OK, I can understand #3, and to a lesser extent #2, but have you ever hit your finger with a hammer? i.e. the type you'd use for a wood-framed building? In that case the expletive just sort of merges with the nearly involuntary yell of agony. One time I was trying to drive this huge metal spike into a timber and I very carelessly got my index finger between the head of the spike and the falling hammer. The effect was sort of like having the bone slide off to the side while the skin and flesh stayed in place between the two pieces of metal.
"ow my finger"
was just NOT the appropriate phrase for that occasion.
"If I'm going to pay, it must be more functional than the free version."
MORE functional? How about equally functional?
If you can buy the content through the mechanism you want(I assume download) and free of restrictions on your personal use of the content, I certainly hope that you and most people would be willing to pay. I agree with all of the gripes about DRM and most of the gripes about the behavior of the big media companies. However, the people that simply refuse to pay for the stuff they want to watch or listen to really irk me. That's where I draw the line, and I haven't heard a compelling argument to convince me that this isn't the right balance between consumer rights and media company revenues.
"I wonder if, at least in the United States, the internet and its "freedoms" are already too interlaced in people's lives for a censorship program to be successfully implemented now."
I'd like to think that's true, but I certainly have little faith in the majority. If Internet censorship is necessary to prevent "terrorism" or "hate speech" or "child porn" then I'm afraid that the public might be all too willing to go along with it. Perhaps a very passionate minority of Internet true-believers can prevent this from happening.
Actually, the biggest threat to the Internet in the U.S. right now isn't a Chinese type censorship program, it's the tiered Internet (i.e. an Internet without Network Neutrality). Independent news services or dissident voices wouldn't exactly be "blocked", but could be slowed to a crawl compared to government approved news sources like CNN and FOX.
Sorry to see that your thread got hijacked by folks wanting to debate the pros and cons of unions (Thank $deity we didn't get off onto the firearms tangent!)
I think it's a good idea, and AT&T would be my nominee.
I already ceased doing business with them after I found out they were allowing the NSA to have free access to their network. However, I wouldn't mind telling them that I refuse to do business with them as long as they continue their blatant attempts to squash network neutrality.
"I like the idea of a Panopticon style world actually, with no privacy at all."
Are you serious? First sentence in the article: "The Panopticon is a type of prison building . . . " Which is exactly what a world without privacy would be.
"May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our country[man]." Samuel Adams
"When you choose an ambiguous swearing word like "f*ck", you are either outright dumb or too lazy to think of something more appropriate."
What could be more appropriate than "FUCK!" when you hit your finger with a hammer, lock your car keys inside the car with the motor running or drop your laptop while walking up a flight of stairs?
I understand your point, but there are situations where expletives are definitely "appropriate".
The whole "left" vs. "right", "liberal" vs. "conservative" etc. labeling system is an arbitrary construct implemented by the governmedia to provide the illusion of political opposition and distract attention away from fundamental issues.
"when a country upsets the balance of power by deploying heavier defensive systems, the appropriate response is NOT to increase offensive capability in their direction . . . the appropriate response is to increase defensive capability in turn."
By what higher authority do you judge how "appropriate" a particular military strategy is?
The U.S. has poured untold billions into the idea of missile defense under various acronyms. The result has been a string of miserable failures and a few dubious "successes". It's an incredibly difficult engineering problem, and it's unlikely that the system in question would ever be very effective. Rather than waste vast amounts of their own resources in a futile effort to try to catch up with this "defensive" technology, the Russians are just going to redeploy a few missiles to make sure that the Pentagon's new toy would be overwhelmed in the event of a conflict.
I'm against Internet taxes. I'm also opposed to income taxes. I'm vehemently opposed to the renegade government spending and accumulation of debt that has been occurring throughout my years in the full time work force. I'm opposed to the government's use of tax dollars for imperialistic crusades in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and to fund a massive and perpetual worldwide military force. I oppose the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, illegal immigration and the war on drugs.
