And that, in short, is what I've been saying for about 20 years now is broken about the economics of the Internet - the built-in belief that bogarting as much bandwidth as possible shouldn't increase one's costs.
Data is not a finite resource, but bandwidth suffers from"The Tragedy of the Commons", meaning basic economics indicates there must be some economic penalty for heavy bandwidth users, or else everyone else is subjected to multiple "buffering..." messages every time they try to watch porn. (Which is very annoying... er, not that I have any personal experience with the issue!) I've been saying for 20 years now that ISPs _should_ be charging by the byte for internet service in one way or another. The difficulty of accurately metering every byte indicates a tiered model should be used, with heavy usage placing you in a higher priced tier.
Better idea: patent "ripping off your customer", then sue every telecom company in the US for violating your patent! Seriously, why would you want to prevent companies from not ripping off customers?
That's never stopped Faux News from showing hundreds of thosands of people going crazy or millions in property damage before... today's coverage on Faux News should be interesting! (Especially for those who witnessed what actually happened.)
You may not have thought of this, but firing a gun in a plane at altitude is actually a really bad idea. A plane is a pressurized can with almost 1 atm pressing against the thin metal skin at 30,000 feet. Punching a hole in that skin tends to cause sudden depressurization, and may result in things (like people) getting sucked through the hole. Could also result in damage to the jet engines; again, a really bad idea at 30,000 feet. The other thing about planes: they are usually very densely packed with people, so missing one human being very likely results in the bullet lodging in another human being. Yes, Air Marshall's carry guns, but I'm pretty sure they are trained to use them only as a very last resort. Best strategy is exactly what has happened several times post 9/11: Everbody that can get close to the person perceived as threatening jumps them and beats the hell out of them, then their hands are zip-tied and somebody sits on them until the plane lands and they are removed by law enforcement.
Just do what I do: look the TSA guy straight in the eyes, and in a high-pitched voice, say "Don't you wanna check my PACKAGE?!?" while thrusting your hips forward... nine out of ten times, they wave you through. One out of ten times, they caress you slowly and gently...
To true to be funny. "Suffer the children." In my view, one of the major malfunctions of the Catholic Church is that they consider suffering in and of itself a virtue, and by all appearances, they seem to be promoting suffering. This is a misinterpretation of the message of Christ, which is that suffering is a good thing if and only it accomplishes a net good that exceeds the suffering itself, i.e. the sacrifice of one man for the salvation of all believers. In nerd terms, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” "Or the one."
Of course engineers are more likely to be autistic. In fact, it was observed years ago that autism rates are way up in the Silicon Valley, which is explained quite simply by the fact that engineers are interbreeding! As a software engineer, do I consider myself more autistic than average? Yes. Does Bill Gates exhibit symptoms of autism? Absolutely. If you're a slashdot reader, you probably score higher than average on an autism test.
My sister watched the supervisor run her backpack through the xray 3 times before the screener notice the pen knife in it, and my mother actually succeeded in getting a small pen knife onto a plane by "forgetting" it was in her makeup kit. These incidents were years ago. And, they don't really matter; post 9/11, a knife would not be an effective weapon for highjacking a plane. When every passenger makes the assumption they are going to die anyway if they don't take out the highjacker, pretty much every passenger is going to attempt to jump the highjacker and take him out. Even with a knife, you'd be hard pressed to be 100 to 1 odds - people don't die fast enough.
So what we really need is a "treble damages" clause for enforcement, i,e, fine them 3 times the revenue they took in from WiFi while blocking mobile hotspots. I'm pretty sure lots of other venues have had this idea... perhaps we should have a "finder's fee" for people to wander around with a WiFi sniffer and suss out new culprits, shouldn't they get 10% of the fine?
Slashdot's journalism standards are kind of like my dating standards: "Well, it seems like she's biologically female., and still breathing... go for it!"
I've worked with people that argued very loudly about technical issues, and as long as they did it in a good-natured way with a smile on their face, it was kind of an enjoyable experience. As far as Linus's complaint, which is essentially "Why use an ultra-secret poorly supported subroutine call when using simple explicit logic is much more clear and readable", I consider that a valid complaint. Sucks to be the person whose code triggered this rant, but it needed to be said. Agreed, it is very easy to misinterpret email or text because the tone of the person "ranting" isn't apparent, but I see no way to personally broadcast this message to the entire developer community.
