact that the Bush administration has routinely ignored the legal processes that are in place. There were secret courts in place where NSA, etc., could get a warrant after conducting some eavesdropping; the Bush administration refused to do that. Federal law prohibited torture; the CIA outsourced the job to other countries. There have been a few cases of innocent people being rounded up and their lives destroyed -- and then not even getting an apology from the government afterward. When the executive branch of government decides it is above the law and can ignore legal process, then everyone ought to be afraid.
But if your mate believes something which you see as patently foolish - like the idea that everyone born between certain dates each year will have the same personality/fate, despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite a total lack of explanation as to how the position of stellar bodies relates to human events - I think this deep disagreement about how life works will lead to bitterness and problems. It's hard to conceal contempt.
Of course you understand, then, why non-Christians may feel some of the tenets of Christianity seem patently foolish to them. We've considered the world using the evidence and mental faculties available to us and have come to the conclusion that Christianity doesn't add up. I have even talked with one particularly erudite Christian who pretty freely admitted as much, but he continues to practice and defend his faith -- with faith being the key word. He has figured out where the boundaries are between the sacred and the profane (i.e., non-sacred).
I think you're onto the right thing, that respect is key. Whether it's one's spouse or a fellow citizen, we need to get beyond feeling contempt for people who don't believe what we believe and accept their right to hold a different opinion. If you don't, then the relationship is doomed.
Hmm. I learned to type on an old Underwood, and it was just like that. You really had to work at it to hit a key, so "pounding the keyboard" wasn't hyperbole. I think the sucker was made in the 1920's, and it was very heavy. The funny thing is, I never heard of people having carpal tunnel syndrome until the days of electric typewriters. In college, I got an Olivetti electric with an adjustable-action keyboard. When it's set on the light touch setting, it's more sensitive than any computer keyboard I've come across yet. I guess Olivetti went from one extreme to the other.
Hrm... It would be interesting if the cost of harvesting it outweighted the investment to build the infostructure to bring it back to our planet.
Just imagine, if we could bring back and burn more hydrocarbons than we'll ever be able to extract from the earth, we could eliminate all skepticism about global warming. Heck, I may just go trade my minivan for a Hummer!
Although, however incensed we may be that the U.S. is doing it, we still face the potential problem of encountering the same sort of intrusive searches going into other countries, particularly as U.S. allies follow our lead. As for me, I'm locking my phone, etc., if I travel in the U.S. by public conveyance. If I'm asked to unlock it, I'll ask for a warrant. (This is probably an empty boast, since I have no such travel plans anytime in the foreseeable future.)
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I don't see anything misleading about it. It seems to me like a 100-foot wave could easily run up to 1700 feet on an incline if the wave has enough momentum. All that water moving at such a high speed isn't just going to stop when it hits the short unless the shore is a vertical wall of stone. So it's going to slosh up the incline until it decelerates to zero.
You can see this effect yourself by putting a four-year-old in a bathtub and instructing him to make waves by sliding back and forth in the tub. Although the wave height will never exceed the height of the tub, the water will go over the side and get the floor very wet. (OK, no one told me to do it, but it was great fun until Mom caught me.)
Point taken. The problem of oil pricing has many more dimensions. I was thinking simplistically of the financial relationship between the buyers and sellers. However, your comment reminds me of another similarity between oil prices and SMS prices: in both cases, the buyers have the option of reducing their reliance on the commodity. I didn't have to buy my minivan; I could have reduced the amount of crap I take with me on vacation. (But it also gives me a good excuse to bike to work.) I don't generally use text messaging because I've already paid for voice minutes that I probably won't be able to use up.
If I may throw in a tangential remark, I'd like to point out that while the parent said "Same as gas", it's really "same as oil". The refiners and the poor cuss who runs the corner gas station are squeezed in the middle between customers angry over $4 gasoline and oil extractors who want to maximize the profit on their labors.
Not really. Same game, just different players. Well, maybe not entirely. The oil producing nations don't have an infinite supply of oil, while the phone companies have bandwidth as long as they have electricity to power the transmitters. But both are charging what they think the market will bear, and they are getting it.
Summary:
The first line of TFA:
Maybe that's why they're non-IT graduates. Why in heck would someone want to study for a profession that is not interesting? My God, we've got enough people who are miserable in their jobs; why try to convince more of them to do the same?
