It is shameful, isn't it. And the willful blindness is bipartisan, in part because of Iowa's position in deciding future presidents. Nothing wrong with Iowa looking out for it's interests; it's just that they are not always the interests of the country as a whole.
I'm one of those CSPAN geeks who will watch occasional committee meetings. I was amazed to see a few congressmen--both parties--ask a panel of ethanol experts how much oil it takes to produce the energy equivalent of ethanol. Nobody on the panel could answer the question. Seemed like an important question to answer considering the issue under discussion was subsidies for ethanol. However there were an equal number of politicians--both parties--that looked down their noses at anyone who had the temerity to ask such a question.
I'm not an environmentalist by any means. Global warming? I'm in favor of it. I just wish we weren't reliant on unstable/unfreindly countries for our energy needs. If the solution emits less CO2, so be it. But it's not clear corn ethanol either controls carbon emissions or reduces our dependence on oil.
Is it the agribusiness lobby--partly. The rest is politics of farm states.
Funny how the volume thing works...but it also depends where you are buying it from. I've got dedicated IP for $35/mbit, but if I bought it and transported it accross state lines on leased fiber I could buy it for $10/mbit based on my current purchasing power.
Problem is in some communities the pricing you and I get is a pipe dream. In some communities not so far from where I live, the best they can do is a DS3 at $200 a magabit. How's that for economy of scale?
I don't think net neutrality fixes the ATT issue. Simply capping consumption is one way of being net neutral, but effectively making IPTV not useable. Say you charge $1/Gigabyte for excess data over say a 30G limit. The average american watches about 2 1/2 hrs per day of TV. 2.5hrs * 30 days * 3.5G/hr for high def = about 260G of data, or a $230 consumption charge on your internet bill. Standard definition wouldn't be quite so bad at about 1/4 the bandwidth. Point is, service providers who put in consumption limits can prevent IPTV from working and live within net neutrality.
ATT could simply choose not to support multicast traffic through their backbone--multicast traffic is a method of sending data in a "party line" kind of way. Basically it's broadcast traffic that only goes down network paths where a subscriber is listening. It allows you to send one stream through the backbone and allow millions to subscribe to that one stream--the most efficient way to do IPTV. Nothing in net neutrality would require them to upgrade routers to support specific networking technology if they didn't want to. ATT could simply just allow unicast traffic--in other words, one stream is sent over the internet for each subscriber and bandwidth levels become obscene. This would effectively kill IPTV over the internet. ISPs can all play the same game with traffic they allow in over their internet connection.
Call me a laissez-faire utopianist, but government regulation really hurts a business's ability to run its own business. I honestly think a caching system implemented community-by-community is the best way to avoid any internet backone issues. Multicast traffic is a real time broadcast technology, and television is moving toward a more interactive on demand kind of service anyway. If the local network affiliates wanted to make ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, etc available to my internet subscribers because that's what the national networks are doing, I'd be more than happy to peer with them and keep that television data on-net. Heck, it would even be a selling point to my subscribers.
As an ISP operator, I'm happy to let people use as much bandwidth as they want to, however I do have bandwidth and network costs to keep in mind. I've got a few thousand users on a 100mbit link and offer a 10mbit service--we are by no means oversubscribing our service since we rarely, if ever max out our link (usually at about 85% capacity during peak times). I suspect my competitors actually have lower ratios of bandwidth per subscriber and do more to play with how people use their service than I do.
I could not however sustain every subscriber watching television in high definition. Say only half of our 5000 subscribers are watching TV one evening in high def...that's 8mbit * 2500, or 20 terabits of data! Please let me know where I can get a 20 terabit capable router, if one exists, and where I can get a 20 terabit connection to the internet. Oh...and if I can provide that service and charge less than $500/mo per subscriber, let me know that too.
I'm not saying as an ISP I am opposed to things going this way, however a lot of infrastructure work has to be done...not just by ISPs, but on the internet backbone as a whole. A couple things that could be tried: 1. Multicasting has to be working nation wide/supported everywhere, or there will never be enough bandwidth. 2. Content distribution companies need to work with ISPs to provide local caching capabilities on ISP networks (and enough ISPs have to go along with it).
#1 will probably never work. ATT is one of the larger tier one networks that other ISPs connect to. Fat chance that ATT would ever let competitors multicast an IPTV lineup through their network, and if one Teir one network doesn't allow it, you pretty much kill the idea for most everyone.
