It's not that much of an issue as they introduce new and distinct worlds to scale with the number of players. Each world has a soft cap of simultaneous players. A really big aspect of the success of an online game is the success of its social structure. People get addicted sometimes for no other reason than that they don't want to say goodbye to their friends.
So ultimately the social structure isn't hurt by a game having 80,000,000 players versus 25,000.
From my experience, it's important to *have* a degree, then beyond that, it's not very important except for a few narrow jobs.
The "quality" of your degree does have some bearing on specific jobs. For example, if you want to be a consultant at a major consulting firm, they're more interested in the degree than in the skill. That's how they justify absurd fees for "business strategy planning" and such.
Also, if you're looking for a job in upper management, some companies will glass-ceiling you if you don't have an impressive sounding degree. You can become a team leader, probably a manager, but if you want to become a director or CIO, those companies will hire externally to get the degree that sounds good (this mostly applies to publicly traded companies who have weak stocks and are looking for it to provide a boost). Of course this can be avoided even in such a company if you really know what you're doing. If you're incredibly talented, very few companies would avoid absorbing your skills to the highest level possible just because of outward appearances. Chances are you're not such a person though as those people are 1 in 1000.
I drive 3 hours a day. 1.5 in, 1.5 back. It would take me 30 minutes to reach the nearest public transit system outside of rush hour, which I'd have to do in my own car. During rush hour, it's at least an hour.
Presuming a ~15 minute wait for the transit to leave the station (gotta leave early in case I run into traffic on the way, and it has a chance of delay on its own), then accounting for stops in between, and that the transit doesn't take the most direct route to where I'm going, I can easily see another 15 minutes added to the drive.
When I arrive at my destination, I'm going to need a second car in that location to get me the last 10 miles to work, and give up 15-20 minutes for that.
Yes, I get to work / play games / whatever else during my mass transit time, but I give up as much time or more accomodating the mass transit as it gives me back.
Mass transit works if you start in a city and end in a city, that's it. Believe me, I *really* wish it worked: 3 hours a day is a lot of time to give up: functionally my shortest possible work week is 55 hours. And the drive is more tiring than my actual job, it requires a lot more persistent concentration, while at my desk, I can sit back and relax once in a while, maybe go get a cup of decaff.
Mailing lists exist for several reasons that online forums don't directly address (in no particular order).
* Messages come to you rather than you having to go to them (server push rather than client get, and depending on the list, this can mean basically real-time receipt). * Easy offline access to the messages * Not subject to network restrictions in almost any company * Can be delivered directly to portable devices (eg, Blackberry) * Can be alerted based on criteria (alert me whenever I see Critical Flaw in a Microsoft-based message on bugtraq, as an example) * Can automatically sort based on criteria (message rules) * Ability to maintain your own archive of messages you deem important * Ability to easily forward messages to others who are not on the list * Fewer complete chowder-heads exist on mailing lists as they're a bit more techy in general (how much work did Slashdot put into their moderation system to battle trolls?)
All of this exists with out any need for additional technology. Yes, all of it could be accomodated in one way or another with new features on forums etc, but the fact is, the purposes that mailing lists serve is wholly served by them currently.
There's no reason to reinvent the wheel with a device 10x as complex that rolls 2% better.
This is just a list of contest entrants. They haven't judged these games yet, so as far as you or I am concerned, these things are relatively trivial at this point.
Actually, it's the government who gets to control their own loan payback. In this area (like many other areas) they don't really play by the same rules as citizens. Although the government has to pay off the interest every year like us, when they don't have the money to do so, they borrow it. It's sortof a financial shell game.
Gov -> Debtor A "We owe you 4 billion in interest." Gov -> Debtor B "We owe you 4 billion in interest." Gov -> Debtor A "Can we borrow 4 billion?" Gov -> Debtor B "Here's your 4 billion in interest, can we borrow 4 billion?" Gov -> Debtor A "Here's your 4 billion in interest."
Actually it's similar to how some people handle tight times on their mortgage. You can borrow against the equity in your mortgage, and use that to continue your payments. It'll only work for so long though.
Re: living within my means, one of the circumstances I said makes sense to take out a loan is when there is a need which you can otherwise not fulfill. The decision between shelter vs food qualifies. However, unless your street has suddenly turned into the Serengheti, it's very unlikely that a car loan for a new SUV qualifies.
re: balanced budget, whether or not the budget was actually balanced from every angle, we were certainly at least headed in that direction. Bush set that on fire and is engaged in a full sprint the other direction.
re: Social Security, I've seen both sides since I've been self employed in the past, and have had to pay both sides worth of taxes. That gets costly for sure, but Social Security isn't the only tax area where your employer is matching your tax payments. A general rule of thumb is that every dollar you spend on taxes, your employer spends on a matching tax. Yes, Social Security is in bad shape, and the system is badly in need of reform. This is also a good suggestion on what we could have done with our money if there wasn't such a huge national debt.
And re: prescription drugs. This is not a subject I've gotten into much depth on for a couple of reasons. One is: the only prescription I've purchased in the last several years is my wife's birth control, and one pack of Prednazone when she first discovered her allergy to poison ivy, which was met 100% by her insurance (she's a teacher).
I *can* say this though, I've been working in and around pharmaceuticals since I got out of high school (when I wasn't directly employed by a pharmaceutical, I was employed by a company who does work for pharmaceuticals).
