The fact is, VoIP is going to blow the phone paradigm away in about 30 years. Right now, home networks are getting VoIP boxes and software, and users are providing addresses for these home networks because those boxes are stationary. But what about people who are smart enough to take their VoIP box with them? What about the posibility of VoIP over wireless in 30 years?
The copper wire switched networks have specific addresses they can link to nodes because the network was proprietary and controlled. Now that the network (the internet) is open, it doesn't yet have this feature that can tie an IP address, particularly a roaming IP address, to a location.
The only thing I can think of right now are GPS locators on all phones which have a frequency only the 911 operators can access... but that could be abused way too easily.
For now, asking the VoIPs to provide 911 service like vonage does is enough for the time being, but soon they'll have to solve this problem for VoIP roamers, and that will require a "think-outside-the-box" solution. As VoIP evolves, 911 will have to be completely redesigned.
Most people worry that Blackbox software is a privacy concern. Coming from Microsoft, I believe it would be, but in general, I feel very strongly about black box software. Some black box software can go as far as trace the executable C or C++ code that is running and provide a step by step look at what the code was doing when, say, an error occured. When aprogrammer steps through it, they easily see the problem and can correct it. For support reps like me this is huge in correcting problems.
However, not all languages are supported by black boxes. I hope over time a black box software type comes out to support Powerbuilder, because this would make my life so much easier. I could have this black box running on the user's system and simply "trace" their activity. When a problem occurs, they send the log and I send to programmers.
This of course would leave me the rest of the day to read slashdot and take the occasional "how do I click a mouse" case;)
The Clone Wars on Cartoon Network was awesome. That's what I want in a cartoon and it's what I want in Star Wars. Shitpan Star Wars all you want, I want Genndy Tartakovsky to make more!
And considering Lucas is not specifically directing the cartoons, I figure the mouth frothing Star Wars critics would actually enjoy them:)
I love how the OS community assumes it's always about them. In the thin client arena, Microsoft's main competition is Citrix Metaframe. My company sells a solution that works on both citrix and terminal services. Citrix is more expensive but has more features. There are also a ton of addons and configurations that TS doesn't do yet.
The more options MS comes up with, the more they can compete. So far our customers are buying more TS Licenses than Citrix since windows 2000 came out because it's adequate for most users who want a reasonably functional thin client solution.
Yes, thin client options on Linux are a threat, but that's just lumped into the over all Linux beast they are tackling right now and specifically isn't anything special... yet.
It's not limited to linux. I've seen several Mac and Windows programs that don't appear to have a lot of polish. Hell, my own company, who happens to have the largest market share of software sales within its niche isn't nearly as polished as some competitors.
So many developers are either simply not experienced in proper structure, or proper GUI design, or they are under pressure by execs or marketing departments to get the project out the door. The important part of the software is does it do what it's supposed to do? Yes? Then ship it.
The type of polish tends to differ. There are plenty of windows and mac apps with bad GUI, but it happens more in the Linux community because the body of developers don't have a deep background in coding GUI interfaces as to Mac or Windows developers. Windows programs tend to have more bugs but the windows environment provides a stable interface usually. Mac apps probably have the best of both worlds (as long as you agree the OS X interface is as good as the OS 9 interface).
VoIP's main draw isn't that it's cheaper, or at least, it shouldn't be.
This statement is misleading. It depends on many factors, and usually it does break down to be cheaper, depending on how you look at it.
If you have dialup networking and you don't make a lot of phone calls, VoIP won't save you any money. That's assuming $35 for a basic phone line plus $20 for an ISP. $55 total. If it's good enough for you then good for you.
To use VoIP, you really need a high speed connection for the best quality and in order to use your internet connection while on the phone. If you already have that high speed connection, then you'd be saving loads of money by switching your phone service. The $35 for basic service is just that. Verizon has a phone service deal for $55 that you can get unlimited calling, voice mail, etc. Vonage gives you the same package for $25! That's $30 a month in savings. I'm going to have a cable internet connection anyway. Now, I had to buy the box from Radio Shack for $70, but I made my money back in 3 months.
What I've found is that after converting to cable internet (with cable, which I would have had to buy or my total internet connection would be more expensive without) and VoIP, I'm paying the same price as I would have had to pay With Verizon's full featured package, dialup internet, and NO cable TV. Had I stayed with verizon's phone service, I would have paid more money for all those calling features.
