How big a problem is this? The author proposes we build satellite uplinks in every commercial airframe, from corporate jets to airliners, that they stream a staggering amount of data through some new satellites to unbuilt ground stations to retain this data for post-mortum analysis... Does this author have any idea how many airframes there are? Any idea what such a retrofit would cost per-plane? What the estimated downtime would be to retrofit this hardware into a thirty year old airframe? And, the big question, how long would it take to design, build, and certify just such an uplink - with, of course, SIX NINES uptime?
The only real problem the author seems to have is that tape isn't "cool" and other, cooler, options exist.
And let's not forget that 99.999% of information captured will never be needed, since the plane didn't have an "event".
Don't forget, the signal needs to be jam-proof, and has to work in any possible weather conditions - if it can't work in a storm, what is it's value?
Are you seriously thinking that folks 'branded' with unremovable GPS collars will be able to move freely and participate openly in the community?
Where will they live once society figures out you can limit the places they can live (as with regitered sex offenders, who have to live so far away from schools, playgrounds, etc.)?
Where will they work? People without criminal records can't find jobs, and parolees have an even harder time, despite the wide-held notions of 'having paid their debt to society' and the ideal of giving someone a second chance. Active prisoners would not benefit from the view of having 'paid their debt', and would be rendered unemployable, placing the burden for their sustainence on the social welfare system instead of the prison system.
It sounds nice, but this idea seems to ignore reality and is focusing on a technical solution to a social problem, ignoring all the related issues.
Sounds nice, but when 1/4th of the prison population turns up in neighborhoods across America with their tell -tale "I took/take drugs" GPS collar, anklet they might find it a little bit hard to find a job, and they could easily find themselves treated as a new social leper, joining the registered sex offenders who have to live a certain distance from schools, playgrounds, etc (to protect the children). So, once you have turned out 25% of the prison population and branded them unemployable, how will they live - either from Gov't Subsidies or by committing crimes - all you've done is shift the cost from prisons to welfare and their next victims.
And how long until someone implements the ever-popular "exploding collar" as seen in countless sic-fi movies? (Wedlock, Escape from New York, etc.?)
The same people that don't want to live near a prison won't want to live next to a current prisoner.
Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.
Drug users poison themselves, and I find very few possession charges of "individual use" quantities of drugs that carry mandatory prison time... Drug dealing poisons not only the dealer, but also the community, and almost always carries mandatory prison time - as it should. If you are counting parolees in your 25% figure, then your number is inflated because parole isn't prison.
The real problem with drug statutes is the involvement of elected officials in defining mandatory sentencing guidelines for certain offenses, reflecting the "tough on crime" stance of coveted blocks of voters - disparate punishments for, say, crack cocaine, were not implemented to destroy certain racial communities, it was a sincere attempt by well-meaning, but ill-informed public that stiffer penalties reduce crime AND that crack cocaine was a more devastating drug than 'regular' cocaine. The do-gooders that tried to help poor inner-city families wound up destroying them, and once politicized, stiff drug penalties will never be walked back, lest the politicians be viewed as "soft on crime."
This does happen, and unfortunately the journalist either somehow did not discover this or failed to report it.
Me thinks that Nancy Pratt and Dr. Smith are hoping for their 15 minutes of fame with this Y2K-like "catastrophy" - I'd hate to think a reporter didn't fully investigate the claims of the subject they are reporting on...
'FDA could fix this tubing problem tomorrow, but because the agency is so worried about making industry happy, people continue to die,' says Dr. Robert Smith.
Yeah, exactly - the FDA could change EVERY CONNECTOR on every medical device that uses tubing "tomorrow" (I assume you meant that metaphorically, not literally Dr. Smith), ignoring that changing each connector on, say, an air pipe, would require a recertification of the device. How many connecotrs in each hospital room would have to be changed? Doctor's office? Operating rooms? Ambulances? And how long would it take the industry to respond with retro-fit kits and sufficient inspectors to review all the work required, let alone the lead time needed to manufacture, distrubute and use all the new tubing required...
'FDA could fix this tubing problem tomorrow, but because the agency is so worried about making industry happy, people continue to die,' says Dr. Robert Smith.
Yeah, right - the FDA is simply a rubber-stamp for the mdical industry... You have to be painfully ignorant of the medical field to make such statement.