It costs a lot more money to bring a drug to the market in the U.S. than in other countries. This is because the U.S. FDA has extremely high standards, and extremely high paperwork requirements. These things help to ensure (or rather severely decrease the chances) that drugs with unknown or unacceptable side effects ever make it to market. On average, it can take 10 years to get a drug to market, and literally millions of man hours, bringing cost-to-market sometimes into the billions. And that's just for drugs which make it to market, for every drug that does, there are dozens that failed in the product pipeline somewhere (sometimes early on, sometimes very late as some adverse effects will only appear during clinical trials).
Along with the costs to bring a drug to market come the costs of insurance by a pharmaceutical company. Wyeth recently had the first of ~45,000 lawsuits brought against them for the unknown effects of one of their drugs, Fen-Phen (a diet drug that was discovered to cause heart problems many years later). The ruling was for an absurd amount, $1 billion. For a single lawsuit. Where does that money come from? You can bet it's not a magical neverending money pot sitting in their Collegeville, PA headquarters. It comes from prescription drugs, or insurance against this sort of thing.
Insurance charged for drugs sold in the U.S. is higher than in other countries for the simple reason that in other countries, lawsuits don't reach $1 billion in sin
The increase in the national debt during Clinton's administration is due to interest.
A balanced budget refers only to the government not spending more money than it gets in taxes -- which is the elimination of defecit. That is the first step in addressing the national debt, the second step is to start paying down the debt. At the rate the debt is climbing just due to interest, we should be very interested in not contributing to it faster.
In the last year of Clinton's administration, he'd gotten the budget balanced, and actually paid into the debt, almost as much as the interest for that year. Bush gets in office one year, and WHAM Clinton's work is undone. 133 billion dollars in 2001 worth of tax payer money was lost. Sure, we got a big tax cut, but it's really only a forced loan to us taxpayers since any tax cut that happens while the debt increases will ultimately have to be repaid.
It's representative of classic American thinking, and it's why so many people drown in credit card debt. Borrowed money is treated like free money, bonus income. No one pays any heed to the idea that Hey, we're gonna have to pay this back again. Borrowing money is in almost all cases the opposite of good financial planning. Rather than taking money you've saved and investing it, you're taking someone elses money as an investment for them.
There are only a few times when it makes sense to borrow money, and that is when you need something right now that you cannot afford right now. Car loans don't qualify unless you cannot afford a used car -- I buy all my cars used at ~1/4 new-sticker price, pay cash, and they each last 4-5 years. Credit cards don't qualify unless you're habitually paying them off completely every month (and thus avoiding interest on the money). Home loans can qualify only because having a house now with a 30 year mortgage, versus renting for 25 years to save up for a house makes sense in that you're purchasing equity in your house instead of giving your money to your landlord. School loans make sense because the schooling increases your capacity to earn money, and thus it is a positive investment (as long as you get a marketable degree).
I'm one of those people who has credit cards that I pay off completely each month, make double payments on my mortgage, and otherwise spend cash on everything. My and my wife's school bills were paid off completely the first year we were out of college. I've never had a car loan, and aside from my credit cards, the only loans I have ever actually had are my school and mortgage.
Friends who are in similar circumstances as me have $10-20,000 in credit card debt, $20-40,000 in car loans, and $20-30,000 in school loans. They're $50-90,000 in debt, and making minimum payments each month. A big chunk of their income each month goes to interest all around, and they grumble that I seem to have more money to spend than they do despite similar earnings. That's fine though, it's how they choose to live their life, and I make different decisions.
However, when it comes to national debt, I don't have any real say in the matter aside from my Nov 2 ballot. My tax money is being consumed by interst, and it is not my option to pay this down. Think how much good could have been done with the billions of dollars wasted on interest each year.
Everyone (it seems) wants national healthcare, but gripe when taxes go up. This money has to come from somewhere. According to the CIA, estimated US population in July 2004 was 293,027,571. Every man, woman, and child saw $450 go into the debt this past year. I don't know about you, but $450 is a lot more than I'd typically spend a year on medical things. I know that I'm in good health, and that some pe
"Intentionally" implies insight into administration motivation which no one here on Slashdot is likely to possess.
But even if the guy with the hose wasn't intending to water your front door, doesn't mean he didn't do it.
I think the point is, it's possible for Bush to have squashed jobs, then later through inaction on his part, jobs come back. Some will say it's brilliant strategy by Bush to do nothing, others will say it's sheer laziness by Bush. In the end, it doesn't really matter, if being an inactive president is good for the country, then an inactive president is a good president.
That said, Bush sucks, and trashed our economy as well as the balanced budget.
and I likewise have no legal obligation to purchase anything. I guess I didn't specify what would happen when this point is reached, and that's to simply buy nothing instead of DRM encumbered albums. I'll either hold on to that same money and put it in the bank, or I'll purchase alternate music that's not encumbered.
IMO, this depends on acceptance rate of the new format. I won't buy a copy protected CD, so any artists whose title track is the 'bonus' I won't buy (unless I was interested in a different track).
No kidding... as long as there's an option to purchase a CD sans-bonus-track (or whatever it is), I'll take it if it has no freedom sacrificing protections on it.
I was thinking Longhorn looked pretty nice, and I'm one of those Slashdotters that spends a fair amount of time in Windows (I dual boot, honest!). I'm *not* going to give up freedoms I currently have now though, which means buying only non-encumbered software, including my OS.