If internet TV ever actually starts taking off I would very likely have to modify my terms of usage and put in consumption caps (with per gigabyte transferred charges over some reasonable limit so people who want to use more can pay for it). I would no longer be able to offer unlimited usage internet plans because they would no longer be economically feasible. I'd like to be able to continue offering unlimited bandwidth, however IPTV changes everything.
Is the electromagnetic noise coming from the hard drive? Wouldn't many other devices, besides just iPods, cause the same kinds of problems?
I can understand microwaves and particle accelerators:) causing problems with folks who have pacemakers. It would appear they should be concerned aout much more. I would think manufacturers of pacemakers have some responsibility to make their devices handle the everydy environment they work in. Do cell phones break pace makers? Those who have pacemakers just aren't able to avoid electronics.
Have you used old versions of vi? There's a reason that linux old timers used to argue over who's text editor was better (i.e. emacs versus vi). I personally am a fan of vim, but once in a while run into using some crufty old version of vi that is just painful to use. I can't speak to changes in grep or make, but there have certainly been significant improvements in userland tools since the 90s. I remember first trying to install and use linux on a machine in the 90s and found using it to be a most painful experience. Today, I use linux all the time and fine that all the software tools have improved significantly.
I really don't like the government telling us what information we have the right to have. (sigh) guess we've gone too far down the rabbit hole on that one.
I also really don't like the idea of companies making imagery of my property available to whomever wants it. My business is my business and is not for sale. I guess preventing that from happening is futile as well.
oh great, a new weapon of mass distraction
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The Human Mutation
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The Chinese will have super intelligent animal kingdom fighters in no time. We must not let the Chinese beat us to planting spies among wildlife.
What if a major computer manufacturer like Dell considered getting into the OS business to fight back against the MS monopoly? If Apple can take BSD and roll an OS onto it to deliver a complete computer experience, couldn't Dell in partnership with a company like Ubuntu?
I hope this works. Apple does things right by focusing on the desktop user's experience. I wonder if Ubuntu, with the support of a company like Dell, couldn't do the same thing. I assume that in addition to getting end user support contracts, Canonical gets some contract for making their stuff work well with Dell hardware...that can only aid Ubuntu's ability to deliver a good end user experience.
I'm quite comfortable spending a few hours working around linux hardware compatibility issues--and I did have some getting Ubuntu 7.04 working on my new Toshiba laptop. However once the hardware issues were worked out--and Dell will have this done for the end user--everything else about the software "just works". Ubuntu really does a lot for making my linux experience (after the hardware issues) quite effortless. About the only thing I cannot easily do is look at some windows proprietary media formats--but hey, I even run into that once in a while on my Mac. Of course, iTunes for linux will probably never happen. I wonder if Apple will get the same flack MS gets for not supporting competing platforms.
I recently tried ubuntu and found it to be quite user friendly for a Linux distro--I'm use linux on servers/routers, so I'm more comfortable with it's higher need for user knowledge to make work right.
Dell needs to deliver a product that works out of the box, and except for some issues I had getting ubuntu 7.04 to work with all the devices on my laptop, I suspect Dell will make that hurdle easy for users.
Dell would be wise to have a model that will work with both windows and linux--though I assume this will already be the case. Sell it as a linux box, and then offer a "risk free" option to switch back to windows (complete with a wipe clean/fresh restart windows system restore) if it doesn't work out for them for the full price of Windows. That will lower the financial risk to users by giving them an "out" and probably save Dell some production costs.
Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
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Censoring a Number
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I am honestly surprised that there are relatively few prime numbers in the factorization. I am also impressed that 836256503069278983442067, which I assume to be prime but do not know a quick way of checking, shows up on a blog posting with the same factorization when searched for on google.
This truly is a number worth investigating and needs to be written about at length, posted everywhere, etc. Why so few prime numbers in an otherwise random string of numbers? It is actually interesting that the number is so close in size to such large, again assuming correctness of the assertion, prime numbers.
The phone companies could also have their cake and eat it too. They've been arguing to the FCC that they needed DSL excluded from competition. "After all, cable companies can compete with phone service now and do not have to share their lines", said the phone companies. "We need television deregulation. Cable companies can now compete for telephone service, so Cable companies can face that competition from us now.", say the phone companies.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but this looks like one major hoodwink by the phone company. They f'ing suck.
