Sorry you had a bad experience, but the US is nearly as large as the entirety of Europe, so that's a terrible comparison considering that outside the metro areas cell service quality is pretty decent. Also, I don't see how the "US Subway System" (never heard of that one...) is in any way related to the discussion of mobile regulations.
The United States is a huge place, so picking out faults as a whole are pretty ignorant. If anything, I'd say regulations on spectrum use should be relaxed so more carriers can get in on the game.
That is not necessarily true, plenty of radiation workers live long healthy lives, and there is a lot of controversy surrounding the linear no-threshold model wherein all radiation exposure is dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Back to the point, the real problem with the scanners isn't the pictures or the "radiation", it's the blatent invasion of privacy and expenditure of tax dollars on security theatre.
When the systems were in your office, you had X number of points of failure.
And you had someone on site who's job it was to make sure that those systems were available to you.
So you're moving to the "cloud" to save money... by increasing the number of the points of failure.
I think it's a fallacy to assume that you're increasing the points of failure by moving to the cloud.
Most cloud-based services are hosted in a collocation facility where the provider has controlled humidity, temperature, and multiple redundant uplinks.
Meanwhile, the average company running a mail server in a closet has tons of potential points of failure, not to mention the upkeep of the hardware.
Sure, I'd like to think that "we" can do it better than the big guys, but for 99% of the small-not-tech crowd, it opens a lot of doors and improves reliability.
Failover with multiple connections is far from simple, and generally out-of-reach for most businesses. If you're hosting web services, then you need to need to acquire IPv4 space (not exactly easy nowadays), a BGP prefix, an expensive router, and pay hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to >1 ISP that support BGP.
Alternatively, you could just get 2 cheap internet connections and a router that supports active fail-over/load balancing, however now half your address-space on the other ISP is unreachable. Not to mention that those routers cost thousands of dollars if you don't enjoy hours of BSD hacking...
So yeah, it's not that strange that bill-the-office-manager isn't running a HA configuration.
If you don't have the capacity to jailbreak your own device safely, then you shouldn't be messing with it.
Apple is absolutely great for technical users. The barrier to entry is purposeful, and keeps "expert" users from opening their devices and calling into support. In the meantime, I absolutely enjoy the soldering, hacking, and pentalobe screws in exchange for excellent build quality and fantastic design.
Lot's of tech companies are hiring -- so, it's really the intern's fault for getting conned into working for nothing. The problem is that by doing unpaid work, you not only hurt yourself but other people (employees, contractors, etc.)
Just say no to unpaid internships. Any semi-reputable company can afford to pay you.
Actually there is a definite advantage to owning a car over taking a train.
At least here in California, a car gives me opportunities for better jobs, access to cheaper food, plus the absolutely invaluable ability to go somewhere on my own terms. A car means I'm less likely to catch the flu, is much cheaper than public transit, is more comfortable, and takes me directly to my destination.
Public transit is definitely a useful option, but ultimately you're not going to take away the automobile without taking away personal freedom.
The system as it is now is mostly a scheme. There are far better ways to lean "what you love" than pay into a typical college education. How about even taking classes at a community college and not getting into piles of debt?
At some point you have to admit that you're doing it for the money. The sad part is, that the skills learned in college don't readily translate to industry skills, and many college graduates still don't have a job. So now people are under mountains of debt and unemployable when they could've spend that time building their resume.
Isn't the point of driving a car that it *isn't* optimized? You see a cool store and stop to check it out, go to get groceries, then maybe go for a spirited drive in the country? It's the essence of the american dream, freedom, mobility, and life on your own terms.
If you're serious about all this energy saving "use less" mentality, then don't drive a car. The solution isn't to reduce our usage, but to find denser, more efficient, power generation and storage to replaces gasoline.
Whatever country you're living room is, where you would obviously be keeping your mail server in a rack running under truecrypt.
If you don't want to bother than that, then, your privacy just isn't important. As soon as you put your personal information on someone else's hardware you lose control of that information.
Actually, I seriously hope that this was a hoax or a cover for some military technology.
Any encounter with actual beings from another planet will 99% of the time, not turn out well. The sheer difference in technological development would be the equivalent difference between us, and a common fruit fly.
I really doubt that any recent human activity really plays a significant part in the scale of the Earth's rotation/axis. The earthquake released an equivalent energy of ~300mt of TNT. That's the equivalent of thousands of nuclear weapons being exploded.
