the "freedoms" are an illusion. so long as either device you buy is tied to a draconian carrier its just another big ass phone screwing up the line of my pants and sucking down 5 hours worth of charge time in 3 days. the phones may be free, but their features, options and abilities will quickly be restricted at the carrier level.
A phone with freedoms is a phone that doesnt require service contracts or "new every 2" plans for hardware. Its also a phone that lets you question and subvert greedy carrier tactics and, god forbid, gauge and monitor a carriers network performance independently from their own claims of most reliable and most coverage. buy either one, but remember the freedom stops after the transceiver driver comes up.
On the other hand, the contract I'm getting with my N900 gives me unlimited data transfer, unlimited SMS and a big chunk of free talk time. So I'm not particularly worried about "sucking down 5 hours worth of charge time in 3 days." Believe me that if my carrier tries to restrict the capabilities of the phone, it'll be returned to them before you can say "Jack Rabbit" -- and they'll have to take it back.
But I guess you should ignore me; my lack of a tinfoil hat probably means that I'm imagining all that due to the brainwashing mind control beams irradiating my brain. Enjoy your paranoia!
Well, the effort of packaging a application (a) to different platforms and (b) to different distributions is quite a duplicate one, involving a lot of people (and time).
Firstly, this proposal has absolutely no relevance to the difficulty of packaging to different distributions.
Secondly, packaging to different platforms has been solved. Most distributions now have compile farms where you submit a package specification (usually a very simple compilation script and a set of distribution-specific patches) and packages for all the various architectures get spat out automatically.
This proposal is a solution looking for a problem, as far as Free software is concerned. The only utility is where the application is closed-source and can't go through a Linux distribution's normal package compilation and distribution workflow.
However, trying to paint the US armed forces as the same as a bunch of terrorists is disingenuous at best.
Only to a hard-core tribalist USian. To a majority of the population of the planet its a simple fact of life: US is an Empire and "terrorism" is a tool of warfare eagerly employed by both sides, the rag-tag insurgents and the Imperial Centurions alike.
Also, if it is such a blind spot, why is it Western military spends so much effort avoiding it? You do know the US could blindly bomb every village in East Afghanistan with a few B-52's right?
Yes, if such a 'blind spot' existed, the US could solve their problems by bombing every village and major piece of infrastructure in East Afghanistan with one B-52 (loaded with W-80s, the weapon for each village dialed to the appropriate setting between 5 kT and 150 kT). What's the good of being an insurgent with nothing to fight for? W-80s are even pretty clean; the place would be livable within months, and back to background levels in a couple of years.
But since the alleged 'blind spot' doesn't exist, the coalition haven't been nuking villages.
Simple answer: no one has any idea. The people targeted by the drones for extra-judicial assassinations are always and without exception "suspected" "militants" - i.e. people who might militantly oppose US interests, or interests of US sponsored warlords in some way or another. Some might be mass murderers, some merely opposed to their US-appointed "government" or simply enemies of some US informants. Or random bystanders. There is no way to tell.
I guess you're either an idiot, or didn't RTFA (oh wait).
A frequent occurrence is for UAV operators to watch a group of men dig a hole in the road, put something in it, and start to fill it back in. And then the operators shoot the device and them with a missile. Or for them to watch a guy fire some mortar rounds, chuck the mortar in the back of a pickup and cover it in a tarp, and drive off. And then the operators shoot the car and him with a missile.
Just because the intelligence that leads to the strikes is secret (no doubt to protect the details of the humint sources and also of the drones' capabilities) doesn't mean that it isn't there. The drones and their weapons are a limited resource, and even the USAF aren't stupid enough to waste millions of pounds blowing someone up because of mere suspicion.
But one thing can be known for certain, the hordes of children killed by the drones were definitely not "targeting" anyone.
So the bottom line is this: when you choose to descend to the levels of the atrocities that you accuse your "evil" opponents of... you yourself have become the very evil you claim to fight. Which is clearly the case with the US of A, and which all rational observer have pointed out a long time ago.
