Why would you assume that people using a "Lexxmark" toner cartridge that is half the price would not sue Lexmark if their printer subsequently failed? I know plenty of people that would believe the printer was obviously defective if it failed to properly accept and use whatever toner was put in it.
After all, if your expensive replacable-ink-cartridge pen fails to operate it must be defective, no matter what sort of ink cartridge is used, right? The fact that the printer might be a little bit more complicated and have different tolerences would never occur to most people. It certainly would not occur to most attorneys.
You see, there is almost zero downside to producing toner cartridges that will screw up printers. The printer manufacturer is going to be the one taking the hit. And these things are generally sold through layers of distributors and resellers so that the actual manufacturer is all but untracable. Making excellent toner cartridges that just happen to be cheaper than the OEM part is equally a thankless job. There is no point to going the extra mile over there in China or whereever, so you might as well make a crap product that people can do nothing about.
Some toner refill kits are OK, but if you have ever spilled toner anywhere you will understand why these are something that some people avoid. There are some cartridge refillers that do an OK job, but having seen some of their operations you need to understand what you are getting into and the potential down side.
You are assuming the "current directory" is set to the location where an associated file is located. That isn't true. When an application is invoked by an association the current directory is usually the location of the program executable itself, which is passed the fully qualified name of the file that was clicked and caused the invocation of the program.
So placing a DLL in the same folder as the associated file doesn't do anything. You have to put it in the same folder as the executable, which is (as of Vista and Windows 7) write-protected.
With XP it is a lot easier because the Program Files directory structure is not protected and it was common to have applications writing stuff there, so you couldn't protect it. As of Vista the rules changed and you can't write there anymore.
Yes, I understand the exploit. But again, if you have people dropping files willy-nilly into the file system you are going to have troubles. Same goes for Linux - if you install something that has setuser root it is pretty much an exploit for the entire system. Why would anyone do this? Because the installer tells them it is necessary and just does it. Same thing happens with Windows. If you aren't controlling what is installed, you aren't in control. Period.
That artists that created the box art were often working several months in advance of the game being finalized. That pretty much means that they had the conceptual drawings by someone that were given to the developer and computer artists rather than an actual game.
So they had no idea what the game might look like. The programming wasn't done yet.
As someone that worked on a couple of 2600 games that were released under the Parker Brothers label, I can assure you that the boxes were done long before the code was completed. And the box production people were simply not interested in looking at what had been completed. We were in different parts of the country.
Incredible as it might seem, this is how software publishing works. The manual get done before the code is done. The artwork is conceptual because it has a significantly longer lead time. Marketing materials are approved and printed weeks before the gold master CD is burned. Everyone has a schedule and deadlines and stuff has to be done pretty much the way it was planned or it looks like something that was put together by a couple of high school kids after school.
Sure, it would be nice if everything could wait for the highly flexible and iterative development process to complete before committing to graphics for advertising. Except you would miss the big presentation at the trade show and nothing would get sold to the distributors, meaning nothing gets sold to the retailers. So everyone gets to go home and the furniture gets auctioned off along with the computers, phones and pretty posters on the walls. Yup, been there and done that as well for some people that didn't understand how the process works.
Municipalities borrow money through bond issues, not by getting money from a bank. These have tax-free interest and are pretty popular because most municipalities have AAA rated bonds.
Pensions, for example, are restricted to only investing in AAA rated bonds. A lot of not-for-profit money is also invested there along with foundations and just about any other organization with cash on hand and needing someplace to put it.
Most of the problem with the subprime crisis is due (still) to the improper rating of subprime mortgage bonds as AAA when they where back by only the imagination of people. This is still a problem and continuing on today. There will continue to be a lot of pension failures and such until the last of these bonds are finally purged. It could take 10 years - I don't know what the term on these bonds might be.
In the US public transportation (buses, light rail, etc.) is pretty much dead. Ridership is way, way down.
I see the final nail in the coffin being the Chicago subway motorman that sues to be allowed to operate a subway train while using meth. These days there is probably a 50-50 chance of winning.
The problem with plastic is that once you melt two different types together the original strength is gone. You can't make water bottles out of a LDPE and PET mix, but if you can keep the PET separated you can make nice new water bottles out of it.
About all you can make out of a mix of plastics are things like low-grade insulation which there isn't much of a call for. Or, you can burn it as a fuel but it is a rather dirty burn. I believe you can use a plastic mix to make certain types of industrial containers - the sort where the plastic in a half an inch thick. Low strength but by building up enough volume you can use it as a container. There isn't much of a demand for that sort of product either.
The key is in some areas they have relatively highly paid union workers sorting the plastics. The money comes from various subsidies so spending $100 on a ton of trash is worth it - because the money is for putting on a good show. The fact that most of it is going to be dumped anyway is meaningless because the company is being paid to show how good recycling is. They have tours of these facilities but they generally don't show you the warehouse full of stuff waiting to be sold off - which gets dumped into a landfill when there is no buyer after long enough time has elapsed.
The problem is the newspaper reporter takes the tour and writes about the facility and that is what people see. The reality never enters into the picture.
The problem on the plastic side is when you melt two different sorts of plastics together you end up with a low grade sort of plastic that isn't suitable for much of anything. Contrast this with shredding and melting LDPE gets you... LDPE to reuse. Same with HDPE. And PET - mostly water and soda bottles.
So plastics have to be sorted or they aren't usable. Even a single neck ring left over from the cap on a water bottle is enough to cause an entire batch of recycled plastic to be worthless.
Glass isn't quite as bad because you can dilute, dilute, dilute until you have nearly clear glass and then add dyes to even it all out. You can't get clear glass out of a mix, but there are no structural or strength problems like there are with plastics.
Metals are easy - they will naturally separate by weight and density.
The problem with the "so what if 90% ends up in a landfill" argument is you are accepting a bunch of things that are simply wrong:
Make people sort their stuff instead of a single stream. Far less costly to the municipality and gives people an actual idea of what is practical to recycle.
Start down the road of actually reducing the use of non-recyclable packaging. For example, get rid of plastic jars and tubs and use glass. We are not running out of sand. It is less practical to ship glass bottles and jars from China, so they might actually be made in the USA.
Really penalize people for introducing contamination into the recycle bin. Instead of paying someone $10 an hour to remove neck rings make the people do it themselves.
One of the biggest problems is still that recycling is subsidised and funded in odd ways that make sure cities implement some sort of recycling program even if everything ends up in a landfill no matter what. Because of this it is impossible for the average citizen to understand they are being used as suckers and advertising for companies that "pretend" to assist municipalities with recycling.
Putting a "green face" on waste disposal is pointless unless there is something real there. Unfortunately, it is now practical for municipalities to contract out recycling efforts, tell their citizens they are doing a good job recycling and end up just paying money for services that are never performed. Or are performed in ways that are actually detremental to any sort of real recycling effort.
