Is it possible that the average GOP voter doesn't like illegal immigration from a fairness perspective?
No, that seems quite impossible.
Fairness would mean that everyone get to go to the same schools and have the same healthcare, no matter how rich your parents are or where they were born. I cannot see how a republican would embrace that.
There's a difference between Egalitarianism and simple fairness.
Having the same schools, healthcare, etc is a egalitarianism.
Simple Fairness, however, dictates that things provided by the state be equal for all groups; but everything else is available if you want it and can afford it because you (in fairness) worked hard enough to earn it.
Your options there are retrain, change carriers or compete for the ever shrinking number of jobs
Well, unless you work in telecom then I doubt changing carriers - or rather, changing the carrier you work for - would help...even then...changing careers might have better prospects.
Whoops, we're out of MS licenses and we bought a load of netbooks - there you go, have LibreOffice. While you're there, tell me what's wrong with it and why we couldn't just use that everywhere. Nobody ever came up with an answer to that, which really makes me question why we pay MS for Office.
Nobody? Are the people at your school dumb? There are plenty of reasons that LibreOffice is inferior to Microsoft Office. The discussion's been had a thousand times. LO might work for you and your students, but don't pretend that it's an apples-for-apples replacement.
And there's plenty of reasons why it is also superior to Microsoft Office, but don't let that get in your way.
The only real compelling reason to continue using Microsoft Office is if you are tied to a specific feature set, plugin, etc used and supported by Microsoft Office. Most everything can be ported over with minimal effort.
The complex, organically-grown instruction set also leads to some waste of silicon in having to support all those instructions, and waste of performance/energy efficiency in that the instruction set is not designed from the ground up towards efficiency. People on the x86 side make a compelling argument that this has become negligible, but the fact remains that I'm still not seeing any x86 processor getting (unbiased) performance/W scores that are close to common ARM processors.
This is not entirely exact, in fact Intel CPUs have a tremendous per watt, take a 80W or more Intel and compare it to a 2W ARM CPU, the Intel is so incredibly faster (and faster, bigger caches, lower latencies etc.) that it holds its own or even beat it handy if we were to consider total power consumption of the system (if you were to add up ARM systems till you get the same amount of gigaflops going on)
ARM server SoCs will change that a bit. Else, the power efficiency advantage of ARM is foremost there with low loads, e.g. want to run in 200mW, or 500mW (perhaps just throttling down from 2-5W) : here you go.
So I'm looking at designing a server set whose total power envelope (hard drives included) is 50W; yet still does everything necessary and then some. Yeah, x86 isn't even a thought - I'm only looking at ARM boards where the entire board utilizes around 5W.
If you void patients then companies will stop sharing their innovations with people and instead rely on trade secrets to protect their intellectual property.
You think progress is slow now? See what happens when companies actively hide how they do things rather then relying on patients to protect their IP.
So you do realize that the Computer Software Industry was flourishing quite well when it was under Trade Secret Law - one of the biggest reasons why Software has such as hard time with Patent Law, the majority of its origins are still hidden by the time it was under Trade Secret Law and many of those companies have since been bought or gone out of business due to market demands, not "intellectual" property protection issues. This is also one of the reasons why the original UNIX code base developed by AT&T and at recent dispute between Novell and The SCO Group was under the contract that it was - with a very high confidentiallity agreement that protected the trade secrets in the code.
Software then moved to being under Copyright Law (1980's era) and exploded (1990's era). It has only been since people have been trying to extensively put it under Patent Law (late 1990's to present) that the industry has started having lots of problems with law suits, etc. (That's not to say there were not law suits prior, there were - but it was not the issue it is today; no where near the same scale or breadth of the industry).
Trade Secret law as served many industries quite well. Copyright Law does too. Patent Law serves a few industries well and many industries poorly - there doesn't seem to be much in-between.
The declaration of independence was plagarised in large parts from the Declaration of Arbroath.
If lawyers had been as eager back then, the fledgling US would have been sued into oblivion for creating an unauthorised derivative work
Except the "Declaration of Independence" whilst important to the history of the United States of America is nonetheless (at the time) written by citizens of another nation - the USA did not even exist in any form for more than a year (US Constition didn't exist until September 1787; and its predecessor didn't exist until November 1777)after the DoI was written (July 4, 1776). It also has no legal bearing on United States of America.
First, NetFlix started their business by buying DVDs off-the-shelf and renting them out. If they are using cooperative agreements to obtain DVDs now, then that's a change since then - it may very well save them money, but nonetheless it's a distraction here. The people that want DVDs are going to get the DVD service.
Second, VirtualDVDs are essentially NetFlix's Streaming business, and it makes sense they'd do the streaming instead of a DVD download as you describe if for no other reason than the technical challenge of keeping people from sharing the download or breaking the download so that they can keep a copy. For example, you could use a ZFS partition to snapshot the download right before returning it so that the upper level software couldn't tell that it was copied; and then crack away at the copy until you have your HD digital download version of the movie. In other words, doing a DVD-download-as-a-service model simply has too much risk for NetFlix or anyone else in their business (e.g. Hulu, Amazon, Google, etc.).