I totally agree! How fortunate it is, then, that the USA hasn't. Their enemies deliberately target civilians; the USAF only kills civilians by accident, often due to bad intelligence or weapon malfunction.
It's clear you have an agenda from your emotive choice of vocabulary. However, trying to paint the US armed forces as the same as a bunch of terrorists is disingenuous at best.
As long as we keep blowing up women and children, we're making more enemies than we kill.
Not really. In fact, if the coalition were Doing It Right, the thought process would be, "The women and children got blown up. This was because there was insurgent activity in the area. If there was no insurgent activity, these attacks would stop. Therefore we should be uncooperative to the insurgents and rat them out to the coalition if possible." As it is, the civilians are more scared of the Taliban than of the coalition. Therefore the coalition are Doing It Wrong.
Whatever else our new strategy entails, "no civilian casualties" needs to be the cornerstone, or we're never going to win.
Please name a historical conflict (pre-1900) in which "no civilian casualties" was part of the victorious side's strategy.
If I remember correctly, an important part of successful strategies was often, "If you think they shelter the enemy, decimate them; if that doesn't work, kill them all, burn their homes and sow their fields with salt. No exceptions." Also, I believe enslaving civilians of captured lands was also a reliably successful strategy. If someone is worked to exhaustion, fed on a controlled diet and guarded night and day, they don't have much opportunity to support insurgents.
If you insist on "no civilian casualties," I recommend mass relocations of said civilians (preferably to different continents at the same time as stripping their assets and breaking up family groups), then replacing them with loyal, heavily-armed citizens from your home country. This would work a damn sight better than the current strategy, which seems to be to let civilians support insurgents, and then react to it after the fact in a haphazard fashion. Ideal!
i personally hang out in #openbsd, #linux, #macdev, as well as 3-4 other channels of popular, large projects, and i see exactly what he or she speaks about, on a frequent basis as opposed to your observation. in #linux in particular i've been a visitor the past 4 years, spending much of my time "picking up" the people who go there to most often just get slagged down on for asking "stupid questions" as they try to learn.
Yes, you're one of the "nice guys" I mentioned. I'm often in #kde and #fedora, and the people there seem fairly helpful (although the #fedora folks have a penchant for telling people that they don't actually want to do whatever it is they're asking about).
Instead of being friendly and helpful, spending 30 seconds giving a kind answer to help another, these people instead gladly spend 5 minutes elaborating to another how stupid they are, how wrong they are, how inefficient their idea is, how bad their way of thinking is, how wrong they are for trying to learn things the way they do, how wrong they try to solve problems and solve their task, and, in the end, that they should just "rtfm/google" or similar.
I hang out on a variety of Freenode channels regularly, and I see an incident like that about once every three months. Nowadays, when I see people asking questions that would have yielded a detailed, step by step response if they'd typed it into Google instead of an IRC channel, the experienced people in the channel seem to go to the trouble of answering carefully even when they answer the exact same noob questions several times a day.
And yes, I do tell people to RTFM from time to time, especially when people clearly haven't read it before asking their question. I even tell them where to find the manual, and which section they might want to look in. This is because I personally have better things to do than copy and paste sections of manuals into IRC all day. Of course, if someone has read the manual, I'm very happy to help them in more detail.
I'm getting a definite sensation of, "I got an unhelpful response on an IRC channel once in 1998 and I'm still bitter about it," from you.
Remember, this is all part a discussion of whether it is possible to fit more than 56kbit/s of data into the 0-4000 Hz range.
Was it? I thought it was about fitting more than 56 kbit/s of data into the 4kHz low-pass band on a phone line.
And I disagree about reducing resistance being the big problem -- if you do the maths, you'll find that shot noise in the semiconductor devices at each end of the line is a much bigger deal. Also, copper wires are so 20th century -- for long distance lines (i.e. more than a hundred metres or so) fibre is better both in terms of cost and performance.
