If (yeah, I know) the Chinese are developing nuclear bombs, this will hold them up for maybe a couple of years.
China has been a declared nuclear weapons state since 1964.
They are doing what we are doing now - modeling how the weapons work because many of us agreed not to physically test them any more over twenty years ago.
"It has become time to classify Internet Service Providers as Title II Common Carriers. The possibilities for abuse are just too great otherwise. Failure to do so will cripple the future economic well being of the United States, stifle innovation, and limit the freedom of consumers to choose the content they desire."
You do understand that telephone carriers pay to interconnect with each other with the carrier terminating a call ultimately being paid for that termination? This is the exact situation we don't want to see with ISPs. (As a side-bar this is why there are/were so many "free" conference calling solutions in rural Iowa - a few of the carriers there were paid upwards of $0.02/min for termination, regardless of origin, and were willing to *pay* customer to receive calls!)
I support net neutrality 100% but what happened between Netflix, Cogent, and Comcast has nothing to do with it.
Yes, there is. You need a passport to go to Canada or Mexico these days. No passport? You don't get out. They wanna keep you in the US, all they gotta do is cancel your passport. They don't have to give you a reason upfront.
Ah, but you didn't mention cancellation of passports. That's a much larger problem but you could still easily enter Mexico or Canada. There's a few (most?) Mexican border stations that simply don't check documents for people walking across the border to their side.
As for Canada, there's a lot of back roads protected by nothing but an orange cone most of the night.
That is one reason why we've been up in arms about who the Canadians let into their country as it is so easy to get from there to here without being detected.
The so-called wall that supposed to built to keep illegal immigrants out of our country and away from our jobs does just as good a job at keeping US in! You're not going to get out of this country if they don't want you to.
Huh?
Unless you're on a no-fly list you're going to able to fly out of the country. There's no outbound passport control in the US.
And if you're on the no-fly list you're not going anywhere unless you're driving. (Then you could drive to Canada or Mexico)
Perhaps I'm out of the loop but I don't see anything here that's outrageous.
It looks like CBP received a dump of your PNR from the airline, period. Any data that's stored in that PNR will be transmitted when it's dumped. Whoopty-fookin-do. It's the AIRLINE that has all this information to begin with.
As for the CBP internal records it makes sense they would track when/where your passport shows up. I know my passport details have either been manually entered or scanned in and out of most countries I've been in. (Or a backend transmittal occurred from the airline to passport control in that country to indicate I was departing)
Whilst the "big brother" connotation of this is troubling it is not as if CBP went out and GATHERED all this information on its own from various sources. They ask the airline for a dump of the PNR, the airline gives it to them. Since you booked everything into one PNR they got it all.
If anything here the airline is not taking appropriate steps to safeguard your data. I'd bitch at them before I'd get worked up with DHS. (Not saying I wouldn't get worked up with DHS too but I'd start at the source of the data)
IIRC the Blackberry service depends on a particular APN being available to it. When you pop a prepaid SIM in from your destination country it typically won't come with that APN provisioned. This means phones calls, hassles, problems, and likely inability to work.
There's two "easy" solutions to this:
1 - Get unlimited "worldwide" Blackberry service from ATT/Verizon for $65/mo and have a separate phone with a local prepaid SIM in it for voice calls that is shared amongst the crew.
2 - Use an ActiveSync capable device as it merely depends on making an https connection.
My BlackBerry using friend and I were in Ireland and Northern Ireland last week. My iPhone worked quite happily with Vodefone IE and Orange UK SIMs. He couldn't get his Vodafone data working and had to call Orange and pay £5 extra to get his BlackBerry working.
If your people are travelling a lot and are not tech savvy I would go with option 1. There's only one device to swap SIMs on and the most savvy person can be responsible for it.
We provide a web service for serious scientists, and each query to our system requires a LOT of computational and database resources. We're not talking about delivering up static results or a simple database query here, we're talking about launching jobs that run for several seconds to several minutes. A given page might have dozens of these links. So a scientist who asks an reasonable question would spend a few seconds of our server's resources. But then AVS comes along, and could launch dozens of searches that might potentially use an HOUR of CPU time.
Most of these links would never be clicked, because they're not what the scientist is interested in. But AVS, being blind and dumb, hits every one of them.