The only way it really isn't cheaper is if I stayed with basic dialup and had no cable TV. So it really is cheaper, you just have to shuffle the funds around.
So you are saying that in order to light a fire under people about terrorism, you would, say, start a war with some random country that has nothing to do with terrorism just to get people to care?
There are too many scary parallels between the Iraq war, Vietnam, pornography and this solution to fix our lagging space program.
This may be the spur humanity needs to get us up off our collective keisters and establish a viable off-planet colony before it's too late. It would be an unprecedented catastrophe, but still survivable, and it seems like this is the only way we're going to learn.
If the sole reason you want a space program is paranoid fear that we might be hit by a rock, that's a pretty sad reason.
I'd like to visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I'd like to see other star systems. I'd like to advance our knowledge of the galaxy and universe and try to find other life forms.
I mean, if people were dying left and right by micrometeorites hitting the earth and blowing out people's skulls but no one in power cared, I'd be concerned. That's not the case here.
Let's keep the fearmongering to a dull roar here. How sick does our society have to be when someone start's talking like a bad sci-fi thriller about the end of the world?
The sole purpose of any space program should be like any other science program, to make the unknown known and to expand the horizons of human understanding.
Frankly, if the meteor is coming in 2035, my opinion is that it's pretty much too late now. Get out your sandbags and automatic rifles and prepare for the armageddon (not the movie!).
Damn no... wait... you were right... had the wrong tape in and I would have figured that out had I not fast forwarded (got lucky and skipped almost immediately to the right spot. Sorry about that.
I guess I've not been paying attention to all the posts in other threads that are so anti-GPL, but I had no idea there were so many asses out there who believe GPL is anti business.
Let me be clear... the GPL is anti-bad business. GPL is pro-good business and pro consumer. And remember businesses are consumers too, the bad businesses are primarily the huge bureaucratic companies which turn out buggy lame software that doesn't always do what you expect it to do.
Now let me define what is bad business. Bad business consists of companies who do their best to create software libraries and intellectual property manifests with the sole purpose of maybe, possibly, making money. That information is sealed and protected so that in order to get at it, you have to pay someone for it.
This is based on the idea that companies have make something tangible to make money. Proprietary software is tangible enough to make money from the masses because they often buy it as tangible.
Big businesses build up this repetoire of "intellectual property" and sit on it for years. It's okay to benefit from a good idea, but copywrite laws these days take it too far. Copywritable material now has an age of 90 years, it used to be 20! Current copywrite laws therefore allow companies like disney to sit on their repetoire and continue to make money off it and don't encourage them to make new material. These businesses are not sensitive to consumer wants and needs, and stifle competition because having huge amounts of Intellectual property that no one else can ever touch is an unfair competitive advantage.
Customers who use GPL are forced to be more creative, because everyone has access to the same software! Consumers win because companies have to be more competitive. Microsoft can sit on their ass right now and say "You want an office package? Great, here's our package for $600 a person. What, you don't want to pay that price? Lick my ass n00b, you can't do shit without my software, we 0wnz j00r ass!"
Here's another way to look at it. Before the internet, most networks were proprietary. Closed off and not communicating with each other. Companies had their own networks, colleges has theirs, and some of them even tried to create VANs (value added networks) to perform EDI (electronic data interchange). Most of those attempts were novel but they sucked. When the internet came out, everyone was suddenly connected. Now EDI is easy, because as long as your computer is on the internet, I can build something that communicates with you seamlessly.
I believe I once read in an article that innovation is increased when you unbundle functions of a system. For example, if IBM owned the internet, and you had to pay a fee to use it, this would stifle innovation because not everyone would be able to or want to pay the fee. Think about the internet vs phone networks. Phone networks have features like call waiting and call blocking and voice mail and caller ID. However, phone networks can only be used for phone calls (without DSL of course). The internet is simply build on a protocol of information transfer from point a to point b, but it has unlimited uses. You can take phone calls over the internet now, and not use the phone network at all. what's even greater is that if you have 5 ISPs to chose from, you can take your VoIP to any of those ISPs and use it seamlessly, because each ISP implements a standard internet connection. They compete on service!
I'm getting off topic but it all has to do with competition. Competition has been lacking in the last several decades, because people think it's okay for big companies to hold big power. The GPL is simply taking current overly controlling law and turning it against itself by guarenteeing that information released under it is free.
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series.
Excuse me?