Shannon's Limit is a much better an example. We have C = B * Log2(1+S/N). B is fixed, so we are left with the SNR as the determining factor. Now granted, there may be physical limits on how high this value could ever go, but I have not seen any proof of such, so I will not assume they exist until mathematically proven otherwise. With that in mind, any current limitation on this value is still technological (medium quality, techniques to minimize noise, etc), not physical. If you can prove the SNR fundamentally cannot go above a certain value, I would love to see it, and will gladly admit that you are correct.
For an infinite SNR, you require one of the following conditions to be true:
The noise power is zero. This cannot be true; even if your receiver and transmitter are perfectly noise-free, your phone cable will not be at 0 K, and you will therefore have some thermal noise (v2 = 4kTB, where R is the resistance of the cable, T is its temperature, and k is the Boltzmann constant.
The signal power is infinite. This also cannot be true, since your phone cable will melt if you try to drive it with an excessively large current, and the insulation will fail if you try to drive it with an excessively high voltage.
There is therefore some finite upper limit on the SNR which cannot be exceeded for the physical medium of your phone line, before we start wondering about the cost of manufacturing and powering the equipment at each end, and any relevant legislation (since your phone line will act as an antenna at some frequencies).
To say that an analog medium has defined universal limits and that no technology is capable of using it more efficiently sounds like a BS assertion, i think you should cite some sources for a claim like that.
The Shannon-Hartley theorem states that if you have a channel with bandwidth B (in this case, let's say 8 kHz), with additive white Gaussian noise giving a signal-to-noise power ratio of S/N (let's be conservative and say 20 dB), the maximum information capacity of the channel C is given by:
C = B log (1 + S/N)
where the logarithm is taken base 2 to give C units of bits per second. With the numbers above for the analogue channel, this would provide an absolute upper bound on information capacity of C = 53266 bps. Using modern coding systems (LDPC, for instance) it's possible to approach that limit.
An analogue medium does indeed have universal information capacity limits. As any physicist (or electronic engineer, for that matter) will tell you, not only is the analogue bandwidth available usually fixed, but also improving SNR is really, really hard. It doesn't get easier when you're trying to simultaneously make the hardware as small and as power-efficient as possible.
The GP did not make "a BS assertion"; like many/.ers, you really should check your facts before calling someone out like that.
Anathem would take up an entire college semester, let alone a high school one.
Besides, the students wouldn't have the appreciation for it. You need years of scientific and philosophical study to really grasp the entirety of Anathem. I just can't imagine many high schoolers have the knowledge of classical philosophy, as well as some of the advanced mathematics, to avoid having intricate details go right over their head.
(Spoilers ahead).
Agreed. After four years of fairly intensive university education, I "get" pretty much all of the mathematics and philosophy of science in the book (I think) but there's one part I'm still having difficulty tracking down -- what's the real-world equivalent of Lady Baritoe's "Sconics" in the book? Discussed by Arsibalt during the journey from Saunt Edhar to Bly's Butte. This is a classic example of Stephenson "showing his work", but unfortunately my philosophy isn't strong enough to work out what he's referring to...
Others have suggested Anathem, but you've illustrated quite well why it would be unsuitable. Basically, I feel that high school students won't have a mature enough understanding of philosophy and mathematics to understand what the book's actually about. I'm currently reading it for the third time, and but it's been clear to me from the start that the "weird society" is simply a vehicle for a commentary on long-term thinking and the philosophy of science.
I completely agree that Anathem is one of the most important science fiction works of the 21st century so far, but to say that it's worthy of study because it has a "weird society" is completely missing the point.
