>Which ISP has been granted a monopoly? If they have, why are there so many of them to choose from?
Warner-comcast. While they have not yet officially merged, they colluded to divide up total control of the nation's cable internet service between themselves. Yes, they left a few small mom-and-pop shops to point to as competition, but so did Standard Oil and Ma Bell.
As far as other choices?
DSL has low coverage area, and can't even meet the definition of broadband for most of that.
Wireless has low data caps and high usage charges, slow speed, and reliability issues. Assuming it's even available.
Sat is high-latency, low bandwidth, and outside the price range of most people.
Where I live I have exactly two choices for internet service: Warner, or nothing. Even if I wanted to use dial-up, I would have to pay long-distance charges.
Your notion that there are 'so many to choose from' is clearly based in a delusional fantasy world.
Even if Valve intended outright evil things their work would still result in better linux drivers, and everything I've read on this suggests that they're strongly pushing the open-source driver angle.
The worst harm Valve could do to Linux would be abandoning this project; even if it fails Linux would still be better for the work accomplished.
He wasn't charged with anything because that comes [i]after[/i] being arrested. He was, however, [i]suspected[/i] of many things.
I would like to note that I am not taking a stance on those events, I am simply showing flaws in your arguments.
Unless I'm mistaken, the US tried to kill Hitler too. Many times.
Then there's how possession and dissemination is legally distinct from authoring it, plus the historical significance of the work itself.
Then there's the distinction between advocating policies and calling others to direct action.
Ah, see, there's a flaw in your argument. Specifically, it's your implication that protected and legal are the same thing. They are not.
All protected speech is legal, but not everything that's legal is protected speech. While it may be legal for an authority figure to tell a soldier to kill somebody, it's not protected speech.
Those partisan videos called for people to commit acts of violence against US citizens.
I'm pretty sure telling people to kill other people has never been considered protected speech.
Actually, the bible isn't even 2000 years old, it's age is however long ago it was translated. While some vauge concepts may be similar, the translator's ideas about what they're translating bleed into the material and distort it.
Now, the common response to that is that the process was guided by god himself, but that only begs the question "So god denied people the gift of the free will you say he gave them, and refused to allow the translators to alter things to suit their desires?"
Powerplay wasn't fake per-say... they just deluded themselves into thinking they could convince ISPs to give games priority over all other traffic. The concepts behind the idea are sound - reduce latency by reducing delays in the pipe - but insisting that providers pay for it was simple stupidity. The bandwidth a 56k modem can provide actually COULD handle most games sans multiplayer physics objects IF there was no logjam effect working against it.
Now, in the phantom's case, it's a few people putting on a smoke and mirror show with the direct intent to scam people. Misguided vaporware and malicious fraud are two completely different things, mind.
You're missing the reputation stain that results from a 4-hour outage. The company's PR damage from the downtime would likely cost them significant revinue, and thus in this case it's probably worthwhile.
Car with airbags, car without airbags. Most airbags are never used, but people don't buy them because they expect to use them. They buy them because the waste cost of having and not needing is in the $100 range, but the cost of needing and not having is anywhere between $40,000 and death.
The question is if the company is large enough for that kind of down time to do enough damage to justify it's cost.
Care to cite studies into this? Oh, I'm sorry, did you just say you cant?
If one song becomes a classic per year, that's damn impressive. Do you know why? Because the test of any classic is time, and time is something that is distinctly lacking when you compare a restricted sample length to an unrestricted one. Those 1960s songs weren't classics until the 1990s, when the people who listened to them at college had their own kids and wanted to hear songs from their youth on the radio. One day people will look back with fondness on early 00s music with the same nostalgic bent, and the likes of Mariah Carry will join the ranks of The Who on 'KWFT, your one-stop shop for all the classics from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and today!'.
Want an interesting tidbit? Only idiots buy the two year extended warantee, because the chances of the device breaking are so low that it's a waste of cash. Do you honestly think that they would try to cram an extended service plan down your throat if it DIDN'T end-up making them a profit? Are you actually trying to say that the house is putting down odds that AREN'T in it's favor?