I'm no expert here but this sounds poorly designed. I would suggest you find a way to serve up a static page with good information to search engines for them to link to and keep your "expensive" dynamically generated content "protected" by robots.txt or even implement some basic authentication to keep your "expensive" dynamic pages out of search engines.
While I don't think AVG's implementation is good, either, you can't blame them when some simple forethought on your side could prevent most of the problem.
Nuclear power is far far more expensive than oil. Not only is it security risk, but the health hazards are enormous in obtaining the fuel, refining the fuel, using the fuel, and disposal of the spent fuel.
From the Nuclear Energy Institute (yes I know, industry hacks but i couldn't find concise data elsewhere...) nuclear is 1.72, coal is 2.21, and oil is 8 cents per kWh. There's no question that in an environment of standardized reactor design and streamlined regulation that nuclear would be less expensive. While security is a concern I don't really see it as any larger a concern than a conventional power plant should have. Both are critical infrastructure and should be guarded.
Inevitable accidents have world wide affects. To make it worse, nuclear power plants are not the most productive.
Inevitable accidents? Interesting way of phrasing it. Are you familiar with pebble bed reactors? They are fail-safe by design, that is to say you could shut off all the associated machinery and cooling to the reactor and leave the building and the reactor will simply revert to a designed idle temperature, no meltdown, explosion, or radiation release. While true that hydro can produce the largest plants (China's 3 Gorges is 22.5 GW!) spreading out generation and decentralization of the grid has strategic advantages.
I can't recall the study, but the cost benefits of nuclear energy that are quoted never factor in disposal (storage actually) of the spent rods or cleanup of accidents.
Fast breeder reactors are the solution to this. As for cleanup of accidents, I wouldn't suggest one is impossible with properly designed equipment but I'll trade that risk to eliminate emissions from coal, oil, and gas fired plants.
Do we need a reminder of 3 mile island or chernobyl?
Yes, we do. We should keep in mind that Three Mile Island's safety measures contained the core and the only radiation released was from an intentional gas release to reduce pressure. Chernobyl was a terribly designed Soviet reactor lacking a complete containment building not to mention the poor procedures used by the employees there.
The earlier poster had it correct, you need to get some new propaganda that isn't 30 years old.
If I were a the dictator here I'd put nuclear plants next to desalinization plants and crack water to hydrogen all day long. All we need is a transport and storage system for hydrogen to replace gas for transport and we can stop importing oil and use what we produce for all of our other needs. Over time this would eliminate all emissions from cars and conventionally powered electricity generation.
But nuclear is only a stop-gap. I'd also throw a ton of money into solar research and work on decentralizing the grid that way.
Okay, so I'm watching TV on my Verizon FIOS (carried over the internet) and AT&T blocks it (as it goes over their network) because I'm watching a copyrighted movie. Yeah, no problem there.
FIOS Video is not carried on the Internet.
First, regular FIOS Video, your TV channels, are not even video over IP.
Second, any video that is IP (an on-demand service, for example) is carried solely on Verizon's internal network. How is T going to block what's on VZ's internal network?
Really, if you're going to comment at least have half an idea how the technology works.
The real issue, IMHO, is as the original commenter indicated... Such a move could potentially open T to massive civil and potentially criminal liabilities. Back in the old dial-up BBS days there were sysops charged in other states under the foreign state's indecency laws. What is to stop some podunk community from attempting to hold T criminally liable for not filtering material they define as obscene on the basis that T has shown the ability to filter content on their network.
I'm inclined to believe this is smoke in the wind, especially coming from Comcast. Beyond the fact that most companies (or anyone with security in mind) would never go for a cable connection, cable companies still just can't compete with the telecommunications companies' technological expertise and infrastructure. Cable is a consumer-grade product and always will be. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just is what it is.
While I agree with your comment, security really doesn't figure into this equation for me. One should assume everything that leaves the public interface on their firewall/gateway is subject to interception and act accordingly.
Comcast's reliability does leave a lot to be desired, however, a small office that can purchase 8 Mbps symmetric service for circa $160 per month doesn't need to spend $400+ to get a T1 for a fraction of the bandwidth, especially if their email/web are hosted externally. Backup access could be provided by DSL, WISP, or even cellular data for the few times when it would be necessary for continuity reasons. The small office could achieve very high reliability via two providers for under $275/mo.
