Afterthought: I can average 5-15GB total transfer daily. Beyond the linux installs (perhaps 15GB/month)it is mostly TV shows; I pay for Expanded Digital + 5 Premium Channels, I'd say I earned the right to download the new Boston Legal or Dexter considering a DVR could do the same (yay MythTV). I also buy the boxsets for shows I respect and then download the rips anyway for convenience. I.E. My usage might make me a little more prejudiced against the pay-per-bit idea than some Xanga/Myspace teen or AOL e-mail user.
This does bring up another problem with volume pricing; it would flat out _kill_ internet radio and internet TV, reverting audio and video media control back to the cable and radio networks. It would be yet another in a series of steps backwards in american communications and technology. We're already rated as a tech backwater in comparison to Europe, let's not allow our greedy corporatemongers to turn us into a tech fossil.
Wouldn't it be easier for them to switch to a pay-per-gigabyte-downloaded scheme? So instead of paying $X/month for unlimited access, you'd be paying something less than $X per month. Perhaps $10 less. But you'd get charged $1/GB downloaded, which, I think with most people, wouldn't be that much anyways.
That's a fantastic idea. I think you should sign up right now, and tell us all how quickly you go broke paying for unsolicited traffic to your node from John Q. Cracker and his army of bot-machines.
Wait, did I say 'fantastic'? What I meant was 'fantastically retarded'.
But should they teach simple stuff such as using javac and Ant in University ? Sorry to sound like an elitist asshole, but it is pretty reasonable to expect a CS undergraduate student to be able to figure these details by himself. I mean, surely the lecture time could be used for something more fundamental.
I would agree with you, if the students were encouraged to learn on their own and given direction in which to point their curiosity. But they aren't. They're encouraged (from early in childhood, really) to do the bare minimum work to get through the course, to stick to the examples and lectures given by the instructor explicitly, and not deviate from what everyone else is doing, or you'll stick your neck out too far.
Case in point, in my data structures class we were given an assignment in which a requirement was that we used a hash table which had an underlying structure of a pointer-based linked-list. The assignment could be completed in any language, but since Java was the curriculum language, the course was taught using only Java examples. I preferred C, but knowing STL list was available I wrote my implementation with C++. I got half credit for the reason "Not use pointer based linked list". Now, aside from the obvious flaw that Java does not have pointers per se, and the Java kiddies all got full credit, STL list is in fact implemented with pointers. I argued this with the instructor, who relegated me to the TA that graded the assignment. When I explained to her that STL list is pointer based, she told me I was wrong. So I directed her to the SGI documentation that says "STL list is implemented by a doubly-linked pointer-based linked list..." Reluctantly, she gave me full credit. However, she wouldn't correct the scores of the other handful of people that also used C++ and STL list unless they came in and showed her the same web page. It wasn't enough that she had been proven undeniably wrong. Lesson learned: don't deviate from the strict curriculum and curriculum tools, or you get screwed. That is, at least, how the others took it. I was too angry to let the man get get the better of me, and I was determined to fight it. So many other people just rolled over and took it, though, and they abandoned all other languages for Java for the rest of their undergraduate classes.
The problem with you technical guys are that you are all so eliteist.
Whilst you want to truncollage into a trade school with yore narrow
minded views that collage should be a job training centre, humanities
are focused on making you a well rounded person who is auctually
interesting to be with, not a boring focuesed geek. Really, it makes
me so mad when people say "oh, he's doing a humanities degree, that's
easy". I have to read *3* *books* *a* *week* on average. Not picture
books either I assue you. It is a lot of work, but the upshot is
improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the
technical.
From this revealing snippet, you may want to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your education.
The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program.
This is a fantastically insightful comment, and IMHO it is very true. I came from the generation of developers that was caught somewhat in the middle - C++ was the platform for study in high school, and when I got to University Java had just become the de facto platform. As I approached graduation, I was exposed more and more to younger students that had not seen anything other than Java, and they were completely lost without a textbook to copy and paste from. It was depressing. Now I'm running into them in industry, and they don't have the skills to adapt to the real world of software development.
"landing on land was preferred in terms of total life cycle costs for the vehicles."
Landing on land is cheaper, check.
"eliminating the 1500 lb airbags for landing has its appeal"
Landing on land lets it be lighter, check.
"A splashdown in water seems to be favored."
Huh? WTF? Am I supposed to go RTFA or something?
The 1500lbs. of airbags are for cushioning the surface landing, not for buoyancy in water. As I understand it, the CEV will be required to have floaters regardless of the re-entry landing method because the abort scenario puts it in the ocean off the cape anyway, so the extra baggage for cushioning a land impact just facilitates a superfluous landing method.