I'll buy the non-encumbered CD's, and pirate the bonus tracks. Unless the non-encumbered discs are cheaper, then I when I pay the same price as the next guy, I want the same content he gets.
It's BS, and I won't have it.
Hopefully soon we'll see recording companies springing up whose philosophy is to allow users access to their fair use rights. Or recording companies who make their money from live concerts or the like, rather than from album sales. Give the albums away for free, and I guarantee I'm more likely to show up at a concert.
If we are extracting energy from the atmosphere, this means that the atmosphere has less energy stored in it.
As my poorly trained mind sees it, this can come in one of two forms. Either the ambient temperature of the earth decreases, and we see global cooling (less thermal energy), or the winds as a whole blow less hard (less kinetic energy). Most likely it would be a combination of both, for the sake of my argument I'll assume it's 50/50.
Let's say the storage of electricity for use on still days is perfected, 100% storage efficiency (Newton tells us this is not possible in his law of thermodynamics, but let's ignore that for now).
Now, wind power is both the cheapest, and the cleanest energy source. The whole world converts to wind power, fossil fuel engines are smelted down to make plows, and everyone across the world joins hands, singing in harmony.
Soon though, the effects are noticed. The far northern and far southern areas of the planet see it first. Unusually cold months all year around. Also, winds that usually carry moisture and warmth from tropical regions have drastically lessened. Summers are cool and dry, every year we see drought. Every winter is bitterly cold and dry. This effect is soon felt down in the equatorial regions.
Seas slowly rise and lakes slowly fall as the atmosphere has less specific capacity to hold moisture, and more of it ends up in the oceans. The polar ice caps enlarge. Human kind is faced with an energy crisis far greater than that currently faced. We know we can't convert to fossil fuels for primary energy means, these will soon be exhausted, and by the time society could shift to fossils again, it'd be too late.
The scenario I describe is a bit bleak, but I don't think it's all that unlikely.
The main question here is this: Does mankind consume more energy from the earth than the sun provides the earth? Within this question is encoded the need for consideration of energies used directly by man, as well as energies consumed indirectly. We breathe oxygen, this oxygen comes from plants, which use the sun's energy to produce it. We eat plants (or animals which in turn eat plants) which use the sun's energy to grow. Ambient atmospheric heat and kinetics (wind) are required for the survival of man, his food, his food's food, and his air.
To date, man's hunger for energy has been depleting natural stores of energy. Over past millenia, the earth has been dilligently storing excess energy in the form of fossil fuels. Earth receives a certain amount of energy, and gives off less energy than that to surrounding space. Of course something has to have happened to the excess energy, and that something is fossil fuels.
Now, going back to Newton's law, it's known that energy cannot be destroyed. It can only change forms, including taking the form of matter. So global cooling only makes a certain amount of sense since this energy has to remain here somewhere. Each time energy changes shape (solar radiation -> thermal energy -> kinetic energy (wind) -> wind turbines -> man's appliances) some of that energy is lost. Everybody sing Moxy Fruvous, "In other words, damn that rising entropy."
It's inevitable that some of this energy enters forms which it is not possible or not feasible to retrieve it. For example, in the formation of molecules which are very stable, and so require a lot of initial energy to retrieve a small amount of energy in return. This is evident in nearly all non-flamable materials (eg, most metals or glass). If it requires more initial energy to initiate a reaction than the reaction gives off, you can't create a chain reaction to sustain the retrieval of that energy.
So long round about story short. All energy comes from some place. In the case of fossil fuels, it was solar radiation in centuries past, in the case of wind power, it's solar radiation within the last century, and this comes at the expense
Actually, my current mission is to find a valid link for this. The ones provided on mozilla.org are all broken for Windows. (the link is http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/0.10/Firefox%20Setup%201.0PR.exe )
I'm not so sure. Most companies are only going to implement email filtering in this respect if they can get a very high percentage of participation globally (eg, 99%). For example, after MUCH debate, my humongo company (in the top 5 pharmacetuicals, no comment on which one, but suffice it to say we're a multi billion, global company) is finally implementing an anti-spam package. The holdup has been the "unreasonably high" false-positive rate of under 1% for most packages. We're implementing BrightMail with the filters set very loosly so that false positives are substantially lower than normal, but a lot more false negatives make it through.
The very idea that an executive had a measurable chance of losing a single wanted email (despite the fact that this chance exists given the email framework on the 'net as it is) eliminated the ability to implement anti-spam for years.
Companies are never sure which email is going to be the start of a multi-million dollar relationship, or which lost email marks the close of such a relationship, so they'd rather wade through spam by hand than risk software making a mistake.
No big corporation (Microsoft's primary mail server base) is going to reject email simply because it doesn't use sender-id. They can't afford to do that given how fickle customers are believed to be (and often are).
It'd take a long time before simply not having sender-id would prevent your email from arriving at almost any corporation.
I dunno. Given that many computers already ship sans floppy disk, I think the floppy death isn't coming soon, it's already gone. To extend the car analogy, the horse was 'dead' when builders made houses with out a hitching post and stables. Any inclination to use a horse as a means of travel gets diminished since the use of a horse now requires much more effort than it had formerly.
The same is true for floppies. The first time I saw a computer with out a floppy drive, I asked, "But how do you get data on and off of it?" As long as I had a computer with a floppy drive, I continued to use floppies. When I owned a laptop where the floppy drive was external, I resorted to emailing files or otherwise transferring them on a network. I haven't used a floppy disk in the last 2 years except one time when I needed a driver disk to install Fedora Core 1 on my SATA RAID.
