The US cable modem companies started the meme that running servers at home was bad, back during the early trials when they had equipment problems, crappy town-by-town tv infrastructure, and lots of pressure from the telco's "web hog" DSL commercials, and they've infected lots of other carriers with it, even though the reasons for it haven't been valid for a decade. (And the fear that they'll get bad publicity if their service is slow because somebody's running a porn website at home and burning their neighborhood's upstream bandwidth, which was a big motivation, has been replaced by the reality that many of their users are zombie-infested spammers, which also encourages them to ban useful services at home.)
The Australian ISPs started the "monthly download cap" meme, back when wholesale bandwidth to Australia was expensive and content was directionally unbalanced, and they've infected lots of other carriers with it recently, especially the cable modem companies, even though that also hasn't reflected reality for a long time even in Australia. (At least in the US, it makes a lot of sense for the cable companies to peer with hosting companies and content providers like Youtube to reduce costs for both sides, and GB/month doesn't reflect the underlying costs of transit anyway.)
And unfortunately, wireless companies have tended to be infected by both of these memes, with the extra incentive that they actually do have capacity issues on the spectrum in their cells. But still, they tend to be over-aggressive about things like running a Wifi router off your wireless card so you can support all the computers in your house on one firewalled connection, so do read each carrier's ToS carefully to make sure it doesn't ban anything critical to you. One reason I'm using a small ISP that's reselling telco DSL is that their acceptable use policy is "we sold you a real internet connection, not a walled-garden account, so do anything you want except spamming."
WiMax can support very high speed connections and very long distances, and has great hype with it. But in reality, it can support very high speeds over short distances, or moderately low speeds over long distances, and ISPs have to make some tradeoff in between based on how many customers they can get in the cell around a given antenna, and by the time they're done, it's no longer spectacularly shiny. (4G doesn't really exist yet, so of course it'll be really really cool when it gets here, while 3G was really really cool last year until it was widely deployed....) The two main 3G services have technology upgrade paths that are being deployed, so services will probably get faster (though you may need new hardware), while WiMax may be faster now than after it gets more customers, at least if you're close enough to have a strong signal.
In reality, you need to look at what's available where you live - can you get a good signal or not? - and on the service provider's terms of service, and other services you may also be buying (TV? Wired phones? Mobile phones?), and on how mobile you plan to be. 3G has the advantage that you've probably got some friends who have the service providers you want to try out, and you can invite them over to find out if you can actually get good enough speeds or not.
(You've probably already figured out whether you currently hate your cable company or your cellphone company or your wired phone company more...) - but do read the service plan details carefully, because "unlimited" usually doesn't _actually_ mean "not having limits" unless the marketing people have recently gotten spanked by regulators, so it's likely that they'll have fine print you need to care about saying what the limits are and how much excess bandwidth costs. Unfortunately, for wireless providers, heavy bandwidth use translates into cell capacity exhaustion, so dealing with it may cost them actual money, as opposed to wired providers where it only translates into statistical increases in their peering and transit usage, which is a lot cheaper, and they're still only slowly getting the clues that computer users have much higher bandwidth expectations than cellphone/text/paging users, so they may not realize where the boundaries of "greedy" vs. "cheapskate" are.
I remember when we had an array of DSPs that got us a GigaFLOPS worth of horsepower, and could do cool things like ray tracing with it. And that Cray-1, which had 100-250 MLOPS, depending on how much parallelism you could get your programs to use. And even my VAX could support 40-50 users....
I'm actually finding this video-card discussion frustrating, because they new ones all seem to want PCI-Express. My home desktop motherboard does AGP, and none of the AGP graphics cards I can find support 1920x1200; I don't think most of them support 1600x1xxx. So if I go get a decent LCD monitor, I'm going to need to replace the motherboard to support the graphics card...
I've taken a couple of welding courses over at Techshop, and there's a range of welding goggle technology out there. Electric-arc welding (MIG, TIG, old-style stick, etc.) needs really dark goggles, and photo-sensitive welding goggles are available and really cool. They're adjustable-strength, and I think the technology is LCDs driven by a photocell, as opposed to a purely chemical mechanism like sunglasses. (For gas torch welding, the glasses don't need to be as strong, and the standard "adjustable" technology is just flip-up green lenses.) Unfortunately, the automatic ones cost about $200, as opposed to non-adjustable welding helmets that are usually under $100 or torch-welding goggles that are priced like sunglasses.