Want to know what else? In two years, most of the market will have replaced the part for a better one for reasons that have nothing to do with reliability - the old part still works the same as always, but there's a new, better part out to do the job.
But you're right on one point - they DON'T build them like they used to. They used to build TVs with energy-wasting vacuum tubes, but they don't do that anymore. It's nearly impossible to get a TV with a UHF/VHF antenna input, because they don't make them like that anymore. It's nearly impossible to get a TV that doesn't support closed captioning and content lockouts, because they don't make them like that anymore. Technology has improved, and they don't make them "like that" anymore because "that" way yields a poorer product.
Diesel engines don't use spark plugs (In fact, they can be made with no electrical components at all)
This can make diesel engines well suited to being a standby source of power no electrical ignition system to fail just when it is needed.
I suppose, but the downside is that it takes a lot more torque to get the engine started. There are ways around this problem, but that's the reason why gas engines are the de-facto standard - in the days when you started your car with a handcrank, more torque was a lethal drawback.
You made a slight mistake - You said it would take 3% of our cropland, but you don't have to use cropland. Any place that's wet and sunny works - oceans, ponds, fancy hats, etc... Dirt is not required.
First: Earlier engines (mostly those produced before 1992) used rubber for seals, and would need to have said seals replaced with non-rubber ones as biodiesel is very corrosive when it comes to rubber products. This is really the only modification that needs to be done, aside from possibly adding a fuel-line heater for cold climates.
Second: Diesel engines aren't significantly less efficient than gas engines, and that small difference is more a fault of the technology not having the focus that gasoline engines have had than a problem with the concept itself. Diesel engines don't use spark plugs (In fact, they can be made with no electrical components at all), thus reducing the draw on the electrical system - a system which, I should point out, is not exactly the most efficient system in the vehicle. Counterbalancing all of this is the fact that diesel fuel has a far greater energy density than gasoline, which results in a net gain in miles-per-gallon over gasoline technology.
Third: Regenerative breaking is great, but the only part that really needs the power is the fuel injection system, and even then not so much. UNLESS you're building a hybrid, which is a vastly different animal.
Simple.
The CO2 would have been released into the environment anyway when the source plant decayed, but oil that's been stuck in a rock for a million years probably won't be releasing it's CO2 anytime soon without our help.
It's called "Net Zero Emission", which means that the difference in CO2 resulting from the source does not increase due to our using it as an energy source. In addition, increasing high-yield plant growth results in a direct increase in CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
It promises to be a safer and more efficient method, which has natural self-limitations that reduce the reliance on mechanical failsafes.
As for disposal: Anybody who suggests launching it into the sun or burying it underground is a fool; Rockets are expensive, and the last thing we need to do is have a catastrophic rocket failure in the atmosphere. It's dangerous to bury radioactive waste, since it CAN seep out and contaminate areas, and the concentrations involved are absurdly high compared to natural deposits.
Grind it up, massively dilute it with sand, and send it trolling on barges out across the deepest parts of the oceans letting it slowly seep out. Water absorbs radiation very well so there would be a negligible increase over background radiation, and with the exception of plutonium all nuclear materials you would find in a reactor are naturally-occuring. Safe, cheap, and ecological.
Oh, yes, the 'Laffer curve' is real to the extent that 0% of any number is 0, and 100% of 0 is also 0. However, arguments based on it presume that we are ABOVE the ideal tax level - a claim for which there is no supporting evidence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
It's unquestionably a heavier than air vehicle (Especially when full of people), so it can't generate lift from density differences.
It doesn't have any significant wingspan, which means that it can't use bernoulli's principal to generate lift.
Therefore, the only reasonable remaining possibility is that it must be creating a downward thrust equal to the mass*gravity of the vehicle. That's very, very bad for gas mileage, making the "28mpg" claim more than a little dubious.
In theory, strapping four engines with those claimed power/consumption ratios to a compact car with no standard engine and the wheels in neutral should generate highway speeds at vastly higher MPG ratings.