I imagine as the car was gaining in popularity, folks of the time made the same sort of observation: "Why, I haven't ridden in a carriage since my car blew a gasket!"
Living life basically completely sans floppy, as I do now, I recognize that it's no longer an integral part of my computing experience. When I periodically encounter a 3.5" sitting around some place, I tend to look on it with that same sort of look you give an uncle who has a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM and wants Windows XP installed.
If the floppy isn't dead, it's in hospice care, getting periodic apnea tests.
Even literary expression is only protected to a point -- I may not libel someone w/o penalties.
I think the Don't Induce act works well because it makes it illegal only to produce software which serves no legal purpose: virii and the like. Like WMD's and SmallPox, individual organizations might be able to obtain a license to work with and create these otherwise illegal programs, companies like antivirus and security companies.
putting a sticker on a WMD or vial of SmallPox virus that says, "Not suitable for illegal purposes" doesn't make them any more legal. Simply because the manufacturer (or coder in our case) makes such a statement doesn't make it true, nor waive them of culpability for creation of such an item.
Because WMD's have no legal use, their manufacture or distribution is also illegal. That's what the "Don't Induce" act says about software -- it is only illegal to author or distribute if illegal activities are the only action that can be performed with the software.
P2P's have a legal use, and thus they would not be illegal to make, distribute, or use.
I don't agree with the INDUCE act, but by your logic, we should be permitted to create weapons of mass destruction in our basement, and distribute these weapons to anyone we want, including those who have demonstrated a clear desire to use them for evil. As long as I, the creator of the weapon do not directly use it for evil, I should be able to provide tools which serve no other purpose to anyone I want.
No, I think the Don't Induce act treats programming like it treats the creation of tangible goods. If there is no purpose served by the creation of an item but to break the law, then there is no reason to create *and* distribute it unless your intent is to either break the law yourself, or aid in the breaking of the law. Like it is not legal to manufacture smallpox in my basement, it should not be legal to create (particularly to distribute) software that can serve no legal purpose.
In the software world, this breaks down to this: P2P software is legal to author and distribute since it *does* serve a legal purpose -- the distribution of files which are not copyrighted or which have the copyright holder's explicit permission to distribute (eg, music from a garage band looking to make a name for itself, or amateur art).
I am at a loss to think of software that can serve no legal purpose. I'm certain that such purposes exist, but even cracker software such as L0pht Crack is used by network security professionals to test the strength of their security measures. Actually I'll correct that. Viruses serve no legal purpose, probably some spyware/adware is the same. These things would continue to be illegal.
With the Don't Induce act as the standard for what is and isn't legal in software creation, specific measures can be put in place as other public threats are identified, such as (if it wasn't already the case) specifically making it illegal to share copyright works (which don't have the owner's permission for distribution). Fortunately with the standard set at a reasonable level, these exceptions can reach only so high with out contradicting the base law of Don't Induce.
Actually as long as you were communicating only with Earth, this wouldn't be a problem. Red & blue shift as you point out are doppler effects where the frequency is compressed or expanded based on the source of the radiation (light) moving. This effect is only present if the sender and receiver are moving at different velocity vectors (speed/direction). If both are moving at the same vector, there will be no change in perception no matter how significant the doppler effect.
The simple observation of this is recognizing that your car's horn is the same pitch whether you're at a stop light or cruizing down the highway at 90mph.
Now if you think about it for a minute, it's obvious that the earth is involved in 2 curved movements -- revolution and rotation. This means that people on one side of the earth are moving at a different speed from people on the other side of the earth, particularly toward their noon/midnight. From this perspective, people on the dark side are moving faster than on the light side. However, I believe that the theory of relativity would come in to play here and avoid shift. Under this theory, of course, the speed of light relative to your perception of it remains constant despite your velocity. If you consider that the light must continue to travel the same distance, then it's not important whether you're moving faster on the dark side or slower on the light side since regardless of your speed, the light will take the same amount of time to travel the fixed distance of the cable. With out the theory of relativity, we would 'catch up' to the light a small amount, and effect a doppler. Red and blue shift occurs in stars simply because that distance is changing relative to us.
As I mentioned earlier, there ended up being almost a million IP's, which rotated around a lot, day to day there were very few common IP's.
Yes, I could have used cookies to track the legitimate users, but this would have blocked the remote sites that used this page since they relied on PHP's file wrappers to interact with it, which do not support cookies. I was able to detect them with an error in the request headers as mentioned elsewhere, and exit() immediately. Once I had a chance to analyze the attack, I was able to mitigate it pretty easily, but 9 million bogus hits a day still consumes a fair amount of bandwidth and server resources, even as efficiently as I was able to block them.
Unfortunately other sites depended on this link being where it was. It was part of my "logdnet" (where I maintain a list of servers that run my game). Moving this would have broken this functionality for most or all of these sites.
It's possible, though at the time the game was still fairly new, and there was only one ban in place, the subject of the ban decidedly did *not* have the technical knowhow to accomplish something like this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that much of an issue as they introduce new and distinct worlds to scale with the number of players. Each world has a soft cap of simultaneous players. A really big aspect of the success of an online game is the success of its social structure. People get addicted sometimes for no other reason than that they don't want to say goodbye to their friends.
