That may be true for things like Budweiser or Pepsi, where advertising is just there to make people feel good about the product. Most products, however, use advertising to make people aware that the product exists, inform people about what it can do, and encourage people to investigate it further. The product that I make at work is a monitoring system for stand-by generators, called a Gen-Tracker. It's a great product, but not that many people in the industry, much less end users, know about it. So we're starting to advertise in trade magazines. I don't expect anyone to sign up as a dealer because they saw the ad, I expect people will call and do some research because they saw the ad. When they have a customer that wants some sort of monitoring system, they're going to pull out a trade magazine and see if they can find an ad for a product of that sort. The real question with web advertising is if I spend $10k on ads, am I going to get $40k in new business? That's often tricky to measure, but ROI is king.
I couldn't either, although, the US NRC has details on its website about a 10MW unit that Toshiba is planning to install in Alaska. Also, this is the kind of thing that doesn't need to be advertised.
At least we know what to expect from a Jerry Bruckhemier produced game: fantastic graphics and a hollow formulaic plot with over the top characters that will basicly keep you occupied, but ultimately unsatisfied and wishing you'd done something else with your day.
Generally phone/data links don't get knocked out the same way power does. For starters, the phone lines are often buried end to end. Power, on the other hand, is fed from a substation that's sitting out exposed to the elements. Power gets knocked out far more often.
But that doesn't change the fact that this is still a dumb policy. Most cell towers include a generator in the installation already, so long as it's practical to do so. The penalties they pay to cell carriers for outages makes this pretty much a business requirement. But there are a lot of cell towers in locations where it just isn't realistic to put a generator in place. If that's the case, you might create a situation where you either have to abandon a tower or locate a tower in a less than ideal location.
The bigger problem than backup power is that when disasters strike, there usually isn't enough bandwith for everyone who's trying to use their phones.
They're not going to wash away in a flood. Bigger worries would be water in the fuel tank, which typically sits underneath the generator.
As far as looting is concerned, portables are prime targets, but no one steals the big fixed installations. It takes to much work and equipment to move them and then get them running in a new location. Also, they're kind of consipcuous.
Actually, I find it easier to find a stranger to bum a call off of than to find a pay phone to use.
Add this to the list of things I'll have to explain to my kid when she's older.
I don't know where you are, but around here, they're selling out pretty much immediately. Back in September, they might stay on the shelf for as much as half a day. And that's why I planned ahead so my kid will have one on Xmas morning. I haven't seen a unit sitting on a store shelf since before Halloween.
So, really, 2 solutions come to my mind -- either get rid of leap seconds and just let time drift occur. Daylight times will drift a few minutes a century, big deal. Or maybe we could just redefine the length of a second and never have to deal with this shit again.
No, but I have heard people say, "There are just too many girls to choose from. I'll take the easy way out and hook up with one of the ugly ones." This apparently explains the continued existance of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC.
Your argument completely ignores the COBOL paradox. If time travel were possible, some angry programmer from the future would have already come back to prevent COBOL from ever being created.
And NAT works very well as the poor man's firewall. Broadband routers have prevented more worm/virus outbreaks than any patch ever will.
Communism, not freedom. Stallman believes in a world where everyone writes code for the betterment of humanity. That's communism. Freedom would be releasing that code in such a fashion where there were no constraints on it. Where anyone else who uses your code can either release their changes or not. But that's not what RMS believes in. I consider freedom important which is why I'll never release code under the GPL.
It's extrodinarily common. Especially in the custom software market. Small programs rip off GPL software all the time. If pushed, a lot of them could find free* alternatives, or find a cheap commercial product to license, but why bother. (*note, I don't use free in the RMS manner, but in the literal, truly free public domain manner)
But after all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Exactly. I have a plethora of legal activities I engage in that I wish to hide. I don't need thugs with badges and guns using my own money to spy on me.
Once you've got some full time work experiance, no one looks at your grades. All you need the degree for is to get your resume past the HR drone who filters it for keywords. Unless you have aspirations of a PhD, just get your degree and get out of there. Especially if you can post As and Bs on your final year of upper level coursework.
As a man who's been married nearly 8 years (after dating several others), let me say that women are like global thermo-nuclear war: the only winning move is not to play. Truly a strange game.
I assure you, copyrights and patents provided a very valuable function to society. But the important thing is that they are for proper time limits. I believe in a fair copyright, which is why I only pirate works more than 26 years old. If everyone were as principled as I, we might actually be able to make some headway against these infinite monoplies.
The Brits also teach the War of American Secession from a rather different perspective than we teach the American Revolution. When I lived in Virgina, I sometimes heard the Civil War referred to as The War of Northern Agression. I suppose there will always be a bit of a cultural bias in history lessons.