Neal Stephenson: Anathem (long-term thinking, philosophy of science)
Bruce Sterling brings a more biting social commentary to his opus. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Holy Fire all challenged me to view my own experience of the world in a new light. Reading Holy Fire, in particular, caused me look at healthcare in a completely different light, that of the "medical industrial complex," where Show Crash contained an indictment of nanotechnologies all-but-unresearched potential health consequences, and The Diamond Age presented a very cool virtual educational technology along with an explanation of why you'll never see it in public education. (It's the economics, stupid!)
Um. I think you'll find that Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are by Neal Stephenson, not Bruce Sterling (who indeed wrote Holy Fire).
I think you'd also enjoy Stephenson's latest book, Anathem.
Read some short stories by Asimov or Le Guin or Gaiman...
One of the nice things about science fiction/speculative fiction, in my opinion, is that it works wonderfully well in the short story format. Even something as short as Asimov's
'The Last Question' provides an enormous wealth of literary, historical and scientific topics to discuss.
Furthermore, you're quite right that too much $Fav_Author is bad, but I think that you would agree that some works are more worthy of in-class study than others!
They seek to consolidate their position as a cheap and reliable launcher of commercial satellites in the same way, with the advent of the Angara rocket family.
An ambitious and much delayed chunk of vaporware. With their record to date, don't hold your breath.
-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream
That... actually might not be a bad idea. $5/mo discount for being NAT'd, maybe with SOCKS 5 server proxy support. I'm sure a lot of people would be up for it.
Um, I think you'll find that, in reality, there will be a $5/mo premium for not being NAT'd. And SOCKS 5 proxy support? Hahahahaha.
Slashdot Mirror
the "freedoms" are an illusion. so long as either device you buy is tied to a draconian carrier its just another big ass phone screwing up the line of my pants and sucking down 5 hours worth of charge time in 3 days. the phones may be free, but their features, options and abilities will quickly be restricted at the carrier level.
A phone with freedoms is a phone that doesnt require service contracts or "new every 2" plans for hardware. Its also a phone that lets you question and subvert greedy carrier tactics and, god forbid, gauge and monitor a carriers network performance independently from their own claims of most reliable and most coverage. buy either one, but remember the freedom stops after the transceiver driver comes up.
So, since you can buy an N900 without a carrier contract, it's your dream phone, right?
On the other hand, the contract I'm getting with my N900 gives me unlimited data transfer, unlimited SMS and a big chunk of free talk time. So I'm not particularly worried about "sucking down 5 hours worth of charge time in 3 days." Believe me that if my carrier tries to restrict the capabilities of the phone, it'll be returned to them before you can say "Jack Rabbit" -- and they'll have to take it back.
But I guess you should ignore me; my lack of a tinfoil hat probably means that I'm imagining all that due to the brainwashing mind control beams irradiating my brain. Enjoy your paranoia!
I've only heard it pronounced "mee-mo", FWIW.
Well, the effort of packaging a application (a) to different platforms and (b) to different distributions is quite a duplicate one, involving a lot of people (and time).
Firstly, this proposal has absolutely no relevance to the difficulty of packaging to different distributions.
Secondly, packaging to different platforms has been solved. Most distributions now have compile farms where you submit a package specification (usually a very simple compilation script and a set of distribution-specific patches) and packages for all the various architectures get spat out automatically.
This proposal is a solution looking for a problem, as far as Free software is concerned. The only utility is where the application is closed-source and can't go through a Linux distribution's normal package compilation and distribution workflow.
Oh - bluetooth? Don't own it, can't see the point in it. USB seems to do everything that bluetooth claims to do.
So USB (a wired communications standard) seems to do everything that Bluetooth (a wireless communications standard) claims to do?
Miss the point much?
However, trying to paint the US armed forces as the same as a bunch of terrorists is disingenuous at best.
Only to a hard-core tribalist USian. To a majority of the population of the planet its a simple fact of life: US is an Empire and "terrorism" is a tool of warfare eagerly employed by both sides, the rag-tag insurgents and the Imperial Centurions alike.
Actually, I'm European. Nice rant though.
