Go to the party websites. Spend, seriously, 10 or 15 minutes there, reading what they're about. Thats half an hour out of your day, and I will guarantee that you are more informed than a scary percentage of the American voting public. There are very, very few people who are actually fully aware of the issues - they either vote one way out of habit or family tradition, or based on 30 second sound bites. Neither are particularly informative.
Honestly now, its been a very long time since data could be bussed to the CPU fast enough to take full advantage of the chip's speed. Chipmakers spend so much time convincing us that we need these insanely fast processors, when in reality, a large portion of the chip's cycles go wasted because the data simply can't get to the chip that fast. I have two main machines -- an intel Celeron 400 and an AMD Athlon 2400+ (so like, 1997mHz). In theory, my Athlon should be five times faster than my Celeron -- in practice, its maybe 2x. Its all marketing, and I fall victim to it just like everybody else.
You know, I'm fairly out there on the cynical limb right now, but I don't think this is true. They might want to ban something that affected national security -- say, detailed classified info on Secret Service procedures -- but they wouldn't try to stop a pro-terrorist message. For now, at least, free speech is respected.
I see your point, and to some extent I agree -- however, our hold on free speech is becoming increasingly tenuous. After having seen first-hand websites with vaguely anti-american, pro-terrorism sentiments be shut down under the PATRIOT act and associated "homeland defense" laws, I'm having an increasingly difficult time trusting the US government to "respect" the average citizen's right to free speech.
its being banned because it directly questions some of the religious values upon which the entire theocratic government is built, which is, of course, seen as a threat to their power -- if the Matrix causes the average Egyptian to question the existence of God (doubtful, but I suppose conceivable), then the perceived Divine Right to Leadership enjoyed by the government is destroyed. No government wants that.
Well, thats what governments do -- they make decisions for the citizenry based on percieved need. You forget that in many parts of the world, religion is intrinsic to everyday life -- the Church in many cases is the State. Religion is hugely important to most of the middle east... I daresay nearly as important as the "war on terror" is to the United States, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the US government would intervene if a movie were to be released in the country showed terrorism in a positive light. Its all a question of cultural values. How do you feel that your government won't let you make "How to destroy government buildings for dummies"?
That kind of makes me nervous. I don't really like the idea of any sort of "seed" probing like that. For one, it seems like an invasion of sorts. Two, its a recipe for spreading bacteria all over the planet -- despite NASA's stringent cleanliness, the fact of the matter is that some bacteria CAN survive space flight and reentry -- if that happens, and 20 years after we send these things to fly willy-nilly around Mars, how can we tell if these bacteria or whatever are originally from Mars or from Earth? It just seems a wee bit risky to me. *shrug*
This is an interesting idea.... but its entire basis for movement -- the wind on Mars -- seems to limit its usefulness to gathering data only on the areas of Mars where winds blow the strongest. Not that there isn't valuable information to be gathered there, but aren't windy areas somewhat of a scientific dead-end? I mean, if this thing ends up following the prevalent wind currents, wouldn't it just sort of follow a relatively smooth path worn away by centuries of wind erosion? The "juicy bits" of Mars are those that have been left more or less untouched for millenia -- those are the areas that give us the greatest insight into the history of the planet... which are precisely the areas that this thing won't be blown to -- and I suspect, where one would find just the sort of rough terrain this probe is built for. Wind has a bad habit of mixing things up -- ie. are these mineral samples native to the area, or have they been carried from the other side of the planet by this wind system?
No, its not. For you, yeah. For me, yes. For the majority of the readers of Slashdot, yeah. But what of the millions of internet users who, like my grandmother, can download her favorite Pavarotti songs with the click of a button, yet has about an 8th of the storage capacity of a single DVD on her pentium 120? There are always those who can do today what my grandma will do tomorrow -- and its my grandma the MPAA is worried about, not a small niche of the technologically "elite".
Without sounding like I'm supporting the MPAA on this (which I most certainly not), one has to at least appreciate the MPAA's awareness of the future of piracy. The fact of the matter is that widespread piracy of DVDs and movies on the scale of MP3s -- that is, copies of the movies that are of such quality as to be almost indistinguishable from the original, as with MP3s -- just isn't here yet. The average user simply does not have the capacity or ability to simply hop on some p2p network and download and burn DVD-quality full length feature films -- yet. A few years down the road, it might not be such an issue to download say, a 1 gig movie, burn it to DVD-R, and watch it in your DVD player with no appreciable loss of quality. The MPAA isn't so much concerned about the (relatively) low quality movies floating around Kazaa today -- they're concerned about tomorrow. And one at least has to respect, however grudgingly, their foresight and awareness of the future -- contrasted with the "catch-up" that the RIAA is playing right now.