We really want the FDA to regulate the size, color, and style of connecotrs on all medical devices? Seriously? We can't trust doctors with surgical tubing any more?
That sounds expensive, especially when you factor in the cost of all the CYA expenses to protect hospitals/medical providers from federal fines and penalties...
Hundreds of deaths in the past 40 years doesnt sound like a really big problem.
Exactly - this is a story becuase most readers forget how commonplace these types of medical procedures are and how many times a day they are safely carried out. How many times do mothers delivering babies NOT get spinal anesthesia in their veins? How many times do patients not get their IV lines connected to air lines? Etc...
I'm certain, if investigated when they occur, there is an aggrivating factor that contributed to the error (over-worked staff, poor working conditions, lack of training, poorly communicated instructions, someone "helping out" in an area they aren't qualified in, etc.)... True, if the tubes were differnt shapes/colors/sizes these mistakes woul dbe harder, but that buries the contributing factor (sleep deprivation, etc. that will simply cause problems elsewhere).
By requiring that every connection/tube be a different color/size, you've now made medical care even more expensive than it already is - hospitals will be forced to stock all manner of spare parts, in sufficient qty for all possible applications - they will no longer be able to stock a huge spool of bulk tubing and cut it down for the application required... Sounds like a trivial expense increase right? But the hospital will have to have somewhere to store all these unique parts (build a storage facility, for example), they'll have to man it 24x7 (that's a minimum of 4 full time employees), plus have some way of inventorying and distributing the unique parts to all places in the hospital (a group of orderlies with carts, say another 10-15 full time jobs for a regular sized hospital, again to allow for 24x7 coverage), and let's not forget the increased expense of each specialty part when compared with the cost of a length of tubing cut off a huge spool of PVC medical-grade tubing.
But hey, we'll have lowered the bar on the nurse's job - you know who nurses are, right? They are the ones that went to college for four years, then went on for a nursing certificate and worked for months/year to learn how to do their job and not make mistakes, but heck, we can't hold them responsible for actually paying attention and doing the right thing...
I can just imagine the scenario now - "Sorry, we'll have to reschedule your open-heart surgery because we've run out of magenta anesthesia tubing with the square fittings, and trust me, you're gonna want anesthesia for that operation - we sent Jimmy over to the hospital on the other side of town to see if they can spare an appropriate tube..."
'Nurses should not have to work in an environment where it is even possible to make that kind of mistake,' says Nancy Pratt, a vocal advocate for changing the system.
How can an operating room be made 100% safe? Nurses go to school to learn how to work in such an environemnt. If, after years of training and working in the field they can't be relied on to know what they are doing, then what was the point of all that expensive training?
If an operating room is to be brought down to the level that anyone can assist the doctor, then nurses are irrelevant - if every pill has to be a different color, shape or size, if every tube, connection, and device needs to be a size incompatible with anything else in the room, and if all the sharp pointy tools need to have safety guards, then what have we accomplished?
Medical mistakes happen, and they always will happen, because of the humans in the process - people have bad days, make mistakes, get tired, get bad instructions, etc - but I for one, am not ready to submit myself to a CNC-style surgical machine without a human operator controling the blade, dosing me with medications from a spreadsheet, or making diagnosis via an online questionaire - I want people in the process, mistakes and all. Besides, I think the number of preventable human errors looks huge, until you realize how many times things go right - for every procedure with tens or hundred of errors per year, I suspect there are thousands or tens of thousands of similar procedures that are performed without incident - daily.
How many times do nurses manage to find the right receptical for the hoses? Gather and dose the proper medication in the proper amount? On a global scale I suspect it is on the order of billions of times a week...
WTF is that limitation? As an employee I can post on FaceBook all the items I've stolen from my previous employers, mock all my previous bosses, and run my own "Hot or Not" and "Yeah, I tapped that" websites and a potential employer can't use any of that in their hiring decisions?
If passed, it will become a lot harder for young Germans to get hired - employers will be reluctant to take a chance on someone they don't personally know (especially when one considers how hard it is for a German company to fire a bad employee)...