Well, I don't recall my own high school history being terribly accurate on the subject. It was presented in the context that 6 million Jews were killed in concentration camps for no reason other than being jewish. There was never any mention that the Nazis also killed 9 million non-jews (including Poles, Russian POWs, Gypsies, other christian sects like Jehovas Witnesses, etc), or that half of those 6 million jews were killed for being Polish as much as any other reason. I'm no scholar on the subject, and this post isn't meant to shed light on anything except that the typical high school education dumbs the whole complicated mess down to 2 things: Concentration camps and 6 million dead Jews. Except that the vast majority of the dead weren't actually killed in concentration camps.
Again, let me repeat my point: high school history takes a complex event and dumbs it down to a couple of multiple choice questions. I'm inclined to think that a more accurate and detailed history lesson would draw fewer objections. The above paragraph takes a couple of stats haphazardly lifted from Wikipedia and contains no serious scholarship. No flames please.
Actually, on the grand scale of computer support over the years, I've gotten pretty good support from Dell. It's been on the decline these past few years and has fallen to what I'd call "average".
That pretty much covers it. Both sides undermine their arguments. You can't argue that piracy is wrong when you have an infinite monopoly. You also can't argue that your piracy is ok when you're out copying the latest and greatest. Now, if you were out copying old black and white films or the music of the 60s and 70s, I'd probably give you a pass.:)
Well, on Slashdot (as well as much of CNet's target audiance) there is widespread dissatisfaction with the current copyright term length. I don't think there's so much dissatisfaction with patent term lenghts as there is just with bad patents. Most people, if asked about it and forced to think about it, would say that 95 years is far too long of a term for a copyright. Most people, on the other hand, don't think about it. They just accept it as the way it is. They also frequently engage in casual piracy of music, movies, and software.
Patents are a more complicated issue. For one thing, most people don't really have an opportunity to casually infringe patents. Current patent terms are not that far out of step with what might be considered a reasonable time frame. We see patented inventions pass into the public domain on a regular basis, whereas no copyrighted works have fallen into the public domain in my lifetime. The big problem with patents is that it is generally not obvious what is currently patented and what is not. Even after reading the abstract of a patent, I have no idea what it really covers. I have any number of suggestions for reforming patents, but they're really outside the scope of this post.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be true for things like Budweiser or Pepsi, where advertising is just there to make people feel good about the product. Most products, however, use advertising to make people aware that the product exists, inform people about what it can do, and encourage people to investigate it further. The product that I make at work is a monitoring system for stand-by generators, called a Gen-Tracker. It's a great product, but not that many people in the industry, much less end users, know about it. So we're starting to advertise in trade magazines. I don't expect anyone to sign up as a dealer because they saw the ad, I expect people will call and do some research because they saw the ad. When they have a customer that wants some sort of monitoring system, they're going to pull out a trade magazine and see if they can find an ad for a product of that sort. The real question with web advertising is if I spend $10k on ads, am I going to get $40k in new business? That's often tricky to measure, but ROI is king.
I couldn't either, although, the US NRC has details on its website about a 10MW unit that Toshiba is planning to install in Alaska. Also, this is the kind of thing that doesn't need to be advertised.
At least we know what to expect from a Jerry Bruckhemier produced game: fantastic graphics and a hollow formulaic plot with over the top characters that will basicly keep you occupied, but ultimately unsatisfied and wishing you'd done something else with your day.
Generally phone/data links don't get knocked out the same way power does. For starters, the phone lines are often buried end to end. Power, on the other hand, is fed from a substation that's sitting out exposed to the elements. Power gets knocked out far more often.
But that doesn't change the fact that this is still a dumb policy. Most cell towers include a generator in the installation already, so long as it's practical to do so. The penalties they pay to cell carriers for outages makes this pretty much a business requirement. But there are a lot of cell towers in locations where it just isn't realistic to put a generator in place. If that's the case, you might create a situation where you either have to abandon a tower or locate a tower in a less than ideal location.
The bigger problem than backup power is that when disasters strike, there usually isn't enough bandwith for everyone who's trying to use their phones.
They're not going to wash away in a flood. Bigger worries would be water in the fuel tank, which typically sits underneath the generator. As far as looting is concerned, portables are prime targets, but no one steals the big fixed installations. It takes to much work and equipment to move them and then get them running in a new location. Also, they're kind of consipcuous.
Actually, I find it easier to find a stranger to bum a call off of than to find a pay phone to use. Add this to the list of things I'll have to explain to my kid when she's older.
I don't know where you are, but around here, they're selling out pretty much immediately. Back in September, they might stay on the shelf for as much as half a day. And that's why I planned ahead so my kid will have one on Xmas morning. I haven't seen a unit sitting on a store shelf since before Halloween.