If this technology is dark enough for welding,,and not too expensive it's fast enough to be effective.
Sure, my Tivo _has_ a LiveTV button, but I almost never use it. Occasionally I'll watch shows in near-real-time if they happen to be on (e.g. the first few minutes of Colbert after Jon Stewart records and before Leno starts), but even then I'll usually watch something else for 5-10 minutes so that Tivo has enough head-start that I can watch the live show without commercials.
Yes, there are people who upload material in infringing ways. But there are also lots of people who upload material in ways that (at least in the US, Your Kilometers/litre May Vary Elsewhere) don't infringe copyright but are still complained about by record labels and other alleged copyright holders. One way to support alternatives to infringing activities is to support groups like the EFF and Lessig's folks in defending fair use.
The electronic voting push was mainly because the US Republican Party got embarrassed by how narrowly they might or might not have won the election in Florida, where a Republican governor and Republican election commission official were widely accused of having rigged the vote count. Electronic voting machines were "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" about Republicans wanting the election results to be objective and accurate. (Not that the Democrats don't have a long history of voter fraud themselves, but at least they did it with skill and style.) And if they're a Good Thing here in the US, they're a Good Thing to push everywhere, and the voting machine companies did have sales people with quotas to make.
The push for non-verifiable voting machines probably had more to do with protecting the friends of the Republican party who were big players in the business than in actually facilitating fraud - after all, casting doubt on the trustability of the machines is casting doubt on the trustability of the Republicans, which is entirely off the message.
Also, even if the machines were trustable and auditable, they're still useful for voter fraud. In the 2004 elections in Ohio, the black urban voting precincts that were likely to vote Democrat didn't get enough of the machines, or all the parts needed to have them working, leading to hours-long lines on a rainy election day, while the suburban white Republican districts didn't have those problems. With paper ballots, it's much easier to fix that kind of problem, but with an all-electronic system and an election commissioner who'd promised to deliver pro-Republican results, it's just way too complicated, sorry, not our bad.
Racism's amazingly flexible about who you count as the "racially different" enemy. The Irish weren't just Catholics from a different island in the British Isles, they were red-haired or non-Anglo-looking black-haired people, and talked funny even if they did speak English and not Gaelic, and they got stereotyped as drunks in an America where the dominant-culture locals were also drunk off their asses most of the time but were also starting to have rabid temperance movements. And the Brits had centuries of practice in identifying who the Celtic cultures they ruled were...
The real problem with using American-style electronic voting machines is that the "Change the vote to Republican" option that was such a big sales pitch here in the US doesn't work in Ireland, where the "Republican Party" is a different group of people...
It's not hard to get private entities to build redundant systems as long as they get paid for it - they're trying to sell reliable service to customers, and many kinds of customers need redundancy, and it's very hard to provide even regular reliability without it. If they had had better geographical diversity down there, then the vandals would have had to cut two different manholes in south county to do the job instead of cutting one down there and one up in the location they vandalized. Post-2001, it _is_ harder for businesses to get information on what redundancy is available, because while they all are much more aware that they need it, the governments have pushed the never-tell-anybody-real-locations paranoia - and realistically, while everybody can tell that the large building downtown with no windows and a faded bell logo on the wall is a telco office, the only way they can tell where fibers are is to look for the "Don't Dig Here - Fiber" signs which don't tell you which ones are critical.
What's hard to get is Right of Way, and governments can sometimes help that but often interfere - highway departments can be really difficult to deal with, compared to railroads which are usually much more helpful because they're in business and you're paying them. It's especially a problem in the area south of San Jose, because the government regulators constrain ex-monopoly-telcos to operating in LATA boundaries, and they're near several LATA boundaries down there (because it used to be mostly empty farmland, and a lot of it has hills that aren't stable enough to put significant housing on, so most of the area is either reservoir watersheds or cattle ranches on one side of the freeway.) It used to be that the only industry down there was one railroad company, some farmers, and biker bars, and it was 30-40 miles from Watsonville up to the San Jose POP, a frequently-flooding river between them and Santa Cruz, and a LATA boundary between them and Monterey. Even so, I found it surprising that one well-placed cable cut was enough - usually there's one direct connection available and if a business customer needs redundancy, you can find them a second connection but it'll cost a lot more because it has to go a lot longer.