Sure, anyone can make money by running all the trash through a big machine that picks out aluminium cans. So why are they running two different trucks around and only running the "recycling" stuff through the machine? Especially when all the non-aluminium ends up in pretty much the same place? Can anyone explain the logic behind that? If all single-stream recycling must be sorted, why not sort everything? It isn't because the sorting in done by hand and would be too expensive, that's for sure.
Recycling, in limited forms, is reasonable. But for the most part it is a PR game and has no real impact on anything.
Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.
Paper is one of those iffy items. If you have a source of clean paper and can sort out coated papers from uncoated (magazines from newspapers, for example) recycling it makes sense and the pulp from processing uncoated paper can be used in a large variety of materials. Unfortunately, getting coated paper into the mix changes things enough that it can only be used in a few applications. So we are back to a very complicated sorting scheme if it is post-consumer. Another problem with post-consumer is "dirty" paper. Food waste mixed in or other contaminates again seriously limits the utility of recycled materials, so much so that it is almost always just dumped.
So anyone talking about post-consumer paper recycing is almost always dealing with clean products like newspapers that can be sorted or office materials that often do not need to be. They aren't talking about taking a mix of papers from curbside recycling efforts because the costs to process that are large and the markets for the output very restricted.
Metals, especially aluminum, have been profitable for quite a while. So much so that there are machines that can sort out the metal containers - by type - quickly. Glass containers can be cleaned and sorted but the value is far less there because of different types of glass being mixed in and the general impracticality of sorting it.
So what happens to curbside recycling materials? I seriously doubt anyone is hand-sorting and dealing with contamination issues like neck rings. A sorting machine to pick out the metal bits is easy and should be a part of any recycling effort. Glass is probably a big question mark. Paper? Almost certainly it is dumped.
When people had to sort their own stuff it gave the impression of it being more valuable, but the contamination issues were still there preventing most of the stuff from being used.
While Penn and Teller's presentation on this may be a bit dated, from everything I see they are still mostly right. It is a feel-good program for both people recycling and for municipalities. The limited amount of materials that are recovered from the recycling stream do earn enough to make it almost - but not quite - worth doing. But the PR value is priceless.
The problem is that 99% of the world doesn't need and doesn't want something that requires administration. A computer needs an administrator - I don't care whether it is Linux, Windows or OS X. An administrator is required to install software (correctly and only that which should be there) and to fix problems that crop up.
What the world really wants is an appliance that lets them use the Internet. Email, buying stuff, banking, searching for porn, whatever. Things that can easily be corrupted and taken over by malicious software should the user (uninformed, unknowing, etc.) can install thinking they are getting something nice. Like Weather Bug.
What the iPad presents is an appliance that you cannot install Weather Bug on which then reports back on every web site you connect to. And you cannot install some trojan that will help someone steal your money. You also can't install some botnet rootkit which then uses your computer to send spam and make money for some Russian mob folks. Now Apple may be letting some stuff through that they should not be - but it is all fixable.
It is not fixable with Linux, Windows or OS X. An administrator is required. With proper administration there is no virus problem with Windows and no problems with dependencies on Linux.
Today if you are a white male anyone can pretty much say whatever they want about you without it being considered actionable. There is libel and slander, but it is difficult to prove actual malice. Without that it is going to be a tough fight in court to get anywhere with libel or slander.
However, if you are in what is considered to be a protected group, such as women, African-Americans or other groups like this, it can easily be considered a violation of federal law to post comments which are derogatory without even getting into libel or slander. This is a side effect of "hate speech" laws that have come about.
Of course we are all familiar with the idea that if a member of a protected class is murdered and the State does not convict anyone the accused can be tried again (and again and again until convicted) under federal civil rights laws. The idea of double jeopardy has fallen by the wayside when it comes to protected groups.
I would say a web site that charges a fee to remove comments from a forum about a protected group is just asking for trouble on a federal level. Sooner or later they are going to run into someone that gets the attention of a big-name bigmouth like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson Sr. I wouldn't think you would have to go very far to find someone like Barney Franks that could exert some influence on behalf of a gay person being charged a fee to remove some anti-gay comment.
For "unsupervised" forums there may be some cover, but I would imagine it is just a matter of time before this is noticed. Sure, a Slashdot comment may be modded down. But if a unmoderated forum allows comments to stick around and be visible it better be a white male only forum because anything else can get you into serious trouble.
We all have to watch out for the civil rights of protected groups or else they will suffer grevious harm. Right?
I get it, I really do. So bear with me for a moment...
What I want is really pretty simple. First off, with the current unemployment situation it is terribly unfair that some people have jobs and others do not. Especially considering that most of the people without jobs today (as much as 20% of the US population, even higher elsewhere) are never going to get a job. Ever. So the government needs to be in charge - completely - of providing income for people that aren't working. Calling the money "unemployment insurance" is a joke. Call it the dole. Or government support. Whatever. It doesn't matter what it is called but the government needs to recognize that there are more people than jobs and these people need to eat. So working becomes optional. If you don't want to work, there are 10 people that are overqualified for your job that would work for half of what you are making. So nobody needs to work ever again.
Obviously food, rent, clothes and other necessities have to be affordable to the people on the dole. So we need government price controls to insure that people aren't gouged and that the dole covers everything they need. Health care just needs to be something that happens. You shouldn't have to register because that would be a huge problem for immigrants and tourists who can't really "register".
A side effect of this is that you get some really strange lobbying going on. Let's say you have a Ferrari dealership and you sell a couple of cars a month. Wouldn't it be nice if driving a Ferrari was included as a "basic necessity" so people on the dole could buy Ferraris? Then you wouldn't be selling one a month but more like 20 a day. Business would be booming and you might even be able to hire more people.
The result is just about everyone in any sort of business is then going to want to have their products and services declared as a basic necessity so that people on the dole can either buy them or the government just pays for it anyway. The end result of this is that pretty much everyone in any sort of business is working for the government directly or indirectly. From the Ferrari dealer to the company that makes generic (thin) toilet paper. Probably the thicker, more absorbent stuff is declared as a luxury and eliminated by the government.
I guess at that point it doesn't make any difference if I pirate a movie or if I go to the store and buy it - because everything is pretty much owned, priced, paid for and owned by the government. So there is no need for anything like "copyright" any longer and no worries about people stealing stuff - it all belongs to the people anyway.
This system has been tried and it doesn't work. Not just doesn't work well, but actively collapses within a very short period of time. Read some history and look into non-religious communes. Too bad. Of course, there seems to be a never-ending supply of people trying to vote for this kind of plan. We are starting to see what happens when we get someone that almost half-believes this is possible. But doesn't really and can't actually bring himself to either admit it or tell people the truth. So we are getting some half-assed attempts at this kind of a plan without really doing it.
I guess the next plan is based around making rich people pay for it all. Tax them until they aren't quite so rich anymore and all our problems will be over. Except that plan doesn't work any better than the one above.
What it comes down to is you either pay for what you consume or you expect someone else to. Not paying is the gateway to anarchy.