So ultimately the social structure isn't hurt by a game having 80,000,000 players versus 25,000.
From my experience, it's important to *have* a degree, then beyond that, it's not very important except for a few narrow jobs.
The "quality" of your degree does have some bearing on specific jobs. For example, if you want to be a consultant at a major consulting firm, they're more interested in the degree than in the skill. That's how they justify absurd fees for "business strategy planning" and such.
Also, if you're looking for a job in upper management, some companies will glass-ceiling you if you don't have an impressive sounding degree. You can become a team leader, probably a manager, but if you want to become a director or CIO, those companies will hire externally to get the degree that sounds good (this mostly applies to publicly traded companies who have weak stocks and are looking for it to provide a boost). Of course this can be avoided even in such a company if you really know what you're doing. If you're incredibly talented, very few companies would avoid absorbing your skills to the highest level possible just because of outward appearances. Chances are you're not such a person though as those people are 1 in 1000.
I drive 3 hours a day. 1.5 in, 1.5 back. It would take me 30 minutes to reach the nearest public transit system outside of rush hour, which I'd have to do in my own car. During rush hour, it's at least an hour.
Presuming a ~15 minute wait for the transit to leave the station (gotta leave early in case I run into traffic on the way, and it has a chance of delay on its own), then accounting for stops in between, and that the transit doesn't take the most direct route to where I'm going, I can easily see another 15 minutes added to the drive.
When I arrive at my destination, I'm going to need a second car in that location to get me the last 10 miles to work, and give up 15-20 minutes for that.
Yes, I get to work / play games / whatever else during my mass transit time, but I give up as much time or more accomodating the mass transit as it gives me back.
Mass transit works if you start in a city and end in a city, that's it. Believe me, I *really* wish it worked: 3 hours a day is a lot of time to give up: functionally my shortest possible work week is 55 hours. And the drive is more tiring than my actual job, it requires a lot more persistent concentration, while at my desk, I can sit back and relax once in a while, maybe go get a cup of decaff.
Mailing lists exist for several reasons that online forums don't directly address (in no particular order).
* Messages come to you rather than you having to go to them (server push rather than client get, and depending on the list, this can mean basically real-time receipt).
* Easy offline access to the messages
* Not subject to network restrictions in almost any company
* Can be delivered directly to portable devices (eg, Blackberry)
* Can be alerted based on criteria (alert me whenever I see Critical Flaw in a Microsoft-based message on bugtraq, as an example)
* Can automatically sort based on criteria (message rules)
* Ability to maintain your own archive of messages you deem important
* Ability to easily forward messages to others who are not on the list
* Fewer complete chowder-heads exist on mailing lists as they're a bit more techy in general (how much work did Slashdot put into their moderation system to battle trolls?)
All of this exists with out any need for additional technology. Yes, all of it could be accomodated in one way or another with new features on forums etc, but the fact is, the purposes that mailing lists serve is wholly served by them currently.
There's no reason to reinvent the wheel with a device 10x as complex that rolls 2% better.
This is just a list of contest entrants. They haven't judged these games yet, so as far as you or I am concerned, these things are relatively trivial at this point.
Actually, it's the government who gets to control their own loan payback. In this area (like many other areas) they don't really play by the same rules as citizens. Although the government has to pay off the interest every year like us, when they don't have the money to do so, they borrow it. It's sortof a financial shell game.
Gov -> Debtor A "We owe you 4 billion in interest."
Gov -> Debtor B "We owe you 4 billion in interest."
Gov -> Debtor A "Can we borrow 4 billion?"
Gov -> Debtor B "Here's your 4 billion in interest, can we borrow 4 billion?"
Gov -> Debtor A "Here's your 4 billion in interest."
Actually it's similar to how some people handle tight times on their mortgage. You can borrow against the equity in your mortgage, and use that to continue your payments. It'll only work for so long though.
Re: living within my means, one of the circumstances I said makes sense to take out a loan is when there is a need which you can otherwise not fulfill. The decision between shelter vs food qualifies. However, unless your street has suddenly turned into the Serengheti, it's very unlikely that a car loan for a new SUV qualifies.
re: balanced budget, whether or not the budget was actually balanced from every angle, we were certainly at least headed in that direction. Bush set that on fire and is engaged in a full sprint the other direction.
re: Social Security, I've seen both sides since I've been self employed in the past, and have had to pay both sides worth of taxes. That gets costly for sure, but Social Security isn't the only tax area where your employer is matching your tax payments. A general rule of thumb is that every dollar you spend on taxes, your employer spends on a matching tax. Yes, Social Security is in bad shape, and the system is badly in need of reform. This is also a good suggestion on what we could have done with our money if there wasn't such a huge national debt.
And re: prescription drugs. This is not a subject I've gotten into much depth on for a couple of reasons. One is: the only prescription I've purchased in the last several years is my wife's birth control, and one pack of Prednazone when she first discovered her allergy to poison ivy, which was met 100% by her insurance (she's a teacher).
I *can* say this though, I've been working in and around pharmaceuticals since I got out of high school (when I wasn't directly employed by a pharmaceutical, I was employed by a company who does work for pharmaceuticals).