Verizon cold hold hostage all forms of telephone competition, including Cable telephone services which are packet based and terminate PSTN phone calls.
Vonage is the first salvo.
Please. Please. Please. Somebody somewhere with the resources to fight this has to do so.
I'm no fan of the Cable companies, but this will kill both VoIP and Cable phone competition, leaving only the reincarnated Ma Bell to legally be able to sell phone service that can terminate calls to the PSTN.
Though I have to say WOW on that "line" item veto. My fovorite part is how he string together random consecutive zeroes to put together a whole new number. With that kind of line item veto, you really are legislating. Really scary thought--especially with that kind of power in Doyles hand.
Just like the federal government doesn't require the drinking age to be 21--they just won't release highway funds if a state doesn't have a 21 or older drinking age.
Guess what happens. All the states set the same driking age....curious.
It's a way to force states to behave a certain way when the federal government has no authority to make such a rule itself. If the federal government actually had the authority, it would have just passed the law requiring the ID standards without tying it to highway funding.
If Maine wins, it could potentially undo all kinds of federal encroachment into areas it has no business to be in.
A few years ago in Wisconsin--a bit of a beer state--the governor was considering lowering the drinking age for lower alocohol content drinks like beer and challenge the federal highway funding policies. Of course, then one of the UW campuses had a drunken riot in favor of lowering the drinking age--that killed that! Hmmm....maybe 21 is a better drinking age.
I don't find the result of the study surprising at all. My high school chemistry teacher taught at a college level...so it was tough for a high school class. She loved saying, "The more you know, the more you realise how much you don't know."
People who don't know much are more clueless about their lack of knowledge. Hence, clueless people are happy with their state of being because they don't know any better. Ahh, the poisoned fruit from the tree of knowledge! Many mathematical concepts are quite difficult to understand--it is the good students who are able to realise that and get frustrated about it. Everyone else waits until they get their bad grades to find out how off base they were. With the dumbing down of US education, unfortunately the clueless too frequently are never taught how clueless they really are.
I'm sure MS is seething at Apple doing firts what it talked about doing for the past decade....moving the computing experience into the living room, make the computer the center of entertainment.
I'm no Mac fanboy by any means. I've always loathed any Mac pre OSX--but have found OSX a nice envirnoment with all the convenient UNIXy tools I frequently use. We'll see what MS does with Vista and it's new mp3 player, but really Apple has pulled ahead in innovation. MS went after gaming, Apple went after multimedia entertainment. I think Apple chose wisely--sorry you gamers out there.
About time Apple came back anyway. I really think Windows 95 was the huge improvement over 3.1 simply because Apple had a nicer GUI. MS may finally do something to recover--Intel's another tech company that has so far effectively hit back with a good product after being challenged by AMD. I'm so glad MS wasn't first with a TV product--it would have sucked and then killed the idea. Maybe now MS will feel it has something it has to beat and will be compelled to either do or die.
Actually, frequencies that cause "bowel movements" do exist, however it is not as straightforward of an effect as it seems on the South Park episode's "brown noise".
A lot of research has gone into this--particulary in the area of non-lethal weaponry. If you produce a frequency of sound that resonates within human organs, you can cause serious discomfort to the target.There actually exists sound scientific research on this. In a college optics class, we were assigned the task of doing our own research project. A friend of mine thought it would be funny to make his topic the brown noise. He found all kinds of research in respected physics journals about militaty applications of different kinds of noise.
"Quite a few people end up making a living doing something not directly related to their major."
Exactly. Math was one of my majors. I am in charge of IT where I work--never had a comp sci class in my life. There are a lot of career opportunities in business/management for Math majors--ever test your logic/reasoning skills against an MBA (outside finance or econ concentration)? Most business school graduates lack quantitaitive analysis skills.
My advise--make sure you have a well rounded background. Take some literature classes to improve your language/analysis skills. A couple econ classes would be useful--I never took them, but read through macro and micro economics text books and found my knowledge of how the economy works to be on par with the typical business major.
When I hire people for the tech department for the ISP I run, I look for smart, well rounded people who have the capability and self motivated interest to learn. If someone is uncanny enough--like me when I learned economics--to learn a field/skillset on their own, has proven their logic/reasoning skills with a math major, and is a well rounded person with good communications skills, then I would hire that person in a heartbeat. I would not care what job they were being hired for--that person would be capable of being agile and competant in nearly any role they were in.