Also, if it is such a blind spot, why is it Western military spends so much effort avoiding it? You do know the US could blindly bomb every village in East Afghanistan with a few B-52's right?
Yes, if such a 'blind spot' existed, the US could solve their problems by bombing every village and major piece of infrastructure in East Afghanistan with one B-52 (loaded with W-80s, the weapon for each village dialed to the appropriate setting between 5 kT and 150 kT). What's the good of being an insurgent with nothing to fight for? W-80s are even pretty clean; the place would be livable within months, and back to background levels in a couple of years.
But since the alleged 'blind spot' doesn't exist, the coalition haven't been nuking villages.
The GP asked you to substantiate your claims. Would you care to, or shall we just assume you're a troll?
Simple answer: no one has any idea. The people targeted by the drones for extra-judicial assassinations are always and without exception "suspected" "militants" - i.e. people who might militantly oppose US interests, or interests of US sponsored warlords in some way or another. Some might be mass murderers, some merely opposed to their US-appointed "government" or simply enemies of some US informants. Or random bystanders. There is no way to tell.
I guess you're either an idiot, or didn't RTFA (oh wait).
A frequent occurrence is for UAV operators to watch a group of men dig a hole in the road, put something in it, and start to fill it back in. And then the operators shoot the device and them with a missile. Or for them to watch a guy fire some mortar rounds, chuck the mortar in the back of a pickup and cover it in a tarp, and drive off. And then the operators shoot the car and him with a missile.
Just because the intelligence that leads to the strikes is secret (no doubt to protect the details of the humint sources and also of the drones' capabilities) doesn't mean that it isn't there. The drones and their weapons are a limited resource, and even the USAF aren't stupid enough to waste millions of pounds blowing someone up because of mere suspicion.
But one thing can be known for certain, the hordes of children killed by the drones were definitely not "targeting" anyone.
So the bottom line is this: when you choose to descend to the levels of the atrocities that you accuse your "evil" opponents of ... you yourself have become the very evil you claim to fight. Which is clearly the case with the US of A, and which all rational observer have pointed out a long time ago.
I totally agree! How fortunate it is, then, that the USA hasn't. Their enemies deliberately target civilians; the USAF only kills civilians by accident, often due to bad intelligence or weapon malfunction.
It's clear you have an agenda from your emotive choice of vocabulary. However, trying to paint the US armed forces as the same as a bunch of terrorists is disingenuous at best.
Air power never wins wars, and that is what drones are.
It reminds me of a joke:
"Two Soviet tank commanders meet in the centre of Paris. One asks the other, "'By the way -- who won the air war?'"
As long as we keep blowing up women and children, we're making more enemies than we kill.
Not really. In fact, if the coalition were Doing It Right, the thought process would be, "The women and children got blown up. This was because there was insurgent activity in the area. If there was no insurgent activity, these attacks would stop. Therefore we should be uncooperative to the insurgents and rat them out to the coalition if possible." As it is, the civilians are more scared of the Taliban than of the coalition. Therefore the coalition are Doing It Wrong.
Whatever else our new strategy entails, "no civilian casualties" needs to be the cornerstone, or we're never going to win.
Please name a historical conflict (pre-1900) in which "no civilian casualties" was part of the victorious side's strategy.
If I remember correctly, an important part of successful strategies was often, "If you think they shelter the enemy, decimate them; if that doesn't work, kill them all, burn their homes and sow their fields with salt. No exceptions." Also, I believe enslaving civilians of captured lands was also a reliably successful strategy. If someone is worked to exhaustion, fed on a controlled diet and guarded night and day, they don't have much opportunity to support insurgents.