Third, my family & I watch NetFlix on our iPad, iPod, Android Phone (NexusOne), Android Tablets (ASUS Transformer Infinity, Nubi Jr.), and computers (HP Laptop running Windows Vista, Linux Desktop with Pipelight). We have a good size DVD collection that we watch on the computers too, but NetFlix as it is now just transfers and I don't have to think about space considerations - which I would with a DVD-download-as-a-service solution.
So DVD-by-mail and Streaming are the two versions of the service that make the most sense and both offer the least risk compared to other potential solutions.
No, the reason we don't send nuclear waste into the sun is that just delivering something into geosynchronous orbit costs at least $50,000 per kg.
Sending it completely out of earth orbit and into the sun would be hundreds of times more.
Given how heavy nuclear waste is, the cost of solar disposal would make nuclear power ridiculously expensive.
Compared to the costs and risks of storing it for 10,000 years that is nothing.
1) it's easier to send it to alpha centauri than to the sun. It's even easier to drop it into Jupiter.
Except you only have to break it out of orbit and get far enough to not fall back into the earth or moon's orbit. In general, the gravitational pull from the sun will automatically pull it in if there is not a countering force. So, it's actually very easy to drop it into the sun - easier than dropping it into Jupiter. Though dropping it into Venus or Mercury might be easier as it could be captured by their orbits.
2) quick back-of-the-envelop guesstimate. Delta-V required to go from Earth surface to the Sun in a single impulse - 31.7 km/s. Correct that for a reasonably real rocket (one that has to actually accelerate, instead of the magic "single impulse" - 33 km/s.
Now imagine a rocket that massed (empty) 100 metric tons. Imagine that this rocket can carry 900 metric tons of radioactive waste. And imagine that it can hold enough LH2/LO2 to get that 33 km/s deltaV required to reach the Sun.
Do note that we can't actually build a rocket that light that can carry that much. And won't till we can build it out of structural materials with a density comparable to air.
In any case, given the rocket, the payload, and the deltaV, the fuel/reaction mass would be about 1,600,000 metric tons.
In other words, even with impossible materials to build the rocket, we couldn't get it to the Sun....
Note that the same magic rocket could get to Alpha Centauri with 50,000 metric tons of fuel.
Which is still pretty much impossible, but a couple orders of magnitude less impossible.
Nor do we have to. We only have to get it out of an orbit that would fall back into Earth's orbit - not terribly hard. You're thinking too much with respect to how things move on earth - which is not quite how they move in space as there is far less friction, and far more gravitational pull from other bodies; nor do you have to have anywhere near as much propellant.
Also, the weight isn't really an issue. We don't produce that much, and could be done in numerous rockets; even rockets hurded together if necessary. We've also done this kind of thing numerous times - every time we send a probe out to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc - so yes, we have the expertise to do it and the ability.
Use space and send it to the sun. The entire earth could be radioactive and enter the sun with little to no effect. Sending off a rocket loaded with nuclear waste to the sun every year or so would certainly be safer.
And before you start saying "well, the rocket could explode" - you use a safe rocket design - payload on top and design to minimize. You could even launch from aircraft or do other means to get it into space where it is then attached to the doomed delivery vehicle.
Reason we don't? No one thought of it when everyone was signing the agreements not to do weapons stuff in space.
You know nothing of the industry. There are hundreds of ISPs for sale in the United States RIGHT NOW. Go buy one. It'll cost you a few million for a small one.
We're talking about residential broadband. I doubt that more than 0.1% of the population is served by anybody other than one of the major phone or cable companies.
Nearly everyone in the US is only served by a single Cable company; typically enforced by contracts between those companies and the countines - e.g county Y signs a contract saying only company X can provide cable services (TV, Phone, Internet, etc.) in the county. Sometimes municipalities enter these agreements too.
Verizon and AT&T seem to be doing something similar for their fibre-optic services (FIOS, uVerse respectively).
Everything else (e.g DSL, Satellite) is either unable to be limited that way (e.g. Satellite) or operates over existing common carrier mediums (e.g DSL, Dial-up), in which case there are many providers and resellers. The exceptions are apartment complexes where the complex may have contracts with providers - e.g. the complex I'm in allows AT&T DSL and Charter for cable; whether you can get SpeakEasy or others for DSL I don't know.
If you're talking about businesses buying dedicated lines then that is a different story. In such volumes the last mile problem isn't so much of a problem - you can just run a single line to them and bill them $10k for it, and the business doesn't care because they're paying that much every month. If you try to offer residential broadband with a $10k start-up fee you'll never get a single customer, and it isn't any cheaper to run a cable to a residence than to a skyscraper.
Businesses have different options, but can sometimes fall under the same restrictions - especially small companies being run out of peoples homes as the bigger companies will not want to run a business grade line to the home; however, there are DSL and Cable Internet subscription levels for businesses that can be had instead - but then, they're under the same rules.
Oh, and I'm sure there are resellers out there who offer some kind of value-add on top of one of the big phone/cable companies, and they just pay the phone/cable company to use their existing infrastructure.
Yes, they use the common carrier mediums, which do not include Cable or Fibre services.
why aren't the big ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T buying up all these ISPs?