Well, isn't the obvious solution to have the FM module be a seperate piece of equipment?
Make the PodBuddy a car-powered charging station (Not covered by the patent - no FM transmition capabilities), then sell a seperate FM transmitter module (Also not covered by the patent, as it's seperate from the charging unit.)
If the iPod is designed so that the FM transmitter can't be placed properly seperately, simply have a power pass-through (Still not covered by the patent, as the charger is in a seperate housing from the transmitter).
Sadly, the mold might not be compatable with the redesign, and a second mold would be required - however, the sales resulting from being posted on slashdot as a victim of patent abuse would more than make this up.
Heck, I'd buy one just to tick DLO off, and I don't even OWN an iPod!
First off, it's the "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE", not the "Gnu Protective License". This mistake casts doubt on your knowledge of the subjects which you are discussing.
Second, you need only make code changes available if the binaries are distributed - your lawyers are obviously not doing their job properly. Perhaps you hired divorce lawyers instead of ones trained in IP law? ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt ) Aside from the fact that you don't have to in the first place, sharing your alterations with those who provided you the original source is still nothing more than a nice thing to do - If you put your changes in, and your competition does the same, then who comes out ahead?
If your lawyers were competent, they would realize that the GPL does not require that program output - such as a program compiled by GCC - be open sourced. ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt ) It would appear that you are getting your information on linux and open source from Microsoft's propaganda campaign. Do you feel stupid for expecting the truth about linux from a competing vendor?
Microsoft's "Shared Source" license is one of the most draconian pieces of trash I'ce ever seen, and the GPL is Linux's strength. As for your mistaken claim that no companies use linux, I would like to cite some examples:
IBM and their linux initiative
Sony chose linux as the OS of choice for the PS2 AND PS3
Pixar uses Linux for it's rendering clusters
Chrysler is using Linux to simulate vehicle crashs
Linksys routers run Linux
Should I continue to cite examples from the endless string of major companies that rely on linux for matters critical to their very survival?
You, my good man, are both misinformed and completely lacking in a desire to learn the truth.
How about this, then:
What was the timescale from when we realized 9/11 was an attack, and when it was over?
How long would it take to shut down the system after we realize there has been a terrorist attack?
Would not shutting down sections of the GPS network impair the search for survivors?
What ratio of terrorist attacks in the past 50 years have *not* been either singular or simultaneous in nature?
I mean really, shutting down the network after a terrorist attack would have return that's marginal at best, and very negative at worst.
Heck, the article itself says "The GPS system is vital to commercial aviation and marine shipping", meaning there would be real economic damage in the event of a shutdown, and worse yet a distict risk to human life.
The concern in this situation isn't about Bush's facist policies taking away our rights, it's about Bush's *dumb* policies that are all cost and no benefit.
Anonymous Cowards aren't cowards, they're just lasy.:)
At the time, slavery wasn't all that big a deal in the north - people just didn't *care*, and wouldn't have gone off to die so that a bunch of 5/7ths people would go from legally being property to merely effectively being property.
No, to them the civil war was more about a bunch of uppity southern folk thinking they're such big badasses (... and the tobbacco and cotton crops, and tax dollars, and etc...). I'd say that slavery was ranked about 37 on the list of reasons the north fought, just below everybody having to update thier maps to reflect the changes.
Regardless, bowing to political pressure is not in and of itself an evil act. Google is providing a service, and this means that they have to compromise in authoritarian nations like China and France. These alterations are limited only to the nations that demand them, *you* can search for anti-chinese-government sites all day on google if you like.
So in China they can't show anti-government sites, it's a requirement of doing buisness. Heck, thanks to the MLATs if they don't concede to France's demands, they can be arrested and tried under French law!