On the grand scale of things, we don't play that big of an impact on a geological scale. Mother nature is a lot more awesome than anything we could come up with.
A lot of technological advancements came from war. It's pretty obvious that the government don't care about peaceful space exploration since they killed manned spaceflight with no viable replacement. NASA was just a figurehead for a military operation.
Hopefully, our need to find creative ways to kill each-other will result in more advanced spacecraft.
The iPad is neat but not even close to being a decent CarPC for several reasons
1) Glossy LCD Screen makes it impossible to read in a car
2) Lack of a tactile interface
3) Tiny, internal GPS can't connect with an external GPS antenna
4) Lack of XM radio integration (Not everywhere has 3G)
5) Audio quality is mediocre when compared to a discrete sound card
6) The screen is huge. Most cars don't have that kind of room in the dashboard without serious modification
7) The interface, while intuitive, is not great in a car environment. I want to see MPG, the song playing, distance to destination, and more on a single dashboard screen
This is pretty cool, and definitely something I want to roll throw together at home. That said, isn't this supposed to be MIT?
Where's all the anti-gravity, Terawatt laser, and nuclear fusion experiments? This is a beginner Arduino project you might find on instructables. Awesome project, but come on MIT guys, we want more!
It's funny that the distracted driving trend is being blamed on the gadgets, when the problem is with driving.
The problem is the modern automobile. Comfortable, silent, automatic everything. Driving is treated like a chore and cars are essentially appliances. Behind all the fake chrome and hideous glossy plastic buttons is several tons of heavy machinery.
Change the way in which we view the car itself, and the problems will disappear.
Not only is that highly unlikely, but how many boxes is that for your webapp? 20?
I don't know about you but I could rack and deploy 20 production servers in a day. One phone call to my ISP and we're in business.
Personally I'm more concerned with building a profitable company than infinite scalability. By rolling our own gear that puts us ahead a little bit more. I think that these cloud providers are neat, but only for a 1-off solution or a distributed computer problem -- not for running your whole business.
The problem with these solutions is they sell you services like a prepaid phone company to abstract the real cost.
My company has done the math and unless you only need the capacity say, 3 hours out of the day, EC2 (and Rackspace) simply can't compete with running your own hardware. We've heard the arguments about hiring engineers, buying servers, and renting space, but even after those expenses you still come out ahead if you have roughly more than 20 machines.
Also, Rackspace and Amazon sell Xen virtualization hosting. The software is open source and freely available if you want to use it for yourself. I just guess "Cloud Hosting" sounds better but it's not that hard to roll a similar setup if you want the scalability.
It's a neat feat of reverse engineering but I don't really see the practicality here. I deal with serial on a daily basis and using an iPad would be a nightmare. Typing is OK for short emails, but you really need a physical keyboard for these sort of things. A autocorrected word or mistyped letter can be frustrating to no end.
I think we know there weren't cell towers in 1928, but I also don't assume the limits of uninvented technology. If you've invented a time machine it's not unrealistic to think you could have invented a radio that works wherever you are in spacetime. In fact, the latter is probably easier than the former.
Really, is it fair to call them the largest ISP? Sure, they may technically be an ISP, and they may have a ton of search traffic, but those two are non-inclusive of each other. They don't actually provide connectivity to millions of customers like Comcast or Verizon do. As for selling wholesale Tier 1 access, I doubt it's more than Global Crossing or AT&T.
My big issue with this article is that it reads like a plug for cloud-based (what's that supposed to mean again?), a.k.a content-based hosting when that's not how most businesses do telecom. Most people are concerned with SLAs and bandwidth because they want to run their own services for privacy and security reasons. Things like Google Apps are great, but rest assured, Google employees are reading your email whether it's condoned or not.
That kind of attitude makes me upset because I endure a lot of it where I work. A local root exploit is the hard part of owning a server. Getting unprivileged access through some vulnerability is comparatively a piece of cake.
I wonder why they went with the plan to have the craft return to earth? It makes more sense to me to have a reusable "shuttlecraft" that ferried astronauts from the ISS to lunar orbit and back.
As far as I understand, using balloons as a 1st stage doesn't really make sense. Most of the energy required to reach orbit is accelerating to orbital velocity. Getting up there is not the problem. Getting to a minimum 15,000mph tangent to the Earth is.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry you had a bad experience, but the US is nearly as large as the entirety of Europe, so that's a terrible comparison considering that outside the metro areas cell service quality is pretty decent. Also, I don't see how the "US Subway System" (never heard of that one...) is in any way related to the discussion of mobile regulations.