So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms. The fact that this is not even mentioned as a possibly significant issue in the article kinda shows that the entire study is worthless. Or is the idea here that controlling fictional materials in which guns play a role is somehow more politically practical than controlling actual guns?
...
Sure lets talk about controlling violent video games, right after the US adopts the UK gun control laws.
Not every loony is allowed to possess firearms, it is in fact a felony itself for a convicted felon to possess a firearm, and I believe there are mental health statutes as well.
However, what a person is *allowed* to do and what they really actually do are two different things entirely. Violent criminals are still violent, and they'll acquire means to be violent regardless of laws. The fact that they disregard and disobey laws is what defines them as criminals. As a private citizen I highly value my right to be armed and able to protect myself in the event that the government fails to do so. There is also a very American paranoia of government control. Don't forget, the US exists because it threw off the reigns of the British government, and in our Bill of Rights we define that the people have the right to throw off any government that is tyrannical and not acting in the interests of the people. To protect that right, the people armed themselves. It's only recently become a fad to reject the idea that the government should not have a standing army, and that the citizenry can't be trusted with firearms, and it's my opinion that this feeling arouses from the increasing complacency of a fattened society.
But back to my point, owning a firearm doesn't make me necessarily more violent than the average UK citizen. I do, in fact, own several, including an assault rifle (gasp!). And I have played violent video games and watched violent movies my whole life. Do you know how many people I've injured or killed? Zero. Surely I must have killed several hundred neighborhood cats in my day, though, right? Nope, not a single critter - except for a copperhead snake - and that was self defense. This is because I possess a trait called "mental stability". I'm happy to vent my aggressive tendencies on pixels and sheet metal chickens, and switch my aggression off when I'm done. It's not hard to do, and I should not be restricted from either activity (both of which I enjoy very much) because a few nutjobs can't control themselves. It only makes sense that the nutjob offenders be punished, rather than myself and all the other harmless people like me. So no thank you, I do not want your gun control laws. I'd rather you keep them to yourselves.
Really, is it that hard for you to resist your obsessive compulsive behavior and not click on the link for stories you aren't interested in?
Yes, very difficult. Especially when Slashdot "editors" behave so irresponsibly by putting these stories with outrageous headlines out like a couple of big juicy tits on a platter where any normal person simply can't resist. You're implying only heterosexual females are not interested in these stories?
A war against an generic term, a tactic or unspecified groups of people cannot be won. (It cannot be lost either).
As long as your "enemy" is unquantifiable, ever shifting, and not discretely identifiable, you're just using a military pretense to dump mass amounts of public funds into private industry. Most likely because you and your cabinet buddies have huge stock options in the corporations that get the government checks.
Young Indiana Jones used horrible contrivances to get Indy to meet various famous historical figures. Expect any Star Wars TV series to do the same with characters from the movies. Oh and lots of phony CGI.
The truth is that the RIAA truly believes that they are more important than absolutely everybody else in the world!
The truth is that the RIAA truly believes that everybody else in the world owes them a debt, thanks to all the liberty that's interspersed throughout the world. Fixed that for you.
Yeah, you make a good point - controlling the spread of information is just not possible, talk to the RIAA and MPAA about how well they've been able to control the dissemination of media for example. I think we can all agree that the problem is that the dollar trumps the voter. I also think that as long as American citizens that seek wealth do so in the halls of government, they will be fueling the power of the corporate entities that are more than happy to pay their blood money. From this, we can eliminate money from the equation by either removing the human element from government (insane, plus the replacement computer would be built, programmed, and maintained by a human party that can still be corrupted), forbidding government officials from owning assets at any time during or following their term in office (unfeasible), or by jailing government officials and high ranking officers in corporations for soft money or quid pro quo violations found and voiding the actions of such exchanges. Perhaps as an incentive to keep the politicians in line, we add that assets of a corporation and politician found guilty of such actions would be seized by the government and absorbed into the treasury. That might make these jackoffs a little more careful about how they behave, and provide a real incentive for politicians to self-police. The political capital to be gained by blowing the whistle outweighs the rewards and risks of taking a cookie from the jar.
And let's remember that every major new revision of Windows has had a lot of pain for users. Going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was a helluva big change, and moving from Windows 95 to Windows XP was, while somewhat less daunting, still getting used to changes.
But it's got (Can you believe it?!), Reversi! And all this for $500? $1000? Even more? No it's just $99! All these feature plus reversi all for just $99, what an incredible value!
I come from a nerdy IT college that was almost exclusively Linux. However I've worked on setting up labs with a friend of mine at another college down the road, and they insisted on being exclusively Windows. Their argument was that Windows was more "user friendly".