You obviously have strong opinions on this but a couple weaknesses I perceive in your arguement are:
Point 1: I assume the metallic contaminates you refer to would be a result of burning fossil fuels. Reducing carbon does not necessarily equate with reducing other contaminates created by burning fossile fuels. Another strategy may be simply more efforts put toward reducing those contaminates. It worked for the US with regards to nitrogen/sulfur emissions. I remember reading about the acid rain disasters we were supposed to have, but we solved that problem for the most part without eliminating fossil fuels.
While I don't have a degree in ocean sciences, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event) sumarizes nicely my suspicion--that is that the mechanism by which ogygen levels drop is not well established, though wikipedia states that higher temperatures and nutrient increases in the oceans are thought to bring about these conditions. So it seems your arguement that reducing CO2 levels solves oceanic oxygen deprivation presupposes that reducing CO2 will stop global warming. I call logical shenanigans on your arguement sir!
2. Point taken, however an extremely unlikely event would not require a large expenditure to mitigate the risk. Meteor collisions may destroy our planet before global warming does, but nobody who is taken seriously would propose we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to combat meteors. Environmentalists would propose we spend large sums combating a problem we don't yet understand. I actually think we should spend lots of money on alternative fuels, but as a conservative, I feel that the economic, geopolitical, and national security benefits pay those costs for us. (hint--their's a way for environmentalists to pull conservatives your way if you broaden your argument beyond leftist histionics)
Your Final Point: Correct, few climate scientists (and otherwise reasonable people) disagree with the idea that human activity can impact the environment on a global scale. Makes sense to me that over 6 billion people, more and more every day burning away our fuels, will impact the environment world wide. However it is misleading to indicate any agreement whatsoever on what extent human activity impacts world temperatures. Likewise, there is no scientific agreement on what the main causes of global climate change are. That was the point of TFA. The problem with the press is they report that there is scientific consensus about global warming when the real state of affairs is much more nuanced than that. (funny how reporters appreciate nuance in their presidential candidates , but not their reporting:)
...we now know for sure that Apple isn;t going to make it's OS available for other hardware even if unsupported. Not that I can blame them--them being a hardware vendor and all--but it would have been cool if it was a more widely available OS choice.
For a network administrator or a programmer you can learn it without school
You hit the nail on the head with that one. When I look for network administrators or programmers, I almost prefer the self initiated. My staff consists of me, a physics and math degree holder, a guy who majored in history, and a guy who majored in literature. I dare say the netowrking and programming skills of our group are quite good considering our background.
IT training was not what makes us good--we all have unique strenghts, are intellengent folks, and have a strong desire to always learn new things. That's what I look for in staff--more so than specific degree qualifications.
Honestly, you could major in underwater basket weaving and I wouldn't care--so long as you're intelligent, self initiated, and a well rounded individual (in aptitute, not necessarily body shape:) ).
Now comuter/electrical engineering--you better have the degree.
Verizon serves a lot of metropolitan areas and rerunning cable (speaking from someone who works in real estate with multiple tenant properties) can be prohibitively expensive for each order. It has to be done all at once--usually at the apartment building owner's expense. Maybe the telecom company will pay to do that--but what company is willing to do that now if their competitor can use the wire as well? And condos/coops? Yeah, just try and get them to agree on a wiring plan--kind of like herding cats.
The whole point of my one line post--this is more to push cable out. If verizon uses coax to deliver its service, then a customer is unlikely to be able to choose cable TV from the cable company and phone and/or internet from Verizon. The net effect of this will be--forced bundling.
Ever since the FCC ruled that all household coax cable belongs to the home owner, cable companies have been more vulnerable than phone companies to the competitor using wiring they often paid to install in the first place. Cable companies are younger than the telcos. Many have not yet recouped all their initial build costs (especially since they had to rebuild only 10-20 years depending on community for internet/phone). If you are going to pay money--any money--to wire a building, you don't want your competitor to use that for free. Verizon's move will definitely tick off the cable companies
I don't really care who wins or loses--both big cable and big telephone companies are evil in my mind. This could get nasty before all is said and done. Expect the government--blech--to have to step in to mediate.