But even in northern Silicon Valley and the peninsula, there are a number of areas that don't have as much redundancy as they'd like because the locations where telcos can cross freeways are limited. From a nationwide carrier perspective, things are better - while there are some constraints, like a limited number of railroads and highways crossing the Rockies, and a few major cities that have limited numbers of bridges and tunnels, so cable cuts out west will cost you a bunch of extra milliseconds, but the carriers do have alternate routes, and the growth of Microsoft and the Phoenix-area financial and high-tech data centers has meant that everybody's got extra capacity on the northern and southern routes as well as I-80.
The one other source of right-of-way I'm familiar with was a gas pipeline company that ran lots of fiber along their routes. They had a certain advantage over the rest of the industry, because while Bubba the Backhoe Driver might ignore a "telco fiber - don't dig here" sign, a "Gas Pipeline! Explosive! Flammable! Don't Dig Here or You'll Blow Up and Die" sign generally got its point across better.
Disclaimer: This is entirely my personal opinion, not that of any current or past employer.
No, that's not correct, though there's a certain amount of Moore's-Law-like behaviour where the newest cable always has a significantly higher capacity than anything built before it. There's a limited number and capacity of cables going from India to Europe through the Mediterranean, but a somewhat larger number going to and/or around Singapore, and from there there's a wide range of cables heading to North America, either more or less directly, plus a bit of connectivity going to North America by way of Australia and even less going to Europe around the southern end of Africa.
For India-Europe, the cables mostly go through the Med, and have been getting cut a lot recently, usually by ships but occasionally by earthquakes. For India and Southern Asia to Japan and North America, almost everything passes between Taiwan and the Philippines, as we discovered in the earthquake a couple of years ago that took out 95% of it at once (and there's now an effort to build some that go around the other side of the Philippines, but the geography's difficult, and there's some growth in land-based cables across Russia and Kazakhstan.) Australia has decent connections to the US, if you don't mind a few thousand extra miles worth of milliseconds, but their connections to Japan that don't go through the Taiwan Straits mostly go via North America, though there's increasing growth in connections via Hawaii and Guam that cuts off some of that distance.
You don't have to be a lawyer to sue somebody - he can still do that. What it does interfere with is whether he can sue somebody on behalf of a client, as opposed to being the plaintiff himself (or one of the lead plaintiffs in a class action.) He doesn't even need to have a lawyer, and he's already no stranger to having a fool for a client, though it's possible he can come up with some sucker who'll represent him for a share of the take without an upfront payment, or some political action group that'll fund his next lawsuit against his next victim even if he's the plaintiff.
They say there's no bad publicity as long as they spell your name right, but here on/., I've seen Thompson and Thomson already:-)
We couldn't have elected the corpse of Ashcroft - he's Not Dead Yet, and even now he still won't get on the cart. But I would have happily had Richard Nixon back rather than George W. Bush, and the fact that Nixon was already dead doesn't change that...
No, the problem with the OP's post is that he's a troll:-)
But troll, it ain't so. Egypt was also the counter-example I thought of first, especially since the Afro-Centrism folks make a big deal of ancient Egyptians being black people with lighter-colored slaves and servants, and there's Coptic (also mainly in Egypt), and the Ethiopian writing systems used by Amharic and other languages, which you'll typically see on the walls of Ethiopian restaurants. While Swahili and the non-Arabic western and southern African languages generally use Roman fonts, remember that the Roman alphabets are somewhat derived from Greek and Etruscan languages, which they mostly derived from the Phoenicians, who got theirs from farther-east Semitic groups.
Back when the Ethiopians started writing in their Semitic-based scripts and the Copts in their Greek-derived ones, the Northern Europeans hadn't yet figured out how to carve runes into stones, though the Irish were carving Ogham, and everywhere the Romans went, people were starting to write if they didn't know how already. And the Library at Alexandria had burned down centuries before Beowulf got written...