So if passed, German employers can't monitor employee emails sent from employers servers during business hours? They can't access employee pages on public websites (Facebook) though anyone else can (like customers)? Seems to me a few employees could destroy a company and the employer would be helpless to stop it. Imagine a disgruntled employee that starts telling off customers via emails, posts falsehoods about company products on site like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and steals office supplies - this law ties the hands of the employer to track such activities.
I hope they called this the "Lousy Employee Protection Act"
I'm still shocked to learn that the FCC still doesn't classify broadband internet as a telecommunications service. What else could it be?
Do you actually understand what that means?
If the Federal Government were to regulate/oversee the broadband internet service the way it does telcom, there would be a lot of changes:
1) The Federal Gov't could dictate the price one provider has to offer up their hardware to ther competitor - and the provider can't refuse to offer access to ther hardware from their competitors 2) The Federal Gov't could require notification of outages of a certain size or duration 3) The Federal Gov't could limit/control what services the broadband carriers carry/offer 4) The Federal Gov't can start to impose taxes and levies on broadband services (just like cell phones and land lines - remeber how long it took to pay off the Spanish American War?)
The Federal Gov't involvement doesn't come cheaply, and it will raise, not lower end-user costs either through increased administration costs for the ISPs or through taxes and levies passed-through to the consumer. Would federal oversight foster or hinder small start-up ISPs in a given area?
All I'm saying is understand what you are calling for...
First, it's Leaky Faucet (Unless you are thinking of Farrah Fawcett 8^)
Second, never try ot teach a pig to fly, it wastes your time and annoys the pig. The same goes for having in-depth technical discussions with many slashdot commenters...
Let me see if I understand - you take one VM (Say, an Ubuntu 10.04 server running a LAMP stack, just to pick one), then you make "diff's" of that initial VM and create additional VMs that are also running OS/software (as a starting point), Of course, I can load up other software on the "diff'd" VMs, but they increase the actual memory footprint of each VM. So, to maximize oversubscription of memory, I'd want to limit myself to running VMs that are as similar as possible (say a farm of Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP servers), and were I to run a machine with a couple Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP servers, a couple Windows Server 2008 servers, a WIndows Server 2003 server, and an Ubuntu 9.04 server ont he same machine I'd have minimal memory oversubscription benefits (the multiple Windows Server 2008 and Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP servers would share memory, but the one-off Windows Server 2003 and Ubuntu 9.04 would have no shared memory)... Correct?
Interesting idea, seems to me the memory server would cause a serious impact on server performance, but that is the view from my armchair, I'll reserve judgement until I see it in action.
If you read the bill, you'll see that it was a house bill that was amended in the senate, then amended in the house, then amended in the senat yet again, and what we have now is a bill that is no longer about air safety or taxing TARP bonuses, but instead a perfectly transparent attempt to buy the votes of teachers and senior citizens by siphoning off $26BN from Defense, Food assistance programs, and in eliminating tax credits for foreign workers who pay income taxes in foreign countries AND in the US.
This is such horseshit it is unbelievable - I just heard Nancy Pelosi say this will create 300,000 jobs. She says it passed the House twice before, but once as an air safety bill. then as a tarp company bonus tax initiative. They dumped BOTH initiatives in favor of a bill that sucks billions from our defense spending, low income food aid, and $10.6BN in new taxes due from companies that have employees oveseas. They are going to vote now, wonder how the vote will go?
They are taking food out of the mouths of our poor, taking ammunition, weapons and other supplies out of the hands of our soldiers, and taxing companies/individuals that are working overseas, to fund already cut teacher jobs and prop up Medicare so that it can limp along through the Nov elections.
At least they aren't pandering to the public to try and buy our votes with our own money!
1) Not every environment is like the one you work with - my browser doesn't highlight spelling errors, yours does - bravo, your environment has training wheels, that helps you look smarter than you otherwise would appear... 2) I never said students shouldn't protest tuition increases, I simply pointed out the dichotomy of buying expensive computer hardware whilst "crying poverty" when it comes to school tuition.
I have to wonder, did the Marketing Department have the right to "give away" copyrighted material for use on a non-Discovery Channel site? I bet they didn't. Did the lawyers talk to the Marketing Department before sending the notices to the fan site? I bet they didn't. Did the fansite give credit to the Marketing Department for providing the "exclusive" clips for use on the fansite? Probably not.