And while I don't mind talking down Comcast's technical competency when it comes to telecom, they are making drastic improvements as they deploy their voice service as they realize that people may tolerate their computer not working for a few hours here and there but the phone must always work as it has for countless years on much less sophisticated equipment.
The description stating that it "It bonds together four cable lines" is a horrible description of what is likely going on here.
Cable/tv channels are 6 MHz wide. On a typical cable system you can use 256QAM to encode digital data for transmission. In 6 MHz you can get about 39 Mbps. If you bond four channels together (24 MHz) that's 156 Mbps using 256QAM.
So what it sounds like is DOCSIS 3 supports channel bonding or perhaps simply a very wide channel.
The "four cable lines" has nothing to do with how much physical coax comes to your house. On paper an all digital 750 MHz plant could deliver on the order of 4.5 Gbps. But having 70 channels of analog really cuts into that.
What, Did the republicans find an other way to fix the elections?
I think they're taking the Democratic lead and will just appeal to the dead vote. You know, an FDR-esque "brains in every pot!"
On topic, they're probably right to do this. In my home state of Pennsylvania it is literally illegal for the touch-screen machine to produce a paper receipt so a black-box solution like what Diebold provides will always be open to criticism and question. They could provide a 100% fraud-free election and the loser will still complain. In my humble opinion the best solution is a touch-screen front end with a paper ballot printout that is then available for vote count verification. Run the count electronically, sure, but randomly verify counts of a few precincts and if anything is off you know you have to audit the whole thing. If somebody challenges the results you have a paper trail that was REVIEWED by the voter themselves before being placed in the ballot box.
At $1.50 per GB in a large install its about two and a half times what one could build on their own. 5U 24 drive racks go for about $2k each, add in $2k for mobo/controllers, and 24 750 GB drives at $330 ea and we're at $11,920 per 18 TB. You can fit eight of these in a rack so that's 144 TB per rack at a cost of $95,360. Add in for the rack itself, a good switch, and some miscellaneous expenses and call it an even $100k. That's a cost of $0.66/GB.
It's not raid but it is a ton of storage space. Even if you back out one drive for parity and one for spare in each enclosure the cost per GB only goes up to about $0.72.
I think this falls under the catagory of "attractive nuisance".
It is always funny to hear this phrase trotted out. In my opinion, this phrase was created to absolve the CRIMINAL of any blame or guilt and to place the blame on the person who would otherwise be the innocent party. If you're an adult (or nearly so) you should know better than to muck with other people's belongings and deserve hatever you might get if you do.
Further, I believe calling something an "attractive nuisance" should only apply when it is attractive in the eyes of a young child who doesn't know any better. (Example: your backyard pool) In this case the CRIMINAL was a teenager capable of riding a four wheeler and should have known better than to STEAL gasoline.
I'm sure it does not account for the full drop but I am amongst what appears to be a large group waiting for Conroe to be released.
I had been mulling an upgrade for a few months but now that I know Conroe will be out in July and have seen some of the benchmarks people are making public I'm going to wait until I can get a Conroe.
I know Superpi is a pretty artifical benchmark, however, my current P4 2.8 does 1M in around 50-52s. IIRC a Conroe at 2.67 Ghz does it in something like 16-18s. Considering how good of an experience people are having OCing the ES Conroes I'm thinking about buying the 2.4 GHz version and running it at 2.6-2.8 GHz. All that performance for $316 (estimated).
I'm just not looking forward to $400+ for 2 GB of 1066 MHz RAM so I can run 1:1 with the FSB. I don't even know how much benefit it will give me so maybe I'll not start with that.
To use the example in the summary, Yahoo could pay SBC to colocate inside its network in key datacenters with large pipes. There you go, Yahoo pays to load faster than Google. This is a perfectly legitimate business offering and perfectly logical.
Would the difference be appreciable, perhaps it would be, perhaps not.
It almost sounds like SBC is suggesting it will either assign priority to certain packets or delay others. Both border on troublesome given SBC's common carrier status. Assigning priority sounds like their network is incapable of supporting the load requested so instead of upgrading to larger pipes they extort money from content providers who actually want to reach their clients. Delaying packets sounds a lot like the first step to blocking competing or "non-contributing" services such as Vonage and should be treated in a hostile manner by PUCs and the FCC.
the government can give many 100's of MHz away that it's squatting on..