I own the original Radio series... on audio tape no less, and I listen to it frequently. Let me tell you my friend, the Guide entry on towels is very much in the series. It's somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes into the second episode.
Come fly to philadelphia and I'll play it for you sometime:)
Would someone mind telling me what exactly has made the hubble obsolete? What batch of super powerful telescopes has made the hubble unnecessary?
Maybe the hubble is broken down, maybe it's too difficult to maintain, I'll even entertain the very unscientific assessment that the benefits of the hubble are outweighed by the costs now. However, you can't call something obsolete until something else comes along that's simply better and that can replace it fully.
With repairs the hubble can still do tremendous things. The submitter calling it "obsolete" is an irresponsible use of words and that bothers me because it implies it has no further worth. That's simply wrong.
The US government, and most developed nations, have standards for quality and safety for nearly every product on the market. These are simply there to protect the consumers from lies, withholding of facts, and simple ignorance. The history of consumer protection in the US has been that when some nasty problem happens, the industry is extremely slow to adopt any changes because they cost money. The government many times must step in. Quality is sometimes cost effective, and safety is almost never cost effective. If you buy a brand new car, and it kills you in an accident because it had faulty breaks I didn't know about, sure my family can sue, but ummm I'd prefer to be alive thank you.
In their questions, the justices were critical of the entertainment industry's proposal, which would hold companies "predominantly" supported by piracy liable for copyright infringement. However, they showed little sympathy for the file-swapping companies' business model."
IANAL, especially not one who brings cases before the supreme court, but of what little I know of judges this isn't a surprise.
I've had a few traffic tickets and I've even taken an old landlord to court. Every one of those judges, fair as they were, were highly critical, probative, and stern in their questioning of both sides. In other words, they were grumpy and downright rude. However, fortunately in my cases, they showed no favoritism to either side and ruled impartially. I expect this behavior they gave to both sides. Hell if you think your case is important enough to take to the surpreme court you damn well better take any kind of rudeness they give you and say "yes your honor may I have another?"
A big part of this is because judges are never trained to be nice. Judges especially, but laywers in general often seem to lack basic courtesies, especially in court. Another large part of it is because the US system is set up as an advesarial system so there's a lot of bad vibes in a court room that would make anyone stressed and grumpy. But the biggest part is they are simply getting down to business and trying to find the facts. Setting both sides on their heels by asking tough questions is how the supreme court works and how they come to the final answer. If you are coming to the highest court in the land you better come prepared with some pretty damn good answers.
Enough media hype of the judicial process... I want to know the answer the surpreme court comes up with!
"Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,"
The courts. They didn't come out and say it was illegal, but they sure did imply it. And downloading is a legal right allowed by law because it is expressly not prohibited by law in general. No law says you can't download using bittorrent, therefore it's legal.
If the school tries to take him to court for using BitTorrent claiming he's downloading material, it's a simple matter of this student to say "prove it." And if all he downloaded was open source software and linux distros, then the school has no case.
If the student is expelled, the student can take them to civil court and demand documents be produced as to why he was expelled, and the school will fail to produce activity that's strictly illegal. The courts should rule in his favor.
Obviously, this student should take steps to avoid the court situation but should they be put in that situation, they should be covered.
Is the PC market stagnant? Yes it is, because the market is saturated. It might start to fall off soon.
Will the market for PCs completely die off? No. Top of the line PCs will continue to sell. Either for business reasons or because twinks need to have the absolute latest and greatest, the high end will continue to require sell contained PCs. However, most people would be content with graphical dumb terminals at this point.
Will the paradigm shift? You bet your ass. Expect interesting things in the future, such as more powerful PDAs that replace your desktop and your laptop. Expect more consumer gadgets and several All in one devices that aren't quite PCs or PDAs. Expect wireless networking to take off and free us from needing a PC on our desktop wired to a little modem box in the corner of our house.
Bill doesn't want people to change their ideas about how they use computers today. When the public radically shifts it's ideas on what to use in terms of computers and electronics, big companies like Microsoft suffer because they can't shift fast enough to meet those new ideas.
These are just cutsey laws with no meaning
on
Metcalfe's Law Refuted
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· Score: 2, Insightful
See, these "laws" aren't all that significant. They are more like "rules of thumb." These laws try to put qualitative values by using quantitative theories or computations. It's ridiculous.