I think the concept had been around for quite a while by then; I tend to attribute it to the Project-Orion-era speculations about what you could do with nuclear bombs (spacecraft, digging canals, the whole Atoms for Peace shtick), but even if that wasn't the origin, the concept had been hanging around science fiction for a while by the late 70s.
A large explosion probably could stop a tornado, but hurricanes are much much bigger, and you'd need to do something to actually dissipate the heat energy that's driving the hurricane to stop it, as opposed to merely disrupting airflow which might be enough to make a tornado into some other shape of windstorm.
While I've never agreed with the legal theories that allow most wiretapping, the courts have, and this wiretap was approved by a court.
However, dropping prosecution in return for the Congresscritter actively supporting their political agenda strikes me as somewhere on the spectrum between extortion and at least partisan favoritism.
There are lots of people who like to beat up queers, and they seem to have pretty broad definitions of who's queer enough to beat up. Even aside from them, there are lots of people who discriminate against people because of their sexual identity or behaviour or whatever.
Yes, you're being to hung up on the extreme, though living around San Francisco is a good way to get your parameters for extremeness reset. One of my friends had the surgery a few years ago. His chromosomes were XXY, and while he had male external parts, his endocrine system never did really get along with being male that well (things like not going through puberty until his mid-20s). Being not-quite-female seems to be working much better, and most of us get the new name right almost all the time. (On the other hand, I've met several other people who just look like unskilled drag queens; it's easier to ask people to treat you as a woman when you're small and thin than when you're built like a football player.)
Hey, Apple borrows the Dalai Lama's picture for their "Think Different" advertising poster campaign a few years ago. Surely they can become unattached to their possessions enough to donate a bunch of Macs...
"Holy trinity" is just fine, and in fact pretty near mandatory, in a Protestant church. (The Unitarians don't really count..., nor do the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Mormons have been way outside since their beginnings.) Are you thinking of the Holy Family evolving into the veneration of Mary by Catholics or something?
I don't know how the Tibetans feel about borrowing from the simple austere practices of Zen - probably much better than the reverse, since Tibetan Buddhism is a complex eclectic morass has absorbed lots of the old Bon religions, with gods, deities, shamanism, malicious spirits that need placating, prayer flags, etc. as well as more traditionally Buddhist practices and beliefs. And even koans are mainly from one of the various schools of Zen, though they're perhaps the best known in the West, though "getting the damned point" is certainly a Zen kind of thing:-)
The article's assertion was that the frequent posters are usually not the most popular ones, because adding lots of material doesn't usually have enough novelty necessary to attract lots of viewers.
From a profitability standpoint, that's ok - some fraction of the cost of YouTube is uploading and storing new content, but a presumably-larger fraction is the cost of transmitting it to viewers, and the cost to YouTube for transmitting 3 minutes of video to a watcher is relatively independent of whether it was Video 12345678 or video 87654321. (It's a bit different - the most popular videos will get cached more, but that's still independent of whether they're from uploaders who post a little or a lot.)
The big question becomes whether they can make money on the average viewing of a video, whether that's from ads on the page or commercials at the beginning of the video or soundtrack song sales or whatever. Will that depend on how much the authors post, or only on how often individual videos get played? Will some _kinds_ of content be more profitable than others, and will they find a way to promote those or at least prioritize them?
Google didn't buy a money-making business and then have it fail; they bought a very popular service that had not yet deployed a profit-making business model, and they haven't yet gotten it to make a profit. It's a much different situation, and they knew it when they bought it, so it's not like they're surprised.
The real question is how and when they thought they'd be able to get it to profitability, and whether they're on track for that yet or not. If they expected it to be making a profit by now and it's not close, then FAIL, but if they didn't, it's in the same shape as any 1990s-boom internet startup, potentially realistic or potentially just another underpants-gnomes waiting for 5. PROFIT! to happen.
The OJ trials reached the correct results - the police framed him, so they don't get to throw him in jail, but he really did kill her, so the civil court awarded wergild to her family. On the other hand, he tried to trick his way out of paying, so that bizarre robbery trial seemed like just deserts.