I rather think that users and observers commonly mistake "user-friendly" to be "a familiar type and amount of pain". Windows is less easy to use than it is familiar, and remembering the pain it took to gain that familiarity many users will shy from diving into something new fearing what new pain to unveil from a different system.
By the way, I applaud you for questioning the situation and thinking for yourself, rather than falling for the usual liberal paranoia. As opposed to the conservative rationality?
I would argue the inverse - that the government is now an arm of the large corporations. They ahve the money and power to influence government for their own desires, and often bigwigs of large corporate enterprises are found in the high ranking slots of government. How free is this free society, really, when the people that are making the decisions at the top level are most concerned with the interests of large corporations that desire above all else a guarantee to the money and subservience of the populace?
Stopping this playing of music to an entire factory floor without regard to the people actually working (who cares about the royalties collection people) would not be a bad thing in all cases.
Except that it sets the precedent for the music industry to be able to arbitrarily sue consumers for "sharing" music with others when passengers in our cars, guests or family members in our homes, or passersby in the street happen to be able to hear your stereo - which is completely unreasonable. Plus, if this precedent is set, it's only a matter of time before their collective legal genius realizes that they can take this to the level that each playing of an audio sample constitutes a "copy" of audio that you are not entitled to after the first playing, ushering in the dawn of the pay-per-play music era, abolishing all personal media players and ultimately any device that can record or mimic audio.
So maybe not that far, but that would be their wet dream come true
Yes that is all you have to do to fix it, but what does she have to do to fix it? The problem isn't that linux is intimidating for the average/. poster. It is that Linux is pretty freaking intimidating for the average computer user.
Everything is intimidating for the average computer user. A vast majority of "average computer users" also don't know what the fsck to do if their windoze machine breaks, except to call their nephew that's a "whiz with them thar computer doohickeys". So the two really are on even ground here. Any person capable of rescuing themselves from a windoze malfunction has problem solving skills, or at least knows how to use google, and has just as much probability of success on both platforms.
I honestly can't believe how people blur the edges of reality and sci-fi series. So now people deserve special honour because they played in Star Trek? I mean, the guy was probably a great actor, but what the heck.
Reminds me of the 20-th century museum in Futurama, where they have messed up the entire history and thought The Honeymooners were the first people to step on the moon ("Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon, Alice!"), and reimaging the astronauts as movie-style space cowboys complete with cowboy hats and attractive behavior.
It's just idiocracy happening slowly before our eyes. We're sailors on the moon!
We carry a harpoon!
But thar ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing this whalin' tune!
But why should a company support linux just because their gadget has linux running inside it? Because they are benefiting from a mature, open source, and well understood pre-established operating system. If there was no Linux they would have to spend much more development costs in building their own OS for their devices.
Or invest more in hardware and support costs and embed Windows...
And why should the blue screen of death and the business director's kludgey VB apps be relegated only to the PC world, when there are so many devices out there performing vital functions in our society that should be able to crash hard through the floor too?
Since 1945, there has been no direct conflict between major powers, no use of nuclear weapons. My mother once told me that she seriously expected WWIII to begin in the 60's. It didn't happen; it still hasn't happened. Maybe we've learned - a little.
I would argue that we (the US) have learned very little. Those who oppose us, however, have learned quite a bit. We're still tossing trillions of dollars at fleet ships, smart weapons, stealth fighters, and long range artillery against an enemy that has no fixed structures or marked vehicles, hides within civilian populations, and can impart similar destruction with a $20 pipe bomb laid out on the side of the road. I think our high technology is really only increasing the price tag on our military action, and not really doing much to tilt attrition in our favor.
Slashdot Mirror
This does bring up another problem with volume pricing; it would flat out _kill_ internet radio and internet TV, reverting audio and video media control back to the cable and radio networks. It would be yet another in a series of steps backwards in american communications and technology. We're already rated as a tech backwater in comparison to Europe, let's not allow our greedy corporatemongers to turn us into a tech fossil.
Doesn't matter. AT&T doesn't know or care if your firewall drops a packet. It only knows that data went to your link. cha-ching!
That's a fantastic idea. I think you should sign up right now, and tell us all how quickly you go broke paying for unsolicited traffic to your node from John Q. Cracker and his army of bot-machines.
Wait, did I say 'fantastic'? What I meant was 'fantastically retarded'.
US Customs has identified the anal cavity as a container for excrement, and thus reserves the right to fu^H^Hsearch any anuses entering the country.