So where does that leave us? Lawyers who trolled google looking for sites violating Discover Channel properties came across a treasure trove of videos without any convienient way to determine their source on the website. Barring such attribution, the low-level lawyer assigned to the task simply documented everything they saw on the fan website and the senior lawyers approved it without any real investigation.
I suspect the lawyers involved never imagined the Marketing Department would "feed" this site material, and I'm doubly-sure Marketing never approached the Legal Department to properly record the rights they were trying to give the fan site to play the videos.
I think the Marketing group is the one that "went rogue" and went against Discover Channel policy, the lawyers only did what they are supposed to do, and the poor chap with the fan site is really at the mercy of the Discovery Channel Legal Department, since the Marketing Group involved him in their extra-legal adventure in gurellia marketing.
In a perfect world the Marketing Group would own-up to the problem and protect the fan site, but I expect full CYA-mode from them and the poor folks running the fan site will suddenly find themselves without a fan site anymore.
In hindsight, the fan site owner should have verified the legality of the clips/info he was sent - it sounds dumb, but ultimately he is responsible for the information on his site.
I can't wait until the Mainstream Media latches on to this and we get "Balloon Boy"-like coverage of this chunk of ice floating out to sea goes 24x7, until it melts, and the seas don't measurably rise (not that any reasonlable person on either side of th edebate would expect them to), they'll move on to the futile "disaster"...
Or maybe a better analogy would be that this will be the world's biggest slow-motion white bronco chase...
You said: The Artic is warming at about 3X the rate of temperate zones, the phenomena is called Polar Amplification [wikipedia.org], it was predicted by one of James Hansens models in the 80's and has since been confirmed by obsevation. (Emphasis added)
So, without any intensive investigation into the matter, it would seem that James Hansen had several different computer models, and this one model, the one that predicted "Polar Amplification," was proven correct after the fact. What of his other models? Were they all equal until one was "confirmed" by history? To me, this underscores that we don't really know about the climate, but we have lots of ideas.
I believe the saying is "thorw enough stuff against the wall, something is bound to stick"...
So those kids that picket everytime their tuition bills go up (for example here at US Berkeley) are buyng macintoshes instead of the more affordable PCs? Why, how can this be? To hear them rant on and on everytime tuition increases you'd think they were down to their last nickle - oh wait, I was just reminded that Apple offers discounts to students and faculty - what is it 5%? THat must be how they afford all that cool Apple Tech...
I can hear the commenters all across the internet now - "I've never studied anything about the arctic or the antarctic ice caps, climatology, or for that matter earth sciences in any real depth, but I KNOW this is proof of (insert really bad thing here)!"
Of course, to save time, most folks leave off the pre-amble and get right to the "I KNOW this is proof of (insert really bad thing here)!" (The not knowing what you are writing about is just assumed...)
How is this evil? Seriously, two companies partner to provide better service to their mutual customers and you consider it evil? How about when AAA teams up with hotel chains to give me a discount, is that evil too? Or, when AAA partners with towing companies to ensure I am towed within a certain period of time (a form of tow truck QOS), is that evil? Google wants to provide a better service to it's customers/users - when did that become evil?
How? QOS doesn't reduce available bandwidth for all non-QOS traffic (it doesn't carve out a percentage of available capacity), it merely ensures that when the network is congested some traffic will take precedence. The actual difference for non-QOS traffic will only be during peak congestion periods and when there is no QOS traffic to carry, there will be no impact to the non-QOS traffic. Of course, this all assumes ISPs would never upgrade their networks using the revenues from those QOS agreements - if they did, then the net impact on non-QOS traffic would be positive.
It makes no sense for an ISP to actively worsen the service it provides it's customers - that would create a market opportunity for a competitor. Don't have competition in your market? Work on that issue the free market only works when there is competition - fighting to try and manage a monopoly is a losing battle.
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How big a problem is this? The author proposes we build satellite uplinks in every commercial airframe, from corporate jets to airliners, that they stream a staggering amount of data through some new satellites to unbuilt ground stations to retain this data for post-mortum analysis... Does this author have any idea how many airframes there are? Any idea what such a retrofit would cost per-plane? What the estimated downtime would be to retrofit this hardware into a thirty year old airframe? And, the big question, how long would it take to design, build, and certify just such an uplink - with, of course, SIX NINES uptime?