It costs a lot more money to bring a drug to the market in the U.S. than in other countries. This is because the U.S. FDA has extremely high standards, and extremely high paperwork requirements. These things help to ensure (or rather severely decrease the chances) that drugs with unknown or unacceptable side effects ever make it to market. On average, it can take 10 years to get a drug to market, and literally millions of man hours, bringing cost-to-market sometimes into the billions. And that's just for drugs which make it to market, for every drug that does, there are dozens that failed in the product pipeline somewhere (sometimes early on, sometimes very late as some adverse effects will only appear during clinical trials).
Along with the costs to bring a drug to market come the costs of insurance by a pharmaceutical company. Wyeth recently had the first of ~45,000 lawsuits brought against them for the unknown effects of one of their drugs, Fen-Phen (a diet drug that was discovered to cause heart problems many years later). The ruling was for an absurd amount, $1 billion. For a single lawsuit. Where does that money come from? You can bet it's not a magical neverending money pot sitting in their Collegeville, PA headquarters. It comes from prescription drugs, or insurance against this sort of thing.
Insurance charged for drugs sold in the U.S. is higher than in other countries for the simple reason that in other countries, lawsuits don't reach $1 billion in sin
The increase in the national debt during Clinton's administration is due to interest.
A balanced budget refers only to the government not spending more money than it gets in taxes -- which is the elimination of defecit. That is the first step in addressing the national debt, the second step is to start paying down the debt. At the rate the debt is climbing just due to interest, we should be very interested in not contributing to it faster.
Look at what happens in those figures you quoted:
% increase (Date - President)
2.34 (9/28/2001 - Bush)
0.32 (9/29/2000 - Clinton)
2.35 (9/30/1999 - Clinton)
2.09 (9/30/1999 - Clinton)
In the last year of Clinton's administration, he'd gotten the budget balanced, and actually paid into the debt, almost as much as the interest for that year. Bush gets in office one year, and WHAM Clinton's work is undone. 133 billion dollars in 2001 worth of tax payer money was lost. Sure, we got a big tax cut, but it's really only a forced loan to us taxpayers since any tax cut that happens while the debt increases will ultimately have to be repaid.
It's representative of classic American thinking, and it's why so many people drown in credit card debt. Borrowed money is treated like free money, bonus income. No one pays any heed to the idea that Hey, we're gonna have to pay this back again. Borrowing money is in almost all cases the opposite of good financial planning. Rather than taking money you've saved and investing it, you're taking someone elses money as an investment for them.
There are only a few times when it makes sense to borrow money, and that is when you need something right now that you cannot afford right now. Car loans don't qualify unless you cannot afford a used car -- I buy all my cars used at ~1/4 new-sticker price, pay cash, and they each last 4-5 years. Credit cards don't qualify unless you're habitually paying them off completely every month (and thus avoiding interest on the money). Home loans can qualify only because having a house now with a 30 year mortgage, versus renting for 25 years to save up for a house makes sense in that you're purchasing equity in your house instead of giving your money to your landlord. School loans make sense because the schooling increases your capacity to earn money, and thus it is a positive investment (as long as you get a marketable degree).
I'm one of those people who has credit cards that I pay off completely each month, make double payments on my mortgage, and otherwise spend cash on everything. My and my wife's school bills were paid off completely the first year we were out of college. I've never had a car loan, and aside from my credit cards, the only loans I have ever actually had are my school and mortgage.
Friends who are in similar circumstances as me have $10-20,000 in credit card debt, $20-40,000 in car loans, and $20-30,000 in school loans. They're $50-90,000 in debt, and making minimum payments each month. A big chunk of their income each month goes to interest all around, and they grumble that I seem to have more money to spend than they do despite similar earnings. That's fine though, it's how they choose to live their life, and I make different decisions.
However, when it comes to national debt, I don't have any real say in the matter aside from my Nov 2 ballot. My tax money is being consumed by interst, and it is not my option to pay this down. Think how much good could have been done with the billions of dollars wasted on interest each year.
Everyone (it seems) wants national healthcare, but gripe when taxes go up. This money has to come from somewhere. According to the CIA, estimated US population in July 2004 was 293,027,571. Every man, woman, and child saw $450 go into the debt this past year. I don't know about you, but $450 is a lot more than I'd typically spend a year on medical things. I know that I'm in good health, and that some pe
"Intentionally" implies insight into administration motivation which no one here on Slashdot is likely to possess.
But even if the guy with the hose wasn't intending to water your front door, doesn't mean he didn't do it.
I think the point is, it's possible for Bush to have squashed jobs, then later through inaction on his part, jobs come back. Some will say it's brilliant strategy by Bush to do nothing, others will say it's sheer laziness by Bush. In the end, it doesn't really matter, if being an inactive president is good for the country, then an inactive president is a good president.
That said, Bush sucks, and trashed our economy as well as the balanced budget.
and I likewise have no legal obligation to purchase anything. I guess I didn't specify what would happen when this point is reached, and that's to simply buy nothing instead of DRM encumbered albums. I'll either hold on to that same money and put it in the bank, or I'll purchase alternate music that's not encumbered.
IMO, this depends on acceptance rate of the new format. I won't buy a copy protected CD, so any artists whose title track is the 'bonus' I won't buy (unless I was interested in a different track).
No kidding... as long as there's an option to purchase a CD sans-bonus-track (or whatever it is), I'll take it if it has no freedom sacrificing protections on it.
I was thinking Longhorn looked pretty nice, and I'm one of those Slashdotters that spends a fair amount of time in Windows (I dual boot, honest!). I'm *not* going to give up freedoms I currently have now though, which means buying only non-encumbered software, including my OS.