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It is shameful, isn't it. And the willful blindness is bipartisan, in part because of Iowa's position in deciding future presidents. Nothing wrong with Iowa looking out for it's interests; it's just that they are not always the interests of the country as a whole.
I'm one of those CSPAN geeks who will watch occasional committee meetings. I was amazed to see a few congressmen--both parties--ask a panel of ethanol experts how much oil it takes to produce the energy equivalent of ethanol. Nobody on the panel could answer the question. Seemed like an important question to answer considering the issue under discussion was subsidies for ethanol. However there were an equal number of politicians--both parties--that looked down their noses at anyone who had the temerity to ask such a question.
I'm not an environmentalist by any means. Global warming? I'm in favor of it. I just wish we weren't reliant on unstable/unfreindly countries for our energy needs. If the solution emits less CO2, so be it. But it's not clear corn ethanol either controls carbon emissions or reduces our dependence on oil.
Is it the agribusiness lobby--partly. The rest is politics of farm states.
Funny how the volume thing works...but it also depends where you are buying it from. I've got dedicated IP for $35/mbit, but if I bought it and transported it accross state lines on leased fiber I could buy it for $10/mbit based on my current purchasing power.
Problem is in some communities the pricing you and I get is a pipe dream. In some communities not so far from where I live, the best they can do is a DS3 at $200 a magabit. How's that for economy of scale?
thanx for the "mod parent up" props...
I don't think net neutrality fixes the ATT issue. Simply capping consumption is one way of being net neutral, but effectively making IPTV not useable. Say you charge $1/Gigabyte for excess data over say a 30G limit. The average american watches about 2 1/2 hrs per day of TV. 2.5hrs * 30 days * 3.5G/hr for high def = about 260G of data, or a $230 consumption charge on your internet bill. Standard definition wouldn't be quite so bad at about 1/4 the bandwidth. Point is, service providers who put in consumption limits can prevent IPTV from working and live within net neutrality.
ATT could simply choose not to support multicast traffic through their backbone--multicast traffic is a method of sending data in a "party line" kind of way. Basically it's broadcast traffic that only goes down network paths where a subscriber is listening. It allows you to send one stream through the backbone and allow millions to subscribe to that one stream--the most efficient way to do IPTV. Nothing in net neutrality would require them to upgrade routers to support specific networking technology if they didn't want to. ATT could simply just allow unicast traffic--in other words, one stream is sent over the internet for each subscriber and bandwidth levels become obscene. This would effectively kill IPTV over the internet. ISPs can all play the same game with traffic they allow in over their internet connection.
Call me a laissez-faire utopianist, but government regulation really hurts a business's ability to run its own business. I honestly think a caching system implemented community-by-community is the best way to avoid any internet backone issues. Multicast traffic is a real time broadcast technology, and television is moving toward a more interactive on demand kind of service anyway. If the local network affiliates wanted to make ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, etc available to my internet subscribers because that's what the national networks are doing, I'd be more than happy to peer with them and keep that television data on-net. Heck, it would even be a selling point to my subscribers.
As an ISP operator, I'm happy to let people use as much bandwidth as they want to, however I do have bandwidth and network costs to keep in mind. I've got a few thousand users on a 100mbit link and offer a 10mbit service--we are by no means oversubscribing our service since we rarely, if ever max out our link (usually at about 85% capacity during peak times). I suspect my competitors actually have lower ratios of bandwidth per subscriber and do more to play with how people use their service than I do.
I could not however sustain every subscriber watching television in high definition. Say only half of our 5000 subscribers are watching TV one evening in high def...that's 8mbit * 2500, or 20 terabits of data! Please let me know where I can get a 20 terabit capable router, if one exists, and where I can get a 20 terabit connection to the internet. Oh...and if I can provide that service and charge less than $500/mo per subscriber, let me know that too.
I'm not saying as an ISP I am opposed to things going this way, however a lot of infrastructure work has to be done...not just by ISPs, but on the internet backbone as a whole. A couple things that could be tried: 1. Multicasting has to be working nation wide/supported everywhere, or there will never be enough bandwidth. 2. Content distribution companies need to work with ISPs to provide local caching capabilities on ISP networks (and enough ISPs have to go along with it).
#1 will probably never work. ATT is one of the larger tier one networks that other ISPs connect to. Fat chance that ATT would ever let competitors multicast an IPTV lineup through their network, and if one Teir one network doesn't allow it, you pretty much kill the idea for most everyone.