For example, Moore's law means almost nothing now. Processor clock speed is only one aspect of the speed of a computer. It's still useful to gauge this as over all computer process speed, but soon that won't matter as much either. Even still, can you measure to the exact mhz that processing speed has exactly doubled in the past 18 months?
All these "laws" have no proof to begin with so how can one refute them? It's marketing and CEO level philosophy which exists in a world far outside of reality.
Metcalfe's law and this new law are both trying to measure how valuable a network node is. Hell, the value could be ZERO; for example, a pr0n leecher. Or it could be extremely valuable, like wikipedia. And to confuse it more, is citibank.com more valuable than walmart.com, and are both of them more valuable than whitehouse.gov or unicef.org? How does one measure value. And if myblog.com has a low value, but slashdot.org has a high value, don't these nodes offset each other and potentially refute the refutal?
But who really cares? I mean cmon... this is a stupid little law trying to be big and important when there's no need for a "law." It's marketing spin trying to make something more important than it really is. I would agree that the value of a network is more than the sum of it's parts, but trying to put a number to it is pretty stupid.
I personally hate when someone misspells my own name, especially when my name is right in front of their friggin nose. I also hate when slashdot doesn't even proofread their own articles, when the correct spelling of other people's names is right in front of them.
Mark Hamill people...Hamill!! It's right there on the front page of the link! Lazy lazy lazy... sheesh.
You clearly talking about a single man. But with that behavior, how is he ever to get married ? And if he does get married, how is he going to sustain a relationship to the point of having kids ? Is he even having a social life, in which he may find companions ?
You've made two assumptions which basically limit your scope of thinking here. The first assumption is that one does not socialize online. That's simply not true. There are plenty of failed online relationships, but there are plenty of successful ones as well, and, oddly enough, they could be based on spending time online.
Let the jokes about the typical slashdotter rain in, but the classic definition of a living being is that it is born, grows to adulthood, reproduces and dies.
The second assumption is what you think a living being should be doing with their life. Biologically speaking, we are meant to spread our genes, but we are far from simply biologic creatures. Plus mal-adjustment to society is in no way linked to a lack of reproduction. You imply that one has a problem if they aren't making babies... how 1950s of you.
Addictions are defined by the type of harm you are doing to yourself or those around you. Failing to be social or reproducing are in no way harmful to anyone unless you are a fundamentalist christian who think its everyone's duty to marry and have 12 babies each.
There's a lot of back and forth in here about what addiction is, but no one has bothered to identify the definition of addiction. As with most posts you slashdotters have strong opinions, but a lot of you have preconceptions of what others define as addiction to computers/internet/MMORPGs.
I believe its safe to say if a single man gets up in the morning, washes up, dresses nicely for his job, works 8 hours, eats 3 square meals and keeps his apartment clean, and spends every other hour not doing this playing a MMORPG, that he's not addicted. He's well adjusted, like's his game, but knows his other priorities.
I also believe its safe to say that if a man spends 5 days straight playing a game, skips classes to play it, gets little or no sleep, fails to much of anything, both he and his apartment reek of dead ass, and has problems with his grades and health, then he's probably addicted and needs some help.
The deciding factor is usually how you are hurting yourself or those around you. There is plenty of gray area between the two examples. The report is definitely trying to address the latter, and is not trying to make severe judgements just because someone responsible likes to spend 4 hours a night playing games.
On the surface this seems silly but out of context it's easy to miss the point of this statement. This statement by the article is in fact significant.
I avoid MMORPGs, but I'm pretty into IRC, instant messaging and the like (maybe I'm addicted to that, but that's not the point). The point is that of the men I meet online vs the women, women are far likely to be married with children, divorced with children, or simply never married but had children from some previous relationship. Men on the other hand tend to be single men with no current relationship, and no previous marriage.
This could be explained in a number of ways. The most common is that, especially in the United States rural communities, many women are stay at home moms, or were stay at home moms with little income other than alimony and child support. These women have lots of spare time on their hands. So they go online. Some chat, some surf, some play MMORPGs. It's what they do. Men are out working, socializing, or otherwise getting out of the house, while the wife is "stuck at home."
How is this significant? Well stay at home moms have both time and disposable income. They are easily "sucked in," if you will, to MMORPGs. As with any addiction study, it's important to understand the circumstances as to how one got involved in the addiction.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, VoIP is going to blow the phone paradigm away in about 30 years. Right now, home networks are getting VoIP boxes and software, and users are providing addresses for these home networks because those boxes are stationary. But what about people who are smart enough to take their VoIP box with them? What about the posibility of VoIP over wireless in 30 years?