Because they aren't in the same business. The ISPs you talk of are probably in actual competition. If my employer got a call that the ISP wanted to raise rates by 10% at the next contract renewal, they'd get to go through the usual procurement dog and pony show all over again. At significant volumes the up-front costs to switch are fairly low. The professional negotiators would also ensure the contracts are neutral at worst, but most likely slanted towards my employer. Big corporations don't sign contracts of adhesion.
The big telecoms do get into that business as well, but the rates are fairly competitive. When the data volumes are significant they don't really have any last-mile advantages either - even the local phone company will probably need to run a dedicated line as there is unlikely to be sufficient capacity already on the poles. At best they only have advantages of scale.
So the big difference: The companies are purchasing SLAs - Service Level Agreements. If if you have a rather low volume level, it's the SLA that makes the difference. Consumers typically don't purchase an SLA and the ISPs take advantage of that by not providing anywhere near what the customer contracted them for.
If robots are ever remotely competent enough to realize any of these situations, they will never get into these situations to begin with.
So said the autonomous car right before it got a flat tires and ended up stopping not by choice on the rail road tracks. Unfortunately it failed to alert it occupants to leave the vehicle before being crushed by the train that it couldn't get out of the way of because it was too focused on trying to move the vehicle while spinning its wheels; the occupants were locked in as it thought the car was "moving" since the drive wheels were going 45 mph burning rubber while the vehicle was going nowhere.
There's many more OpenStack users and operators than you think. OpenStack is good for small cloud vendors, people that want to run a private, in-house cloud. It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing, or enthusiests that want to try setting up their own private cloud for toying with.
OpenStack holds a summit every 6 months. This last one (just last week) had over 3500 people in attendence - developers from those sponsoring it, operators, and user; and they were talking about how phenominal the growth has been - the first from what I heard had like 500 people.
So while you may want to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Compute for a non-managed, public cloud; if you want to do something in-house, you have fewer choices. VMware certainly has their offering; but it also comes at a high price (yes, I've looked at it in the past). I'm not sure where the various hypervisor support is, but I do know they use KVM and have the ability to use others (Rackspace uses Xen, others use VMware or Windows HyperV if I am not mistaken; at the very least there's discussion on it).
Now, I wouldn't expect high growth for OpenStack. Why? It's a big budget item to run in-house, and most are probably not going to market they use it. If people are not devoting a lot of money up-front to run it, they may be testing and slowly rolling it out as resources allow. And yes, you can run it from the SMB level to the Enterprise level.
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace; I've got a few servers that I may try to install OpenStack on to play with myself as well.
It is possible that the Ohio prison in question got itself listed as a budget theater and was able to get legal copies of those movies between the main theatrical release and the DVD release.
I find that highly unlikely, but it is possible.
Don't have to get listed; just have to give enough money to the distribution companies. If you have your own copy then you can also get a discount - e.g they charge extra to send you a copy to use that you then have to return. How much you pay depends on how well you can haggle the price; can easily be $350 (with DVD) or $700 PER film. Funny thing is, if you try to reach out and cannot get any traction then you've also done your "due diligence" and can just go ahead and show it - been there with Disney licensed Anime films. (We had a budget, wanted to pay them, but couldn't get anyone to stand up and take the money.)
So even if they did do a cam rip (probably bit torrent copy from somewhere), they very well may have had a license to show it.
And, at least in the Anime world, many of the distribution companies will even let you do it for free (e.g Pioneer, RightStuf) if you show all the ads they have on the DVDs and have asked them for permission to do so.
If I'm getting you correctly you seem to be implying that mono should be used as a compatibility framework to enable windows.net apps onto other platforms. This is absolutely not the use case for mono. The Point of mono is that if you start with it, it will work everywhere, even on windows because it's basically a subset of.Net
No. I'm saying Mono is far from being a complete.NET implementation, which many of the most important parts missing - especially if you are using it as a cross-platform framework.
And there's also the legal quagmire that it is in. Microsoft gave a 5 year promise to Novell/SuSE not to use Novell/SuSE's users over use of Mono in a limited context - that being what they submitted to the commit for the C# standard. If you're not a Novell/SuSE user, you're screwed - you're not covered; That 5 year period is also over and they didn't renew the agreement - so you're still screwed - especially if you started development after that agreement expired as you could not "reasonably rely on that agreement". The standard body Microsoft (ECMA, which is basically a standards stamping organization for companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others that want a quick standard without the ISO process) used doesn't forbid them from requiring licensing fees, nor did they submit it under a given fee structure or fee structure promise (f.e F/RAND). So in the end, if Microsoft wants to sue you for using Mono instead of.NET they can; the fact they haven't just means Mono isn't a big enough target (yet) for them to consider a threat worth suing over.
Now the new CEO may change the policy and attitude so that this is all moot; but that's yet to be seen - and he'd still have quite a bit of challenge within Microsoft to keep it from rearing its head again.
Perhaps the issue is how much power Microsoft will have to shut down Mono.
None. Zero. Zilch.
Actually they have quite a bit if they chose to exercise it. If mono develops outside the small framework that Microsoft blessed as being "open" in their C# specification, then it is ripe for Microsoft to shut down. Even if they stick inside that framework, there is nothing saying Microsoft won't try to charge for it - even at a F/RAND rate, which would effectively shut it down.