My guess is what they are really worried about is a jailbroken phone having the phone-tower interface hacked and altered. What if you could break in on a conversation (channel) and just take it over? How about using 10x the maximum allowed transmit power? Both of these would be of benefit to the user and absolutely utterly violate any FCC licensing there might be. In today's FCC climate I believe the phone manufacturer and not the end user would be held responsible.
Do you think they might want to avoid millions of dollars in fines should someone figure out how to do this?
A lot of people believe that EM spectrum radiation is harmful in many different ways.
We can either fight them on every front they raise or we can agree with them that there MIGHT be such a danger. People have believed this since the introduction of electricity, so thinking that someone we are going to convince these people they are wrong just isn't going to happen. It has nothing to do with ignorance or some peculiar regligious belief - it is just a belief in something beyond current knowledge.
Besides, how the heck does anyone really know what we don't know yet? The real answer is nobody knows. It is unlikley, even incredibly unlikely, but there is no way to convince people that it couldn't be happening.
We aren't talking about WiFi routers alone. Every source of EM radiation is suspect, down to the level of detectability. If it can be detected, then it is possible that it is having some kind of unknown effect. Probable? No. But just barely possible. And it doesn't necessarily have to affect everyone, just those that are somehow sensitive.
What needs to be understood is until this is dealt with on a human (not just scientific probability) level, it is going to continue to prevent construction of EM-emitting objects. Like power transmission lines. And cell towers. And there will be complaints about every device like a WiFi router.
How would such proof be managed? I don't know. But I do know that fighting individual battles over Wifi routers, cell towers, radio stations, power lines and every other sort of EM-emitting device is pointless. The non-believing majority will lose out to the minority that believes. As Mr. Obama said just recently, we are a country of religious freedom and it would be wrong to unfairly oppress a religious minority that believes WiFi is harmful. At least without absolute proof that they are wrong.
The problem is that the wireless phone companies have built themselves into a trap. They charge for phone calls with the assumption that they are going to get the bulk of their money from that. As people move to VOIP usage, the phone calls will end and they will be left with far less revenue.
Same thing with wire line providers - as Vonage and other data-driven systems take over the idea of a "phone" will be quaint and obsolete. Of course this means you have Verizon providing service so Vonage can eliminate Verizon from the marketplace.
What a lot of people don't seem to understand is there will likely be a day of reckoning coming along. T-Mobile is paid by voice calls and charges little for data plans. If the voice calls stop and everyone has few or zero minutes they will be faced with some tough choices, as will every other carrier. They can raise prices on data plans to recover the revenue. They can scale the company back drastically to continue operation with the smaller amount of revenue. The last choice would seem to be pretty obvious - they can just fold up operations and find some new business to invest in.
I expect most of the wireless companies to either scale back drastically (no more stores, just online sales for example) or cease operation entirely. If there isn't any money in it, and there will never be any more money in it, there isn't any point in continuing. Same thing with the wire line providers. Once the revenue reaches a low enough point, I don't think they are going to be able to continue.
Of course, what nobody ever asks is what happened to people that actually needed a buggy whip after automobiles came out?
What ended the black market in liquor was the corner liquor store that sells to anyone, without question. If you have an ID that says you are 18, they can sell to you. And there is always a way to get someone else to buy for you if you aren't 18.
The only way we get out of the black market in drugs is for there to be a corner drug store without any restrictions. And end drug tests for employment. Open and legal drug consumption for all.
100 years ago there was no way to internationally distribute drugs on a large scale.
Today no matter what happens, it will be cheaper and easier to grow the marijuana in Mexico with dirt-poor farmers doing the labor. Then the material is shipped all over the planet.
All legalization would do in the US is increase consumption. The people that shouldn't have drugs and would be denied them under whatever legalization scheme there might be would then buy them from the illegal distributors for 10x the price of the legal drugs. The illegal distributors would be in business just the same and the foreign growers would still be in business.
The only way to stop illegal distribution at higher prices is open, cheap, legal distribution without any restrictions. Give drugs to seven-year-olds so they can understand what the great interest is. Give free samples on streetcorners. Make sure that nobody goes a day without some drugs in their life - better a gram than a damn. Soma in Brave New World.
Yup, that's where the drug cartels really lose money and give up. You want to live in that world?
Any regulation isn't going to stop the problem. The problem is rooted in it will always be less restrictive to get your drugs illegally. It might be cheaper, which is a plus. But the main issue is with any sort of regulation you are going to have denial - you stagger in to a drug shop and they say come back when you aren't high. The illegal distributor has no such restrictions.
Illegal distribution of alcohol stopped with draconian enforcement - the tax man wasn't getting paid so they destroyed every still they could find with explosives and anything else handy. This has been tried to some extent with drugs but still not with anywhere near the dedication of the "revenuers". This enforcement against illegal production continued long after Prohibition ended. The battle against illegal importation reached the level of nearly starting a war with Cananda - armed military vessels chasing down civilians smuggling booze.
Complete, unrestricted legalization with prices so low that importation was no longer practical would end the drug trade, but at what cost? If you could get amphetamines from a vending machine what would be the result? Because until you can, there will be people that will provide them regardless of the appropriateness of doing so. Same with heroin, marijuana, Extasy and everything else.
Today, we have a huge trade in marijuana, but there are a lot of people that simply don't use it because it is illegal. What percentage of these people would start using it if it was as legal as candy is now? And what percentage of those new users would have strongly negative reactions, such as overuse? No, the risks of total legalization are mostly unknown but enough is known to say they would be mostly bad.
Without total legalization and open distribution you aren't going to stamp out illegal distribution. It will always be cheaper to grow marijuna in Central America and Mexico than in the US. The US will never have a substantial poppy crop for opiates. So all this stuff will be coming in anyway - either for illegal distribution or both legal and illegal. And the illegal distribution will be for minors and others that are regulated out of legal distribution.
Sure, it might be possible to ramp up the DEA's efforts to that of the 1930s "revenuers". In the 1930s a bootlegger would lose all their property and might be killed and it would all be ignored. Today, CNN is standing there with a camera and there is no escaping the publicity. I don't think the current climate in the US would tolerate the level of enforcement that existed to put down illegal production of booze. We certainly haven't seen anything like it yet.
It is probably going to be like shoplifting. It happens. It happens all the time. It happens so much that it impacts everyone in the country. But there is no stopping it, no matter how hard you try. So do stores give up? No, they have guards and cameras. It reduces the frequency so only 10% of their customers steal instead of 90%. But they are never going to stop it completely. And every single person is paying more in every store because of it.
Today there are two ways content is delivered on the Internet. I has been that way for a number of years, at least since 2000 and maybe longer.
Way one is the way we are familiar with - User A connects to Server B and content is delivered. Slowly. Through whatever forest of routers and links are needed to get from A to B.