Slashdot Mirror
>Which ISP has been granted a monopoly? If they have, why are there so many of them to choose from? Warner-comcast. While they have not yet officially merged, they colluded to divide up total control of the nation's cable internet service between themselves. Yes, they left a few small mom-and-pop shops to point to as competition, but so did Standard Oil and Ma Bell. As far as other choices? DSL has low coverage area, and can't even meet the definition of broadband for most of that. Wireless has low data caps and high usage charges, slow speed, and reliability issues. Assuming it's even available. Sat is high-latency, low bandwidth, and outside the price range of most people. Where I live I have exactly two choices for internet service: Warner, or nothing. Even if I wanted to use dial-up, I would have to pay long-distance charges. Your notion that there are 'so many to choose from' is clearly based in a delusional fantasy world.
Even if Valve intended outright evil things their work would still result in better linux drivers, and everything I've read on this suggests that they're strongly pushing the open-source driver angle. The worst harm Valve could do to Linux would be abandoning this project; even if it fails Linux would still be better for the work accomplished.
He wasn't charged with anything because that comes [i]after[/i] being arrested. He was, however, [i]suspected[/i] of many things. I would like to note that I am not taking a stance on those events, I am simply showing flaws in your arguments.
Unless I'm mistaken, the US tried to kill Hitler too. Many times. Then there's how possession and dissemination is legally distinct from authoring it, plus the historical significance of the work itself. Then there's the distinction between advocating policies and calling others to direct action.
Ah, see, there's a flaw in your argument. Specifically, it's your implication that protected and legal are the same thing. They are not. All protected speech is legal, but not everything that's legal is protected speech. While it may be legal for an authority figure to tell a soldier to kill somebody, it's not protected speech.
Those partisan videos called for people to commit acts of violence against US citizens. I'm pretty sure telling people to kill other people has never been considered protected speech.
Clearly, that trilogy was the pinnacle of 80's SciFi.
Actually, the bible isn't even 2000 years old, it's age is however long ago it was translated. While some vauge concepts may be similar, the translator's ideas about what they're translating bleed into the material and distort it. Now, the common response to that is that the process was guided by god himself, but that only begs the question "So god denied people the gift of the free will you say he gave them, and refused to allow the translators to alter things to suit their desires?"
Powerplay wasn't fake per-say... they just deluded themselves into thinking they could convince ISPs to give games priority over all other traffic. The concepts behind the idea are sound - reduce latency by reducing delays in the pipe - but insisting that providers pay for it was simple stupidity. The bandwidth a 56k modem can provide actually COULD handle most games sans multiplayer physics objects IF there was no logjam effect working against it.
Now, in the phantom's case, it's a few people putting on a smoke and mirror show with the direct intent to scam people. Misguided vaporware and malicious fraud are two completely different things, mind.
You're missing the reputation stain that results from a 4-hour outage. The company's PR damage from the downtime would likely cost them significant revinue, and thus in this case it's probably worthwhile.
Car with airbags, car without airbags. Most airbags are never used, but people don't buy them because they expect to use them. They buy them because the waste cost of having and not needing is in the $100 range, but the cost of needing and not having is anywhere between $40,000 and death.
The question is if the company is large enough for that kind of down time to do enough damage to justify it's cost.
Care to cite studies into this? Oh, I'm sorry, did you just say you cant? If one song becomes a classic per year, that's damn impressive. Do you know why? Because the test of any classic is time, and time is something that is distinctly lacking when you compare a restricted sample length to an unrestricted one. Those 1960s songs weren't classics until the 1990s, when the people who listened to them at college had their own kids and wanted to hear songs from their youth on the radio. One day people will look back with fondness on early 00s music with the same nostalgic bent, and the likes of Mariah Carry will join the ranks of The Who on 'KWFT, your one-stop shop for all the classics from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and today!'. Want an interesting tidbit? Only idiots buy the two year extended warantee, because the chances of the device breaking are so low that it's a waste of cash. Do you honestly think that they would try to cram an extended service plan down your throat if it DIDN'T end-up making them a profit? Are you actually trying to say that the house is putting down odds that AREN'T in it's favor? Want to know what else? In two years, most of the market will have replaced the part for a better one for reasons that have nothing to do with reliability - the old part still works the same as always, but there's a new, better part out to do the job. But you're right on one point - they DON'T build them like they used to. They used to build TVs with energy-wasting vacuum tubes, but they don't do that anymore. It's nearly impossible to get a TV with a UHF/VHF antenna input, because they don't make them like that anymore. It's nearly impossible to get a TV that doesn't support closed captioning and content lockouts, because they don't make them like that anymore. Technology has improved, and they don't make them "like that" anymore because "that" way yields a poorer product.