Sure they can. How much of it is nearly identical to the 700 MHz band in physical property?
700 MHz is nice because it propogates slightly better than the existing A and B mobile telephone bands but not so well that you can't actually build a cellular network.
As you go higher in frequency propogation goes to crap. And everything under that is reserved for other services already ranging from amateur radio and long ago public safety in the sub 54 Mhz range, TV and FM radio up to 108, then aviation, then TV, then some mixed uses up to the 400's, then more TV all the way up to 800 MHZ or so. Ever see a TV that goes to channel 83 off the air? TV channels 70-83 were allocated for mobile telephones many years ago. When most mobile phones were analog it was possible to listen in on a call or two using your older TV! Now the FCC is moving TV out of 52-69 for more space for mobile services and public safety too.
While I must say I really enjoy the editorialization in the summary (not), the submitter has no idea wtf he's talking about in regards to the financing of this project.
The digital TV transition is intended to free up the 700-800 Mhz (appx) spectrum to be auctioned by the FCC for advanced services and for use by public safety organizations. McCain made a big deal of the digital transition after Katrina hit due to the problems with interagency communication.
The $3 billion in subsidy comes from the auction of the spectrum. The people who will eventually pay for it are the users of the spectrum or customers of the companies who purchase the spectrum. Let me be clear, this $3 billion isn't coming from some other agency or program, it is coming from the proceeds of the auction.
So, submitter, if you're going to flame bait about your pet project being cut back at least do it with half a clue.
Things like HDTV and multicasting are nice side effects of the transition, but don't be fooled, this is mostly about money. Congress wants that money in its coffers and had planned for analog turn off at the end of this year when the transition first started ten years ago.
The release of the order itself, in PDF states that the order merely affects VoIP services' subjection to state PUC regulations.
In fact the release specifically states:
The Commission's order does not express an opinion about the applicability to Vonage of
general laws in Minnesota governing taxation, fraud, commercial dealings, marketing,
advertising and other business practices. But the Commission expects states to continue playing a
vital role in protecting consumers from fraud, responding to complaints, and enforcing fair
business practices.
So I'm not sure where people get the idea that the FCC preemption order affects state taxation, the news release about the order clearly states that it does not.
But with the U.S. "wanting" over a half trillion dollars per year for defense purposes, they are going to try getting every penny they can.
Nice troll. Too bad California LOCAL TAXES don't pay for the military.
On topic, this brings up an imporant point. As IP technologies overtake conventional technologies governments will be forced to change tax structures to retain income. Our choices are to tax the new technologies or force the government to live smaller. Guess which one YOUR elected representative normally chooses.
Western Europe has about the same GDP as the US, but does so using about 1/2 the energy.
The energy number per capita might be true but a per capita GDP comparison bears out an advantage in the US' favor.
In 2002 the EU population was about 379 million on a GDP of 8.45 trillion Euros. The US, on a population of about 290 million, had a GDP of 9.24 trillion Euros. On a per captia basis that is about $22,300 in the EU and just shy of $32,000 in the US.
So while the total GDP numbers might be near each other, GDP per capita isn't even close.
Please note I am not trying to justify our country's tremendous appetite for energy, rather put the EU comparison into some economic context. Conservation is potentially the least expensive and most environmentally friendly way to reduce our dependence on "foreign" energy sources.
How could a poll have a median date of 10/31 during the early morning hours of November 1?
"Median date" suggests polling over multiple days and I doubt there has been much polling done today, further, I really doubt any polling done today has already had results released.
I've followed this guy's site for the last few months and I think he has recently developed a problem with his intellectual honesty.
He is an unabashed Kerry supporter, not in and of itself a bad thing, but he is discarding poll results favorable to the President in order to show a Kerry victory. For example he claims to have averaged recent polls in Florida but a Quinnipiac poll from 10/27 thru 10/31 shows an EIGHT point Bush lead. How he ends up with a 2 point Kerry advantage with that in the average I don't know.
Today is his worst showing yet, in my opinion, and he may be indirectly helping the President. If Kerry supporters believe their man is going to win and win big then voters who are not as committed may not show up to vote.
Remember Karl Rove asking where the FOUR MILLION evangelicals were in 2000? If people think their man will win regardless of their vote then fewer people will make the effort to vote and strange things can happen.