The whole world has got to be laughing at us. This ranks right up there with the terror alert rainbow and hair gel ban. Let's bring in a bunch of clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics to see what threats their "wild imaginations" can come up with. I'd LOL if I wasn't funding and sacrificing my liberty for this nonsense.
"Yes, let's be nice to the Iranians. I'm sure they'll never seek to hurt us with the nuclear weapons they're building. . . Moron."
Quit listening to government and media propaganda numbnuts.
-As a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation treaty, Iran has a RIGHT to develop nuclear energy, which includes Uranium enrichment capability.
-Taking an arrogant and belligerent stance toward Iran only gives them MORE incentive to develop weapons. We name three countries an "Axis of Evil", then attack one of them with overwhelming military force. Don't you think that the other two would be inclined to ramp up their military capabilities?
-Iran isn't stupid or suicidal. They're well aware of the fact that if they attacked the U.S. with a nuclear weapon, it would definitely mean their own destruction.
"As to us being a 'colonial power by fiat' - what nonsense. . ..I prefer to have the US run things internationally . .."
So which is it? You say it's nonsense to suggest that we're a colonial (imperial) power, yet conclude that we "run things internationally." How does that work? Why would we be "screwed economically" by dismantling some of our network of 700+ major foreign military bases, ending our trillion dollar war and reducing military spending? We could buy every drop of oil we need with the amount of money we're spending on the war and the DoD budget. We're going to screw ourselves through renegade government spending and idiotic imperialistic crusades like the Iraq war.
". . . many women . . . come to prostitution only as a last resort, while they'd never even think about it under economically secure conditions."
How many people get to choose their line of work under "economically secure conditions"? The folks that genuinely enjoy their jobs are the exception rather than the rule. People work primarily because they need to provide for themselves and their families. Few have a choice of working vs. not working. How many women do you think would work waiting tables or cleaning hotel rooms if they had some sort of guarantee?
You're either forgetting about (dismissing?) quantum mechanics, or making a fundamental assumption about the nature of the universe. We live in a world that is inherently non-deterministic at the quantum level. My favorite example of this is an experiment I learned about in college. I hope you follow my qualitative explanation.
Suppose a light is shone through two polarized lenses in series with the second lens rotated by angle 'T' wrt the first. The fraction of a stream of photons that pass through the lenses vs. the fraction that are blocked is predictable and measurable. However, there is no way to "predict" whether an individual photon is going to be blocked or pass through.
Identical photons and an identical target with different results. You could argue that if I could roll back time and fire the SAME photon again, the result would be the same, but therein lies the assumption. I think it's a leap of faith either way, and I personally believe that this quantum uncertainty is the basis for free will.
Win-Win for the government on this one. They get to please the big-money special interest groups, and amass more power at the same time.
This is just another example of laws that can be used for selective prosecution of political dissidents. Make everyone a criminal, and then just take down people you don't like for whatever reason.
"Dropping standards in handwriting is a good example - it drops because we simply don't need it any more. It's a good thing:)"
Until the electricity gets turned off.
" . ..most of us can't survive without AC and a supermarket round the corner."
Speak for yourself, and if it's true about you, rectify the situation. If you can't "survive" without AC, you're screwed, but for $100 you could easily make yourself "supermarket independent" for a month. Or, you can be like the short-sighted fools camping out in the Wal Mart parking lot waiting for trucks carrying food and bottled water just before Hurricane Katrina hit.
The writer/speaker has some interesting ideas, but they all rest on a fundamental assumption of societal stability. All it takes is a war, plague, anarchy, etc. to revive the need for very fundamental skills. Oh, but I forgot, "That could never happen here."
1. It has never been implemented with any great success
2. There is little incentive for the individual to perform at his or her best because the marginal contribution of a single person has almost zero effect on the collective
3. It encourages irresponsible behavior by shifting the cost of personal decisions onto the society
Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Therefore, Verizon may not be sued by its customers for turning over their private data to the government.