Diesel engines don't use spark plugs (In fact, they can be made with no electrical components at all)
This can make diesel engines well suited to being a standby source of power no electrical ignition system to fail just when it is needed.
I suppose, but the downside is that it takes a lot more torque to get the engine started. There are ways around this problem, but that's the reason why gas engines are the de-facto standard - in the days when you started your car with a handcrank, more torque was a lethal drawback.
You made a slight mistake - You said it would take 3% of our cropland, but you don't have to use cropland. Any place that's wet and sunny works - oceans, ponds, fancy hats, etc... Dirt is not required.
Coating the injectors? No.
First: Earlier engines (mostly those produced before 1992) used rubber for seals, and would need to have said seals replaced with non-rubber ones as biodiesel is very corrosive when it comes to rubber products. This is really the only modification that needs to be done, aside from possibly adding a fuel-line heater for cold climates.
Second: Diesel engines aren't significantly less efficient than gas engines, and that small difference is more a fault of the technology not having the focus that gasoline engines have had than a problem with the concept itself. Diesel engines don't use spark plugs (In fact, they can be made with no electrical components at all), thus reducing the draw on the electrical system - a system which, I should point out, is not exactly the most efficient system in the vehicle. Counterbalancing all of this is the fact that diesel fuel has a far greater energy density than gasoline, which results in a net gain in miles-per-gallon over gasoline technology.
Third: Regenerative breaking is great, but the only part that really needs the power is the fuel injection system, and even then not so much. UNLESS you're building a hybrid, which is a vastly different animal.
For a primer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
Simple. The CO2 would have been released into the environment anyway when the source plant decayed, but oil that's been stuck in a rock for a million years probably won't be releasing it's CO2 anytime soon without our help. It's called "Net Zero Emission", which means that the difference in CO2 resulting from the source does not increase due to our using it as an energy source. In addition, increasing high-yield plant growth results in a direct increase in CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor It promises to be a safer and more efficient method, which has natural self-limitations that reduce the reliance on mechanical failsafes. As for disposal: Anybody who suggests launching it into the sun or burying it underground is a fool; Rockets are expensive, and the last thing we need to do is have a catastrophic rocket failure in the atmosphere. It's dangerous to bury radioactive waste, since it CAN seep out and contaminate areas, and the concentrations involved are absurdly high compared to natural deposits. Grind it up, massively dilute it with sand, and send it trolling on barges out across the deepest parts of the oceans letting it slowly seep out. Water absorbs radiation very well so there would be a negligible increase over background radiation, and with the exception of plutonium all nuclear materials you would find in a reactor are naturally-occuring. Safe, cheap, and ecological.
Oh, yes, the 'Laffer curve' is real to the extent that 0% of any number is 0, and 100% of 0 is also 0. However, arguments based on it presume that we are ABOVE the ideal tax level - a claim for which there is no supporting evidence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
It's unquestionably a heavier than air vehicle (Especially when full of people), so it can't generate lift from density differences. It doesn't have any significant wingspan, which means that it can't use bernoulli's principal to generate lift. Therefore, the only reasonable remaining possibility is that it must be creating a downward thrust equal to the mass*gravity of the vehicle. That's very, very bad for gas mileage, making the "28mpg" claim more than a little dubious. In theory, strapping four engines with those claimed power/consumption ratios to a compact car with no standard engine and the wheels in neutral should generate highway speeds at vastly higher MPG ratings.