The copper wire switched networks have specific addresses they can link to nodes because the network was proprietary and controlled. Now that the network (the internet) is open, it doesn't yet have this feature that can tie an IP address, particularly a roaming IP address, to a location.
The only thing I can think of right now are GPS locators on all phones which have a frequency only the 911 operators can access... but that could be abused way too easily.
For now, asking the VoIPs to provide 911 service like vonage does is enough for the time being, but soon they'll have to solve this problem for VoIP roamers, and that will require a "think-outside-the-box" solution. As VoIP evolves, 911 will have to be completely redesigned.
...Over a simple wardrobe malfunction.
Most people worry that Blackbox software is a privacy concern. Coming from Microsoft, I believe it would be, but in general, I feel very strongly about black box software. Some black box software can go as far as trace the executable C or C++ code that is running and provide a step by step look at what the code was doing when, say, an error occured. When aprogrammer steps through it, they easily see the problem and can correct it. For support reps like me this is huge in correcting problems.
;)
However, not all languages are supported by black boxes. I hope over time a black box software type comes out to support Powerbuilder, because this would make my life so much easier. I could have this black box running on the user's system and simply "trace" their activity. When a problem occurs, they send the log and I send to programmers.
This of course would leave me the rest of the day to read slashdot and take the occasional "how do I click a mouse" case
The Clone Wars on Cartoon Network was awesome. That's what I want in a cartoon and it's what I want in Star Wars. Shitpan Star Wars all you want, I want Genndy Tartakovsky to make more!
:)
And considering Lucas is not specifically directing the cartoons, I figure the mouth frothing Star Wars critics would actually enjoy them
I love how the OS community assumes it's always about them. In the thin client arena, Microsoft's main competition is Citrix Metaframe. My company sells a solution that works on both citrix and terminal services. Citrix is more expensive but has more features. There are also a ton of addons and configurations that TS doesn't do yet.
The more options MS comes up with, the more they can compete. So far our customers are buying more TS Licenses than Citrix since windows 2000 came out because it's adequate for most users who want a reasonably functional thin client solution.
Yes, thin client options on Linux are a threat, but that's just lumped into the over all Linux beast they are tackling right now and specifically isn't anything special... yet.
It's not limited to linux. I've seen several Mac and Windows programs that don't appear to have a lot of polish. Hell, my own company, who happens to have the largest market share of software sales within its niche isn't nearly as polished as some competitors.
So many developers are either simply not experienced in proper structure, or proper GUI design, or they are under pressure by execs or marketing departments to get the project out the door. The important part of the software is does it do what it's supposed to do? Yes? Then ship it.
The type of polish tends to differ. There are plenty of windows and mac apps with bad GUI, but it happens more in the Linux community because the body of developers don't have a deep background in coding GUI interfaces as to Mac or Windows developers. Windows programs tend to have more bugs but the windows environment provides a stable interface usually. Mac apps probably have the best of both worlds (as long as you agree the OS X interface is as good as the OS 9 interface).
VoIP's main draw isn't that it's cheaper, or at least, it shouldn't be.
This statement is misleading. It depends on many factors, and usually it does break down to be cheaper, depending on how you look at it.
If you have dialup networking and you don't make a lot of phone calls, VoIP won't save you any money. That's assuming $35 for a basic phone line plus $20 for an ISP. $55 total. If it's good enough for you then good for you.
To use VoIP, you really need a high speed connection for the best quality and in order to use your internet connection while on the phone. If you already have that high speed connection, then you'd be saving loads of money by switching your phone service. The $35 for basic service is just that. Verizon has a phone service deal for $55 that you can get unlimited calling, voice mail, etc. Vonage gives you the same package for $25! That's $30 a month in savings. I'm going to have a cable internet connection anyway. Now, I had to buy the box from Radio Shack for $70, but I made my money back in 3 months.
What I've found is that after converting to cable internet (with cable, which I would have had to buy or my total internet connection would be more expensive without) and VoIP, I'm paying the same price as I would have had to pay With Verizon's full featured package, dialup internet, and NO cable TV. Had I stayed with verizon's phone service, I would have paid more money for all those calling features.
The only way it really isn't cheaper is if I stayed with basic dialup and had no cable TV. So it really is cheaper, you just have to shuffle the funds around.