If you insist on "no civilian casualties," I recommend mass relocations of said civilians (preferably to different continents at the same time as stripping their assets and breaking up family groups), then replacing them with loyal, heavily-armed citizens from your home country. This would work a damn sight better than the current strategy, which seems to be to let civilians support insurgents, and then react to it after the fact in a haphazard fashion. Ideal!
i personally hang out in #openbsd, #linux, #macdev, as well as 3-4 other channels of popular, large projects, and i see exactly what he or she speaks about, on a frequent basis as opposed to your observation. in #linux in particular i've been a visitor the past 4 years, spending much of my time "picking up" the people who go there to most often just get slagged down on for asking "stupid questions" as they try to learn.
Yes, you're one of the "nice guys" I mentioned. I'm often in #kde and #fedora, and the people there seem fairly helpful (although the #fedora folks have a penchant for telling people that they don't actually want to do whatever it is they're asking about).
Instead of being friendly and helpful, spending 30 seconds giving a kind answer to help another, these people instead gladly spend 5 minutes elaborating to another how stupid they are, how wrong they are, how inefficient their idea is, how bad their way of thinking is, how wrong they are for trying to learn things the way they do, how wrong they try to solve problems and solve their task, and, in the end, that they should just "rtfm/google" or similar.
I hang out on a variety of Freenode channels regularly, and I see an incident like that about once every three months. Nowadays, when I see people asking questions that would have yielded a detailed, step by step response if they'd typed it into Google instead of an IRC channel, the experienced people in the channel seem to go to the trouble of answering carefully even when they answer the exact same noob questions several times a day.
And yes, I do tell people to RTFM from time to time, especially when people clearly haven't read it before asking their question. I even tell them where to find the manual, and which section they might want to look in. This is because I personally have better things to do than copy and paste sections of manuals into IRC all day. Of course, if someone has read the manual, I'm very happy to help them in more detail.
I'm getting a definite sensation of, "I got an unhelpful response on an IRC channel once in 1998 and I'm still bitter about it," from you.
And guess what frequency bicycle tail lights flash at?
FWIW, I've never seen a bike light flashing at more than approx. 3 Hz. Mine is about 2.5 Hz.
Investment is a cost...
Um. That doesn't seem to ring true with what I was taught in my accounting classes.
Remember, this is all part a discussion of whether it is possible to fit more than 56kbit/s of data into the 0-4000 Hz range.
Was it? I thought it was about fitting more than 56 kbit/s of data into the 4kHz low-pass band on a phone line.
And I disagree about reducing resistance being the big problem -- if you do the maths, you'll find that shot noise in the semiconductor devices at each end of the line is a much bigger deal. Also, copper wires are so 20th century -- for long distance lines (i.e. more than a hundred metres or so) fibre is better both in terms of cost and performance.
Shannon's Limit is a much better an example. We have C = B * Log2(1+S/N). B is fixed, so we are left with the SNR as the determining factor. Now granted, there may be physical limits on how high this value could ever go, but I have not seen any proof of such, so I will not assume they exist until mathematically proven otherwise. With that in mind, any current limitation on this value is still technological (medium quality, techniques to minimize noise, etc), not physical. If you can prove the SNR fundamentally cannot go above a certain value, I would love to see it, and will gladly admit that you are correct.
For an infinite SNR, you require one of the following conditions to be true:
There is therefore some finite upper limit on the SNR which cannot be exceeded for the physical medium of your phone line, before we start wondering about the cost of manufacturing and powering the equipment at each end, and any relevant legislation (since your phone line will act as an antenna at some frequencies).
And for the matter at hand, 2G and 3G are quite spectrally inefficient. LTE will be much better. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandwidth_efficiency#Comparison_table
You're comparing the maximum achievable spectral efficiency. What will the average efficiency achieved in practice be?
To say that an analog medium has defined universal limits and that no technology is capable of using it more efficiently sounds like a BS assertion, i think you should cite some sources for a claim like that.