Well, isn't the obvious solution to have the FM module be a seperate piece of equipment? Make the PodBuddy a car-powered charging station (Not covered by the patent - no FM transmition capabilities), then sell a seperate FM transmitter module (Also not covered by the patent, as it's seperate from the charging unit.) If the iPod is designed so that the FM transmitter can't be placed properly seperately, simply have a power pass-through (Still not covered by the patent, as the charger is in a seperate housing from the transmitter). Sadly, the mold might not be compatable with the redesign, and a second mold would be required - however, the sales resulting from being posted on slashdot as a victim of patent abuse would more than make this up. Heck, I'd buy one just to tick DLO off, and I don't even OWN an iPod!
First off, it's the "GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE", not the "Gnu Protective License". This mistake casts doubt on your knowledge of the subjects which you are discussing.
D ecember/msg04120.html ) - which makes yours an understandable mistake, considering that you are used to working with a system as horribly untidy as Windows - there are indeed tools for doing just that ( http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/ext2.html ).
Aside from the fact that ext2 doesn't need to be defragmented in the first place ( https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2003-
Second, you need only make code changes available if the binaries are distributed - your lawyers are obviously not doing their job properly. Perhaps you hired divorce lawyers instead of ones trained in IP law? ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt ) Aside from the fact that you don't have to in the first place, sharing your alterations with those who provided you the original source is still nothing more than a nice thing to do - If you put your changes in, and your competition does the same, then who comes out ahead?
If your lawyers were competent, they would realize that the GPL does not require that program output - such as a program compiled by GCC - be open sourced. ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt ) It would appear that you are getting your information on linux and open source from Microsoft's propaganda campaign. Do you feel stupid for expecting the truth about linux from a competing vendor?
Microsoft's "Shared Source" license is one of the most draconian pieces of trash I'ce ever seen, and the GPL is Linux's strength. As for your mistaken claim that no companies use linux, I would like to cite some examples:
IBM and their linux initiative
Sony chose linux as the OS of choice for the PS2 AND PS3
Pixar uses Linux for it's rendering clusters
Chrysler is using Linux to simulate vehicle crashs
Linksys routers run Linux
Should I continue to cite examples from the endless string of major companies that rely on linux for matters critical to their very survival?
You, my good man, are both misinformed and completely lacking in a desire to learn the truth.
In soviet Russia, nuclear battery becomes YOU!
My first +5 post, and I forgot to login. --;;
How about this, then: What was the timescale from when we realized 9/11 was an attack, and when it was over? How long would it take to shut down the system after we realize there has been a terrorist attack? Would not shutting down sections of the GPS network impair the search for survivors? What ratio of terrorist attacks in the past 50 years have *not* been either singular or simultaneous in nature? I mean really, shutting down the network after a terrorist attack would have return that's marginal at best, and very negative at worst. Heck, the article itself says "The GPS system is vital to commercial aviation and marine shipping", meaning there would be real economic damage in the event of a shutdown, and worse yet a distict risk to human life. The concern in this situation isn't about Bush's facist policies taking away our rights, it's about Bush's *dumb* policies that are all cost and no benefit. Anonymous Cowards aren't cowards, they're just lasy. :)
Mod parent down. -1, Grouchy
At the time, slavery wasn't all that big a deal in the north - people just didn't *care*, and wouldn't have gone off to die so that a bunch of 5/7ths people would go from legally being property to merely effectively being property. No, to them the civil war was more about a bunch of uppity southern folk thinking they're such big badasses (... and the tobbacco and cotton crops, and tax dollars, and etc...). I'd say that slavery was ranked about 37 on the list of reasons the north fought, just below everybody having to update thier maps to reflect the changes. Regardless, bowing to political pressure is not in and of itself an evil act. Google is providing a service, and this means that they have to compromise in authoritarian nations like China and France. These alterations are limited only to the nations that demand them, *you* can search for anti-chinese-government sites all day on google if you like. So in China they can't show anti-government sites, it's a requirement of doing buisness. Heck, thanks to the MLATs if they don't concede to France's demands, they can be arrested and tried under French law!