If you're still reading (sorry, I was just getting back to my comments)
Well, "air" would be close to ideal from an electrical perspective. That would minimize capacitance between adjacent wires. Think of "capacitance" as a barrel that holds electrical charge. You have to fill the barrel with charge to turn a '0' into a '1'. Given that a transistor of a certain size can only pump so much charge, the larger the barrel(larger capacitance), the longer it takes to fill it up, which means that the chip runs more slowly.
Air isn't possible however because you need something with mechanical strength as well. The wires in a chip need to be done in layers, sometimes 8 or more. You do metal wiring on one layer, then fill in the spaces and cover it over with a silicide glass. You then do another layer of wiring and tunnel down through the glass(insulator) to the wires and transistors on the layers below through a vertical hole called a "via". It isn't manufacturable without some filler material to make a planar surface for the next layer of wiring. Imagine that done 8 times. You have 8 planes of this maze of metal wires a few tenths of microns apart, with a bunch of vertical pieces which span one or more of the planes. Even if it could be manufactured, the slightest jolt would annihilate it.
Mechanical issues also rule out many other materials with lower dielectric constants. Anything with a high "coefficient of thermal expansion"(quantifies expansion of a material with temp change) is out because expansion and contraction would bend and break the wires. So, the trick is to find something with a low dielectric constant, which has suitable mechanical qualities as well.
"we're not even talking about the dielectric of air here, we're talking about a vacuum!"
A vacuum has a constant of 1.00 and air is like 1.04. The extra savings is marginal when you're comparing it to '3'
"As for decreasing the dielectric, what I do know is that means less leakage"
Where do you get that from? Most of the leakage in semiconductors is from sub-threshold transistor operation, which has nothing to do with the wires. The other leakage is "gate" leakage, and to mitigate that, you want something with a very high dielectric constant.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I can understand #3, and to a lesser extent #2, but have you ever hit your finger with a hammer? i.e. the type you'd use for a wood-framed building? In that case the expletive just sort of merges with the nearly involuntary yell of agony. One time I was trying to drive this huge metal spike into a timber and I very carelessly got my index finger between the head of the spike and the falling hammer. The effect was sort of like having the bone slide off to the side while the skin and flesh stayed in place between the two pieces of metal.
"ow my finger"
was just NOT the appropriate phrase for that occasion.
"If I'm going to pay, it must be more functional than the free version."
MORE functional? How about equally functional?
If you can buy the content through the mechanism you want(I assume download) and free of restrictions on your personal use of the content, I certainly hope that you and most people would be willing to pay. I agree with all of the gripes about DRM and most of the gripes about the behavior of the big media companies. However, the people that simply refuse to pay for the stuff they want to watch or listen to really irk me. That's where I draw the line, and I haven't heard a compelling argument to convince me that this isn't the right balance between consumer rights and media company revenues.
"I wonder if, at least in the United States, the internet and its "freedoms" are already too interlaced in people's lives for a censorship program to be successfully implemented now."
I'd like to think that's true, but I certainly have little faith in the majority. If Internet censorship is necessary to prevent "terrorism" or "hate speech" or "child porn" then I'm afraid that the public might be all too willing to go along with it. Perhaps a very passionate minority of Internet true-believers can prevent this from happening.
Actually, the biggest threat to the Internet in the U.S. right now isn't a Chinese type censorship program, it's the tiered Internet (i.e. an Internet without Network Neutrality). Independent news services or dissident voices wouldn't exactly be "blocked", but could be slowed to a crawl compared to government approved news sources like CNN and FOX.
"So what you're saying is that people of average (or below) intelligence should live on a limited income?"
No, I think that all people of below average intelligence should be provided with unlimited income.
Sorry to see that your thread got hijacked by folks wanting to debate the pros and cons of unions
(Thank $deity we didn't get off onto the firearms tangent!)
I think it's a good idea, and AT&T would be my nominee.
I already ceased doing business with them after I found out they were allowing the NSA to have free access to their network. However, I wouldn't mind telling them that I refuse to do business with them as long as they continue their blatant attempts to squash network neutrality.
"I like the idea of a Panopticon style world actually, with no privacy at all."