I would agree with you, if the students were encouraged to learn on their own and given direction in which to point their curiosity. But they aren't. They're encouraged (from early in childhood, really) to do the bare minimum work to get through the course, to stick to the examples and lectures given by the instructor explicitly, and not deviate from what everyone else is doing, or you'll stick your neck out too far.
Case in point, in my data structures class we were given an assignment in which a requirement was that we used a hash table which had an underlying structure of a pointer-based linked-list. The assignment could be completed in any language, but since Java was the curriculum language, the course was taught using only Java examples. I preferred C, but knowing STL list was available I wrote my implementation with C++. I got half credit for the reason "Not use pointer based linked list". Now, aside from the obvious flaw that Java does not have pointers per se, and the Java kiddies all got full credit, STL list is in fact implemented with pointers. I argued this with the instructor, who relegated me to the TA that graded the assignment. When I explained to her that STL list is pointer based, she told me I was wrong. So I directed her to the SGI documentation that says "STL list is implemented by a doubly-linked pointer-based linked list..." Reluctantly, she gave me full credit. However, she wouldn't correct the scores of the other handful of people that also used C++ and STL list unless they came in and showed her the same web page. It wasn't enough that she had been proven undeniably wrong. Lesson learned: don't deviate from the strict curriculum and curriculum tools, or you get screwed. That is, at least, how the others took it. I was too angry to let the man get get the better of me, and I was determined to fight it. So many other people just rolled over and took it, though, and they abandoned all other languages for Java for the rest of their undergraduate classes.
Whilst you want to trun collage into a trade school with yore narrow
minded views that collage should be a job training centre, humanities
are focused on making you a well rounded person who is auctually
interesting to be with, not a boring focuesed geek. Really, it makes
me so mad when people say "oh, he's doing a humanities degree, that's
easy". I have to read *3* *books* *a* *week* on average. Not picture
books either I assue you. It is a lot of work, but the upshot is
improved grammer and spelling skills that are lacking in the
technical.
From this revealing snippet, you may want to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your education.
This is a fantastically insightful comment, and IMHO it is very true. I came from the generation of developers that was caught somewhat in the middle - C++ was the platform for study in high school, and when I got to University Java had just become the de facto platform. As I approached graduation, I was exposed more and more to younger students that had not seen anything other than Java, and they were completely lost without a textbook to copy and paste from. It was depressing. Now I'm running into them in industry, and they don't have the skills to adapt to the real world of software development.
"landing on land was preferred in terms of total life cycle costs for the vehicles."
Landing on land is cheaper, check.
"eliminating the 1500 lb airbags for landing has its appeal"
Landing on land lets it be lighter, check.
"A splashdown in water seems to be favored."
Huh? WTF? Am I supposed to go RTFA or something?
The 1500lbs. of airbags are for cushioning the surface landing, not for buoyancy in water. As I understand it, the CEV will be required to have floaters regardless of the re-entry landing method because the abort scenario puts it in the ocean off the cape anyway, so the extra baggage for cushioning a land impact just facilitates a superfluous landing method.
So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms. The fact that this is not even mentioned as a possibly significant issue in the article kinda shows that the entire study is worthless. Or is the idea here that controlling fictional materials in which guns play a role is somehow more politically practical than controlling actual guns?
Sure lets talk about controlling violent video games, right after the US adopts the UK gun control laws.
Not every loony is allowed to possess firearms, it is in fact a felony itself for a convicted felon to possess a firearm, and I believe there are mental health statutes as well.
However, what a person is *allowed* to do and what they really actually do are two different things entirely. Violent criminals are still violent, and they'll acquire means to be violent regardless of laws. The fact that they disregard and disobey laws is what defines them as criminals. As a private citizen I highly value my right to be armed and able to protect myself in the event that the government fails to do so. There is also a very American paranoia of government control. Don't forget, the US exists because it threw off the reigns of the British government, and in our Bill of Rights we define that the people have the right to throw off any government that is tyrannical and not acting in the interests of the people. To protect that right, the people armed themselves. It's only recently become a fad to reject the idea that the government should not have a standing army, and that the citizenry can't be trusted with firearms, and it's my opinion that this feeling arouses from the increasing complacency of a fattened society.
But back to my point, owning a firearm doesn't make me necessarily more violent than the average UK citizen. I do, in fact, own several, including an assault rifle (gasp!). And I have played violent video games and watched violent movies my whole life. Do you know how many people I've injured or killed? Zero. Surely I must have killed several hundred neighborhood cats in my day, though, right? Nope, not a single critter - except for a copperhead snake - and that was self defense. This is because I possess a trait called "mental stability". I'm happy to vent my aggressive tendencies on pixels and sheet metal chickens, and switch my aggression off when I'm done. It's not hard to do, and I should not be restricted from either activity (both of which I enjoy very much) because a few nutjobs can't control themselves. It only makes sense that the nutjob offenders be punished, rather than myself and all the other harmless people like me. So no thank you, I do not want your gun control laws. I'd rather you keep them to yourselves.