The only real problem the author seems to have is that tape isn't "cool" and other, cooler, options exist.
And let's not forget that 99.999% of information captured will never be needed, since the plane didn't have an "event".
Don't forget, the signal needs to be jam-proof, and has to work in any possible weather conditions - if it can't work in a storm, what is it's value?
Are you seriously thinking that folks 'branded' with unremovable GPS collars will be able to move freely and participate openly in the community?
Where will they live once society figures out you can limit the places they can live (as with regitered sex offenders, who have to live so far away from schools, playgrounds, etc.)?
Where will they work? People without criminal records can't find jobs, and parolees have an even harder time, despite the wide-held notions of 'having paid their debt to society' and the ideal of giving someone a second chance. Active prisoners would not benefit from the view of having 'paid their debt', and would be rendered unemployable, placing the burden for their sustainence on the social welfare system instead of the prison system.
It sounds nice, but this idea seems to ignore reality and is focusing on a technical solution to a social problem, ignoring all the related issues.
Sounds nice, but when 1/4th of the prison population turns up in neighborhoods across America with their tell
-tale "I took/take drugs" GPS collar, anklet they might find it a little bit hard to find a job, and they could easily find themselves treated as a new social leper, joining the registered sex offenders who have to live a certain distance from schools, playgrounds, etc (to protect the children). So, once you have turned out 25% of the prison population and branded them unemployable, how will they live - either from Gov't Subsidies or by committing crimes - all you've done is shift the cost from prisons to welfare and their next victims.
And how long until someone implements the ever-popular "exploding collar" as seen in countless sic-fi movies? (Wedlock, Escape from New York, etc.?)
The same people that don't want to live near a prison won't want to live next to a current prisoner.
Also, I take issue with this meme that 25% of all those incarcerated are locked up ONLY for non-violent drug charges. For that to be true, it would require that ON AVERAGE one in for convicts behind bars was guilty of either using or selling drugs, without any associated crimes, like robbery, assault, possession of a gun, etc., and that is simply unbelievable.
Drug users poison themselves, and I find very few possession charges of "individual use" quantities of drugs that carry mandatory prison time... Drug dealing poisons not only the dealer, but also the community, and almost always carries mandatory prison time - as it should. If you are counting parolees in your 25% figure, then your number is inflated because parole isn't prison.
The real problem with drug statutes is the involvement of elected officials in defining mandatory sentencing guidelines for certain offenses, reflecting the "tough on crime" stance of coveted blocks of voters - disparate punishments for, say, crack cocaine, were not implemented to destroy certain racial communities, it was a sincere attempt by well-meaning, but ill-informed public that stiffer penalties reduce crime AND that crack cocaine was a more devastating drug than 'regular' cocaine. The do-gooders that tried to help poor inner-city families wound up destroying them, and once politicized, stiff drug penalties will never be walked back, lest the politicians be viewed as "soft on crime."
Me thinks that Nancy Pratt and Dr. Smith are hoping for their 15 minutes of fame with this Y2K-like "catastrophy" - I'd hate to think a reporter didn't fully investigate the claims of the subject they are reporting on...
Yeah, exactly - the FDA could change EVERY CONNECTOR on every medical device that uses tubing "tomorrow" (I assume you meant that metaphorically, not literally Dr. Smith), ignoring that changing each connector on, say, an air pipe, would require a recertification of the device. How many connecotrs in each hospital room would have to be changed? Doctor's office? Operating rooms? Ambulances? And how long would it take the industry to respond with retro-fit kits and sufficient inspectors to review all the work required, let alone the lead time needed to manufacture, distrubute and use all the new tubing required...
Yeah, right - the FDA is simply a rubber-stamp for the mdical industry... You have to be painfully ignorant of the medical field to make such statement.
We really want the FDA to regulate the size, color, and style of connecotrs on all medical devices? Seriously? We can't trust doctors with surgical tubing any more?
That sounds expensive, especially when you factor in the cost of all the CYA expenses to protect hospitals/medical providers from federal fines and penalties...
Exactly - this is a story becuase most readers forget how commonplace these types of medical procedures are and how many times a day they are safely carried out. How many times do mothers delivering babies NOT get spinal anesthesia in their veins? How many times do patients not get their IV lines connected to air lines? Etc...