Way two is evidently a secret to a lot of people. Akami. This company has servers co-located in ISP centers all over the US and other parts of the world. User A no longer connects to Server B but instead connects to Akami caching server C which is right there at the ISP where User A's service is hosted. Content is delivered across the internal ISP network very, very quickly. Much, much faster than from a remote server.
How do you get your content on Akami caching servers? You pay. Lots and lots. But your users then get really excellent service. Isn't this what people are talking about trying to prevent from happening? The whole pay-to-play model is already here and it isn't going away.
Sorry, but we lost the idea of treating every server identically at the dawn of the Internet when it moved from University computers to commercial entities.
A corporation has nothing to do with "an entity created to sell things to consumers". A corporation is a tool to eliminate the possibility of liability to investors.
In a partnership the partners all share in liability for debts of the partnership. This also means that any fines or judgements levied against the partnership are distributed among the partners according to their interest in the partnership.
With a corporation the liability ends with the corporation. Only in very special circumstances and the shareholders be found to have liabilty for corporation debts. This means investors are essentially judgement-proof.
This pretty much dates back the 1600s with the formation of trading companies and such where it was necessary to obtain outside investment to build the large companies that were needed to trade at a practical level with India from England. What we have today is mostly unchanged from the rules that were established at that time.
Today, especially in the litigous environment we live with in the US, I can't imagine it being possible to secure investment for businesses without the shield of a corporation. Would you invest money in a partnership when it meant that you might be found to owe 1% of a billion-dollar judgement against the partnership? No? Well neither would anyone else. And that would mean that business investment would cease and we would be back to the economy the way it was in 1500 Florence.
Well, there are a couple of things wrong with that idea.
One that strikes me immediately is that Bing, unlike Google, doesn't really have any content. They have seach results that point to other providers, not Bing itself. Google points every link back to Google for tracking purposes. I don't think Bing (or any other search engine) does that.
I would also suspect that if one day www.usatoday.com says there is no such domain but www.cnn.com works fine the result would be an instant service call. By every user.
Also, you have to understand that today we have something called Akami. They cache content locally, at the ISP or very, very close to it. You want to look at some CNN content - it isn't really taken from CNN's server but from the Akami caching server inside the ISP. Akami's service costs plenty, so even a high-traffic blog isn't going to have the money to pay for that service. So their stuff is slower than CNN's.
So the idea of paying for speed is here already and has been for 10 years or so.
One of the problems with folks in the computer software business today is that they are generally young and haven't had much experience with what has gone on before. Often, even when there is an opportunity to gather information about older systems, they don't think it is relevent.
Well, here I would say it is extremely relevent to understand some of the performance tricks utilized by VM/370 and VM/SP in the 1970s and 1980s. VM/370 is pretty much the foundation of today's IBM virtualization offerings. In the 1960s the foundation of VM/370 was created at Cambridge University (MA, USA, not UK) and called CP/67.
The key bit of information here is that for interactive users running CMS a significant optimization was put in place of sharing the bulk of the operating system pages. This was done by dividing the operating system into two parts, shared and non-shared and by design avoiding writes to the shared portion. If a page was written to a local copy was made and that page was no longer shared.
This was extremely practical for VM/370 and later systems because all interactive users were using pretty much the same operating system - CMS. It was not unusual to have anywhere from 100 to 4000 interactive users on such systems so sharing these pages meant for huge gains in memory utilization.
It seems to me that a reasonable implementation of this for virtualization today would be extremely powerful in that a bulk of virtualized machines are going to be running the same OS. Today most kernel pages are read-only so sharing them across multiple virtual machines would make incredible sense. So instead of booting an OS "natively" you would instead load a shared system where the shared (read only) pages would be loaded along with an initial copy of writable non-shared memory from a snapshot taken at some point during initialization of the OS.
This would seem to be able to be done easily for Linux even to the extent of having it assist with taking a snapshot during initialization. Doing this with Windows should also be possible as well. This would greatly reduce the memory footprint of adding another virtual machine also using a shared operating system. The memory then used by a new virtual machine would only be the non-shared pages. True, the bulk of the RAM of a virtual machine might be occupied by such non-shared pages but the working set of a virtual machine is likely to be composed of a significant number of OS pages - perhaps 25% or more. Reducing memory requirements by 25% would be a significant performance gain and increase in available physical memory.
"blabbing about death panels" isn't exactly all that far-fetched. You seem to think that the idea of a bunch of doctors sitting down and deciding that a few people would be better off dead is some kind of absurd nonsense.
In fact, what people are a little concerned about is the progression of things in the US mirroring that which happened in Holland. Pretty much they moved in less than 30 years from assisted suicide being illegal and doctors rarely assisting patients that requested assistance with ending their lives to doctors taking an active role in what is now called "termination of the patient without explicit request".
Basically, thousands of people every year have matters decided for them by a doctor and one or more colleagues. And often this is decided on the basis of chronic illnesses or mental illness affecting the "quality of life" of the patient.
The progression took less than 30 years to move from being an illegal practice to being fully sanctioned by the state and now being the cause in over 20% of all deaths in the Netherlands.
How long do you think it would take in the US, once it got started?
What is clearly needed here is insurance against this type of loss. Then nobody will be a victim anymore... well, as long as they have insurance.
The problem is that we started out giving hammers to 6 year-old boys without any instruction. This was the DOS command line in 1982. The result was predictable and painful for some but for the most part it is possible to use a PC now, 25 years later. But we still have huge volumes of phishing and botnet emails because people do fall for this stuff.
With Android phones we have more like a situation where we have given hydraulicly powered hammers to 6 year-old boys and are suprised when the neighbor's car (and dog) have been "hammered". The actual damage is much worse, the potential damage is virtually unlimited and some technical people are standing around saying how nice these huge hydraulic hammers are and how capable they are of smashing anything. All without any thought as to the consequences of handing these powerful tools to 6 year-old boys without any understanding of the tools they are using.
Yes, I am equating the general public's familiarity with technology with the common sense of a six year-old boy. Absolutely. And I may be overestimating somewhat.
Don't blame the victim only goes so far. We need to blame the victim's lack of education and common sense and we also should think before handing out powerful tools to people that cannot make use of the without damaging the world.
The problem that you seem to have missed is that while you might be able to do this today, you don't speak Hindi. Or Chinese. Or Sswahili. Or have a huge army of subjugated workers that are happy to work for 10x what they might get doing other stuff. In other words, trying to do this kind of thing in a first-world Western environment makes no sense at all.
If geography makes no difference and teams can work together in virtual space, then why not push this down to the absolute lowest wage place on Earth?
Today, the advantage Western workers have is they are available in the same time zone as their co-workers and clients and they speak the same language. Once this is removed, there will be no need for anyone to work in a technical capacity in the high-wage West and business owners will be able to reap the rewards of using the lowest paid worker available for each job that can be done through the Internet. And as much work as possible will be shifted to off-site "virtual" workers.
What this means for people in the West is you better hope there is a really great social safety net that will let you sit on the couch and not work - because there will be no jobs for high-wage Western workers.