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The US cable modem companies started the meme that running servers at home was bad, back during the early trials when they had equipment problems, crappy town-by-town tv infrastructure, and lots of pressure from the telco's "web hog" DSL commercials, and they've infected lots of other carriers with it, even though the reasons for it haven't been valid for a decade. (And the fear that they'll get bad publicity if their service is slow because somebody's running a porn website at home and burning their neighborhood's upstream bandwidth, which was a big motivation, has been replaced by the reality that many of their users are zombie-infested spammers, which also encourages them to ban useful services at home.)
The Australian ISPs started the "monthly download cap" meme, back when wholesale bandwidth to Australia was expensive and content was directionally unbalanced, and they've infected lots of other carriers with it recently, especially the cable modem companies, even though that also hasn't reflected reality for a long time even in Australia. (At least in the US, it makes a lot of sense for the cable companies to peer with hosting companies and content providers like Youtube to reduce costs for both sides, and GB/month doesn't reflect the underlying costs of transit anyway.)
And unfortunately, wireless companies have tended to be infected by both of these memes, with the extra incentive that they actually do have capacity issues on the spectrum in their cells. But still, they tend to be over-aggressive about things like running a Wifi router off your wireless card so you can support all the computers in your house on one firewalled connection, so do read each carrier's ToS carefully to make sure it doesn't ban anything critical to you. One reason I'm using a small ISP that's reselling telco DSL is that their acceptable use policy is "we sold you a real internet connection, not a walled-garden account, so do anything you want except spamming."
WiMax can support very high speed connections and very long distances, and has great hype with it. But in reality, it can support very high speeds over short distances, or moderately low speeds over long distances, and ISPs have to make some tradeoff in between based on how many customers they can get in the cell around a given antenna, and by the time they're done, it's no longer spectacularly shiny. (4G doesn't really exist yet, so of course it'll be really really cool when it gets here, while 3G was really really cool last year until it was widely deployed....) The two main 3G services have technology upgrade paths that are being deployed, so services will probably get faster (though you may need new hardware), while WiMax may be faster now than after it gets more customers, at least if you're close enough to have a strong signal.
In reality, you need to look at what's available where you live - can you get a good signal or not? - and on the service provider's terms of service, and other services you may also be buying (TV? Wired phones? Mobile phones?), and on how mobile you plan to be. 3G has the advantage that you've probably got some friends who have the service providers you want to try out, and you can invite them over to find out if you can actually get good enough speeds or not.
(You've probably already figured out whether you currently hate your cable company or your cellphone company or your wired phone company more...) - but do read the service plan details carefully, because "unlimited" usually doesn't _actually_ mean "not having limits" unless the marketing people have recently gotten spanked by regulators, so it's likely that they'll have fine print you need to care about saying what the limits are and how much excess bandwidth costs. Unfortunately, for wireless providers, heavy bandwidth use translates into cell capacity exhaustion, so dealing with it may cost them actual money, as opposed to wired providers where it only translates into statistical increases in their peering and transit usage, which is a lot cheaper, and they're still only slowly getting the clues that computer users have much higher bandwidth expectations than cellphone/text/paging users, so they may not realize where the boundaries of "greedy" vs. "cheapskate" are.
I remember when we had an array of DSPs that got us a GigaFLOPS worth of horsepower, and could do cool things like ray tracing with it. And that Cray-1, which had 100-250 MLOPS, depending on how much parallelism you could get your programs to use. And even my VAX could support 40-50 users....
I'm actually finding this video-card discussion frustrating, because they new ones all seem to want PCI-Express. My home desktop motherboard does AGP, and none of the AGP graphics cards I can find support 1920x1200; I don't think most of them support 1600x1xxx. So if I go get a decent LCD monitor, I'm going to need to replace the motherboard to support the graphics card...
I've taken a couple of welding courses over at Techshop, and there's a range of welding goggle technology out there. Electric-arc welding (MIG, TIG, old-style stick, etc.) needs really dark goggles, and photo-sensitive welding goggles are available and really cool. They're adjustable-strength, and I think the technology is LCDs driven by a photocell, as opposed to a purely chemical mechanism like sunglasses. (For gas torch welding, the glasses don't need to be as strong, and the standard "adjustable" technology is just flip-up green lenses.) Unfortunately, the automatic ones cost about $200, as opposed to non-adjustable welding helmets that are usually under $100 or torch-welding goggles that are priced like sunglasses.