(It cannot be lost either).
As long as your "enemy" is unquantifiable, ever shifting, and not discretely identifiable, you're just using a military pretense to dump mass amounts of public funds into private industry. Most likely because you and your cabinet buddies have huge stock options in the corporations that get the government checks.
I knew you were going to say that. I have ESPN.
Yeah, you make a good point - controlling the spread of information is just not possible, talk to the RIAA and MPAA about how well they've been able to control the dissemination of media for example. I think we can all agree that the problem is that the dollar trumps the voter. I also think that as long as American citizens that seek wealth do so in the halls of government, they will be fueling the power of the corporate entities that are more than happy to pay their blood money. From this, we can eliminate money from the equation by either removing the human element from government (insane, plus the replacement computer would be built, programmed, and maintained by a human party that can still be corrupted), forbidding government officials from owning assets at any time during or following their term in office (unfeasible), or by jailing government officials and high ranking officers in corporations for soft money or quid pro quo violations found and voiding the actions of such exchanges. Perhaps as an incentive to keep the politicians in line, we add that assets of a corporation and politician found guilty of such actions would be seized by the government and absorbed into the treasury. That might make these jackoffs a little more careful about how they behave, and provide a real incentive for politicians to self-police. The political capital to be gained by blowing the whistle outweighs the rewards and risks of taking a cookie from the jar.
That's too damn funny. I wish you hadn't posted AC.
But it's got (Can you believe it?!), Reversi! And all this for $500? $1000? Even more? No it's just $99! All these feature plus reversi all for just $99, what an incredible value!
I rather think that users and observers commonly mistake "user-friendly" to be "a familiar type and amount of pain". Windows is less easy to use than it is familiar, and remembering the pain it took to gain that familiarity many users will shy from diving into something new fearing what new pain to unveil from a different system.
I would argue the inverse - that the government is now an arm of the large corporations. They ahve the money and power to influence government for their own desires, and often bigwigs of large corporate enterprises are found in the high ranking slots of government. How free is this free society, really, when the people that are making the decisions at the top level are most concerned with the interests of large corporations that desire above all else a guarantee to the money and subservience of the populace?
Except that it sets the precedent for the music industry to be able to arbitrarily sue consumers for "sharing" music with others when passengers in our cars, guests or family members in our homes, or passersby in the street happen to be able to hear your stereo - which is completely unreasonable. Plus, if this precedent is set, it's only a matter of time before their collective legal genius realizes that they can take this to the level that each playing of an audio sample constitutes a "copy" of audio that you are not entitled to after the first playing, ushering in the dawn of the pay-per-play music era, abolishing all personal media players and ultimately any device that can record or mimic audio.
So maybe not that far, but that would be their wet dream come true
It could have been a mistake. Or it could have been a Sony employee/fanboy making a vain attempt to crush negative opinion.
Everything is intimidating for the average computer user. A vast majority of "average computer users" also don't know what the fsck to do if their windoze machine breaks, except to call their nephew that's a "whiz with them thar computer doohickeys". So the two really are on even ground here. Any person capable of rescuing themselves from a windoze malfunction has problem solving skills, or at least knows how to use google, and has just as much probability of success on both platforms.
Reminds me of the 20-th century museum in Futurama, where they have messed up the entire history and thought The Honeymooners were the first people to step on the moon ("Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon, Alice!"), and reimaging the astronauts as movie-style space cowboys complete with cowboy hats and attractive behavior.
It's just idiocracy happening slowly before our eyes. We're sailors on the moon!
We carry a harpoon!
But thar ain't no whales
So we tell tall tales
And sing this whalin' tune!
Or invest more in hardware and support costs and embed Windows...
And why should the blue screen of death and the business director's kludgey VB apps be relegated only to the PC world, when there are so many devices out there performing vital functions in our society that should be able to crash hard through the floor too?
I would argue that we (the US) have learned very little. Those who oppose us, however, have learned quite a bit. We're still tossing trillions of dollars at fleet ships, smart weapons, stealth fighters, and long range artillery against an enemy that has no fixed structures or marked vehicles, hides within civilian populations, and can impart similar destruction with a $20 pipe bomb laid out on the side of the road. I think our high technology is really only increasing the price tag on our military action, and not really doing much to tilt attrition in our favor.