So you are saying that in order to light a fire under people about terrorism, you would, say, start a war with some random country that has nothing to do with terrorism just to get people to care?
There are too many scary parallels between the Iraq war, Vietnam, pornography and this solution to fix our lagging space program.
This may be the spur humanity needs to get us up off our collective keisters and establish a viable off-planet colony before it's too late. It would be an unprecedented catastrophe, but still survivable, and it seems like this is the only way we're going to learn.
If the sole reason you want a space program is paranoid fear that we might be hit by a rock, that's a pretty sad reason.
I'd like to visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I'd like to see other star systems. I'd like to advance our knowledge of the galaxy and universe and try to find other life forms.
I mean, if people were dying left and right by micrometeorites hitting the earth and blowing out people's skulls but no one in power cared, I'd be concerned. That's not the case here.
Let's keep the fearmongering to a dull roar here. How sick does our society have to be when someone start's talking like a bad sci-fi thriller about the end of the world?
The sole purpose of any space program should be like any other science program, to make the unknown known and to expand the horizons of human understanding.
Frankly, if the meteor is coming in 2035, my opinion is that it's pretty much too late now. Get out your sandbags and automatic rifles and prepare for the armageddon (not the movie!).
Damn no... wait... you were right... had the wrong tape in and I would have figured that out had I not fast forwarded (got lucky and skipped almost immediately to the right spot. Sorry about that.
I guess I've not been paying attention to all the posts in other threads that are so anti-GPL, but I had no idea there were so many asses out there who believe GPL is anti business.
Let me be clear... the GPL is anti-bad business. GPL is pro-good business and pro consumer. And remember businesses are consumers too, the bad businesses are primarily the huge bureaucratic companies which turn out buggy lame software that doesn't always do what you expect it to do.
Now let me define what is bad business. Bad business consists of companies who do their best to create software libraries and intellectual property manifests with the sole purpose of maybe, possibly, making money. That information is sealed and protected so that in order to get at it, you have to pay someone for it.
This is based on the idea that companies have make something tangible to make money. Proprietary software is tangible enough to make money from the masses because they often buy it as tangible.
Big businesses build up this repetoire of "intellectual property" and sit on it for years. It's okay to benefit from a good idea, but copywrite laws these days take it too far. Copywritable material now has an age of 90 years, it used to be 20! Current copywrite laws therefore allow companies like disney to sit on their repetoire and continue to make money off it and don't encourage them to make new material. These businesses are not sensitive to consumer wants and needs, and stifle competition because having huge amounts of Intellectual property that no one else can ever touch is an unfair competitive advantage.
Customers who use GPL are forced to be more creative, because everyone has access to the same software! Consumers win because companies have to be more competitive. Microsoft can sit on their ass right now and say "You want an office package? Great, here's our package for $600 a person. What, you don't want to pay that price? Lick my ass n00b, you can't do shit without my software, we 0wnz j00r ass!"
Here's another way to look at it. Before the internet, most networks were proprietary. Closed off and not communicating with each other. Companies had their own networks, colleges has theirs, and some of them even tried to create VANs (value added networks) to perform EDI (electronic data interchange). Most of those attempts were novel but they sucked. When the internet came out, everyone was suddenly connected. Now EDI is easy, because as long as your computer is on the internet, I can build something that communicates with you seamlessly.
I believe I once read in an article that innovation is increased when you unbundle functions of a system. For example, if IBM owned the internet, and you had to pay a fee to use it, this would stifle innovation because not everyone would be able to or want to pay the fee. Think about the internet vs phone networks. Phone networks have features like call waiting and call blocking and voice mail and caller ID. However, phone networks can only be used for phone calls (without DSL of course). The internet is simply build on a protocol of information transfer from point a to point b, but it has unlimited uses. You can take phone calls over the internet now, and not use the phone network at all. what's even greater is that if you have 5 ISPs to chose from, you can take your VoIP to any of those ISPs and use it seamlessly, because each ISP implements a standard internet connection. They compete on service!
I'm getting off topic but it all has to do with competition. Competition has been lacking in the last several decades, because people think it's okay for big companies to hold big power. The GPL is simply taking current overly controlling law and turning it against itself by guarenteeing that information released under it is free.
I've seen moans that the Guide entry on towels is not in the movie, how could it be left out, etc. conveniently forgetting that this entry didn't even appear in the first radio series.
:)
Excuse me?