If this technology is dark enough for welding, ,and not too expensive it's fast enough to be effective.
Sure, my Tivo _has_ a LiveTV button, but I almost never use it. Occasionally I'll watch shows in near-real-time if they happen to be on (e.g. the first few minutes of Colbert after Jon Stewart records and before Leno starts), but even then I'll usually watch something else for 5-10 minutes so that Tivo has enough head-start that I can watch the live show without commercials.
Yes, there are people who upload material in infringing ways. But there are also lots of people who upload material in ways that (at least in the US, Your Kilometers/litre May Vary Elsewhere) don't infringe copyright but are still complained about by record labels and other alleged copyright holders. One way to support alternatives to infringing activities is to support groups like the EFF and Lessig's folks in defending fair use.
The electronic voting push was mainly because the US Republican Party got embarrassed by how narrowly they might or might not have won the election in Florida, where a Republican governor and Republican election commission official were widely accused of having rigged the vote count. Electronic voting machines were "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" about Republicans wanting the election results to be objective and accurate. (Not that the Democrats don't have a long history of voter fraud themselves, but at least they did it with skill and style.) And if they're a Good Thing here in the US, they're a Good Thing to push everywhere, and the voting machine companies did have sales people with quotas to make.
The push for non-verifiable voting machines probably had more to do with protecting the friends of the Republican party who were big players in the business than in actually facilitating fraud - after all, casting doubt on the trustability of the machines is casting doubt on the trustability of the Republicans, which is entirely off the message.
Also, even if the machines were trustable and auditable, they're still useful for voter fraud. In the 2004 elections in Ohio, the black urban voting precincts that were likely to vote Democrat didn't get enough of the machines, or all the parts needed to have them working, leading to hours-long lines on a rainy election day, while the suburban white Republican districts didn't have those problems. With paper ballots, it's much easier to fix that kind of problem, but with an all-electronic system and an election commissioner who'd promised to deliver pro-Republican results, it's just way too complicated, sorry, not our bad.
Racism's amazingly flexible about who you count as the "racially different" enemy. The Irish weren't just Catholics from a different island in the British Isles, they were red-haired or non-Anglo-looking black-haired people, and talked funny even if they did speak English and not Gaelic, and they got stereotyped as drunks in an America where the dominant-culture locals were also drunk off their asses most of the time but were also starting to have rabid temperance movements. And the Brits had centuries of practice in identifying who the Celtic cultures they ruled were...
The real problem with using American-style electronic voting machines is that the "Change the vote to Republican" option that was such a big sales pitch here in the US doesn't work in Ireland, where the "Republican Party" is a different group of people...
It's not hard to get private entities to build redundant systems as long as they get paid for it - they're trying to sell reliable service to customers, and many kinds of customers need redundancy, and it's very hard to provide even regular reliability without it. If they had had better geographical diversity down there, then the vandals would have had to cut two different manholes in south county to do the job instead of cutting one down there and one up in the location they vandalized. Post-2001, it _is_ harder for businesses to get information on what redundancy is available, because while they all are much more aware that they need it, the governments have pushed the never-tell-anybody-real-locations paranoia - and realistically, while everybody can tell that the large building downtown with no windows and a faded bell logo on the wall is a telco office, the only way they can tell where fibers are is to look for the "Don't Dig Here - Fiber" signs which don't tell you which ones are critical.
What's hard to get is Right of Way, and governments can sometimes help that but often interfere - highway departments can be really difficult to deal with, compared to railroads which are usually much more helpful because they're in business and you're paying them. It's especially a problem in the area south of San Jose, because the government regulators constrain ex-monopoly-telcos to operating in LATA boundaries, and they're near several LATA boundaries down there (because it used to be mostly empty farmland, and a lot of it has hills that aren't stable enough to put significant housing on, so most of the area is either reservoir watersheds or cattle ranches on one side of the freeway.) It used to be that the only industry down there was one railroad company, some farmers, and biker bars, and it was 30-40 miles from Watsonville up to the San Jose POP, a frequently-flooding river between them and Santa Cruz, and a LATA boundary between them and Monterey. Even so, I found it surprising that one well-placed cable cut was enough - usually there's one direct connection available and if a business customer needs redundancy, you can find them a second connection but it'll cost a lot more because it has to go a lot longer.