I'm certain, if investigated when they occur, there is an aggrivating factor that contributed to the error (over-worked staff, poor working conditions, lack of training, poorly communicated instructions, someone "helping out" in an area they aren't qualified in, etc.)... True, if the tubes were differnt shapes/colors/sizes these mistakes woul dbe harder, but that buries the contributing factor (sleep deprivation, etc. that will simply cause problems elsewhere).
A good carpenter never blames his tools.
By requiring that every connection/tube be a different color/size, you've now made medical care even more expensive than it already is - hospitals will be forced to stock all manner of spare parts, in sufficient qty for all possible applications - they will no longer be able to stock a huge spool of bulk tubing and cut it down for the application required... Sounds like a trivial expense increase right? But the hospital will have to have somewhere to store all these unique parts (build a storage facility, for example), they'll have to man it 24x7 (that's a minimum of 4 full time employees), plus have some way of inventorying and distributing the unique parts to all places in the hospital (a group of orderlies with carts, say another 10-15 full time jobs for a regular sized hospital, again to allow for 24x7 coverage), and let's not forget the increased expense of each specialty part when compared with the cost of a length of tubing cut off a huge spool of PVC medical-grade tubing.
But hey, we'll have lowered the bar on the nurse's job - you know who nurses are, right? They are the ones that went to college for four years, then went on for a nursing certificate and worked for months/year to learn how to do their job and not make mistakes, but heck, we can't hold them responsible for actually paying attention and doing the right thing...
I can just imagine the scenario now - "Sorry, we'll have to reschedule your open-heart surgery because we've run out of magenta anesthesia tubing with the square fittings, and trust me, you're gonna want anesthesia for that operation - we sent Jimmy over to the hospital on the other side of town to see if they can spare an appropriate tube..."
From the excerpt above:
How can an operating room be made 100% safe? Nurses go to school to learn how to work in such an environemnt. If, after years of training and working in the field they can't be relied on to know what they are doing, then what was the point of all that expensive training?
If an operating room is to be brought down to the level that anyone can assist the doctor, then nurses are irrelevant - if every pill has to be a different color, shape or size, if every tube, connection, and device needs to be a size incompatible with anything else in the room, and if all the sharp pointy tools need to have safety guards, then what have we accomplished?
Medical mistakes happen, and they always will happen, because of the humans in the process - people have bad days, make mistakes, get tired, get bad instructions, etc - but I for one, am not ready to submit myself to a CNC-style surgical machine without a human operator controling the blade, dosing me with medications from a spreadsheet, or making diagnosis via an online questionaire - I want people in the process, mistakes and all. Besides, I think the number of preventable human errors looks huge, until you realize how many times things go right - for every procedure with tens or hundred of errors per year, I suspect there are thousands or tens of thousands of similar procedures that are performed without incident - daily.
How many times do nurses manage to find the right receptical for the hoses? Gather and dose the proper medication in the proper amount? On a global scale I suspect it is on the order of billions of times a week...
WTF is that limitation? As an employee I can post on FaceBook all the items I've stolen from my previous employers, mock all my previous bosses, and run my own "Hot or Not" and "Yeah, I tapped that" websites and a potential employer can't use any of that in their hiring decisions?
If passed, it will become a lot harder for young Germans to get hired - employers will be reluctant to take a chance on someone they don't personally know (especially when one considers how hard it is for a German company to fire a bad employee)...
So if passed, German employers can't monitor employee emails sent from employers servers during business hours? They can't access employee pages on public websites (Facebook) though anyone else can (like customers)? Seems to me a few employees could destroy a company and the employer would be helpless to stop it. Imagine a disgruntled employee that starts telling off customers via emails, posts falsehoods about company products on site like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and steals office supplies - this law ties the hands of the employer to track such activities.
I hope they called this the "Lousy Employee Protection Act"
Do you actually understand what that means?
If the Federal Government were to regulate/oversee the broadband internet service the way it does telcom, there would be a lot of changes:
1) The Federal Gov't could dictate the price one provider has to offer up their hardware to ther competitor - and the provider can't refuse to offer access to ther hardware from their competitors
2) The Federal Gov't could require notification of outages of a certain size or duration
3) The Federal Gov't could limit/control what services the broadband carriers carry/offer
4) The Federal Gov't can start to impose taxes and levies on broadband services (just like cell phones and land lines - remeber how long it took to pay off the Spanish American War?)