I bought my daughter a Sony MP3 player a few years ago, brought it home, and discovered it would only play MP3's that were wrapped in Sony's proprietary wrapper, and applying the wrapper locked it for a single device so if you lost the device, you had to repurchase the MP3! I took it back to the store and returned it with the explanation that it was defective because it didn't play actual MP3s! Sony abandoned the Sony Soundstage BS shortly after that, apparently enough other people were upset by it that it hurt their sales. Since buying a $600 Sony "Dream Machine" DVD player that was a complete piece of crap, I've pretty much been boycotting Sony (Called for warranty repaird of DVD player, it was an automated system that no matter what was said, would respond "I don't understand you!" until you gave up - way to keep those warranty repair costs down, Sony!) Problem is, now for console games we have to choose between two evils: Sony or Microsoft. Which company is worse? (I'm leaning towards buying an Xbox One.)
Standard Operating Procedure is to turn it off at the breaker box, then Red Tag the switches so that nobody turns it back on again. Anybody other than the person that red tagged it turning it back on risks getting their ass kicked for endangering someone else's life. As a matter of general principle, I'd probably throw a meter across the circuit to make sure it's not live before touching anything too, but that's not required, and there should be plenty of indicator lights anyway. I'd love to know what the true story is of how this guy was working around live circuits in the first place. Getting across anything higher than 120v is painful as hell, I've only managed to touch 240v (touched the prongs while plugging it in behind a dryer), and it was NOT pleasant!
Contractors are not protected by the EEOC. You heard me right, it is OK by the federal government to discriminate against contractors, as in I had an EEOC worker specifically tell me they would do nothing for me because I was a contractor, not an employee.
Slashdot Mirror
And that, in short, is what I've been saying for about 20 years now is broken about the economics of the Internet - the built-in belief that bogarting as much bandwidth as possible shouldn't increase one's costs.
Data is not a finite resource, but bandwidth suffers from"The Tragedy of the Commons", meaning basic economics indicates there must be some economic penalty for heavy bandwidth users, or else everyone else is subjected to multiple "buffering..." messages every time they try to watch porn. (Which is very annoying... er, not that I have any personal experience with the issue!) I've been saying for 20 years now that ISPs _should_ be charging by the byte for internet service in one way or another. The difficulty of accurately metering every byte indicates a tiered model should be used, with heavy usage placing you in a higher priced tier.
Better idea: patent "ripping off your customer", then sue every telecom company in the US for violating your patent! Seriously, why would you want to prevent companies from not ripping off customers?
That's never stopped Faux News from showing hundreds of thosands of people going crazy or millions in property damage before... today's coverage on Faux News should be interesting! (Especially for those who witnessed what actually happened.)
Is this a bad day to wear my Guy Fawkes mask, then?
You're confused. When you hear people saying "Work is a PITA!" they mean "Pain In The Ass", not a type of bread!
Yeah, my "unbreakable" combs never seem to last very long either for some reason...
Couldn't cigarettes and drugs be parachuted in just as easily? Drones are a lot noisier, therefore more noticeable.
The real problem for prisons is helicopters:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sort of difficult to jam the control system for a vehicle carrying a pilot inside it, isn't it?
Didn't I see that in a Star Trek movie?
(This glass is made out of alumina, not silica. So, not really "glass" is the usual sense of the word.)
You may not have thought of this, but firing a gun in a plane at altitude is actually a really bad idea. A plane is a pressurized can with almost 1 atm pressing against the thin metal skin at 30,000 feet. Punching a hole in that skin tends to cause sudden depressurization, and may result in things (like people) getting sucked through the hole. Could also result in damage to the jet engines; again, a really bad idea at 30,000 feet. The other thing about planes: they are usually very densely packed with people, so missing one human being very likely results in the bullet lodging in another human being. Yes, Air Marshall's carry guns, but I'm pretty sure they are trained to use them only as a very last resort. Best strategy is exactly what has happened several times post 9/11: Everbody that can get close to the person perceived as threatening jumps them and beats the hell out of them, then their hands are zip-tied and somebody sits on them until the plane lands and they are removed by law enforcement.
The ones that aren't flat out lying on their resumes, yes.
Just do what I do: look the TSA guy straight in the eyes, and in a high-pitched voice, say "Don't you wanna check my PACKAGE?!?" while thrusting your hips forward... nine out of ten times, they wave you through. One out of ten times, they caress you slowly and gently...