TFA doesn't examine another type of aggressive driver, the guy who worships his car. He won't put any bumper stickers on it because that would damage the finish, and he washes it weekly. He is far more territorial about his car than the guy with bumper stickers, but there is nothing about the car to warn you that he has this personality type.
I'm not sure where the corruption comes in. We are where we are thanks to democracy and the more-or-less free market. In the 1970's, we had two nasty oil crunches, and people in the U.S. responded by reducing the size of their cars -- for a while. But oil prices -- pretty cheap by world standards -- went down, and consumers started demanding more powerful and larger cars. When we bought our minivan 11 years ago, gasoline prices were pretty low, and within a year or so, they were so low in constant dollars that there was no economic justification for me to keep my old VW around. People responded by buying even bigger motor vehicles and building houses farther out. We voted out the regulators in 1994 and elected people who told us we could have our cake and eat it, too.
Now the rest of the world wants to live like Americans, and fuel prices are through the roof. I think it's really a matter of the chickens coming home to roost. Remember Mencken:
When/if fuel prices go down again, expect large car sales to rise again. As a species, we are quick to forget lessons learned.
Lest anyone write me off as being a car nut, I'll point out that I biked to work this morning and have commuted by bicycle when possible for my entire working life.
There have always been illegal thoughts. It is only a matter of enacting the proper legislation so people can be punished for having them.
I am sorry for your losses. I hope to God I never know pain like what you have experienced. The closest I can come is to say that my daughter's teacher lost a daughter at Virginia Tech -- mindless terrorism, as opposed to fanatical terrorism. In the wake of Virginia Tech, some of us are looking more closely at gun control laws, and there is resistance because there is a constitutional principle -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" -- at stake.
The U.S. Constitution also guarantees us freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. In the case of Customs, people are being searched, detained, and occasionally arrested for stuff completely unrelated to terrorism. Is it reasonable to strip search every person coming into the U.S. just to catch a few who are into pornography? Why not allow the government to examine every computer plugged into the Internet? After all, remember that the Oklahoma City bombing was the act of U.S. citizens.
A smart terrorist isn't going to put anything on his computer or cell phone that would be found in a digital "strip search" at the border. He's going to get it into the U.S. using other means. There is really no way to stop that. But I may have pictures on my computer that are embarrassing, not meant to be shared with others but not illegal. It really isn't the government's business to be snooping in there.
And there's another thing. It's not just privacy or protecting intellectual property. Today, they're not (as far as I know) looking for people in the political opposition, but who's to say they couldn't be in the future. Suppose a president comes into office who decides to issue an executive order instructing Customs agents to detain and harass people of the political opposition. Sen. Ted Kennedy has already been on the no-fly list once, in an apparent mistake -- or was it? People have been kicked off of planes just for reading Arabic materials. All of this hassle isn't providing the protection it's intended to provide, and at great cost in terms of time, inconvenience, and world opinion.
To return to the Virginia Tech shootings a moment: would it be a reasonable response to make gun ownership illegal and go door-to-door collecting guns? Maybe we could prevent all sorts of shootings, but it would be at a great cost to our personal liberty.
Several times a year, we honor the thousands of men and women who wore a uniform and defended the U.S. and our way of life -- particularly the Constitution. They believed it was worth risking their lives for. I believe it's more than just words.
Again, I don't intend to try and minimize your losses. But one of the things I mourned on 9/11, along with the thousands of people who died and suffered, was that our way of life had suffered a serious blow. The slope from democracy to tyranny is slippery, and every item in the Constitution is something to hold onto to keep us from sliding. I don't want to go down without a fight.
By way of a shameless plug, I will ask everyone who is concerned about this to write their congressman. Venting on /. may feel good, but it doesn't change things.
I was wondering something similar: Isn't that my office LAN over in the top left corner?
I don't know about How to Program Linux, but there's this record in my library's catalog for Linux programming by example, by Kurt Wall (2000), and here's The Linux Kernel Book, by Remy Card, Eric Dumas, and Franck Mevel (1998).
Naturally, you shouldn't just be concerned about U.S. customs agents when crossing borders: other nations' agents may do the same, and unless you have dual citizenship, you don't even have the claim of a citizen when entering a foreign country.