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If (yeah, I know) the Chinese are developing nuclear bombs, this will hold them up for maybe a couple of years.
China has been a declared nuclear weapons state since 1964.
They are doing what we are doing now - modeling how the weapons work because many of us agreed not to physically test them any more over twenty years ago.
"It has become time to classify Internet Service Providers as Title II Common Carriers. The possibilities for abuse are just too great otherwise. Failure to do so will cripple the future economic well being of the United States, stifle innovation, and limit the freedom of consumers to choose the content they desire."
You do understand that telephone carriers pay to interconnect with each other with the carrier terminating a call ultimately being paid for that termination? This is the exact situation we don't want to see with ISPs. (As a side-bar this is why there are/were so many "free" conference calling solutions in rural Iowa - a few of the carriers there were paid upwards of $0.02/min for termination, regardless of origin, and were willing to *pay* customer to receive calls!)
I support net neutrality 100% but what happened between Netflix, Cogent, and Comcast has nothing to do with it.
Yes, there is. You need a passport to go to Canada or Mexico these days. No passport? You don't get out. They wanna keep you in the US, all they gotta do is cancel your passport. They don't have to give you a reason upfront.
Ah, but you didn't mention cancellation of passports. That's a much larger problem but you could still easily enter Mexico or Canada. There's a few (most?) Mexican border stations that simply don't check documents for people walking across the border to their side.
As for Canada, there's a lot of back roads protected by nothing but an orange cone most of the night.
That is one reason why we've been up in arms about who the Canadians let into their country as it is so easy to get from there to here without being detected.
The so-called wall that supposed to built to keep illegal immigrants out of our country and away from our jobs does just as good a job at keeping US in! You're not going to get out of this country if they don't want you to.
Huh?
Unless you're on a no-fly list you're going to able to fly out of the country. There's no outbound passport control in the US.
And if you're on the no-fly list you're not going anywhere unless you're driving. (Then you could drive to Canada or Mexico)
Perhaps I'm out of the loop but I don't see anything here that's outrageous.
It looks like CBP received a dump of your PNR from the airline, period. Any data that's stored in that PNR will be transmitted when it's dumped. Whoopty-fookin-do. It's the AIRLINE that has all this information to begin with.
As for the CBP internal records it makes sense they would track when/where your passport shows up. I know my passport details have either been manually entered or scanned in and out of most countries I've been in. (Or a backend transmittal occurred from the airline to passport control in that country to indicate I was departing)
Whilst the "big brother" connotation of this is troubling it is not as if CBP went out and GATHERED all this information on its own from various sources. They ask the airline for a dump of the PNR, the airline gives it to them. Since you booked everything into one PNR they got it all.
If anything here the airline is not taking appropriate steps to safeguard your data. I'd bitch at them before I'd get worked up with DHS. (Not saying I wouldn't get worked up with DHS too but I'd start at the source of the data)
This is not as simple as it sounds.
IIRC the Blackberry service depends on a particular APN being available to it. When you pop a prepaid SIM in from your destination country it typically won't come with that APN provisioned. This means phones calls, hassles, problems, and likely inability to work.
There's two "easy" solutions to this:
1 - Get unlimited "worldwide" Blackberry service from ATT/Verizon for $65/mo and have a separate phone with a local prepaid SIM in it for voice calls that is shared amongst the crew.
2 - Use an ActiveSync capable device as it merely depends on making an https connection.
My BlackBerry using friend and I were in Ireland and Northern Ireland last week. My iPhone worked quite happily with Vodefone IE and Orange UK SIMs. He couldn't get his Vodafone data working and had to call Orange and pay £5 extra to get his BlackBerry working.
If your people are travelling a lot and are not tech savvy I would go with option 1. There's only one device to swap SIMs on and the most savvy person can be responsible for it.
We provide a web service for serious scientists, and each query to our system requires a LOT of computational and database resources. We're not talking about delivering up static results or a simple database query here, we're talking about launching jobs that run for several seconds to several minutes. A given page might have dozens of these links. So a scientist who asks an reasonable question would spend a few seconds of our server's resources. But then AVS comes along, and could launch dozens of searches that might potentially use an HOUR of CPU time.
Most of these links would never be clicked, because they're not what the scientist is interested in. But AVS, being blind and dumb, hits every one of them.