I own the original Radio series... on audio tape no less, and I listen to it frequently. Let me tell you my friend, the Guide entry on towels is very much in the series. It's somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes into the second episode.
Come fly to philadelphia and I'll play it for you sometime
Would someone mind telling me what exactly has made the hubble obsolete? What batch of super powerful telescopes has made the hubble unnecessary?
Maybe the hubble is broken down, maybe it's too difficult to maintain, I'll even entertain the very unscientific assessment that the benefits of the hubble are outweighed by the costs now. However, you can't call something obsolete until something else comes along that's simply better and that can replace it fully.
With repairs the hubble can still do tremendous things. The submitter calling it "obsolete" is an irresponsible use of words and that bothers me because it implies it has no further worth. That's simply wrong.
Patent lawsuits.... Microsoft.... evil quotient reaching infinity...
cannot... decide... which to... cheer for... brain can't take... much more... **BOOM**
The US government, and most developed nations, have standards for quality and safety for nearly every product on the market. These are simply there to protect the consumers from lies, withholding of facts, and simple ignorance. The history of consumer protection in the US has been that when some nasty problem happens, the industry is extremely slow to adopt any changes because they cost money. The government many times must step in. Quality is sometimes cost effective, and safety is almost never cost effective. If you buy a brand new car, and it kills you in an accident because it had faulty breaks I didn't know about, sure my family can sue, but ummm I'd prefer to be alive thank you.
In their questions, the justices were critical of the entertainment industry's proposal, which would hold companies "predominantly" supported by piracy liable for copyright infringement. However, they showed little sympathy for the file-swapping companies' business model."
IANAL, especially not one who brings cases before the supreme court, but of what little I know of judges this isn't a surprise.
I've had a few traffic tickets and I've even taken an old landlord to court. Every one of those judges, fair as they were, were highly critical, probative, and stern in their questioning of both sides. In other words, they were grumpy and downright rude. However, fortunately in my cases, they showed no favoritism to either side and ruled impartially. I expect this behavior they gave to both sides. Hell if you think your case is important enough to take to the surpreme court you damn well better take any kind of rudeness they give you and say "yes your honor may I have another?"
A big part of this is because judges are never trained to be nice. Judges especially, but laywers in general often seem to lack basic courtesies, especially in court. Another large part of it is because the US system is set up as an advesarial system so there's a lot of bad vibes in a court room that would make anyone stressed and grumpy. But the biggest part is they are simply getting down to business and trying to find the facts. Setting both sides on their heels by asking tough questions is how the supreme court works and how they come to the final answer. If you are coming to the highest court in the land you better come prepared with some pretty damn good answers.
Enough media hype of the judicial process... I want to know the answer the surpreme court comes up with!
I welcome my new Canadian overlords! :)
Are you saying we'll be invaded by those wicked barbarians from the north, the Canadians?
See they didn't say "Legitamite use" they said:
"Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,"
The courts. They didn't come out and say it was illegal, but they sure did imply it. And downloading is a legal right allowed by law because it is expressly not prohibited by law in general. No law says you can't download using bittorrent, therefore it's legal.
If the school tries to take him to court for using BitTorrent claiming he's downloading material, it's a simple matter of this student to say "prove it." And if all he downloaded was open source software and linux distros, then the school has no case.
If the student is expelled, the student can take them to civil court and demand documents be produced as to why he was expelled, and the school will fail to produce activity that's strictly illegal. The courts should rule in his favor.
Obviously, this student should take steps to avoid the court situation but should they be put in that situation, they should be covered.
Is the PC market stagnant? Yes it is, because the market is saturated. It might start to fall off soon.
Will the market for PCs completely die off? No. Top of the line PCs will continue to sell. Either for business reasons or because twinks need to have the absolute latest and greatest, the high end will continue to require sell contained PCs. However, most people would be content with graphical dumb terminals at this point.
Will the paradigm shift? You bet your ass. Expect interesting things in the future, such as more powerful PDAs that replace your desktop and your laptop. Expect more consumer gadgets and several All in one devices that aren't quite PCs or PDAs. Expect wireless networking to take off and free us from needing a PC on our desktop wired to a little modem box in the corner of our house.
Bill doesn't want people to change their ideas about how they use computers today. When the public radically shifts it's ideas on what to use in terms of computers and electronics, big companies like Microsoft suffer because they can't shift fast enough to meet those new ideas.
See, these "laws" aren't all that significant. They are more like "rules of thumb." These laws try to put qualitative values by using quantitative theories or computations. It's ridiculous.