But even in northern Silicon Valley and the peninsula, there are a number of areas that don't have as much redundancy as they'd like because the locations where telcos can cross freeways are limited. From a nationwide carrier perspective, things are better - while there are some constraints, like a limited number of railroads and highways crossing the Rockies, and a few major cities that have limited numbers of bridges and tunnels, so cable cuts out west will cost you a bunch of extra milliseconds, but the carriers do have alternate routes, and the growth of Microsoft and the Phoenix-area financial and high-tech data centers has meant that everybody's got extra capacity on the northern and southern routes as well as I-80.
The one other source of right-of-way I'm familiar with was a gas pipeline company that ran lots of fiber along their routes. They had a certain advantage over the rest of the industry, because while Bubba the Backhoe Driver might ignore a "telco fiber - don't dig here" sign, a "Gas Pipeline! Explosive! Flammable! Don't Dig Here or You'll Blow Up and Die" sign generally got its point across better.
Disclaimer: This is entirely my personal opinion, not that of any current or past employer.
No, that's not correct, though there's a certain amount of Moore's-Law-like behaviour where the newest cable always has a significantly higher capacity than anything built before it. There's a limited number and capacity of cables going from India to Europe through the Mediterranean, but a somewhat larger number going to and/or around Singapore, and from there there's a wide range of cables heading to North America, either more or less directly, plus a bit of connectivity going to North America by way of Australia and even less going to Europe around the southern end of Africa.
For India-Europe, the cables mostly go through the Med, and have been getting cut a lot recently, usually by ships but occasionally by earthquakes. For India and Southern Asia to Japan and North America, almost everything passes between Taiwan and the Philippines, as we discovered in the earthquake a couple of years ago that took out 95% of it at once (and there's now an effort to build some that go around the other side of the Philippines, but the geography's difficult, and there's some growth in land-based cables across Russia and Kazakhstan.) Australia has decent connections to the US, if you don't mind a few thousand extra miles worth of milliseconds, but their connections to Japan that don't go through the Taiwan Straits mostly go via North America, though there's increasing growth in connections via Hawaii and Guam that cuts off some of that distance.
Or maybe it's up to 95 by now, but certainly not until then.
I'd been going to do some reference about Enki putting a nam-shub on your ass, but I've been totally outclassed and pwn3d here :-)
You don't have to be a lawyer to sue somebody - he can still do that. What it does interfere with is whether he can sue somebody on behalf of a client, as opposed to being the plaintiff himself (or one of the lead plaintiffs in a class action.) He doesn't even need to have a lawyer, and he's already no stranger to having a fool for a client, though it's possible he can come up with some sucker who'll represent him for a share of the take without an upfront payment, or some political action group that'll fund his next lawsuit against his next victim even if he's the plaintiff.
They say there's no bad publicity as long as they spell your name right, but here on /., I've seen Thompson and Thomson already :-)
We couldn't have elected the corpse of Ashcroft - he's Not Dead Yet, and even now he still won't get on the cart. But I would have happily had Richard Nixon back rather than George W. Bush, and the fact that Nixon was already dead doesn't change that...
No, the problem with the OP's post is that he's a troll :-)
But troll, it ain't so. Egypt was also the counter-example I thought of first, especially since the Afro-Centrism folks make a big deal of ancient Egyptians being black people with lighter-colored slaves and servants, and there's Coptic (also mainly in Egypt), and the Ethiopian writing systems used by Amharic and other languages, which you'll typically see on the walls of Ethiopian restaurants. While Swahili and the non-Arabic western and southern African languages generally use Roman fonts, remember that the Roman alphabets are somewhat derived from Greek and Etruscan languages, which they mostly derived from the Phoenicians, who got theirs from farther-east Semitic groups.
Back when the Ethiopians started writing in their Semitic-based scripts and the Copts in their Greek-derived ones, the Northern Europeans hadn't yet figured out how to carve runes into stones, though the Irish were carving Ogham, and everywhere the Romans went, people were starting to write if they didn't know how already. And the Library at Alexandria had burned down centuries before Beowulf got written...