If internet TV ever actually starts taking off I would very likely have to modify my terms of usage and put in consumption caps (with per gigabyte transferred charges over some reasonable limit so people who want to use more can pay for it). I would no longer be able to offer unlimited usage internet plans because they would no longer be economically feasible. I'd like to be able to continue offering unlimited bandwidth, however IPTV changes everything.
Is the electromagnetic noise coming from the hard drive? Wouldn't many other devices, besides just iPods, cause the same kinds of problems?
:) causing problems with folks who have pacemakers. It would appear they should be concerned aout much more. I would think manufacturers of pacemakers have some responsibility to make their devices handle the everydy environment they work in. Do cell phones break pace makers? Those who have pacemakers just aren't able to avoid electronics.
I can understand microwaves and particle accelerators
Have you used old versions of vi? There's a reason that linux old timers used to argue over who's text editor was better (i.e. emacs versus vi). I personally am a fan of vim, but once in a while run into using some crufty old version of vi that is just painful to use. I can't speak to changes in grep or make, but there have certainly been significant improvements in userland tools since the 90s. I remember first trying to install and use linux on a machine in the 90s and found using it to be a most painful experience. Today, I use linux all the time and fine that all the software tools have improved significantly.
I really don't like the government telling us what information we have the right to have. (sigh) guess we've gone too far down the rabbit hole on that one.
I also really don't like the idea of companies making imagery of my property available to whomever wants it. My business is my business and is not for sale. I guess preventing that from happening is futile as well.
The Chinese will have super intelligent animal kingdom fighters in no time. We must not let the Chinese beat us to planting spies among wildlife.
What if a major computer manufacturer like Dell considered getting into the OS business to fight back against the MS monopoly? If Apple can take BSD and roll an OS onto it to deliver a complete computer experience, couldn't Dell in partnership with a company like Ubuntu?
I hope this works. Apple does things right by focusing on the desktop user's experience. I wonder if Ubuntu, with the support of a company like Dell, couldn't do the same thing. I assume that in addition to getting end user support contracts, Canonical gets some contract for making their stuff work well with Dell hardware...that can only aid Ubuntu's ability to deliver a good end user experience.
I'm quite comfortable spending a few hours working around linux hardware compatibility issues--and I did have some getting Ubuntu 7.04 working on my new Toshiba laptop. However once the hardware issues were worked out--and Dell will have this done for the end user--everything else about the software "just works". Ubuntu really does a lot for making my linux experience (after the hardware issues) quite effortless. About the only thing I cannot easily do is look at some windows proprietary media formats--but hey, I even run into that once in a while on my Mac. Of course, iTunes for linux will probably never happen. I wonder if Apple will get the same flack MS gets for not supporting competing platforms.
I recently tried ubuntu and found it to be quite user friendly for a Linux distro--I'm use linux on servers/routers, so I'm more comfortable with it's higher need for user knowledge to make work right.
Dell needs to deliver a product that works out of the box, and except for some issues I had getting ubuntu 7.04 to work with all the devices on my laptop, I suspect Dell will make that hurdle easy for users.
Dell would be wise to have a model that will work with both windows and linux--though I assume this will already be the case. Sell it as a linux box, and then offer a "risk free" option to switch back to windows (complete with a wipe clean/fresh restart windows system restore) if it doesn't work out for them for the full price of Windows. That will lower the financial risk to users by giving them an "out" and probably save Dell some production costs.
I am honestly surprised that there are relatively few prime numbers in the factorization. I am also impressed that 836256503069278983442067, which I assume to be prime but do not know a quick way of checking, shows up on a blog posting with the same factorization when searched for on google.
This truly is a number worth investigating and needs to be written about at length, posted everywhere, etc. Why so few prime numbers in an otherwise random string of numbers? It is actually interesting that the number is so close in size to such large, again assuming correctness of the assertion, prime numbers.
The phone companies could also have their cake and eat it too. They've been arguing to the FCC that they needed DSL excluded from competition. "After all, cable companies can compete with phone service now and do not have to share their lines", said the phone companies. "We need television deregulation. Cable companies can now compete for telephone service, so Cable companies can face that competition from us now.", say the phone companies.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but this looks like one major hoodwink by the phone company. They f'ing suck.