For example, Moore's law means almost nothing now. Processor clock speed is only one aspect of the speed of a computer. It's still useful to gauge this as over all computer process speed, but soon that won't matter as much either. Even still, can you measure to the exact mhz that processing speed has exactly doubled in the past 18 months?
All these "laws" have no proof to begin with so how can one refute them? It's marketing and CEO level philosophy which exists in a world far outside of reality.
Metcalfe's law and this new law are both trying to measure how valuable a network node is. Hell, the value could be ZERO; for example, a pr0n leecher. Or it could be extremely valuable, like wikipedia. And to confuse it more, is citibank.com more valuable than walmart.com, and are both of them more valuable than whitehouse.gov or unicef.org? How does one measure value. And if myblog.com has a low value, but slashdot.org has a high value, don't these nodes offset each other and potentially refute the refutal?
But who really cares? I mean cmon... this is a stupid little law trying to be big and important when there's no need for a "law." It's marketing spin trying to make something more important than it really is. I would agree that the value of a network is more than the sum of it's parts, but trying to put a number to it is pretty stupid.
I personally hate when someone misspells my own name, especially when my name is right in front of their friggin nose. I also hate when slashdot doesn't even proofread their own articles, when the correct spelling of other people's names is right in front of them.
Mark Hamill people...Hamill!! It's right there on the front page of the link! Lazy lazy lazy... sheesh.
You clearly talking about a single man. But with that behavior, how is he ever to get married ? And if he does get married, how is he going to sustain a relationship to the point of having kids ? Is he even having a social life, in which he may find companions ?
You've made two assumptions which basically limit your scope of thinking here. The first assumption is that one does not socialize online. That's simply not true. There are plenty of failed online relationships, but there are plenty of successful ones as well, and, oddly enough, they could be based on spending time online.
Let the jokes about the typical slashdotter rain in, but the classic definition of a living being is that it is born, grows to adulthood, reproduces and dies.
The second assumption is what you think a living being should be doing with their life. Biologically speaking, we are meant to spread our genes, but we are far from simply biologic creatures. Plus mal-adjustment to society is in no way linked to a lack of reproduction. You imply that one has a problem if they aren't making babies... how 1950s of you.
Addictions are defined by the type of harm you are doing to yourself or those around you. Failing to be social or reproducing are in no way harmful to anyone unless you are a fundamentalist christian who think its everyone's duty to marry and have 12 babies each.
There's a lot of back and forth in here about what addiction is, but no one has bothered to identify the definition of addiction. As with most posts you slashdotters have strong opinions, but a lot of you have preconceptions of what others define as addiction to computers/internet/MMORPGs.
I believe its safe to say if a single man gets up in the morning, washes up, dresses nicely for his job, works 8 hours, eats 3 square meals and keeps his apartment clean, and spends every other hour not doing this playing a MMORPG, that he's not addicted. He's well adjusted, like's his game, but knows his other priorities.
I also believe its safe to say that if a man spends 5 days straight playing a game, skips classes to play it, gets little or no sleep, fails to much of anything, both he and his apartment reek of dead ass, and has problems with his grades and health, then he's probably addicted and needs some help.
The deciding factor is usually how you are hurting yourself or those around you. There is plenty of gray area between the two examples. The report is definitely trying to address the latter, and is not trying to make severe judgements just because someone responsible likes to spend 4 hours a night playing games.
On the surface this seems silly but out of context it's easy to miss the point of this statement. This statement by the article is in fact significant.
I avoid MMORPGs, but I'm pretty into IRC, instant messaging and the like (maybe I'm addicted to that, but that's not the point). The point is that of the men I meet online vs the women, women are far likely to be married with children, divorced with children, or simply never married but had children from some previous relationship. Men on the other hand tend to be single men with no current relationship, and no previous marriage.
This could be explained in a number of ways. The most common is that, especially in the United States rural communities, many women are stay at home moms, or were stay at home moms with little income other than alimony and child support. These women have lots of spare time on their hands. So they go online. Some chat, some surf, some play MMORPGs. It's what they do. Men are out working, socializing, or otherwise getting out of the house, while the wife is "stuck at home."
How is this significant? Well stay at home moms have both time and disposable income. They are easily "sucked in," if you will, to MMORPGs. As with any addiction study, it's important to understand the circumstances as to how one got involved in the addiction.