The United States is a huge place, so picking out faults as a whole are pretty ignorant. If anything, I'd say regulations on spectrum use should be relaxed so more carriers can get in on the game.
That is not necessarily true, plenty of radiation workers live long healthy lives, and there is a lot of controversy surrounding the linear no-threshold model wherein all radiation exposure is dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
Back to the point, the real problem with the scanners isn't the pictures or the "radiation", it's the blatent invasion of privacy and expenditure of tax dollars on security theatre.
When the systems were in your office, you had X number of points of failure. And you had someone on site who's job it was to make sure that those systems were available to you. So you're moving to the "cloud" to save money ... by increasing the number of the points of failure.
I think it's a fallacy to assume that you're increasing the points of failure by moving to the cloud. Most cloud-based services are hosted in a collocation facility where the provider has controlled humidity, temperature, and multiple redundant uplinks.
Meanwhile, the average company running a mail server in a closet has tons of potential points of failure, not to mention the upkeep of the hardware.
Sure, I'd like to think that "we" can do it better than the big guys, but for 99% of the small-not-tech crowd, it opens a lot of doors and improves reliability.
Failover with multiple connections is far from simple, and generally out-of-reach for most businesses. If you're hosting web services, then you need to need to acquire IPv4 space (not exactly easy nowadays), a BGP prefix, an expensive router, and pay hundreds to thousands of dollars a month to >1 ISP that support BGP.
Alternatively, you could just get 2 cheap internet connections and a router that supports active fail-over/load balancing, however now half your address-space on the other ISP is unreachable. Not to mention that those routers cost thousands of dollars if you don't enjoy hours of BSD hacking...
So yeah, it's not that strange that bill-the-office-manager isn't running a HA configuration.
If you don't have the capacity to jailbreak your own device safely, then you shouldn't be messing with it.
Apple is absolutely great for technical users. The barrier to entry is purposeful, and keeps "expert" users from opening their devices and calling into support. In the meantime, I absolutely enjoy the soldering, hacking, and pentalobe screws in exchange for excellent build quality and fantastic design.
Lot's of tech companies are hiring -- so, it's really the intern's fault for getting conned into working for nothing.
The problem is that by doing unpaid work, you not only hurt yourself but other people (employees, contractors, etc.)
Just say no to unpaid internships. Any semi-reputable company can afford to pay you.
Actually there is a definite advantage to owning a car over taking a train.
At least here in California, a car gives me opportunities for better jobs, access to cheaper food, plus the absolutely invaluable ability to go somewhere on my own terms. A car means I'm less likely to catch the flu, is much cheaper than public transit, is more comfortable, and takes me directly to my destination.
Public transit is definitely a useful option, but ultimately you're not going to take away the automobile without taking away personal freedom.
I agree,
The system as it is now is mostly a scheme. There are far better ways to lean "what you love" than pay into a typical college education. How about even taking classes at a community college and not getting into piles of debt?
At some point you have to admit that you're doing it for the money. The sad part is, that the skills learned in college don't readily translate to industry skills, and many college graduates still don't have a job. So now people are under mountains of debt and unemployable when they could've spend that time building their resume.
Isn't the point of driving a car that it *isn't* optimized? You see a cool store and stop to check it out, go to get groceries, then maybe go for a spirited drive in the country? It's the essence of the american dream, freedom, mobility, and life on your own terms.
If you're serious about all this energy saving "use less" mentality, then don't drive a car. The solution isn't to reduce our usage, but to find denser, more efficient, power generation and storage to replaces gasoline.
The idea of breaking p2p centric applications might be considered a good thing for some people.
This also breaks VoIP, some internet video, and lots of other stuff. NAT is a terrible "solution" for users, but great for corporate profit margins.
Whatever country you're living room is, where you would obviously be keeping your mail server in a rack running under truecrypt.
If you don't want to bother than that, then, your privacy just isn't important. As soon as you put your personal information on someone else's hardware you lose control of that information.
Actually, I seriously hope that this was a hoax or a cover for some military technology.
Any encounter with actual beings from another planet will 99% of the time, not turn out well. The sheer difference in technological development would be the equivalent difference between us, and a common fruit fly.
I really doubt that any recent human activity really plays a significant part in the scale of the Earth's rotation/axis. The earthquake released an equivalent energy of ~300mt of TNT. That's the equivalent of thousands of nuclear weapons being exploded.