Umm if you actually check mono's compatibility notes, it has ridiculous good compatibility distinguished between the various versions of.NET. While there will always be a lag, if you develop with Mono, you know what works and what doesn't..Net 3.0 and 3.5 are pretty mainstream and 4.0 is pretty much good to go for a broad set of use cases.
It may be compatible, but it is not as feature rich. Mono only implements the parts of the spec that Microsoft put out in the open, which consists of may be 30% of the all the APIs really needed to do.NET development. You cannot develop an application on Windows using Microsoft's tools without paying attention to which APIs are used - even the Window Forms - and expect the application to work under Mono - chances are it won't.
I don't follow these lines at all:
> it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources.
> confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.
That said, I think you misunderstand me. Lets make up a scale. say the average standard of living around the globe is 100. Basically everybody living in the US (w/ a few exceptions) already enjoys a standard of living far above the mean, say 150. Now, as trade becomes global and we can chose talent from a much wider pool, the flood gates are open and much of the wealth of the 1st spreads to the rest of the world, the world as a whole (should) benefit. More innovators, etc. But we end up all balancing out at 125. overall, a great deal for the world. A bitter pill for the 1st world.
However, the 125 is really just an inflated 100, and the 1st worlds will just figure out a way to raise the 150 to 200 at the same time.
The latter changes all the time. In fact, you could go to five different religious scholars and get five different answers as to what a section of text means.
If you only get 5 different translations you may be doing good. More likely than not, each will have their own translation but will also provide one or more alternate translations. This is the case whenever any kind of translation is involved namely because translating language is not a 1:1 translation - more likely than not the words in one language will have nuances that are not existent in the other language, or will have a one to many translation.
But those same religious folks who tout the bible as being so good because (in part) it is unchanging are usually the same ones who will tout their interpretation of the bible's text as being the "unchanging truth."
Mostly because the majority of people reading the Bible know absolutely nothing about translating and the original texts. They'll be lucky if the pastor/reverend/preacher/minister they are listening to even references the original language of the text in the sermons.
And all too often those same pastors/reverends/preachers/ministers rely on whatever they were taught in seminary was the "one true translation" and just stick with it and not really dig into the original language much if at all, again relying on commentaries and others to do the majority of the work for them. Now contrast this with their equivalents 200-400 years ago and those were people that generally read and understood the original texts.
While the propogation of the Bible in numerous languages has certainly brought it to many more people to read and understand, it has also lead to many preaching from it professionally (e.g. ministers, preachers, etc) not understanding the original text.
If anyone thought "science knew everything" or anything like that, then they need to take a long, hard look at science and realize that it does not.
I don't think I've met in person anyone over the age of 12 that thought science knew everything. But I've met quite a few people who thought scientists and/or pro-science types believed science knew everything.
Outside of/. and the media, I'd say that's generally true.
And, to a scientist's eye (or anyone who knows how science works), saying "the established science is wrong" is very exciting. Unlike the bible which never changes* despite new evidence, science adapts. As old theories are proven to be incomplete or wrong, they are either fixed or ditched entirely to make way for new theories. Science is never considered "100% right", but it is always "the best approximation we have at the time given the available evidence."
Unfortunately, as I've seen first hand, some religious types consider changing to adapt to new evidence as scary and a weakness and staying the same no matter what to be safe and a strength.
If anyone thought "science knew everything" or anything like that, then they need to take a long, hard look at science and realize that it does not.
Thus, the unchanging bible* is good and changing science is bad/scary.
* While these religious folks like to think of the bible as unchanging and the text is (in most cases over short-term history) unchanging, the interpretations of it can change wildly. Case in point: Slavery is condemned by most religious folks now but, pre-Civil War, many religious people rationalized slavery saying that the bible clearly showed how some people were supposed to be slaves to other people. In short, the "bible is unchanging" argument is garbage because the bible can say pretty much anything you want it to say.
And now to digress...
1) Your point on slavery has nothing to do with the "bible changing" or even its interpretation. The bible still says the same thing it always has regarding slavery, and the interpretation is the same. The difference is the popular opinion that slavery in any form is bad; the American Civil War occurred as the world-wide opinion on slavery was changing.
2) It's been shown that the Greek and Hebrew texts have been shown to be unchanged for quite a long time. The greek texts have more contraversy around them as they didn't have the same practices; but the Hebrew texts for the Old Testament have been shown to have not changed for well over 2000 years. They have yet find a canonical Hebrew text (one that is not known to be writing error or a commentary) that has a change. Per the Greek texts - they have been shown to mostly be unchanged and the contraversy is around areas where people suspect that a copier put in some commentary and another copier couldn't tell whether it was or not, or what someone at sometime may have considered a grammatical correction, etc - even in those cases, there's very little of it and its nearly all of it doesn't change the meaning, or translation/interpretations (e.g grammatical changes are usually additions of articles that could have been implied).
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Is it possible that the average GOP voter doesn't like illegal immigration from a fairness perspective?
No, that seems quite impossible.
Fairness would mean that everyone get to go to the same schools and have the same healthcare, no matter how rich your parents are or where they were born. I cannot see how a republican would embrace that.
There's a difference between Egalitarianism and simple fairness.
Having the same schools, healthcare, etc is a egalitarianism.