I'm no expert here but this sounds poorly designed. I would suggest you find a way to serve up a static page with good information to search engines for them to link to and keep your "expensive" dynamically generated content "protected" by robots.txt or even implement some basic authentication to keep your "expensive" dynamic pages out of search engines.
While I don't think AVG's implementation is good, either, you can't blame them when some simple forethought on your side could prevent most of the problem.
Nuclear power is far far more expensive than oil. Not only is it security risk, but the health hazards are enormous in obtaining the fuel, refining the fuel, using the fuel, and disposal of the spent fuel.
From the Nuclear Energy Institute (yes I know, industry hacks but i couldn't find concise data elsewhere...) nuclear is 1.72, coal is 2.21, and oil is 8 cents per kWh. There's no question that in an environment of standardized reactor design and streamlined regulation that nuclear would be less expensive. While security is a concern I don't really see it as any larger a concern than a conventional power plant should have. Both are critical infrastructure and should be guarded.
Inevitable accidents have world wide affects. To make it worse, nuclear power plants are not the most productive.
Inevitable accidents? Interesting way of phrasing it. Are you familiar with pebble bed reactors? They are fail-safe by design, that is to say you could shut off all the associated machinery and cooling to the reactor and leave the building and the reactor will simply revert to a designed idle temperature, no meltdown, explosion, or radiation release. While true that hydro can produce the largest plants (China's 3 Gorges is 22.5 GW!) spreading out generation and decentralization of the grid has strategic advantages.
I can't recall the study, but the cost benefits of nuclear energy that are quoted never factor in disposal (storage actually) of the spent rods or cleanup of accidents.
Fast breeder reactors are the solution to this. As for cleanup of accidents, I wouldn't suggest one is impossible with properly designed equipment but I'll trade that risk to eliminate emissions from coal, oil, and gas fired plants.
Do we need a reminder of 3 mile island or chernobyl?
Yes, we do. We should keep in mind that Three Mile Island's safety measures contained the core and the only radiation released was from an intentional gas release to reduce pressure. Chernobyl was a terribly designed Soviet reactor lacking a complete containment building not to mention the poor procedures used by the employees there.
The earlier poster had it correct, you need to get some new propaganda that isn't 30 years old.
If I were a the dictator here I'd put nuclear plants next to desalinization plants and crack water to hydrogen all day long. All we need is a transport and storage system for hydrogen to replace gas for transport and we can stop importing oil and use what we produce for all of our other needs. Over time this would eliminate all emissions from cars and conventionally powered electricity generation.
But nuclear is only a stop-gap. I'd also throw a ton of money into solar research and work on decentralizing the grid that way.
Okay, so I'm watching TV on my Verizon FIOS (carried over the internet) and AT&T blocks it (as it goes over their network) because I'm watching a copyrighted movie. Yeah, no problem there.
FIOS Video is not carried on the Internet.
First, regular FIOS Video, your TV channels, are not even video over IP.
Second, any video that is IP (an on-demand service, for example) is carried solely on Verizon's internal network. How is T going to block what's on VZ's internal network?
Really, if you're going to comment at least have half an idea how the technology works.
The real issue, IMHO, is as the original commenter indicated... Such a move could potentially open T to massive civil and potentially criminal liabilities. Back in the old dial-up BBS days there were sysops charged in other states under the foreign state's indecency laws. What is to stop some podunk community from attempting to hold T criminally liable for not filtering material they define as obscene on the basis that T has shown the ability to filter content on their network.
I'm inclined to believe this is smoke in the wind, especially coming from Comcast. Beyond the fact that most companies (or anyone with security in mind) would never go for a cable connection, cable companies still just can't compete with the telecommunications companies' technological expertise and infrastructure. Cable is a consumer-grade product and always will be. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just is what it is.
While I agree with your comment, security really doesn't figure into this equation for me. One should assume everything that leaves the public interface on their firewall/gateway is subject to interception and act accordingly.
Comcast's reliability does leave a lot to be desired, however, a small office that can purchase 8 Mbps symmetric service for circa $160 per month doesn't need to spend $400+ to get a T1 for a fraction of the bandwidth, especially if their email/web are hosted externally. Backup access could be provided by DSL, WISP, or even cellular data for the few times when it would be necessary for continuity reasons. The small office could achieve very high reliability via two providers for under $275/mo.