I'll buy the non-encumbered CD's, and pirate the bonus tracks. Unless the non-encumbered discs are cheaper, then I when I pay the same price as the next guy, I want the same content he gets.
It's BS, and I won't have it.
Hopefully soon we'll see recording companies springing up whose philosophy is to allow users access to their fair use rights. Or recording companies who make their money from live concerts or the like, rather than from album sales. Give the albums away for free, and I guarantee I'm more likely to show up at a concert.
This all raises a question in my mind.
If we are extracting energy from the atmosphere, this means that the atmosphere has less energy stored in it.
As my poorly trained mind sees it, this can come in one of two forms. Either the ambient temperature of the earth decreases, and we see global cooling (less thermal energy), or the winds as a whole blow less hard (less kinetic energy). Most likely it would be a combination of both, for the sake of my argument I'll assume it's 50/50.
Let's say the storage of electricity for use on still days is perfected, 100% storage efficiency (Newton tells us this is not possible in his law of thermodynamics, but let's ignore that for now).
Now, wind power is both the cheapest, and the cleanest energy source. The whole world converts to wind power, fossil fuel engines are smelted down to make plows, and everyone across the world joins hands, singing in harmony.
Soon though, the effects are noticed. The far northern and far southern areas of the planet see it first. Unusually cold months all year around. Also, winds that usually carry moisture and warmth from tropical regions have drastically lessened. Summers are cool and dry, every year we see drought. Every winter is bitterly cold and dry. This effect is soon felt down in the equatorial regions.
Seas slowly rise and lakes slowly fall as the atmosphere has less specific capacity to hold moisture, and more of it ends up in the oceans. The polar ice caps enlarge. Human kind is faced with an energy crisis far greater than that currently faced. We know we can't convert to fossil fuels for primary energy means, these will soon be exhausted, and by the time society could shift to fossils again, it'd be too late.
The scenario I describe is a bit bleak, but I don't think it's all that unlikely.
The main question here is this: Does mankind consume more energy from the earth than the sun provides the earth? Within this question is encoded the need for consideration of energies used directly by man, as well as energies consumed indirectly. We breathe oxygen, this oxygen comes from plants, which use the sun's energy to produce it. We eat plants (or animals which in turn eat plants) which use the sun's energy to grow. Ambient atmospheric heat and kinetics (wind) are required for the survival of man, his food, his food's food, and his air.
To date, man's hunger for energy has been depleting natural stores of energy. Over past millenia, the earth has been dilligently storing excess energy in the form of fossil fuels. Earth receives a certain amount of energy, and gives off less energy than that to surrounding space. Of course something has to have happened to the excess energy, and that something is fossil fuels.
Now, going back to Newton's law, it's known that energy cannot be destroyed. It can only change forms, including taking the form of matter. So global cooling only makes a certain amount of sense since this energy has to remain here somewhere. Each time energy changes shape (solar radiation -> thermal energy -> kinetic energy (wind) -> wind turbines -> man's appliances) some of that energy is lost. Everybody sing Moxy Fruvous, "In other words, damn that rising entropy."
It's inevitable that some of this energy enters forms which it is not possible or not feasible to retrieve it. For example, in the formation of molecules which are very stable, and so require a lot of initial energy to retrieve a small amount of energy in return. This is evident in nearly all non-flamable materials (eg, most metals or glass). If it requires more initial energy to initiate a reaction than the reaction gives off, you can't create a chain reaction to sustain the retrieval of that energy.
So long round about story short. All energy comes from some place. In the case of fossil fuels, it was solar radiation in centuries past, in the case of wind power, it's solar radiation within the last century, and this comes at the expense
Actually, my current mission is to find a valid link for this. The ones provided on mozilla.org are all broken for Windows. (the link is http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/0.10/Firefox%20Setup%201.0PR.exe )
I'm not so sure. Most companies are only going to implement email filtering in this respect if they can get a very high percentage of participation globally (eg, 99%). For example, after MUCH debate, my humongo company (in the top 5 pharmacetuicals, no comment on which one, but suffice it to say we're a multi billion, global company) is finally implementing an anti-spam package. The holdup has been the "unreasonably high" false-positive rate of under 1% for most packages. We're implementing BrightMail with the filters set very loosly so that false positives are substantially lower than normal, but a lot more false negatives make it through.
The very idea that an executive had a measurable chance of losing a single wanted email (despite the fact that this chance exists given the email framework on the 'net as it is) eliminated the ability to implement anti-spam for years.
Companies are never sure which email is going to be the start of a multi-million dollar relationship, or which lost email marks the close of such a relationship, so they'd rather wade through spam by hand than risk software making a mistake.
No big corporation (Microsoft's primary mail server base) is going to reject email simply because it doesn't use sender-id. They can't afford to do that given how fickle customers are believed to be (and often are).
It'd take a long time before simply not having sender-id would prevent your email from arriving at almost any corporation.
I dunno. Given that many computers already ship sans floppy disk, I think the floppy death isn't coming soon, it's already gone. To extend the car analogy, the horse was 'dead' when builders made houses with out a hitching post and stables. Any inclination to use a horse as a means of travel gets diminished since the use of a horse now requires much more effort than it had formerly.