Simple Fairness, however, dictates that things provided by the state be equal for all groups; but everything else is available if you want it and can afford it because you (in fairness) worked hard enough to earn it.
Even though it is not recommended, many, many organizations use the SSN as a unique identifier. See http://consumersunion.org/news...
Technically not legal; but doesn't stop them.
Technically - you can only use your SSN with the IRS for tax purposes; but that doesn't stop anyone.
Your options there are retrain, change carriers or compete for the ever shrinking number of jobs
Well, unless you work in telecom then I doubt changing carriers - or rather, changing the carrier you work for - would help...even then...changing careers might have better prospects.
Whoops, we're out of MS licenses and we bought a load of netbooks - there you go, have LibreOffice. While you're there, tell me what's wrong with it and why we couldn't just use that everywhere. Nobody ever came up with an answer to that, which really makes me question why we pay MS for Office.
Nobody? Are the people at your school dumb? There are plenty of reasons that LibreOffice is inferior to Microsoft Office. The discussion's been had a thousand times. LO might work for you and your students, but don't pretend that it's an apples-for-apples replacement.
And there's plenty of reasons why it is also superior to Microsoft Office, but don't let that get in your way.
The only real compelling reason to continue using Microsoft Office is if you are tied to a specific feature set, plugin, etc used and supported by Microsoft Office. Most everything can be ported over with minimal effort.
The complex, organically-grown instruction set also leads to some waste of silicon in having to support all those instructions, and waste of performance/energy efficiency in that the instruction set is not designed from the ground up towards efficiency. People on the x86 side make a compelling argument that this has become negligible, but the fact remains that I'm still not seeing any x86 processor getting (unbiased) performance/W scores that are close to common ARM processors.
This is not entirely exact, in fact Intel CPUs have a tremendous per watt, take a 80W or more Intel and compare it to a 2W ARM CPU, the Intel is so incredibly faster (and faster, bigger caches, lower latencies etc.) that it holds its own or even beat it handy if we were to consider total power consumption of the system (if you were to add up ARM systems till you get the same amount of gigaflops going on)
ARM server SoCs will change that a bit. Else, the power efficiency advantage of ARM is foremost there with low loads, e.g. want to run in 200mW, or 500mW (perhaps just throttling down from 2-5W) : here you go.
So I'm looking at designing a server set whose total power envelope (hard drives included) is 50W; yet still does everything necessary and then some. Yeah, x86 isn't even a thought - I'm only looking at ARM boards where the entire board utilizes around 5W.
If you void patients then companies will stop sharing their innovations with people and instead rely on trade secrets to protect their intellectual property.
You think progress is slow now? See what happens when companies actively hide how they do things rather then relying on patients to protect their IP.
So you do realize that the Computer Software Industry was flourishing quite well when it was under Trade Secret Law - one of the biggest reasons why Software has such as hard time with Patent Law, the majority of its origins are still hidden by the time it was under Trade Secret Law and many of those companies have since been bought or gone out of business due to market demands, not "intellectual" property protection issues. This is also one of the reasons why the original UNIX code base developed by AT&T and at recent dispute between Novell and The SCO Group was under the contract that it was - with a very high confidentiallity agreement that protected the trade secrets in the code.
Software then moved to being under Copyright Law (1980's era) and exploded (1990's era). It has only been since people have been trying to extensively put it under Patent Law (late 1990's to present) that the industry has started having lots of problems with law suits, etc. (That's not to say there were not law suits prior, there were - but it was not the issue it is today; no where near the same scale or breadth of the industry).
Trade Secret law as served many industries quite well. Copyright Law does too. Patent Law serves a few industries well and many industries poorly - there doesn't seem to be much in-between.
> if it was simple enough to copy quickly, then your > invention wasn't so revolutionary anyway.
I canmake a copy of the declaration of independence in about two seconds . The document was obviously revolutionary. :)
Except that would be Copyright Law, not Patent Law.
The declaration of independence was plagarised in large parts from the Declaration of Arbroath. If lawyers had been as eager back then, the fledgling US would have been sued into oblivion for creating an unauthorised derivative work
Except the "Declaration of Independence" whilst important to the history of the United States of America is nonetheless (at the time) written by citizens of another nation - the USA did not even exist in any form for more than a year (US Constition didn't exist until September 1787; and its predecessor didn't exist until November 1777)after the DoI was written (July 4, 1776). It also has no legal bearing on United States of America.
First, NetFlix started their business by buying DVDs off-the-shelf and renting them out. If they are using cooperative agreements to obtain DVDs now, then that's a change since then - it may very well save them money, but nonetheless it's a distraction here. The people that want DVDs are going to get the DVD service.
Second, VirtualDVDs are essentially NetFlix's Streaming business, and it makes sense they'd do the streaming instead of a DVD download as you describe if for no other reason than the technical challenge of keeping people from sharing the download or breaking the download so that they can keep a copy. For example, you could use a ZFS partition to snapshot the download right before returning it so that the upper level software couldn't tell that it was copied; and then crack away at the copy until you have your HD digital download version of the movie. In other words, doing a DVD-download-as-a-service model simply has too much risk for NetFlix or anyone else in their business (e.g. Hulu, Amazon, Google, etc.).