And while I don't mind talking down Comcast's technical competency when it comes to telecom, they are making drastic improvements as they deploy their voice service as they realize that people may tolerate their computer not working for a few hours here and there but the phone must always work as it has for countless years on much less sophisticated equipment.
The description stating that it "It bonds together four cable lines" is a horrible description of what is likely going on here.
Cable/tv channels are 6 MHz wide. On a typical cable system you can use 256QAM to encode digital data for transmission. In 6 MHz you can get about 39 Mbps. If you bond four channels together (24 MHz) that's 156 Mbps using 256QAM.
So what it sounds like is DOCSIS 3 supports channel bonding or perhaps simply a very wide channel.
The "four cable lines" has nothing to do with how much physical coax comes to your house. On paper an all digital 750 MHz plant could deliver on the order of 4.5 Gbps. But having 70 channels of analog really cuts into that.
I think they're taking the Democratic lead and will just appeal to the dead vote. You know, an FDR-esque "brains in every pot!"
On topic, they're probably right to do this. In my home state of Pennsylvania it is literally illegal for the touch-screen machine to produce a paper receipt so a black-box solution like what Diebold provides will always be open to criticism and question. They could provide a 100% fraud-free election and the loser will still complain. In my humble opinion the best solution is a touch-screen front end with a paper ballot printout that is then available for vote count verification. Run the count electronically, sure, but randomly verify counts of a few precincts and if anything is off you know you have to audit the whole thing. If somebody challenges the results you have a paper trail that was REVIEWED by the voter themselves before being placed in the ballot box.
You assume that managing forty individual servers will be less costly than managing eight larger servers.
Really, person-hours wise the cheapest way to do it is likely one big farking system with fibre channel or the like.
At $1.50 per GB in a large install its about two and a half times what one could build on their own. 5U 24 drive racks go for about $2k each, add in $2k for mobo/controllers, and 24 750 GB drives at $330 ea and we're at $11,920 per 18 TB. You can fit eight of these in a rack so that's 144 TB per rack at a cost of $95,360. Add in for the rack itself, a good switch, and some miscellaneous expenses and call it an even $100k. That's a cost of $0.66/GB.
It's not raid but it is a ton of storage space. Even if you back out one drive for parity and one for spare in each enclosure the cost per GB only goes up to about $0.72.
It is always funny to hear this phrase trotted out. In my opinion, this phrase was created to absolve the CRIMINAL of any blame or guilt and to place the blame on the person who would otherwise be the innocent party. If you're an adult (or nearly so) you should know better than to muck with other people's belongings and deserve hatever you might get if you do.
Further, I believe calling something an "attractive nuisance" should only apply when it is attractive in the eyes of a young child who doesn't know any better. (Example: your backyard pool) In this case the CRIMINAL was a teenager capable of riding a four wheeler and should have known better than to STEAL gasoline.
I'm sure it does not account for the full drop but I am amongst what appears to be a large group waiting for Conroe to be released.
I had been mulling an upgrade for a few months but now that I know Conroe will be out in July and have seen some of the benchmarks people are making public I'm going to wait until I can get a Conroe.
I know Superpi is a pretty artifical benchmark, however, my current P4 2.8 does 1M in around 50-52s. IIRC a Conroe at 2.67 Ghz does it in something like 16-18s. Considering how good of an experience people are having OCing the ES Conroes I'm thinking about buying the 2.4 GHz version and running it at 2.6-2.8 GHz. All that performance for $316 (estimated).
I'm just not looking forward to $400+ for 2 GB of 1066 MHz RAM so I can run 1:1 with the FSB. I don't even know how much benefit it will give me so maybe I'll not start with that.
To use the example in the summary, Yahoo could pay SBC to colocate inside its network in key datacenters with large pipes. There you go, Yahoo pays to load faster than Google. This is a perfectly legitimate business offering and perfectly logical.
Would the difference be appreciable, perhaps it would be, perhaps not.
It almost sounds like SBC is suggesting it will either assign priority to certain packets or delay others. Both border on troublesome given SBC's common carrier status. Assigning priority sounds like their network is incapable of supporting the load requested so instead of upgrading to larger pipes they extort money from content providers who actually want to reach their clients. Delaying packets sounds a lot like the first step to blocking competing or "non-contributing" services such as Vonage and should be treated in a hostile manner by PUCs and the FCC.
the government can give many 100's of MHz away that it's squatting on..