Verizon cold hold hostage all forms of telephone competition, including Cable telephone services which are packet based and terminate PSTN phone calls.
Vonage is the first salvo.
Please. Please. Please. Somebody somewhere with the resources to fight this has to do so.
I'm no fan of the Cable companies, but this will kill both VoIP and Cable phone competition, leaving only the reincarnated Ma Bell to legally be able to sell phone service that can terminate calls to the PSTN.
Tommy Thompson did this too.
Though I have to say WOW on that "line" item veto. My fovorite part is how he string together random consecutive zeroes to put together a whole new number. With that kind of line item veto, you really are legislating. Really scary thought--especially with that kind of power in Doyles hand.
Just like the federal government doesn't require the drinking age to be 21--they just won't release highway funds if a state doesn't have a 21 or older drinking age.
Guess what happens. All the states set the same driking age....curious.
It's a way to force states to behave a certain way when the federal government has no authority to make such a rule itself. If the federal government actually had the authority, it would have just passed the law requiring the ID standards without tying it to highway funding.
If Maine wins, it could potentially undo all kinds of federal encroachment into areas it has no business to be in.
A few years ago in Wisconsin--a bit of a beer state--the governor was considering lowering the drinking age for lower alocohol content drinks like beer and challenge the federal highway funding policies. Of course, then one of the UW campuses had a drunken riot in favor of lowering the drinking age--that killed that! Hmmm....maybe 21 is a better drinking age.
I don't find the result of the study surprising at all. My high school chemistry teacher taught at a college level...so it was tough for a high school class. She loved saying, "The more you know, the more you realise how much you don't know."
People who don't know much are more clueless about their lack of knowledge. Hence, clueless people are happy with their state of being because they don't know any better. Ahh, the poisoned fruit from the tree of knowledge! Many mathematical concepts are quite difficult to understand--it is the good students who are able to realise that and get frustrated about it. Everyone else waits until they get their bad grades to find out how off base they were. With the dumbing down of US education, unfortunately the clueless too frequently are never taught how clueless they really are.
I'm sure MS is seething at Apple doing firts what it talked about doing for the past decade....moving the computing experience into the living room, make the computer the center of entertainment.
I'm no Mac fanboy by any means. I've always loathed any Mac pre OSX--but have found OSX a nice envirnoment with all the convenient UNIXy tools I frequently use. We'll see what MS does with Vista and it's new mp3 player, but really Apple has pulled ahead in innovation. MS went after gaming, Apple went after multimedia entertainment. I think Apple chose wisely--sorry you gamers out there.
About time Apple came back anyway. I really think Windows 95 was the huge improvement over 3.1 simply because Apple had a nicer GUI. MS may finally do something to recover--Intel's another tech company that has so far effectively hit back with a good product after being challenged by AMD. I'm so glad MS wasn't first with a TV product--it would have sucked and then killed the idea. Maybe now MS will feel it has something it has to beat and will be compelled to either do or die.
Actually, frequencies that cause "bowel movements" do exist, however it is not as straightforward of an effect as it seems on the South Park episode's "brown noise".
A lot of research has gone into this--particulary in the area of non-lethal weaponry. If you produce a frequency of sound that resonates within human organs, you can cause serious discomfort to the target.There actually exists sound scientific research on this. In a college optics class, we were assigned the task of doing our own research project. A friend of mine thought it would be funny to make his topic the brown noise. He found all kinds of research in respected physics journals about militaty applications of different kinds of noise.
"Quite a few people end up making a living doing something not directly related to their major."
Exactly. Math was one of my majors. I am in charge of IT where I work--never had a comp sci class in my life. There are a lot of career opportunities in business/management for Math majors--ever test your logic/reasoning skills against an MBA (outside finance or econ concentration)? Most business school graduates lack quantitaitive analysis skills.
My advise--make sure you have a well rounded background. Take some literature classes to improve your language/analysis skills. A couple econ classes would be useful--I never took them, but read through macro and micro economics text books and found my knowledge of how the economy works to be on par with the typical business major.
When I hire people for the tech department for the ISP I run, I look for smart, well rounded people who have the capability and self motivated interest to learn. If someone is uncanny enough--like me when I learned economics--to learn a field/skillset on their own, has proven their logic/reasoning skills with a math major, and is a well rounded person with good communications skills, then I would hire that person in a heartbeat. I would not care what job they were being hired for--that person would be capable of being agile and competant in nearly any role they were in.