On the grand scale of things, we don't play that big of an impact on a geological scale. Mother nature is a lot more awesome than anything we could come up with.
A lot of technological advancements came from war. It's pretty obvious that the government don't care about peaceful space exploration since
they killed manned spaceflight with no viable replacement. NASA was just a figurehead for a military operation.
Hopefully, our need to find creative ways to kill each-other will result in more advanced spacecraft.
The iPad is neat but not even close to being a decent CarPC for several reasons
1) Glossy LCD Screen makes it impossible to read in a car
2) Lack of a tactile interface
3) Tiny, internal GPS can't connect with an external GPS antenna
4) Lack of XM radio integration (Not everywhere has 3G)
5) Audio quality is mediocre when compared to a discrete sound card
6) The screen is huge. Most cars don't have that kind of room in the dashboard without serious modification
7) The interface, while intuitive, is not great in a car environment. I want to see MPG, the song playing, distance to destination, and more on a single dashboard screen
8) It's easy to steal if you make it removable
This is pretty cool, and definitely something I want to roll throw together at home. That said, isn't this supposed to be MIT?
Where's all the anti-gravity, Terawatt laser, and nuclear fusion experiments? This is a beginner Arduino project you might find on instructables. Awesome project, but come on MIT guys, we want more!
It's funny that the distracted driving trend is being blamed on the gadgets, when the problem is with driving.
The problem is the modern automobile. Comfortable, silent, automatic everything. Driving is treated like a chore and cars are essentially appliances. Behind all the fake chrome and hideous glossy plastic buttons is several tons of heavy machinery.
Change the way in which we view the car itself, and the problems will disappear.
Not only is that highly unlikely, but how many boxes is that for your webapp? 20?
I don't know about you but I could rack and deploy 20 production servers in a day. One phone call to my ISP and we're in business.
Personally I'm more concerned with building a profitable company than infinite scalability. By rolling our own gear that puts us ahead a little bit more. I think that these cloud providers are neat, but only for a 1-off solution or a distributed computer problem -- not for running your whole business.
The problem with these solutions is they sell you services like a prepaid phone company to abstract the real cost.
My company has done the math and unless you only need the capacity say, 3 hours out of the day, EC2 (and Rackspace) simply can't compete with running your own hardware. We've heard the arguments about hiring engineers, buying servers, and renting space, but even after those expenses you still come out ahead if you have roughly more than 20 machines.
Also, Rackspace and Amazon sell Xen virtualization hosting. The software is open source and freely available if you want to use it for yourself. I just guess "Cloud Hosting" sounds better but it's not that hard to roll a similar setup if you want the scalability.
It's a neat feat of reverse engineering but I don't really see the practicality here. I deal with serial on a daily basis and using an iPad would be a nightmare. Typing is OK for short emails, but you really need a physical keyboard for these sort of things. A autocorrected word or mistyped letter can be frustrating to no end.
I think we know there weren't cell towers in 1928, but I also don't assume the limits of uninvented technology. If you've invented a time machine it's not unrealistic to think you could have invented a radio that works wherever you are in spacetime. In fact, the latter is probably easier than the former.
Really, is it fair to call them the largest ISP? Sure, they may technically be an ISP, and they may have a ton of search traffic, but those two are non-inclusive of each other. They don't actually provide connectivity to millions of customers like Comcast or Verizon do. As for selling wholesale Tier 1 access, I doubt it's more than Global Crossing or AT&T.
My big issue with this article is that it reads like a plug for cloud-based (what's that supposed to mean again?), a.k.a content-based hosting when that's not how most businesses do telecom. Most people are concerned with SLAs and bandwidth because they want to run their own services for privacy and security reasons. Things like Google Apps are great, but rest assured, Google employees are reading your email whether it's condoned or not.
Only? Only a local root exploit?
That kind of attitude makes me upset because I endure a lot of it where I work. A local root exploit is the hard part of owning a server. Getting
unprivileged access through some vulnerability is comparatively a piece of cake.
I wonder why they went with the plan to have the craft return to earth? It makes more sense to me to have a reusable "shuttlecraft" that ferried
astronauts from the ISS to lunar orbit and back.
As far as I understand, using balloons as a 1st stage doesn't really make sense. Most of the energy required to reach orbit is accelerating to orbital velocity. Getting up there is not the problem. Getting to a minimum 15,000mph tangent to the Earth is.