:)
Sure they can. How much of it is nearly identical to the 700 MHz band in physical property?
700 MHz is nice because it propogates slightly better than the existing A and B mobile telephone bands but not so well that you can't actually build a cellular network.
As you go higher in frequency propogation goes to crap. And everything under that is reserved for other services already ranging from amateur radio and long ago public safety in the sub 54 Mhz range, TV and FM radio up to 108, then aviation, then TV, then some mixed uses up to the 400's, then more TV all the way up to 800 MHZ or so. Ever see a TV that goes to channel 83 off the air? TV channels 70-83 were allocated for mobile telephones many years ago. When most mobile phones were analog it was possible to listen in on a call or two using your older TV! Now the FCC is moving TV out of 52-69 for more space for mobile services and public safety too.
And let's not forget money.
While I must say I really enjoy the editorialization in the summary (not), the submitter has no idea wtf he's talking about in regards to the financing of this project.
The digital TV transition is intended to free up the 700-800 Mhz (appx) spectrum to be auctioned by the FCC for advanced services and for use by public safety organizations. McCain made a big deal of the digital transition after Katrina hit due to the problems with interagency communication.
The $3 billion in subsidy comes from the auction of the spectrum. The people who will eventually pay for it are the users of the spectrum or customers of the companies who purchase the spectrum. Let me be clear, this $3 billion isn't coming from some other agency or program, it is coming from the proceeds of the auction.
So, submitter, if you're going to flame bait about your pet project being cut back at least do it with half a clue.
Things like HDTV and multicasting are nice side effects of the transition, but don't be fooled, this is mostly about money. Congress wants that money in its coffers and had planned for analog turn off at the end of this year when the transition first started ten years ago.
In fact the release specifically states:
The Commission's order does not express an opinion about the applicability to Vonage of general laws in Minnesota governing taxation, fraud, commercial dealings, marketing, advertising and other business practices. But the Commission expects states to continue playing a vital role in protecting consumers from fraud, responding to complaints, and enforcing fair business practices.
So I'm not sure where people get the idea that the FCC preemption order affects state taxation, the news release about the order clearly states that it does not.
But with the U.S. "wanting" over a half trillion dollars per year for defense purposes, they are going to try getting every penny they can.
Nice troll. Too bad California LOCAL TAXES don't pay for the military.
On topic, this brings up an imporant point. As IP technologies overtake conventional technologies governments will be forced to change tax structures to retain income. Our choices are to tax the new technologies or force the government to live smaller. Guess which one YOUR elected representative normally chooses.
The energy number per capita might be true but a per capita GDP comparison bears out an advantage in the US' favor.
In 2002 the EU population was about 379 million on a GDP of 8.45 trillion Euros. The US, on a population of about 290 million, had a GDP of 9.24 trillion Euros. On a per captia basis that is about $22,300 in the EU and just shy of $32,000 in the US.
So while the total GDP numbers might be near each other, GDP per capita isn't even close.
Please note I am not trying to justify our country's tremendous appetite for energy, rather put the EU comparison into some economic context. Conservation is potentially the least expensive and most environmentally friendly way to reduce our dependence on "foreign" energy sources.
How could a poll have a median date of 10/31 during the early morning hours of November 1?
"Median date" suggests polling over multiple days and I doubt there has been much polling done today, further, I really doubt any polling done today has already had results released.
I've followed this guy's site for the last few months and I think he has recently developed a problem with his intellectual honesty.
He is an unabashed Kerry supporter, not in and of itself a bad thing, but he is discarding poll results favorable to the President in order to show a Kerry victory. For example he claims to have averaged recent polls in Florida but a Quinnipiac poll from 10/27 thru 10/31 shows an EIGHT point Bush lead. How he ends up with a 2 point Kerry advantage with that in the average I don't know.
Today is his worst showing yet, in my opinion, and he may be indirectly helping the President. If Kerry supporters believe their man is going to win and win big then voters who are not as committed may not show up to vote.
Remember Karl Rove asking where the FOUR MILLION evangelicals were in 2000? If people think their man will win regardless of their vote then fewer people will make the effort to vote and strange things can happen.
SecurID and its like are your friends.
While you maintain a reasonably secure password you're not logging in without the token.