Third, my family & I watch NetFlix on our iPad, iPod, Android Phone (NexusOne), Android Tablets (ASUS Transformer Infinity, Nubi Jr.), and computers (HP Laptop running Windows Vista, Linux Desktop with Pipelight). We have a good size DVD collection that we watch on the computers too, but NetFlix as it is now just transfers and I don't have to think about space considerations - which I would with a DVD-download-as-a-service solution.
So DVD-by-mail and Streaming are the two versions of the service that make the most sense and both offer the least risk compared to other potential solutions.
No, the reason we don't send nuclear waste into the sun is that just delivering something into geosynchronous orbit costs at least $50,000 per kg. Sending it completely out of earth orbit and into the sun would be hundreds of times more. Given how heavy nuclear waste is, the cost of solar disposal would make nuclear power ridiculously expensive.
Compared to the costs and risks of storing it for 10,000 years that is nothing.
Not again.
Two things:
1) it's easier to send it to alpha centauri than to the sun. It's even easier to drop it into Jupiter.
Except you only have to break it out of orbit and get far enough to not fall back into the earth or moon's orbit. In general, the gravitational pull from the sun will automatically pull it in if there is not a countering force. So, it's actually very easy to drop it into the sun - easier than dropping it into Jupiter. Though dropping it into Venus or Mercury might be easier as it could be captured by their orbits.
2) quick back-of-the-envelop guesstimate. Delta-V required to go from Earth surface to the Sun in a single impulse - 31.7 km/s. Correct that for a reasonably real rocket (one that has to actually accelerate, instead of the magic "single impulse" - 33 km/s.
Now imagine a rocket that massed (empty) 100 metric tons. Imagine that this rocket can carry 900 metric tons of radioactive waste. And imagine that it can hold enough LH2/LO2 to get that 33 km/s deltaV required to reach the Sun.
Do note that we can't actually build a rocket that light that can carry that much. And won't till we can build it out of structural materials with a density comparable to air.
In any case, given the rocket, the payload, and the deltaV, the fuel/reaction mass would be about 1,600,000 metric tons.
In other words, even with impossible materials to build the rocket, we couldn't get it to the Sun....
Note that the same magic rocket could get to Alpha Centauri with 50,000 metric tons of fuel.
Which is still pretty much impossible, but a couple orders of magnitude less impossible.
Nor do we have to. We only have to get it out of an orbit that would fall back into Earth's orbit - not terribly hard. You're thinking too much with respect to how things move on earth - which is not quite how they move in space as there is far less friction, and far more gravitational pull from other bodies; nor do you have to have anywhere near as much propellant.
Also, the weight isn't really an issue. We don't produce that much, and could be done in numerous rockets; even rockets hurded together if necessary. We've also done this kind of thing numerous times - every time we send a probe out to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc - so yes, we have the expertise to do it and the ability.
Use space and send it to the sun. The entire earth could be radioactive and enter the sun with little to no effect. Sending off a rocket loaded with nuclear waste to the sun every year or so would certainly be safer.
And before you start saying "well, the rocket could explode" - you use a safe rocket design - payload on top and design to minimize. You could even launch from aircraft or do other means to get it into space where it is then attached to the doomed delivery vehicle.
Reason we don't? No one thought of it when everyone was signing the agreements not to do weapons stuff in space.
You know nothing of the industry. There are hundreds of ISPs for sale in the United States RIGHT NOW. Go buy one. It'll cost you a few million for a small one.
We're talking about residential broadband. I doubt that more than 0.1% of the population is served by anybody other than one of the major phone or cable companies.
Nearly everyone in the US is only served by a single Cable company; typically enforced by contracts between those companies and the countines - e.g county Y signs a contract saying only company X can provide cable services (TV, Phone, Internet, etc.) in the county. Sometimes municipalities enter these agreements too.
Verizon and AT&T seem to be doing something similar for their fibre-optic services (FIOS, uVerse respectively).
Everything else (e.g DSL, Satellite) is either unable to be limited that way (e.g. Satellite) or operates over existing common carrier mediums (e.g DSL, Dial-up), in which case there are many providers and resellers. The exceptions are apartment complexes where the complex may have contracts with providers - e.g. the complex I'm in allows AT&T DSL and Charter for cable; whether you can get SpeakEasy or others for DSL I don't know.
If you're talking about businesses buying dedicated lines then that is a different story. In such volumes the last mile problem isn't so much of a problem - you can just run a single line to them and bill them $10k for it, and the business doesn't care because they're paying that much every month. If you try to offer residential broadband with a $10k start-up fee you'll never get a single customer, and it isn't any cheaper to run a cable to a residence than to a skyscraper.
Businesses have different options, but can sometimes fall under the same restrictions - especially small companies being run out of peoples homes as the bigger companies will not want to run a business grade line to the home; however, there are DSL and Cable Internet subscription levels for businesses that can be had instead - but then, they're under the same rules.
Oh, and I'm sure there are resellers out there who offer some kind of value-add on top of one of the big phone/cable companies, and they just pay the phone/cable company to use their existing infrastructure.
Yes, they use the common carrier mediums, which do not include Cable or Fibre services.
why aren't the big ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T buying up all these ISPs?