This would probably be easier to put through than the telephone opt-in system. Most spammers are (slimy) individuals, without the lobbying clout of the Direct Marketing Association behind them - and as everyone knows, laws are made (or not made) because of lobbyists, not out of any sense of whats right. =)
Here's an example of exploiting the rich in a manner that benefits everybody. The wireless internet access will cost the soon-to-be adventurers $2000-$5000 per expedition - which, according to the numbers given, is only a small addition to the $65,000 typically already paid per person for the expedition. Surely people who can afford the ascent can afford the added cost of WiFi access. The beauty part is that the profits go to the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nonprofit environmental group. So in effect, the poor are exploiting the rich in their need for all the creature comforts - and doing so in a way that benefits everybody.
According to thei creator's website, they are planning on creating Deep Flight II, which they hope to pilot to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, some 38,000 feet down. But wouldn't the intense pressure and high viscosity of the water at that depth make it nearly impossible to operate on the flight principle? I don't know the first thing about high pressure underwater maneuvering, so perhaps someone else can tell me why this will (or won't) work?
The article states that, when the submersible drops beneath "stall" speed (approx 1.2 knots), a conventional ballast system kicks in to maintain dive depth - making it perhaps more versatile than conventional submersibles, as opposed to the limitations that you suggest.
I confess, I don't know much about how this system works... but wouldn't this be a neat way to get your protest message across? I mean, say you oppose Nike's sweat shop labour practices. Go to Nike headquarters, covertly set up the system, program a message like, "Just Don't Do It" or whatever strikes your fancy, and time it to start in the middle of the night. I expect the first few incidences would get huge media exposure, and have the added benefit of being somewhat more acceptable to the general public - thus, getting your message across to more people. I know it'd certainly grab my attention... you can see only so many crowds with signs before you sort of ignore them.
No one benchmark (or set of benchmarks) provides an absolute answer -- but information helps make reasonable decisions
Ah ha! Someone who understands what benchmarks are for and how to use them - it sometimes seems like the corporate world uses numbers from benchmarks only when they prove their claims. Of course, that's the difference between open source and the business world - open source (ideally) looks at every benchmark result and asks "now how can we get all of these numbers better than the competition?" while more traditional businesses ask, "Which of these numbers make our product look the best?". *shrug* its just nice to see benchmarks used properly, is all.
Couldn't this also be applied to vehicle tires? I know I just had a hell of a time driving home tonight, with all the frozen rain on the roads. I've got expensive snow tires on my vehicle, but on slick ice like this, I might as well have a set of skates. I don't know if its a workable (or affordable) solution, but I know I would pay good money to have some additional traction for these icy Canadian west coast winters.
Then you propose that they tax nothing? Governments are greedy, yes - but they do need money to function. You can make the system as efficient and corruption-free as you like, but the system still needs to be funded.
We've got prices getting awfully close (and in some provinces exceeding) $10 for a single pack of 20 cigarettes - which is about £5. Last I heard, a carton of 200 cigarettes was going for £40 or so in London, while ours are are about $100 (£50) for the same amount - so yeah, we know a thing or two about taxation. =)
14 million subscribers sending 10 messages a day is 140 million messages. If the tax worked out to 1/10th of a cent on each message, the total cost to the user would be 1 penny each day - certainly not an unmanagable amount. That works out to $140,000 a day - or $51.1 million a year. That's a sizeable amount of cash. This is one of those cases where the effect to the consumer is nearly nil, but the economic benefits to the country are quite large. We should be congratulating the Phillipines for finding a new and unique way to find money in an economically unstable region, rather than criticize. It certainly beats putting huge amounts of tax on addictive or necessary products such as cigarettes and gasoline like we do here in North America, which I've always thought of as really sneaky and low.
A commendable action! I'm sure you saved a few people some headaches. However, next time anyone is in a situation like this, I might suggest that the second place you contact (after the service provider) are whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over fraud cases such as these. Shutting them down is one thing, but getting them put behind bars guarantees that they'll have to wait a while before starting up a new scam.
Perhaps if you'd read the article instead of trying to get an early post, you'd know that the numbers aren't stolen - the site, ebayupdates.com, fools people into thinking that they are affiliated with the real ebay.com, and asks them to re-enter their financial information. It has nothing to do with credit card databases or encryption - just new take on a tried and true con that has been around for probably centuries.
Representatives of eBay were not immediately available for comment, but the company has issued a general warning on its Web site, urging caution over e-mails seeking passwords or credit card numbers.
Sounds like they've mentioned it on the website to me.....