The Shannon-Hartley theorem states that if you have a channel with bandwidth B (in this case, let's say 8 kHz), with additive white Gaussian noise giving a signal-to-noise power ratio of S/N (let's be conservative and say 20 dB), the maximum information capacity of the channel C is given by:
C = B log (1 + S/N)
where the logarithm is taken base 2 to give C units of bits per second. With the numbers above for the analogue channel, this would provide an absolute upper bound on information capacity of C = 53266 bps. Using modern coding systems (LDPC, for instance) it's possible to approach that limit.
An analogue medium does indeed have universal information capacity limits. As any physicist (or electronic engineer, for that matter) will tell you, not only is the analogue bandwidth available usually fixed, but also improving SNR is really, really hard. It doesn't get easier when you're trying to simultaneously make the hardware as small and as power-efficient as possible.
The GP did not make "a BS assertion"; like many /.ers, you really should check your facts before calling someone out like that.
Anathem would take up an entire college semester, let alone a high school one.
Besides, the students wouldn't have the appreciation for it. You need years of scientific and philosophical study to really grasp the entirety of Anathem. I just can't imagine many high schoolers have the knowledge of classical philosophy, as well as some of the advanced mathematics, to avoid having intricate details go right over their head.
(Spoilers ahead).
Agreed. After four years of fairly intensive university education, I "get" pretty much all of the mathematics and philosophy of science in the book (I think) but there's one part I'm still having difficulty tracking down -- what's the real-world equivalent of Lady Baritoe's "Sconics" in the book? Discussed by Arsibalt during the journey from Saunt Edhar to Bly's Butte. This is a classic example of Stephenson "showing his work", but unfortunately my philosophy isn't strong enough to work out what he's referring to...
Neal Stephenson: Anathem (weird society)
Others have suggested Anathem, but you've illustrated quite well why it would be unsuitable. Basically, I feel that high school students won't have a mature enough understanding of philosophy and mathematics to understand what the book's actually about. I'm currently reading it for the third time, and but it's been clear to me from the start that the "weird society" is simply a vehicle for a commentary on long-term thinking and the philosophy of science.
I completely agree that Anathem is one of the most important science fiction works of the 21st century so far, but to say that it's worthy of study because it has a "weird society" is completely missing the point.
Neal Stephenson: Anathem (long-term thinking, philosophy of science)
Fixed that for you.
Bruce Sterling brings a more biting social commentary to his opus. Snow Crash, The Diamond Age and Holy Fire all challenged me to view my own experience of the world in a new light. Reading Holy Fire, in particular, caused me look at healthcare in a completely different light, that of the "medical industrial complex," where Show Crash contained an indictment of nanotechnologies all-but-unresearched potential health consequences, and The Diamond Age presented a very cool virtual educational technology along with an explanation of why you'll never see it in public education. (It's the economics, stupid!)
Um. I think you'll find that Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are by Neal Stephenson, not Bruce Sterling (who indeed wrote Holy Fire).
I think you'd also enjoy Stephenson's latest book, Anathem.
Unless it's about robots.
Even the books about robots are, fundamentally, about people.
Read some short stories by Asimov or Le Guin or Gaiman...
One of the nice things about science fiction/speculative fiction, in my opinion, is that it works wonderfully well in the short story format. Even something as short as Asimov's 'The Last Question' provides an enormous wealth of literary, historical and scientific topics to discuss.
Furthermore, you're quite right that too much $Fav_Author is bad, but I think that you would agree that some works are more worthy of in-class study than others!
They seek to consolidate their position as a cheap and reliable launcher of commercial satellites in the same way, with the advent of the Angara rocket family.
An ambitious and much delayed chunk of vaporware. With their record to date, don't hold your breath.
Dnepr has been highly successful, IMHO.
-ISPs dropping granting an IP to residential customers and phones on the base plans, using NAT upstream
That... actually might not be a bad idea. $5/mo discount for being NAT'd, maybe with SOCKS 5 server proxy support. I'm sure a lot of people would be up for it.
Um, I think you'll find that, in reality, there will be a $5/mo premium for not being NAT'd. And SOCKS 5 proxy support? Hahahahaha.