So, really, 2 solutions come to my mind -- either get rid of leap seconds and just let time drift occur. Daylight times will drift a few minutes a century, big deal. Or maybe we could just redefine the length of a second and never have to deal with this shit again.
That's ok. RFCs are only a suggestion.
No, but I have heard people say, "There are just too many girls to choose from. I'll take the easy way out and hook up with one of the ugly ones." This apparently explains the continued existance of COBOL, FORTRAN and BASIC.
And if you RTFA, the woman want's to change the one part that does work: the safe harbor/takedown provision. Grrr.
Your argument completely ignores the COBOL paradox. If time travel were possible, some angry programmer from the future would have already come back to prevent COBOL from ever being created.
And NAT works very well as the poor man's firewall. Broadband routers have prevented more worm/virus outbreaks than any patch ever will.
Communism, not freedom. Stallman believes in a world where everyone writes code for the betterment of humanity. That's communism. Freedom would be releasing that code in such a fashion where there were no constraints on it. Where anyone else who uses your code can either release their changes or not. But that's not what RMS believes in. I consider freedom important which is why I'll never release code under the GPL.
It's extrodinarily common. Especially in the custom software market. Small programs rip off GPL software all the time. If pushed, a lot of them could find free* alternatives, or find a cheap commercial product to license, but why bother. (*note, I don't use free in the RMS manner, but in the literal, truly free public domain manner)
But after all, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
Exactly. I have a plethora of legal activities I engage in that I wish to hide. I don't need thugs with badges and guns using my own money to spy on me.
Once you've got some full time work experiance, no one looks at your grades. All you need the degree for is to get your resume past the HR drone who filters it for keywords. Unless you have aspirations of a PhD, just get your degree and get out of there. Especially if you can post As and Bs on your final year of upper level coursework.
As a man who's been married nearly 8 years (after dating several others), let me say that women are like global thermo-nuclear war: the only winning move is not to play. Truly a strange game.
I assure you, copyrights and patents provided a very valuable function to society. But the important thing is that they are for proper time limits. I believe in a fair copyright, which is why I only pirate works more than 26 years old. If everyone were as principled as I, we might actually be able to make some headway against these infinite monoplies.
The Brits also teach the War of American Secession from a rather different perspective than we teach the American Revolution. When I lived in Virgina, I sometimes heard the Civil War referred to as The War of Northern Agression. I suppose there will always be a bit of a cultural bias in history lessons.
Well, I don't recall my own high school history being terribly accurate on the subject. It was presented in the context that 6 million Jews were killed in concentration camps for no reason other than being jewish. There was never any mention that the Nazis also killed 9 million non-jews (including Poles, Russian POWs, Gypsies, other christian sects like Jehovas Witnesses, etc), or that half of those 6 million jews were killed for being Polish as much as any other reason. I'm no scholar on the subject, and this post isn't meant to shed light on anything except that the typical high school education dumbs the whole complicated mess down to 2 things: Concentration camps and 6 million dead Jews. Except that the vast majority of the dead weren't actually killed in concentration camps. Again, let me repeat my point: high school history takes a complex event and dumbs it down to a couple of multiple choice questions. I'm inclined to think that a more accurate and detailed history lesson would draw fewer objections. The above paragraph takes a couple of stats haphazardly lifted from Wikipedia and contains no serious scholarship. No flames please.
Actually, on the grand scale of computer support over the years, I've gotten pretty good support from Dell. It's been on the decline these past few years and has fallen to what I'd call "average".
That pretty much covers it. Both sides undermine their arguments. You can't argue that piracy is wrong when you have an infinite monopoly. You also can't argue that your piracy is ok when you're out copying the latest and greatest. Now, if you were out copying old black and white films or the music of the 60s and 70s, I'd probably give you a pass. :)
Well, on Slashdot (as well as much of CNet's target audiance) there is widespread dissatisfaction with the current copyright term length. I don't think there's so much dissatisfaction with patent term lenghts as there is just with bad patents. Most people, if asked about it and forced to think about it, would say that 95 years is far too long of a term for a copyright. Most people, on the other hand, don't think about it. They just accept it as the way it is. They also frequently engage in casual piracy of music, movies, and software.
Patents are a more complicated issue. For one thing, most people don't really have an opportunity to casually infringe patents. Current patent terms are not that far out of step with what might be considered a reasonable time frame. We see patented inventions pass into the public domain on a regular basis, whereas no copyrighted works have fallen into the public domain in my lifetime. The big problem with patents is that it is generally not obvious what is currently patented and what is not. Even after reading the abstract of a patent, I have no idea what it really covers. I have any number of suggestions for reforming patents, but they're really outside the scope of this post.
Correction, this article is already the top 2 spots on the list. :)
Recursion and branching. Not bad, eh?
Wow, that's some mighty fine recursion going on there. :)