No. The tenets of basic economics are hurting the legitmate consumers every time the MPAA accuses someone of stealing DVDs. The fact of the matter is that DVD piracy is almost nonexistent in North America - unlike MP3s, which can be and are downloaded and burned to CD in minutes, inexpensively. The time and cost of copying DVDs is huge in comparison. DVD piracy just isn't here on a large enough scale to warrant any price increase. Its the same reason gas prices are on the rise in every country on the planet - its making a very small number of people very, very rich.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to the party websites. Spend, seriously, 10 or 15 minutes there, reading what they're about. Thats half an hour out of your day, and I will guarantee that you are more informed than a scary percentage of the American voting public. There are very, very few people who are actually fully aware of the issues - they either vote one way out of habit or family tradition, or based on 30 second sound bites. Neither are particularly informative.
30 minutes of your time isn't too much to ask.
Sweet mother of all things holy, this is the only Slashdot post to ever cause Coca-cola to blow through my nostrils. Good stuff.
... this is the same guy that made a serious bid for the X-Prize. I think he knows how not to blow his nozzles.
Honestly now, its been a very long time since data could be bussed to the CPU fast enough to take full advantage of the chip's speed. Chipmakers spend so much time convincing us that we need these insanely fast processors, when in reality, a large portion of the chip's cycles go wasted because the data simply can't get to the chip that fast. I have two main machines -- an intel Celeron 400 and an AMD Athlon 2400+ (so like, 1997mHz). In theory, my Athlon should be five times faster than my Celeron -- in practice, its maybe 2x. Its all marketing, and I fall victim to it just like everybody else.
I see your point, and to some extent I agree -- however, our hold on free speech is becoming increasingly tenuous. After having seen first-hand websites with vaguely anti-american, pro-terrorism sentiments be shut down under the PATRIOT act and associated "homeland defense" laws, I'm having an increasingly difficult time trusting the US government to "respect" the average citizen's right to free speech.
its being banned because it directly questions some of the religious values upon which the entire theocratic government is built, which is, of course, seen as a threat to their power -- if the Matrix causes the average Egyptian to question the existence of God (doubtful, but I suppose conceivable), then the perceived Divine Right to Leadership enjoyed by the government is destroyed. No government wants that.
Well, thats what governments do -- they make decisions for the citizenry based on percieved need. You forget that in many parts of the world, religion is intrinsic to everyday life -- the Church in many cases is the State. Religion is hugely important to most of the middle east... I daresay nearly as important as the "war on terror" is to the United States, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the US government would intervene if a movie were to be released in the country showed terrorism in a positive light. Its all a question of cultural values. How do you feel that your government won't let you make "How to destroy government buildings for dummies"?
That kind of makes me nervous. I don't really like the idea of any sort of "seed" probing like that. For one, it seems like an invasion of sorts. Two, its a recipe for spreading bacteria all over the planet -- despite NASA's stringent cleanliness, the fact of the matter is that some bacteria CAN survive space flight and reentry -- if that happens, and 20 years after we send these things to fly willy-nilly around Mars, how can we tell if these bacteria or whatever are originally from Mars or from Earth? It just seems a wee bit risky to me. *shrug*
This is an interesting idea.... but its entire basis for movement -- the wind on Mars -- seems to limit its usefulness to gathering data only on the areas of Mars where winds blow the strongest. Not that there isn't valuable information to be gathered there, but aren't windy areas somewhat of a scientific dead-end? I mean, if this thing ends up following the prevalent wind currents, wouldn't it just sort of follow a relatively smooth path worn away by centuries of wind erosion? The "juicy bits" of Mars are those that have been left more or less untouched for millenia -- those are the areas that give us the greatest insight into the history of the planet... which are precisely the areas that this thing won't be blown to -- and I suspect, where one would find just the sort of rough terrain this probe is built for. Wind has a bad habit of mixing things up -- ie. are these mineral samples native to the area, or have they been carried from the other side of the planet by this wind system?
No, its not. For you, yeah. For me, yes. For the majority of the readers of Slashdot, yeah. But what of the millions of internet users who, like my grandmother, can download her favorite Pavarotti songs with the click of a button, yet has about an 8th of the storage capacity of a single DVD on her pentium 120? There are always those who can do today what my grandma will do tomorrow -- and its my grandma the MPAA is worried about, not a small niche of the technologically "elite".
Without sounding like I'm supporting the MPAA on this (which I most certainly not), one has to at least appreciate the MPAA's awareness of the future of piracy. The fact of the matter is that widespread piracy of DVDs and movies on the scale of MP3s -- that is, copies of the movies that are of such quality as to be almost indistinguishable from the original, as with MP3s -- just isn't here yet. The average user simply does not have the capacity or ability to simply hop on some p2p network and download and burn DVD-quality full length feature films -- yet. A few years down the road, it might not be such an issue to download say, a 1 gig movie, burn it to DVD-R, and watch it in your DVD player with no appreciable loss of quality. The MPAA isn't so much concerned about the (relatively) low quality movies floating around Kazaa today -- they're concerned about tomorrow. And one at least has to respect, however grudgingly, their foresight and awareness of the future -- contrasted with the "catch-up" that the RIAA is playing right now.