Are you serious? First sentence in the article: "The Panopticon is a type of prison building . . . " Which is exactly what a world without privacy would be.
"May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our country[man]."
Samuel Adams
"When you choose an ambiguous swearing word like "f*ck", you are either outright dumb or too lazy to think of something more appropriate."
What could be more appropriate than "FUCK!" when you hit your finger with a hammer, lock your car keys inside the car with the motor running or drop your laptop while walking up a flight of stairs?
I understand your point, but there are situations where expletives are definitely "appropriate".
The whole "left" vs. "right", "liberal" vs. "conservative" etc. labeling system is an arbitrary construct implemented by the governmedia to provide the illusion of political opposition and distract attention away from fundamental issues.
" . . .please explain, if sales of shoes, light bulbs . . .[are] taxed, why ISP service should not be."
I wasn't making an argument differentiating internet service with that post. I was questioning the casual acceptance of taxes on "everything else".
"when a country upsets the balance of power by deploying heavier defensive systems, the appropriate response is NOT to increase offensive capability in their direction . . . the appropriate response is to increase defensive capability in turn."
By what higher authority do you judge how "appropriate" a particular military strategy is?
The U.S. has poured untold billions into the idea of missile defense under various acronyms. The result has been a string of miserable failures and a few dubious "successes". It's an incredibly difficult engineering problem, and it's unlikely that the system in question would ever be very effective. Rather than waste vast amounts of their own resources in a futile effort to try to catch up with this "defensive" technology, the Russians are just going to redeploy a few missiles to make sure that the Pentagon's new toy would be overwhelmed in the event of a conflict.
"taxation without representation"
I'm against Internet taxes. I'm also opposed to income taxes. I'm vehemently opposed to the renegade government spending and accumulation of debt that has been occurring throughout my years in the full time work force. I'm opposed to the government's use of tax dollars for imperialistic crusades in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and to fund a massive and perpetual worldwide military force. I oppose the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, secret prisons, illegal immigration and the war on drugs.
WHO exactly is "representing" me?
"ISP service currently has a special exemption from sales tax. Why should that be?"
"whenever you buy something, it's usually subject to sales tax."
Why should THAT be??
You should put a '}' or something at the beginning of your sig.
press 1 now.
The whole world has got to be laughing at us. This ranks right up there with the terror alert rainbow and hair gel ban. Let's bring in a bunch of clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenics to see what threats their "wild imaginations" can come up with. I'd LOL if I wasn't funding and sacrificing my liberty for this nonsense.
"Yes, let's be nice to the Iranians. I'm sure they'll never seek to hurt us with the nuclear weapons they're building. . . Moron."
.I prefer to have the US run things internationally . . ."
Quit listening to government and media propaganda numbnuts.
-As a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation treaty, Iran has a RIGHT to develop nuclear energy, which includes Uranium enrichment capability.
-Taking an arrogant and belligerent stance toward Iran only gives them MORE incentive to develop weapons. We name three countries an "Axis of Evil", then attack one of them with overwhelming military force. Don't you think that the other two would be inclined to ramp up their military capabilities?
-Iran isn't stupid or suicidal. They're well aware of the fact that if they attacked the U.S. with a nuclear weapon, it would definitely mean their own destruction.
"As to us being a 'colonial power by fiat' - what nonsense. . .
So which is it? You say it's nonsense to suggest that we're a colonial (imperial) power, yet conclude that we "run things internationally." How does that work? Why would we be "screwed economically" by dismantling some of our network of 700+ major foreign military bases, ending our trillion dollar war and reducing military spending? We could buy every drop of oil we need with the amount of money we're spending on the war and the DoD budget. We're going to screw ourselves through renegade government spending and idiotic imperialistic crusades like the Iraq war.
". . . many women . . . come to prostitution only as a last resort, while they'd never even think about it under economically secure conditions."
How many people get to choose their line of work under "economically secure conditions"? The folks that genuinely enjoy their jobs are the exception rather than the rule. People work primarily because they need to provide for themselves and their families. Few have a choice of working vs. not working. How many women do you think would work waiting tables or cleaning hotel rooms if they had some sort of guarantee?