Unless you can think of some reason for people to pay more for a physical presence rather than a virtual worker. Promoting virtual remote workers is a sure way to the couch and unemployment.
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Why would you assume that people using a "Lexxmark" toner cartridge that is half the price would not sue Lexmark if their printer subsequently failed? I know plenty of people that would believe the printer was obviously defective if it failed to properly accept and use whatever toner was put in it.
After all, if your expensive replacable-ink-cartridge pen fails to operate it must be defective, no matter what sort of ink cartridge is used, right? The fact that the printer might be a little bit more complicated and have different tolerences would never occur to most people. It certainly would not occur to most attorneys.
You see, there is almost zero downside to producing toner cartridges that will screw up printers. The printer manufacturer is going to be the one taking the hit. And these things are generally sold through layers of distributors and resellers so that the actual manufacturer is all but untracable. Making excellent toner cartridges that just happen to be cheaper than the OEM part is equally a thankless job. There is no point to going the extra mile over there in China or whereever, so you might as well make a crap product that people can do nothing about.
Some toner refill kits are OK, but if you have ever spilled toner anywhere you will understand why these are something that some people avoid. There are some cartridge refillers that do an OK job, but having seen some of their operations you need to understand what you are getting into and the potential down side.
You are assuming the "current directory" is set to the location where an associated file is located. That isn't true. When an application is invoked by an association the current directory is usually the location of the program executable itself, which is passed the fully qualified name of the file that was clicked and caused the invocation of the program.
So placing a DLL in the same folder as the associated file doesn't do anything. You have to put it in the same folder as the executable, which is (as of Vista and Windows 7) write-protected.
With XP it is a lot easier because the Program Files directory structure is not protected and it was common to have applications writing stuff there, so you couldn't protect it. As of Vista the rules changed and you can't write there anymore.
Yes, I understand the exploit. But again, if you have people dropping files willy-nilly into the file system you are going to have troubles. Same goes for Linux - if you install something that has setuser root it is pretty much an exploit for the entire system. Why would anyone do this? Because the installer tells them it is necessary and just does it. Same thing happens with Windows. If you aren't controlling what is installed, you aren't in control. Period.
That artists that created the box art were often working several months in advance of the game being finalized. That pretty much means that they had the conceptual drawings by someone that were given to the developer and computer artists rather than an actual game.
So they had no idea what the game might look like. The programming wasn't done yet.
As someone that worked on a couple of 2600 games that were released under the Parker Brothers label, I can assure you that the boxes were done long before the code was completed. And the box production people were simply not interested in looking at what had been completed. We were in different parts of the country.
Incredible as it might seem, this is how software publishing works. The manual get done before the code is done. The artwork is conceptual because it has a significantly longer lead time. Marketing materials are approved and printed weeks before the gold master CD is burned. Everyone has a schedule and deadlines and stuff has to be done pretty much the way it was planned or it looks like something that was put together by a couple of high school kids after school.
Sure, it would be nice if everything could wait for the highly flexible and iterative development process to complete before committing to graphics for advertising. Except you would miss the big presentation at the trade show and nothing would get sold to the distributors, meaning nothing gets sold to the retailers. So everyone gets to go home and the furniture gets auctioned off along with the computers, phones and pretty posters on the walls. Yup, been there and done that as well for some people that didn't understand how the process works.
Municipalities borrow money through bond issues, not by getting money from a bank. These have tax-free interest and are pretty popular because most municipalities have AAA rated bonds.
Pensions, for example, are restricted to only investing in AAA rated bonds. A lot of not-for-profit money is also invested there along with foundations and just about any other organization with cash on hand and needing someplace to put it.
Most of the problem with the subprime crisis is due (still) to the improper rating of subprime mortgage bonds as AAA when they where back by only the imagination of people. This is still a problem and continuing on today. There will continue to be a lot of pension failures and such until the last of these bonds are finally purged. It could take 10 years - I don't know what the term on these bonds might be.
In the US public transportation (buses, light rail, etc.) is pretty much dead. Ridership is way, way down.
I see the final nail in the coffin being the Chicago subway motorman that sues to be allowed to operate a subway train while using meth. These days there is probably a 50-50 chance of winning.
The problem with plastic is that once you melt two different types together the original strength is gone. You can't make water bottles out of a LDPE and PET mix, but if you can keep the PET separated you can make nice new water bottles out of it.
About all you can make out of a mix of plastics are things like low-grade insulation which there isn't much of a call for. Or, you can burn it as a fuel but it is a rather dirty burn. I believe you can use a plastic mix to make certain types of industrial containers - the sort where the plastic in a half an inch thick. Low strength but by building up enough volume you can use it as a container. There isn't much of a demand for that sort of product either.
The key is in some areas they have relatively highly paid union workers sorting the plastics. The money comes from various subsidies so spending $100 on a ton of trash is worth it - because the money is for putting on a good show. The fact that most of it is going to be dumped anyway is meaningless because the company is being paid to show how good recycling is. They have tours of these facilities but they generally don't show you the warehouse full of stuff waiting to be sold off - which gets dumped into a landfill when there is no buyer after long enough time has elapsed.
The problem is the newspaper reporter takes the tour and writes about the facility and that is what people see. The reality never enters into the picture.
The problem on the plastic side is when you melt two different sorts of plastics together you end up with a low grade sort of plastic that isn't suitable for much of anything. Contrast this with shredding and melting LDPE gets you ... LDPE to reuse. Same with HDPE. And PET - mostly water and soda bottles.
So plastics have to be sorted or they aren't usable. Even a single neck ring left over from the cap on a water bottle is enough to cause an entire batch of recycled plastic to be worthless.
Glass isn't quite as bad because you can dilute, dilute, dilute until you have nearly clear glass and then add dyes to even it all out. You can't get clear glass out of a mix, but there are no structural or strength problems like there are with plastics.
Metals are easy - they will naturally separate by weight and density.
The problem with the "so what if 90% ends up in a landfill" argument is you are accepting a bunch of things that are simply wrong:
One of the biggest problems is still that recycling is subsidised and funded in odd ways that make sure cities implement some sort of recycling program even if everything ends up in a landfill no matter what. Because of this it is impossible for the average citizen to understand they are being used as suckers and advertising for companies that "pretend" to assist municipalities with recycling.
Putting a "green face" on waste disposal is pointless unless there is something real there. Unfortunately, it is now practical for municipalities to contract out recycling efforts, tell their citizens they are doing a good job recycling and end up just paying money for services that are never performed. Or are performed in ways that are actually detremental to any sort of real recycling effort.
Sure, anyone can make money by running all the trash through a big machine that picks out aluminium cans. So why are they running two different trucks around and only running the "recycling" stuff through the machine? Especially when all the non-aluminium ends up in pretty much the same place? Can anyone explain the logic behind that? If all single-stream recycling must be sorted, why not sort everything? It isn't because the sorting in done by hand and would be too expensive, that's for sure.