This would probably be easier to put through than the telephone opt-in system. Most spammers are (slimy) individuals, without the lobbying clout of the Direct Marketing Association behind them - and as everyone knows, laws are made (or not made) because of lobbyists, not out of any sense of whats right. =)
Here's an example of exploiting the rich in a manner that benefits everybody. The wireless internet access will cost the soon-to-be adventurers $2000-$5000 per expedition - which, according to the numbers given, is only a small addition to the $65,000 typically already paid per person for the expedition. Surely people who can afford the ascent can afford the added cost of WiFi access. The beauty part is that the profits go to the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, a nonprofit environmental group. So in effect, the poor are exploiting the rich in their need for all the creature comforts - and doing so in a way that benefits everybody.
According to thei creator's website, they are planning on creating Deep Flight II, which they hope to pilot to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, some 38,000 feet down. But wouldn't the intense pressure and high viscosity of the water at that depth make it nearly impossible to operate on the flight principle? I don't know the first thing about high pressure underwater maneuvering, so perhaps someone else can tell me why this will (or won't) work?
The article states that, when the submersible drops beneath "stall" speed (approx 1.2 knots), a conventional ballast system kicks in to maintain dive depth - making it perhaps more versatile than conventional submersibles, as opposed to the limitations that you suggest.
I confess, I don't know much about how this system works... but wouldn't this be a neat way to get your protest message across? I mean, say you oppose Nike's sweat shop labour practices. Go to Nike headquarters, covertly set up the system, program a message like, "Just Don't Do It" or whatever strikes your fancy, and time it to start in the middle of the night. I expect the first few incidences would get huge media exposure, and have the added benefit of being somewhat more acceptable to the general public - thus, getting your message across to more people. I know it'd certainly grab my attention... you can see only so many crowds with signs before you sort of ignore them.
Ah ha! Someone who understands what benchmarks are for and how to use them - it sometimes seems like the corporate world uses numbers from benchmarks only when they prove their claims. Of course, that's the difference between open source and the business world - open source (ideally) looks at every benchmark result and asks "now how can we get all of these numbers better than the competition?" while more traditional businesses ask, "Which of these numbers make our product look the best?". *shrug* its just nice to see benchmarks used properly, is all.
Couldn't this also be applied to vehicle tires? I know I just had a hell of a time driving home tonight, with all the frozen rain on the roads. I've got expensive snow tires on my vehicle, but on slick ice like this, I might as well have a set of skates. I don't know if its a workable (or affordable) solution, but I know I would pay good money to have some additional traction for these icy Canadian west coast winters.
Then you propose that they tax nothing? Governments are greedy, yes - but they do need money to function. You can make the system as efficient and corruption-free as you like, but the system still needs to be funded.
We've got prices getting awfully close (and in some provinces exceeding) $10 for a single pack of 20 cigarettes - which is about £5. Last I heard, a carton of 200 cigarettes was going for £40 or so in London, while ours are are about $100 (£50) for the same amount - so yeah, we know a thing or two about taxation. =)
14 million subscribers sending 10 messages a day is 140 million messages. If the tax worked out to 1/10th of a cent on each message, the total cost to the user would be 1 penny each day - certainly not an unmanagable amount. That works out to $140,000 a day - or $51.1 million a year. That's a sizeable amount of cash. This is one of those cases where the effect to the consumer is nearly nil, but the economic benefits to the country are quite large. We should be congratulating the Phillipines for finding a new and unique way to find money in an economically unstable region, rather than criticize. It certainly beats putting huge amounts of tax on addictive or necessary products such as cigarettes and gasoline like we do here in North America, which I've always thought of as really sneaky and low.
A commendable action! I'm sure you saved a few people some headaches. However, next time anyone is in a situation like this, I might suggest that the second place you contact (after the service provider) are whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over fraud cases such as these. Shutting them down is one thing, but getting them put behind bars guarantees that they'll have to wait a while before starting up a new scam.
Perhaps if you'd read the article instead of trying to get an early post, you'd know that the numbers aren't stolen - the site, ebayupdates.com, fools people into thinking that they are affiliated with the real ebay.com, and asks them to re-enter their financial information. It has nothing to do with credit card databases or encryption - just new take on a tried and true con that has been around for probably centuries.
Sounds like they've mentioned it on the website to me.....
No. The tenets of basic economics are hurting the legitmate consumers every time the MPAA accuses someone of stealing DVDs. The fact of the matter is that DVD piracy is almost nonexistent in North America - unlike MP3s, which can be and are downloaded and burned to CD in minutes, inexpensively. The time and cost of copying DVDs is huge in comparison. DVD piracy just isn't here on a large enough scale to warrant any price increase. Its the same reason gas prices are on the rise in every country on the planet - its making a very small number of people very, very rich.