You're either forgetting about (dismissing?) quantum mechanics, or making a fundamental assumption about the nature of the universe. We live in a world that is inherently non-deterministic at the quantum level. My favorite example of this is an experiment I learned about in college. I hope you follow my qualitative explanation.
Suppose a light is shone through two polarized lenses in series with the second lens rotated by angle 'T' wrt the first. The fraction of a stream of photons that pass through the lenses vs. the fraction that are blocked is predictable and measurable. However, there is no way to "predict" whether an individual photon is going to be blocked or pass through.
Identical photons and an identical target with different results. You could argue that if I could roll back time and fire the SAME photon again, the result would be the same, but therein lies the assumption. I think it's a leap of faith either way, and I personally believe that this quantum uncertainty is the basis for free will.
Win-Win for the government on this one. They get to please the big-money special interest groups, and amass more power at the same time.
This is just another example of laws that can be used for selective prosecution of political dissidents. Make everyone a criminal, and then just take down people you don't like for whatever reason.
Shut up! I can't read /. while you're thinking about the Brady Bunch theme song.
"Dropping standards in handwriting is a good example - it drops because we simply don't need it any more. It's a good thing :)"
.most of us can't survive without AC and a supermarket round the corner."
Until the electricity gets turned off.
" . .
Speak for yourself, and if it's true about you, rectify the situation. If you can't "survive" without AC, you're screwed, but for $100 you could easily make yourself "supermarket independent" for a month. Or, you can be like the short-sighted fools camping out in the Wal Mart parking lot waiting for trucks carrying food and bottled water just before Hurricane Katrina hit.
The writer/speaker has some interesting ideas, but they all rest on a fundamental assumption of societal stability. All it takes is a war, plague, anarchy, etc. to revive the need for very fundamental skills. Oh, but I forgot, "That could never happen here."
1. It has never been implemented with any great success
2. There is little incentive for the individual to perform at his or her best because the marginal contribution of a single person has almost zero effect on the collective
3. It encourages irresponsible behavior by shifting the cost of personal decisions onto the society
Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Therefore, Verizon may not be sued by its customers for turning over their private data to the government.
?????????
If you're still reading (sorry, I was just getting back to my comments)
Well, "air" would be close to ideal from an electrical perspective. That would minimize capacitance between adjacent wires. Think of "capacitance" as a barrel that holds electrical charge. You have to fill the barrel with charge to turn a '0' into a '1'. Given that a transistor of a certain size can only pump so much charge, the larger the barrel(larger capacitance), the longer it takes to fill it up, which means that the chip runs more slowly.
Air isn't possible however because you need something with mechanical strength as well. The wires in a chip need to be done in layers, sometimes 8 or more. You do metal wiring on one layer, then fill in the spaces and cover it over with a silicide glass. You then do another layer of wiring and tunnel down through the glass(insulator) to the wires and transistors on the layers below through a vertical hole called a "via". It isn't manufacturable without some filler material to make a planar surface for the next layer of wiring. Imagine that done 8 times. You have 8 planes of this maze of metal wires a few tenths of microns apart, with a bunch of vertical pieces which span one or more of the planes. Even if it could be manufactured, the slightest jolt would annihilate it.
Mechanical issues also rule out many other materials with lower dielectric constants. Anything with a high "coefficient of thermal expansion"(quantifies expansion of a material with temp change) is out because expansion and contraction would bend and break the wires. So, the trick is to find something with a low dielectric constant, which has suitable mechanical qualities as well.
"we're not even talking about the dielectric of air here, we're talking about a vacuum!"
A vacuum has a constant of 1.00 and air is like 1.04. The extra savings is marginal when you're comparing it to '3'
"As for decreasing the dielectric, what I do know is that means less leakage"
Where do you get that from? Most of the leakage in semiconductors is from sub-threshold transistor operation, which has nothing to do with the wires. The other leakage is "gate" leakage, and to mitigate that, you want something with a very high dielectric constant.