To true to be funny. "Suffer the children." In my view, one of the major malfunctions of the Catholic Church is that they consider suffering in and of itself a virtue, and by all appearances, they seem to be promoting suffering. This is a misinterpretation of the message of Christ, which is that suffering is a good thing if and only it accomplishes a net good that exceeds the suffering itself, i.e. the sacrifice of one man for the salvation of all believers. In nerd terms, “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” "Or the one."
Of course engineers are more likely to be autistic. In fact, it was observed years ago that autism rates are way up in the Silicon Valley, which is explained quite simply by the fact that engineers are interbreeding! As a software engineer, do I consider myself more autistic than average? Yes. Does Bill Gates exhibit symptoms of autism? Absolutely. If you're a slashdot reader, you probably score higher than average on an autism test.
"So it turns out that wasn't..." (Removes glasses) "... such a nice model afterall!"
My sister watched the supervisor run her backpack through the xray 3 times before the screener notice the pen knife in it, and my mother actually succeeded in getting a small pen knife onto a plane by "forgetting" it was in her makeup kit. These incidents were years ago. And, they don't really matter; post 9/11, a knife would not be an effective weapon for highjacking a plane. When every passenger makes the assumption they are going to die anyway if they don't take out the highjacker, pretty much every passenger is going to attempt to jump the highjacker and take him out. Even with a knife, you'd be hard pressed to be 100 to 1 odds - people don't die fast enough.
So what we really need is a "treble damages" clause for enforcement, i,e, fine them 3 times the revenue they took in from WiFi while blocking mobile hotspots. I'm pretty sure lots of other venues have had this idea... perhaps we should have a "finder's fee" for people to wander around with a WiFi sniffer and suss out new culprits, shouldn't they get 10% of the fine?
Slashdot's journalism standards are kind of like my dating standards: "Well, it seems like she's biologically female., and still breathing... go for it!"
I've worked with people that argued very loudly about technical issues, and as long as they did it in a good-natured way with a smile on their face, it was kind of an enjoyable experience. As far as Linus's complaint, which is essentially "Why use an ultra-secret poorly supported subroutine call when using simple explicit logic is much more clear and readable", I consider that a valid complaint. Sucks to be the person whose code triggered this rant, but it needed to be said. Agreed, it is very easy to misinterpret email or text because the tone of the person "ranting" isn't apparent, but I see no way to personally broadcast this message to the entire developer community.
Sounds like a perfect case of Karma to me -- you listen to Beastie Boys, you should be forced to suffer! ;-)
I bought my daughter a Sony MP3 player a few years ago, brought it home, and discovered it would only play MP3's that were wrapped in Sony's proprietary wrapper, and applying the wrapper locked it for a single device so if you lost the device, you had to repurchase the MP3! I took it back to the store and returned it with the explanation that it was defective because it didn't play actual MP3s! Sony abandoned the Sony Soundstage BS shortly after that, apparently enough other people were upset by it that it hurt their sales. Since buying a $600 Sony "Dream Machine" DVD player that was a complete piece of crap, I've pretty much been boycotting Sony (Called for warranty repaird of DVD player, it was an automated system that no matter what was said, would respond "I don't understand you!" until you gave up - way to keep those warranty repair costs down, Sony!) Problem is, now for console games we have to choose between two evils: Sony or Microsoft. Which company is worse? (I'm leaning towards buying an Xbox One.)
Standard Operating Procedure is to turn it off at the breaker box, then Red Tag the switches so that nobody turns it back on again. Anybody other than the person that red tagged it turning it back on risks getting their ass kicked for endangering someone else's life. As a matter of general principle, I'd probably throw a meter across the circuit to make sure it's not live before touching anything too, but that's not required, and there should be plenty of indicator lights anyway. I'd love to know what the true story is of how this guy was working around live circuits in the first place. Getting across anything higher than 120v is painful as hell, I've only managed to touch 240v (touched the prongs while plugging it in behind a dryer), and it was NOT pleasant!
Contractors are not protected by the EEOC. You heard me right, it is OK by the federal government to discriminate against contractors, as in I had an EEOC worker specifically tell me they would do nothing for me because I was a contractor, not an employee.
Awesome product idea: bayonet-equipped shovels!