You obviously have strong opinions on this but a couple weaknesses I perceive in your arguement are:
Point 1:
I assume the metallic contaminates you refer to would be a result of burning fossil fuels. Reducing carbon does not necessarily equate with reducing other contaminates created by burning fossile fuels. Another strategy may be simply more efforts put toward reducing those contaminates. It worked for the US with regards to nitrogen/sulfur emissions. I remember reading about the acid rain disasters we were supposed to have, but we solved that problem for the most part without eliminating fossil fuels.
While I don't have a degree in ocean sciences, wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxic_event) sumarizes nicely my suspicion--that is that the mechanism by which ogygen levels drop is not well established, though wikipedia states that higher temperatures and nutrient increases in the oceans are thought to bring about these conditions. So it seems your arguement that reducing CO2 levels solves oceanic oxygen deprivation presupposes that reducing CO2 will stop global warming. I call logical shenanigans on your arguement sir!
2. Point taken, however an extremely unlikely event would not require a large expenditure to mitigate the risk. Meteor collisions may destroy our planet before global warming does, but nobody who is taken seriously would propose we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to combat meteors. Environmentalists would propose we spend large sums combating a problem we don't yet understand. I actually think we should spend lots of money on alternative fuels, but as a conservative, I feel that the economic, geopolitical, and national security benefits pay those costs for us. (hint--their's a way for environmentalists to pull conservatives your way if you broaden your argument beyond leftist histionics)
Your Final Point:
Correct, few climate scientists (and otherwise reasonable people) disagree with the idea that human activity can impact the environment on a global scale. Makes sense to me that over 6 billion people, more and more every day burning away our fuels, will impact the environment world wide. However it is misleading to indicate any agreement whatsoever on what extent human activity impacts world temperatures. Likewise, there is no scientific agreement on what the main causes of global climate change are. That was the point of TFA. The problem with the press is they report that there is scientific consensus about global warming when the real state of affairs is much more nuanced than that. (funny how reporters appreciate nuance in their presidential candidates , but not their reporting
wow--just looking at their company web sites says a lot about what kind of firms they run.
...we now know for sure that Apple isn;t going to make it's OS available for other hardware even if unsupported. Not that I can blame them--them being a hardware vendor and all--but it would have been cool if it was a more widely available OS choice.
I'm reminded of that scene in Shawshank Redemption:
For a network administrator or a programmer you can learn it without school
:) ).
You hit the nail on the head with that one. When I look for network administrators or programmers, I almost prefer the self initiated. My staff consists of me, a physics and math degree holder, a guy who majored in history, and a guy who majored in literature. I dare say the netowrking and programming skills of our group are quite good considering our background.
IT training was not what makes us good--we all have unique strenghts, are intellengent folks, and have a strong desire to always learn new things. That's what I look for in staff--more so than specific degree qualifications.
Honestly, you could major in underwater basket weaving and I wouldn't care--so long as you're intelligent, self initiated, and a well rounded individual (in aptitute, not necessarily body shape
Now comuter/electrical engineering--you better have the degree.
Verizon serves a lot of metropolitan areas and rerunning cable (speaking from someone who works in real estate with multiple tenant properties) can be prohibitively expensive for each order. It has to be done all at once--usually at the apartment building owner's expense. Maybe the telecom company will pay to do that--but what company is willing to do that now if their competitor can use the wire as well? And condos/coops? Yeah, just try and get them to agree on a wiring plan--kind of like herding cats.
The whole point of my one line post--this is more to push cable out. If verizon uses coax to deliver its service, then a customer is unlikely to be able to choose cable TV from the cable company and phone and/or internet from Verizon. The net effect of this will be--forced bundling.
Ever since the FCC ruled that all household coax cable belongs to the home owner, cable companies have been more vulnerable than phone companies to the competitor using wiring they often paid to install in the first place. Cable companies are younger than the telcos. Many have not yet recouped all their initial build costs (especially since they had to rebuild only 10-20 years depending on community for internet/phone). If you are going to pay money--any money--to wire a building, you don't want your competitor to use that for free. Verizon's move will definitely tick off the cable companies
I don't really care who wins or loses--both big cable and big telephone companies are evil in my mind. This could get nasty before all is said and done. Expect the government--blech--to have to step in to mediate.