I think the concept had been around for quite a while by then; I tend to attribute it to the Project-Orion-era speculations about what you could do with nuclear bombs (spacecraft, digging canals, the whole Atoms for Peace shtick), but even if that wasn't the origin, the concept had been hanging around science fiction for a while by the late 70s.
A large explosion probably could stop a tornado, but hurricanes are much much bigger, and you'd need to do something to actually dissipate the heat energy that's driving the hurricane to stop it, as opposed to merely disrupting airflow which might be enough to make a tornado into some other shape of windstorm.
While I've never agreed with the legal theories that allow most wiretapping, the courts have, and this wiretap was approved by a court.
However, dropping prosecution in return for the Congresscritter actively supporting their political agenda strikes me as somewhere on the spectrum between extortion and at least partisan favoritism.
There are lots of people who like to beat up queers, and they seem to have pretty broad definitions of who's queer enough to beat up. Even aside from them, there are lots of people who discriminate against people because of their sexual identity or behaviour or whatever.
Yes, you're being to hung up on the extreme, though living around San Francisco is a good way to get your parameters for extremeness reset. One of my friends had the surgery a few years ago. His chromosomes were XXY, and while he had male external parts, his endocrine system never did really get along with being male that well (things like not going through puberty until his mid-20s). Being not-quite-female seems to be working much better, and most of us get the new name right almost all the time. (On the other hand, I've met several other people who just look like unskilled drag queens; it's easier to ask people to treat you as a woman when you're small and thin than when you're built like a football player.)
Oh, come on, somebody had to post something like that one....
Hey, Apple borrows the Dalai Lama's picture for their "Think Different" advertising poster campaign a few years ago. Surely they can become unattached to their possessions enough to donate a bunch of Macs...
"Holy trinity" is just fine, and in fact pretty near mandatory, in a Protestant church. (The Unitarians don't really count..., nor do the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Mormons have been way outside since their beginnings.) Are you thinking of the Holy Family evolving into the veneration of Mary by Catholics or something?
I don't know how the Tibetans feel about borrowing from the simple austere practices of Zen - probably much better than the reverse, since Tibetan Buddhism is a complex eclectic morass has absorbed lots of the old Bon religions, with gods, deities, shamanism, malicious spirits that need placating, prayer flags, etc. as well as more traditionally Buddhist practices and beliefs. And even koans are mainly from one of the various schools of Zen, though they're perhaps the best known in the West, though "getting the damned point" is certainly a Zen kind of thing :-)
The article's assertion was that the frequent posters are usually not the most popular ones, because adding lots of material doesn't usually have enough novelty necessary to attract lots of viewers.
From a profitability standpoint, that's ok - some fraction of the cost of YouTube is uploading and storing new content, but a presumably-larger fraction is the cost of transmitting it to viewers, and the cost to YouTube for transmitting 3 minutes of video to a watcher is relatively independent of whether it was Video 12345678 or video 87654321. (It's a bit different - the most popular videos will get cached more, but that's still independent of whether they're from uploaders who post a little or a lot.)
The big question becomes whether they can make money on the average viewing of a video, whether that's from ads on the page or commercials at the beginning of the video or soundtrack song sales or whatever. Will that depend on how much the authors post, or only on how often individual videos get played? Will some _kinds_ of content be more profitable than others, and will they find a way to promote those or at least prioritize them?
Google didn't buy a money-making business and then have it fail; they bought a very popular service that had not yet deployed a profit-making business model, and they haven't yet gotten it to make a profit. It's a much different situation, and they knew it when they bought it, so it's not like they're surprised.
The real question is how and when they thought they'd be able to get it to profitability, and whether they're on track for that yet or not. If they expected it to be making a profit by now and it's not close, then FAIL, but if they didn't, it's in the same shape as any 1990s-boom internet startup, potentially realistic or potentially just another underpants-gnomes waiting for 5. PROFIT! to happen.
The OJ trials reached the correct results - the police framed him, so they don't get to throw him in jail, but he really did kill her, so the civil court awarded wergild to her family. On the other hand, he tried to trick his way out of paying, so that bizarre robbery trial seemed like just deserts.