Recycling, in limited forms, is reasonable. But for the most part it is a PR game and has no real impact on anything.
Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.
Paper is one of those iffy items. If you have a source of clean paper and can sort out coated papers from uncoated (magazines from newspapers, for example) recycling it makes sense and the pulp from processing uncoated paper can be used in a large variety of materials. Unfortunately, getting coated paper into the mix changes things enough that it can only be used in a few applications. So we are back to a very complicated sorting scheme if it is post-consumer. Another problem with post-consumer is "dirty" paper. Food waste mixed in or other contaminates again seriously limits the utility of recycled materials, so much so that it is almost always just dumped.
So anyone talking about post-consumer paper recycing is almost always dealing with clean products like newspapers that can be sorted or office materials that often do not need to be. They aren't talking about taking a mix of papers from curbside recycling efforts because the costs to process that are large and the markets for the output very restricted.
Metals, especially aluminum, have been profitable for quite a while. So much so that there are machines that can sort out the metal containers - by type - quickly. Glass containers can be cleaned and sorted but the value is far less there because of different types of glass being mixed in and the general impracticality of sorting it.
So what happens to curbside recycling materials? I seriously doubt anyone is hand-sorting and dealing with contamination issues like neck rings. A sorting machine to pick out the metal bits is easy and should be a part of any recycling effort. Glass is probably a big question mark. Paper? Almost certainly it is dumped.
When people had to sort their own stuff it gave the impression of it being more valuable, but the contamination issues were still there preventing most of the stuff from being used.
While Penn and Teller's presentation on this may be a bit dated, from everything I see they are still mostly right. It is a feel-good program for both people recycling and for municipalities. The limited amount of materials that are recovered from the recycling stream do earn enough to make it almost - but not quite - worth doing. But the PR value is priceless.
Is the iPad. Too bad it came a long so late.
The problem is that 99% of the world doesn't need and doesn't want something that requires administration. A computer needs an administrator - I don't care whether it is Linux, Windows or OS X. An administrator is required to install software (correctly and only that which should be there) and to fix problems that crop up.
What the world really wants is an appliance that lets them use the Internet. Email, buying stuff, banking, searching for porn, whatever. Things that can easily be corrupted and taken over by malicious software should the user (uninformed, unknowing, etc.) can install thinking they are getting something nice. Like Weather Bug.
What the iPad presents is an appliance that you cannot install Weather Bug on which then reports back on every web site you connect to. And you cannot install some trojan that will help someone steal your money. You also can't install some botnet rootkit which then uses your computer to send spam and make money for some Russian mob folks. Now Apple may be letting some stuff through that they should not be - but it is all fixable.
It is not fixable with Linux, Windows or OS X. An administrator is required. With proper administration there is no virus problem with Windows and no problems with dependencies on Linux.
Today if you are a white male anyone can pretty much say whatever they want about you without it being considered actionable. There is libel and slander, but it is difficult to prove actual malice. Without that it is going to be a tough fight in court to get anywhere with libel or slander.
However, if you are in what is considered to be a protected group, such as women, African-Americans or other groups like this, it can easily be considered a violation of federal law to post comments which are derogatory without even getting into libel or slander. This is a side effect of "hate speech" laws that have come about.
Of course we are all familiar with the idea that if a member of a protected class is murdered and the State does not convict anyone the accused can be tried again (and again and again until convicted) under federal civil rights laws. The idea of double jeopardy has fallen by the wayside when it comes to protected groups.
I would say a web site that charges a fee to remove comments from a forum about a protected group is just asking for trouble on a federal level. Sooner or later they are going to run into someone that gets the attention of a big-name bigmouth like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson Sr. I wouldn't think you would have to go very far to find someone like Barney Franks that could exert some influence on behalf of a gay person being charged a fee to remove some anti-gay comment.
For "unsupervised" forums there may be some cover, but I would imagine it is just a matter of time before this is noticed. Sure, a Slashdot comment may be modded down. But if a unmoderated forum allows comments to stick around and be visible it better be a white male only forum because anything else can get you into serious trouble.
We all have to watch out for the civil rights of protected groups or else they will suffer grevious harm. Right?
I get it, I really do. So bear with me for a moment...
What I want is really pretty simple. First off, with the current unemployment situation it is terribly unfair that some people have jobs and others do not. Especially considering that most of the people without jobs today (as much as 20% of the US population, even higher elsewhere) are never going to get a job. Ever. So the government needs to be in charge - completely - of providing income for people that aren't working. Calling the money "unemployment insurance" is a joke. Call it the dole. Or government support. Whatever. It doesn't matter what it is called but the government needs to recognize that there are more people than jobs and these people need to eat. So working becomes optional. If you don't want to work, there are 10 people that are overqualified for your job that would work for half of what you are making. So nobody needs to work ever again.
Obviously food, rent, clothes and other necessities have to be affordable to the people on the dole. So we need government price controls to insure that people aren't gouged and that the dole covers everything they need. Health care just needs to be something that happens. You shouldn't have to register because that would be a huge problem for immigrants and tourists who can't really "register".
A side effect of this is that you get some really strange lobbying going on. Let's say you have a Ferrari dealership and you sell a couple of cars a month. Wouldn't it be nice if driving a Ferrari was included as a "basic necessity" so people on the dole could buy Ferraris? Then you wouldn't be selling one a month but more like 20 a day. Business would be booming and you might even be able to hire more people.
The result is just about everyone in any sort of business is then going to want to have their products and services declared as a basic necessity so that people on the dole can either buy them or the government just pays for it anyway. The end result of this is that pretty much everyone in any sort of business is working for the government directly or indirectly. From the Ferrari dealer to the company that makes generic (thin) toilet paper. Probably the thicker, more absorbent stuff is declared as a luxury and eliminated by the government.
I guess at that point it doesn't make any difference if I pirate a movie or if I go to the store and buy it - because everything is pretty much owned, priced, paid for and owned by the government. So there is no need for anything like "copyright" any longer and no worries about people stealing stuff - it all belongs to the people anyway.
This system has been tried and it doesn't work. Not just doesn't work well, but actively collapses within a very short period of time. Read some history and look into non-religious communes. Too bad. Of course, there seems to be a never-ending supply of people trying to vote for this kind of plan. We are starting to see what happens when we get someone that almost half-believes this is possible. But doesn't really and can't actually bring himself to either admit it or tell people the truth. So we are getting some half-assed attempts at this kind of a plan without really doing it.
I guess the next plan is based around making rich people pay for it all. Tax them until they aren't quite so rich anymore and all our problems will be over. Except that plan doesn't work any better than the one above.
What it comes down to is you either pay for what you consume or you expect someone else to. Not paying is the gateway to anarchy.