Because they aren't in the same business. The ISPs you talk of are probably in actual competition. If my employer got a call that the ISP wanted to raise rates by 10% at the next contract renewal, they'd get to go through the usual procurement dog and pony show all over again. At significant volumes the up-front costs to switch are fairly low. The professional negotiators would also ensure the contracts are neutral at worst, but most likely slanted towards my employer. Big corporations don't sign contracts of adhesion.
The big telecoms do get into that business as well, but the rates are fairly competitive. When the data volumes are significant they don't really have any last-mile advantages either - even the local phone company will probably need to run a dedicated line as there is unlikely to be sufficient capacity already on the poles. At best they only have advantages of scale.
So the big difference: The companies are purchasing SLAs - Service Level Agreements. If if you have a rather low volume level, it's the SLA that makes the difference. Consumers typically don't purchase an SLA and the ISPs take advantage of that by not providing anywhere near what the customer contracted them for.
If robots are ever remotely competent enough to realize any of these situations, they will never get into these situations to begin with.
So said the autonomous car right before it got a flat tires and ended up stopping not by choice on the rail road tracks. Unfortunately it failed to alert it occupants to leave the vehicle before being crushed by the train that it couldn't get out of the way of because it was too focused on trying to move the vehicle while spinning its wheels; the occupants were locked in as it thought the car was "moving" since the drive wheels were going 45 mph burning rubber while the vehicle was going nowhere.
There's many more OpenStack users and operators than you think. OpenStack is good for small cloud vendors, people that want to run a private, in-house cloud. It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing, or enthusiests that want to try setting up their own private cloud for toying with.
OpenStack holds a summit every 6 months. This last one (just last week) had over 3500 people in attendence - developers from those sponsoring it, operators, and user; and they were talking about how phenominal the growth has been - the first from what I heard had like 500 people.
So while you may want to use AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Compute for a non-managed, public cloud; if you want to do something in-house, you have fewer choices. VMware certainly has their offering; but it also comes at a high price (yes, I've looked at it in the past). I'm not sure where the various hypervisor support is, but I do know they use KVM and have the ability to use others (Rackspace uses Xen, others use VMware or Windows HyperV if I am not mistaken; at the very least there's discussion on it).
Now, I wouldn't expect high growth for OpenStack. Why? It's a big budget item to run in-house, and most are probably not going to market they use it. If people are not devoting a lot of money up-front to run it, they may be testing and slowly rolling it out as resources allow. And yes, you can run it from the SMB level to the Enterprise level.
Disclaimer: I work for Rackspace; I've got a few servers that I may try to install OpenStack on to play with myself as well.
The CIA gets windows for free. After all they know where Ballmer hides the chairs
But Ballmer is no longer in charge...they still probably have the scoop on the new guy though...
It is possible that the Ohio prison in question got itself listed as a budget theater and was able to get legal copies of those movies between the main theatrical release and the DVD release.
I find that highly unlikely, but it is possible.
Don't have to get listed; just have to give enough money to the distribution companies. If you have your own copy then you can also get a discount - e.g they charge extra to send you a copy to use that you then have to return. How much you pay depends on how well you can haggle the price; can easily be $350 (with DVD) or $700 PER film. Funny thing is, if you try to reach out and cannot get any traction then you've also done your "due diligence" and can just go ahead and show it - been there with Disney licensed Anime films. (We had a budget, wanted to pay them, but couldn't get anyone to stand up and take the money.)
So even if they did do a cam rip (probably bit torrent copy from somewhere), they very well may have had a license to show it.
And, at least in the Anime world, many of the distribution companies will even let you do it for free (e.g Pioneer, RightStuf) if you show all the ads they have on the DVDs and have asked them for permission to do so.
If I'm getting you correctly you seem to be implying that mono should be used as a compatibility framework to enable windows .net apps onto other platforms. This is absolutely not the use case for mono. The Point of mono is that if you start with it, it will work everywhere, even on windows because it's basically a subset of .Net
No. I'm saying Mono is far from being a complete .NET implementation, which many of the most important parts missing - especially if you are using it as a cross-platform framework.
.NET they can; the fact they haven't just means Mono isn't a big enough target (yet) for them to consider a threat worth suing over.
And there's also the legal quagmire that it is in. Microsoft gave a 5 year promise to Novell/SuSE not to use Novell/SuSE's users over use of Mono in a limited context - that being what they submitted to the commit for the C# standard. If you're not a Novell/SuSE user, you're screwed - you're not covered; That 5 year period is also over and they didn't renew the agreement - so you're still screwed - especially if you started development after that agreement expired as you could not "reasonably rely on that agreement". The standard body Microsoft (ECMA, which is basically a standards stamping organization for companies like Microsoft, IBM, and others that want a quick standard without the ISO process) used doesn't forbid them from requiring licensing fees, nor did they submit it under a given fee structure or fee structure promise (f.e F/RAND). So in the end, if Microsoft wants to sue you for using Mono instead of
Now the new CEO may change the policy and attitude so that this is all moot; but that's yet to be seen - and he'd still have quite a bit of challenge within Microsoft to keep it from rearing its head again.
Perhaps the issue is how much power Microsoft will have to shut down Mono.
None. Zero. Zilch.