The same is true for floppies. The first time I saw a computer with out a floppy drive, I asked, "But how do you get data on and off of it?" As long as I had a computer with a floppy drive, I continued to use floppies. When I owned a laptop where the floppy drive was external, I resorted to emailing files or otherwise transferring them on a network. I haven't used a floppy disk in the last 2 years except one time when I needed a driver disk to install Fedora Core 1 on my SATA RAID.
I imagine as the car was gaining in popularity, folks of the time made the same sort of observation: "Why, I haven't ridden in a carriage since my car blew a gasket!"
Living life basically completely sans floppy, as I do now, I recognize that it's no longer an integral part of my computing experience. When I periodically encounter a 3.5" sitting around some place, I tend to look on it with that same sort of look you give an uncle who has a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM and wants Windows XP installed.
If the floppy isn't dead, it's in hospice care, getting periodic apnea tests.
Even literary expression is only protected to a point -- I may not libel someone w/o penalties.
I think the Don't Induce act works well because it makes it illegal only to produce software which serves no legal purpose: virii and the like. Like WMD's and SmallPox, individual organizations might be able to obtain a license to work with and create these otherwise illegal programs, companies like antivirus and security companies.
putting a sticker on a WMD or vial of SmallPox virus that says, "Not suitable for illegal purposes" doesn't make them any more legal. Simply because the manufacturer (or coder in our case) makes such a statement doesn't make it true, nor waive them of culpability for creation of such an item.
Right, which is what I was saying. Please read the entire comment again.
Which is exactly the point I was making.
Because WMD's have no legal use, their manufacture or distribution is also illegal. That's what the "Don't Induce" act says about software -- it is only illegal to author or distribute if illegal activities are the only action that can be performed with the software.
P2P's have a legal use, and thus they would not be illegal to make, distribute, or use.
I don't agree with the INDUCE act, but by your logic, we should be permitted to create weapons of mass destruction in our basement, and distribute these weapons to anyone we want, including those who have demonstrated a clear desire to use them for evil. As long as I, the creator of the weapon do not directly use it for evil, I should be able to provide tools which serve no other purpose to anyone I want.
No, I think the Don't Induce act treats programming like it treats the creation of tangible goods. If there is no purpose served by the creation of an item but to break the law, then there is no reason to create *and* distribute it unless your intent is to either break the law yourself, or aid in the breaking of the law. Like it is not legal to manufacture smallpox in my basement, it should not be legal to create (particularly to distribute) software that can serve no legal purpose.
In the software world, this breaks down to this: P2P software is legal to author and distribute since it *does* serve a legal purpose -- the distribution of files which are not copyrighted or which have the copyright holder's explicit permission to distribute (eg, music from a garage band looking to make a name for itself, or amateur art).
I am at a loss to think of software that can serve no legal purpose. I'm certain that such purposes exist, but even cracker software such as L0pht Crack is used by network security professionals to test the strength of their security measures. Actually I'll correct that. Viruses serve no legal purpose, probably some spyware/adware is the same. These things would continue to be illegal.
With the Don't Induce act as the standard for what is and isn't legal in software creation, specific measures can be put in place as other public threats are identified, such as (if it wasn't already the case) specifically making it illegal to share copyright works (which don't have the owner's permission for distribution). Fortunately with the standard set at a reasonable level, these exceptions can reach only so high with out contradicting the base law of Don't Induce.
For you corporate / wife still sleeping types, this page has background music.
Actually as long as you were communicating only with Earth, this wouldn't be a problem. Red & blue shift as you point out are doppler effects where the frequency is compressed or expanded based on the source of the radiation (light) moving. This effect is only present if the sender and receiver are moving at different velocity vectors (speed/direction). If both are moving at the same vector, there will be no change in perception no matter how significant the doppler effect.
The simple observation of this is recognizing that your car's horn is the same pitch whether you're at a stop light or cruizing down the highway at 90mph.
Now if you think about it for a minute, it's obvious that the earth is involved in 2 curved movements -- revolution and rotation. This means that people on one side of the earth are moving at a different speed from people on the other side of the earth, particularly toward their noon/midnight. From this perspective, people on the dark side are moving faster than on the light side. However, I believe that the theory of relativity would come in to play here and avoid shift. Under this theory, of course, the speed of light relative to your perception of it remains constant despite your velocity. If you consider that the light must continue to travel the same distance, then it's not important whether you're moving faster on the dark side or slower on the light side since regardless of your speed, the light will take the same amount of time to travel the fixed distance of the cable. With out the theory of relativity, we would 'catch up' to the light a small amount, and effect a doppler. Red and blue shift occurs in stars simply because that distance is changing relative to us.
As I mentioned earlier, there ended up being almost a million IP's, which rotated around a lot, day to day there were very few common IP's.
Yes, I could have used cookies to track the legitimate users, but this would have blocked the remote sites that used this page since they relied on PHP's file wrappers to interact with it, which do not support cookies. I was able to detect them with an error in the request headers as mentioned elsewhere, and exit() immediately. Once I had a chance to analyze the attack, I was able to mitigate it pretty easily, but 9 million bogus hits a day still consumes a fair amount of bandwidth and server resources, even as efficiently as I was able to block them.
Unfortunately other sites depended on this link being where it was. It was part of my "logdnet" (where I maintain a list of servers that run my game). Moving this would have broken this functionality for most or all of these sites.
It's possible, though at the time the game was still fairly new, and there was only one ban in place, the subject of the ban decidedly did *not* have the technical knowhow to accomplish something like this.