My guess is what they are really worried about is a jailbroken phone having the phone-tower interface hacked and altered. What if you could break in on a conversation (channel) and just take it over? How about using 10x the maximum allowed transmit power? Both of these would be of benefit to the user and absolutely utterly violate any FCC licensing there might be. In today's FCC climate I believe the phone manufacturer and not the end user would be held responsible.
Do you think they might want to avoid millions of dollars in fines should someone figure out how to do this?
A lot of people believe that EM spectrum radiation is harmful in many different ways.
We can either fight them on every front they raise or we can agree with them that there MIGHT be such a danger. People have believed this since the introduction of electricity, so thinking that someone we are going to convince these people they are wrong just isn't going to happen. It has nothing to do with ignorance or some peculiar regligious belief - it is just a belief in something beyond current knowledge.
Besides, how the heck does anyone really know what we don't know yet? The real answer is nobody knows. It is unlikley, even incredibly unlikely, but there is no way to convince people that it couldn't be happening.
We aren't talking about WiFi routers alone. Every source of EM radiation is suspect, down to the level of detectability. If it can be detected, then it is possible that it is having some kind of unknown effect. Probable? No. But just barely possible. And it doesn't necessarily have to affect everyone, just those that are somehow sensitive.
What needs to be understood is until this is dealt with on a human (not just scientific probability) level, it is going to continue to prevent construction of EM-emitting objects. Like power transmission lines. And cell towers. And there will be complaints about every device like a WiFi router.
How would such proof be managed? I don't know. But I do know that fighting individual battles over Wifi routers, cell towers, radio stations, power lines and every other sort of EM-emitting device is pointless. The non-believing majority will lose out to the minority that believes. As Mr. Obama said just recently, we are a country of religious freedom and it would be wrong to unfairly oppress a religious minority that believes WiFi is harmful. At least without absolute proof that they are wrong.
The problem is that the wireless phone companies have built themselves into a trap. They charge for phone calls with the assumption that they are going to get the bulk of their money from that. As people move to VOIP usage, the phone calls will end and they will be left with far less revenue.
Same thing with wire line providers - as Vonage and other data-driven systems take over the idea of a "phone" will be quaint and obsolete. Of course this means you have Verizon providing service so Vonage can eliminate Verizon from the marketplace.
What a lot of people don't seem to understand is there will likely be a day of reckoning coming along. T-Mobile is paid by voice calls and charges little for data plans. If the voice calls stop and everyone has few or zero minutes they will be faced with some tough choices, as will every other carrier. They can raise prices on data plans to recover the revenue. They can scale the company back drastically to continue operation with the smaller amount of revenue. The last choice would seem to be pretty obvious - they can just fold up operations and find some new business to invest in.
I expect most of the wireless companies to either scale back drastically (no more stores, just online sales for example) or cease operation entirely. If there isn't any money in it, and there will never be any more money in it, there isn't any point in continuing. Same thing with the wire line providers. Once the revenue reaches a low enough point, I don't think they are going to be able to continue.
Of course, what nobody ever asks is what happened to people that actually needed a buggy whip after automobiles came out?
What ended the black market in liquor was the corner liquor store that sells to anyone, without question. If you have an ID that says you are 18, they can sell to you. And there is always a way to get someone else to buy for you if you aren't 18.
The only way we get out of the black market in drugs is for there to be a corner drug store without any restrictions. And end drug tests for employment. Open and legal drug consumption for all.
100 years ago there was no way to internationally distribute drugs on a large scale.
Today no matter what happens, it will be cheaper and easier to grow the marijuana in Mexico with dirt-poor farmers doing the labor. Then the material is shipped all over the planet.
All legalization would do in the US is increase consumption. The people that shouldn't have drugs and would be denied them under whatever legalization scheme there might be would then buy them from the illegal distributors for 10x the price of the legal drugs. The illegal distributors would be in business just the same and the foreign growers would still be in business.
The only way to stop illegal distribution at higher prices is open, cheap, legal distribution without any restrictions. Give drugs to seven-year-olds so they can understand what the great interest is. Give free samples on streetcorners. Make sure that nobody goes a day without some drugs in their life - better a gram than a damn. Soma in Brave New World.
Yup, that's where the drug cartels really lose money and give up. You want to live in that world?
Any regulation isn't going to stop the problem. The problem is rooted in it will always be less restrictive to get your drugs illegally. It might be cheaper, which is a plus. But the main issue is with any sort of regulation you are going to have denial - you stagger in to a drug shop and they say come back when you aren't high. The illegal distributor has no such restrictions.
Illegal distribution of alcohol stopped with draconian enforcement - the tax man wasn't getting paid so they destroyed every still they could find with explosives and anything else handy. This has been tried to some extent with drugs but still not with anywhere near the dedication of the "revenuers". This enforcement against illegal production continued long after Prohibition ended. The battle against illegal importation reached the level of nearly starting a war with Cananda - armed military vessels chasing down civilians smuggling booze.
Complete, unrestricted legalization with prices so low that importation was no longer practical would end the drug trade, but at what cost? If you could get amphetamines from a vending machine what would be the result? Because until you can, there will be people that will provide them regardless of the appropriateness of doing so. Same with heroin, marijuana, Extasy and everything else.
Today, we have a huge trade in marijuana, but there are a lot of people that simply don't use it because it is illegal. What percentage of these people would start using it if it was as legal as candy is now? And what percentage of those new users would have strongly negative reactions, such as overuse? No, the risks of total legalization are mostly unknown but enough is known to say they would be mostly bad.
Without total legalization and open distribution you aren't going to stamp out illegal distribution. It will always be cheaper to grow marijuna in Central America and Mexico than in the US. The US will never have a substantial poppy crop for opiates. So all this stuff will be coming in anyway - either for illegal distribution or both legal and illegal. And the illegal distribution will be for minors and others that are regulated out of legal distribution.
Sure, it might be possible to ramp up the DEA's efforts to that of the 1930s "revenuers". In the 1930s a bootlegger would lose all their property and might be killed and it would all be ignored. Today, CNN is standing there with a camera and there is no escaping the publicity. I don't think the current climate in the US would tolerate the level of enforcement that existed to put down illegal production of booze. We certainly haven't seen anything like it yet.
It is probably going to be like shoplifting. It happens. It happens all the time. It happens so much that it impacts everyone in the country. But there is no stopping it, no matter how hard you try. So do stores give up? No, they have guards and cameras. It reduces the frequency so only 10% of their customers steal instead of 90%. But they are never going to stop it completely. And every single person is paying more in every store because of it.
Today there are two ways content is delivered on the Internet. I has been that way for a number of years, at least since 2000 and maybe longer.
Way one is the way we are familiar with - User A connects to Server B and content is delivered. Slowly. Through whatever forest of routers and links are needed to get from A to B.
Way two is evidently a secret to a lot of people. Akami. This company has servers co-located in ISP centers all over the US and other parts of the world. User A no longer connects to Server B but instead connects to Akami caching server C which is right there at the ISP where User A's service is hosted. Content is delivered across the internal ISP network very, very quickly. Much, much faster than from a remote server.