Actually they have quite a bit if they chose to exercise it. If mono develops outside the small framework that Microsoft blessed as being "open" in their C# specification, then it is ripe for Microsoft to shut down. Even if they stick inside that framework, there is nothing saying Microsoft won't try to charge for it - even at a F/RAND rate, which would effectively shut it down.
Umm if you actually check mono's compatibility notes, it has ridiculous good compatibility distinguished between the various versions of .NET. While there will always be a lag, if you develop with Mono, you know what works and what doesn't. .Net 3.0 and 3.5 are pretty mainstream and 4.0 is pretty much good to go for a broad set of use cases.
It may be compatible, but it is not as feature rich. Mono only implements the parts of the spec that Microsoft put out in the open, which consists of may be 30% of the all the APIs really needed to do .NET development. You cannot develop an application on Windows using Microsoft's tools without paying attention to which APIs are used - even the Window Forms - and expect the application to work under Mono - chances are it won't.
That is, however, the case with Java.
I don't follow these lines at all: > it is an excellent deal for people in the 1st world as it is a drain of resources. > confusing the interests of a a few unionized groups of people with the interests of the country.
That said, I think you misunderstand me. Lets make up a scale. say the average standard of living around the globe is 100. Basically everybody living in the US (w/ a few exceptions) already enjoys a standard of living far above the mean, say 150. Now, as trade becomes global and we can chose talent from a much wider pool, the flood gates are open and much of the wealth of the 1st spreads to the rest of the world, the world as a whole (should) benefit. More innovators, etc. But we end up all balancing out at 125. overall, a great deal for the world. A bitter pill for the 1st world.
However, the 125 is really just an inflated 100, and the 1st worlds will just figure out a way to raise the 150 to 200 at the same time.
The latter changes all the time. In fact, you could go to five different religious scholars and get five different answers as to what a section of text means.
If you only get 5 different translations you may be doing good. More likely than not, each will have their own translation but will also provide one or more alternate translations. This is the case whenever any kind of translation is involved namely because translating language is not a 1:1 translation - more likely than not the words in one language will have nuances that are not existent in the other language, or will have a one to many translation.
But those same religious folks who tout the bible as being so good because (in part) it is unchanging are usually the same ones who will tout their interpretation of the bible's text as being the "unchanging truth."
Mostly because the majority of people reading the Bible know absolutely nothing about translating and the original texts. They'll be lucky if the pastor/reverend/preacher/minister they are listening to even references the original language of the text in the sermons.
And all too often those same pastors/reverends/preachers/ministers rely on whatever they were taught in seminary was the "one true translation" and just stick with it and not really dig into the original language much if at all, again relying on commentaries and others to do the majority of the work for them. Now contrast this with their equivalents 200-400 years ago and those were people that generally read and understood the original texts.
While the propogation of the Bible in numerous languages has certainly brought it to many more people to read and understand, it has also lead to many preaching from it professionally (e.g. ministers, preachers, etc) not understanding the original text.
If anyone thought "science knew everything" or anything like that, then they need to take a long, hard look at science and realize that it does not.
I don't think I've met in person anyone over the age of 12 that thought science knew everything. But I've met quite a few people who thought scientists and/or pro-science types believed science knew everything.
Outside of /. and the media, I'd say that's generally true.
And, to a scientist's eye (or anyone who knows how science works), saying "the established science is wrong" is very exciting. Unlike the bible which never changes* despite new evidence, science adapts. As old theories are proven to be incomplete or wrong, they are either fixed or ditched entirely to make way for new theories. Science is never considered "100% right", but it is always "the best approximation we have at the time given the available evidence."
Unfortunately, as I've seen first hand, some religious types consider changing to adapt to new evidence as scary and a weakness and staying the same no matter what to be safe and a strength.
If anyone thought "science knew everything" or anything like that, then they need to take a long, hard look at science and realize that it does not.
Thus, the unchanging bible* is good and changing science is bad/scary.
* While these religious folks like to think of the bible as unchanging and the text is (in most cases over short-term history) unchanging, the interpretations of it can change wildly. Case in point: Slavery is condemned by most religious folks now but, pre-Civil War, many religious people rationalized slavery saying that the bible clearly showed how some people were supposed to be slaves to other people. In short, the "bible is unchanging" argument is garbage because the bible can say pretty much anything you want it to say.
And now to digress...
1) Your point on slavery has nothing to do with the "bible changing" or even its interpretation. The bible still says the same thing it always has regarding slavery, and the interpretation is the same. The difference is the popular opinion that slavery in any form is bad; the American Civil War occurred as the world-wide opinion on slavery was changing.
2) It's been shown that the Greek and Hebrew texts have been shown to be unchanged for quite a long time. The greek texts have more contraversy around them as they didn't have the same practices; but the Hebrew texts for the Old Testament have been shown to have not changed for well over 2000 years. They have yet find a canonical Hebrew text (one that is not known to be writing error or a commentary) that has a change. Per the Greek texts - they have been shown to mostly be unchanged and the contraversy is around areas where people suspect that a copier put in some commentary and another copier couldn't tell whether it was or not, or what someone at sometime may have considered a grammatical correction, etc - even in those cases, there's very little of it and its nearly all of it doesn't change the meaning, or translation/interpretations (e.g grammatical changes are usually additions of articles that could have been implied).