Rule one in litigating for profit is to go after a defendant deep pockets. The plaintiff's attorneys are clearly trying to earn whatever equivalent there is that the bar association has.
Can't blame British Rail for this one. TFA now says they made a mistake:
I don't see where T-mobile has a leg to stand on. I can see a difference between Engadget's magenta and T-mobile's magenta, and I'm mildly color-blind.
The author of TFA is either:
Nearly all the engineering profs and engineers I have met in life have been friendly, fun, and interesting people, and I say that having given up on engineering for a liberal arts degree because I couldn't pass second-semester calculus.
It's the "Dummycratic party", or "Dummycrats", not "Dummycrat party". Get it right, or you'll sound like an idiot.
The last time I checked, the president was a Republican, and the Republican party controlled the House of Representatives. The Democratic majority in the Senate is slim. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was appointed by this administration, and any liberal tilt in that court is waning. I don't see how that counts as the Democrats controlling things. Or are you already conceding the coming election?
I don't see where you get that it was the Democrats that caused 9/11. It was extremist Islamic terrorists -- the same group that made the first attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993, only a month after Clinton took office. I don't think they whipped it up in a month, and the GOP held the presidency for the three preceding terms. The GOP also controlled both houses of Congress from 1994-2006, but they did little toward fighting terrorism until after the Twin Towers fell. And invading Iraq, where Al Qaeda was not until after we had been there, seems to be breeding terrorists faster than we can kill them off. Abu Grahib (sp?) and Guantanamo have done wonders for terrorist recruitment.
The reason we paranoid people are paranoid, however, isn't just the eavesdropping. It's the fact that the Bush administration has routinely ignored the legal processes that are in place. There were secret courts in place where NSA, etc., could get a warrant after conducting some eavesdropping; the Bush administration refused to do that. Federal law prohibited torture; the CIA outsourced the job to other countries. There have been a few cases of innocent people being rounded up and their lives destroyed -- and then not even getting an apology from the government afterward. When the executive branch of government decides it is above the law and can ignore legal process, then everyone ought to be afraid.
When I'm not reading /., I'm exploring the packages available for Linux.
Of course you understand, then, why non-Christians may feel some of the tenets of Christianity seem patently foolish to them. We've considered the world using the evidence and mental faculties available to us and have come to the conclusion that Christianity doesn't add up. I have even talked with one particularly erudite Christian who pretty freely admitted as much, but he continues to practice and defend his faith -- with faith being the key word. He has figured out where the boundaries are between the sacred and the profane (i.e., non-sacred).
I think you're onto the right thing, that respect is key. Whether it's one's spouse or a fellow citizen, we need to get beyond feeling contempt for people who don't believe what we believe and accept their right to hold a different opinion. If you don't, then the relationship is doomed.
Hmm. I learned to type on an old Underwood, and it was just like that. You really had to work at it to hit a key, so "pounding the keyboard" wasn't hyperbole. I think the sucker was made in the 1920's, and it was very heavy. The funny thing is, I never heard of people having carpal tunnel syndrome until the days of electric typewriters. In college, I got an Olivetti electric with an adjustable-action keyboard. When it's set on the light touch setting, it's more sensitive than any computer keyboard I've come across yet. I guess Olivetti went from one extreme to the other.
<sigh> Those were the good ol' days.
Did you mean to use the plural there?
I guess we all need to add 88.80.13.160 and 87.106.162.82 to our sigs, right under the DeCSS key.
At last, someone who really deserves Vista!
Just imagine, if we could bring back and burn more hydrocarbons than we'll ever be able to extract from the earth, we could eliminate all skepticism about global warming. Heck, I may just go trade my minivan for a Hummer!
Since TFA is a dup, I'll just post a link to my original comment on the matter: write your congresscritters!
Although, however incensed we may be that the U.S. is doing it, we still face the potential problem of encountering the same sort of intrusive searches going into other countries, particularly as U.S. allies follow our lead. As for me, I'm locking my phone, etc., if I travel in the U.S. by public conveyance. If I'm asked to unlock it, I'll ask for a warrant. (This is probably an empty boast, since I have no such travel plans anytime in the foreseeable future.)