How do you get your content on Akami caching servers? You pay. Lots and lots. But your users then get really excellent service. Isn't this what people are talking about trying to prevent from happening? The whole pay-to-play model is already here and it isn't going away.
Sorry, but we lost the idea of treating every server identically at the dawn of the Internet when it moved from University computers to commercial entities.
A corporation has nothing to do with "an entity created to sell things to consumers". A corporation is a tool to eliminate the possibility of liability to investors.
In a partnership the partners all share in liability for debts of the partnership. This also means that any fines or judgements levied against the partnership are distributed among the partners according to their interest in the partnership.
With a corporation the liability ends with the corporation. Only in very special circumstances and the shareholders be found to have liabilty for corporation debts. This means investors are essentially judgement-proof.
This pretty much dates back the 1600s with the formation of trading companies and such where it was necessary to obtain outside investment to build the large companies that were needed to trade at a practical level with India from England. What we have today is mostly unchanged from the rules that were established at that time.
Today, especially in the litigous environment we live with in the US, I can't imagine it being possible to secure investment for businesses without the shield of a corporation. Would you invest money in a partnership when it meant that you might be found to owe 1% of a billion-dollar judgement against the partnership? No? Well neither would anyone else. And that would mean that business investment would cease and we would be back to the economy the way it was in 1500 Florence.
Well, there are a couple of things wrong with that idea.
One that strikes me immediately is that Bing, unlike Google, doesn't really have any content. They have seach results that point to other providers, not Bing itself. Google points every link back to Google for tracking purposes. I don't think Bing (or any other search engine) does that.
I would also suspect that if one day www.usatoday.com says there is no such domain but www.cnn.com works fine the result would be an instant service call. By every user.
Also, you have to understand that today we have something called Akami. They cache content locally, at the ISP or very, very close to it. You want to look at some CNN content - it isn't really taken from CNN's server but from the Akami caching server inside the ISP. Akami's service costs plenty, so even a high-traffic blog isn't going to have the money to pay for that service. So their stuff is slower than CNN's.
So the idea of paying for speed is here already and has been for 10 years or so.
One of the problems with folks in the computer software business today is that they are generally young and haven't had much experience with what has gone on before. Often, even when there is an opportunity to gather information about older systems, they don't think it is relevent.
Well, here I would say it is extremely relevent to understand some of the performance tricks utilized by VM/370 and VM/SP in the 1970s and 1980s. VM/370 is pretty much the foundation of today's IBM virtualization offerings. In the 1960s the foundation of VM/370 was created at Cambridge University (MA, USA, not UK) and called CP/67.
The key bit of information here is that for interactive users running CMS a significant optimization was put in place of sharing the bulk of the operating system pages. This was done by dividing the operating system into two parts, shared and non-shared and by design avoiding writes to the shared portion. If a page was written to a local copy was made and that page was no longer shared.
This was extremely practical for VM/370 and later systems because all interactive users were using pretty much the same operating system - CMS. It was not unusual to have anywhere from 100 to 4000 interactive users on such systems so sharing these pages meant for huge gains in memory utilization.
It seems to me that a reasonable implementation of this for virtualization today would be extremely powerful in that a bulk of virtualized machines are going to be running the same OS. Today most kernel pages are read-only so sharing them across multiple virtual machines would make incredible sense. So instead of booting an OS "natively" you would instead load a shared system where the shared (read only) pages would be loaded along with an initial copy of writable non-shared memory from a snapshot taken at some point during initialization of the OS.
This would seem to be able to be done easily for Linux even to the extent of having it assist with taking a snapshot during initialization. Doing this with Windows should also be possible as well. This would greatly reduce the memory footprint of adding another virtual machine also using a shared operating system. The memory then used by a new virtual machine would only be the non-shared pages. True, the bulk of the RAM of a virtual machine might be occupied by such non-shared pages but the working set of a virtual machine is likely to be composed of a significant number of OS pages - perhaps 25% or more. Reducing memory requirements by 25% would be a significant performance gain and increase in available physical memory.
"blabbing about death panels" isn't exactly all that far-fetched. You seem to think that the idea of a bunch of doctors sitting down and deciding that a few people would be better off dead is some kind of absurd nonsense.
In fact, what people are a little concerned about is the progression of things in the US mirroring that which happened in Holland. Pretty much they moved in less than 30 years from assisted suicide being illegal and doctors rarely assisting patients that requested assistance with ending their lives to doctors taking an active role in what is now called "termination of the patient without explicit request".
Basically, thousands of people every year have matters decided for them by a doctor and one or more colleagues. And often this is decided on the basis of chronic illnesses or mental illness affecting the "quality of life" of the patient.
The progression took less than 30 years to move from being an illegal practice to being fully sanctioned by the state and now being the cause in over 20% of all deaths in the Netherlands.
How long do you think it would take in the US, once it got started?
What is clearly needed here is insurance against this type of loss. Then nobody will be a victim anymore ... well, as long as they have insurance.
The problem is that we started out giving hammers to 6 year-old boys without any instruction. This was the DOS command line in 1982. The result was predictable and painful for some but for the most part it is possible to use a PC now, 25 years later. But we still have huge volumes of phishing and botnet emails because people do fall for this stuff.
With Android phones we have more like a situation where we have given hydraulicly powered hammers to 6 year-old boys and are suprised when the neighbor's car (and dog) have been "hammered". The actual damage is much worse, the potential damage is virtually unlimited and some technical people are standing around saying how nice these huge hydraulic hammers are and how capable they are of smashing anything. All without any thought as to the consequences of handing these powerful tools to 6 year-old boys without any understanding of the tools they are using.
Yes, I am equating the general public's familiarity with technology with the common sense of a six year-old boy. Absolutely. And I may be overestimating somewhat.
Don't blame the victim only goes so far. We need to blame the victim's lack of education and common sense and we also should think before handing out powerful tools to people that cannot make use of the without damaging the world.
The problem that you seem to have missed is that while you might be able to do this today, you don't speak Hindi. Or Chinese. Or Sswahili. Or have a huge army of subjugated workers that are happy to work for 10x what they might get doing other stuff. In other words, trying to do this kind of thing in a first-world Western environment makes no sense at all.
If geography makes no difference and teams can work together in virtual space, then why not push this down to the absolute lowest wage place on Earth?
Today, the advantage Western workers have is they are available in the same time zone as their co-workers and clients and they speak the same language. Once this is removed, there will be no need for anyone to work in a technical capacity in the high-wage West and business owners will be able to reap the rewards of using the lowest paid worker available for each job that can be done through the Internet. And as much work as possible will be shifted to off-site "virtual" workers.
What this means for people in the West is you better hope there is a really great social safety net that will let you sit on the couch and not work - because there will be no jobs for high-wage Western workers.
Unless you can think of some reason for people to pay more for a physical presence rather than a virtual worker. Promoting virtual remote workers is a sure way to the couch and unemployment.