The Federal Gov't involvement doesn't come cheaply, and it will raise, not lower end-user costs either through increased administration costs for the ISPs or through taxes and levies passed-through to the consumer. Would federal oversight foster or hinder small start-up ISPs in a given area?
All I'm saying is understand what you are calling for...
First, it's Leaky Faucet (Unless you are thinking of Farrah Fawcett 8^)
Second, never try ot teach a pig to fly, it wastes your time and annoys the pig. The same goes for having in-depth technical discussions with many slashdot commenters...
Let me see if I understand - you take one VM (Say, an Ubuntu 10.04 server running a LAMP stack, just to pick one), then you make "diff's" of that initial VM and create additional VMs that are also running OS/software (as a starting point), Of course, I can load up other software on the "diff'd" VMs, but they increase the actual memory footprint of each VM. So, to maximize oversubscription of memory, I'd want to limit myself to running VMs that are as similar as possible (say a farm of Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP servers), and were I to run a machine with a couple Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP servers, a couple Windows Server 2008 servers, a WIndows Server 2003 server, and an Ubuntu 9.04 server ont he same machine I'd have minimal memory oversubscription benefits (the multiple Windows Server 2008 and Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP servers would share memory, but the one-off Windows Server 2003 and Ubuntu 9.04 would have no shared memory)... Correct?
Interesting idea, seems to me the memory server would cause a serious impact on server performance, but that is the view from my armchair, I'll reserve judgement until I see it in action.
Thanks for following up on the /. story.
If you read the bill, you'll see that it was a house bill that was amended in the senate, then amended in the house, then amended in the senat yet again, and what we have now is a bill that is no longer about air safety or taxing TARP bonuses, but instead a perfectly transparent attempt to buy the votes of teachers and senior citizens by siphoning off $26BN from Defense, Food assistance programs, and in eliminating tax credits for foreign workers who pay income taxes in foreign countries AND in the US.
This is such horseshit it is unbelievable - I just heard Nancy Pelosi say this will create 300,000 jobs. She says it passed the House twice before, but once as an air safety bill. then as a tarp company bonus tax initiative. They dumped BOTH initiatives in favor of a bill that sucks billions from our defense spending, low income food aid, and $10.6BN in new taxes due from companies that have employees oveseas. They are going to vote now, wonder how the vote will go?
They are taking food out of the mouths of our poor, taking ammunition, weapons and other supplies out of the hands of our soldiers, and taxing companies/individuals that are working overseas, to fund already cut teacher jobs and prop up Medicare so that it can limp along through the Nov elections.
At least they aren't pandering to the public to try and buy our votes with our own money!
Whatever:
1) Not every environment is like the one you work with - my browser doesn't highlight spelling errors, yours does - bravo, your environment has training wheels, that helps you look smarter than you otherwise would appear...
2) I never said students shouldn't protest tuition increases, I simply pointed out the dichotomy of buying expensive computer hardware whilst "crying poverty" when it comes to school tuition.
A half-day of work is typically cheaper than a new computer, and I believe that was the point the previous poster was trying to make.
I have to wonder, did the Marketing Department have the right to "give away" copyrighted material for use on a non-Discovery Channel site? I bet they didn't. Did the lawyers talk to the Marketing Department before sending the notices to the fan site? I bet they didn't. Did the fansite give credit to the Marketing Department for providing the "exclusive" clips for use on the fansite? Probably not.
So where does that leave us? Lawyers who trolled google looking for sites violating Discover Channel properties came across a treasure trove of videos without any convienient way to determine their source on the website. Barring such attribution, the low-level lawyer assigned to the task simply documented everything they saw on the fan website and the senior lawyers approved it without any real investigation.
I suspect the lawyers involved never imagined the Marketing Department would "feed" this site material, and I'm doubly-sure Marketing never approached the Legal Department to properly record the rights they were trying to give the fan site to play the videos.
I think the Marketing group is the one that "went rogue" and went against Discover Channel policy, the lawyers only did what they are supposed to do, and the poor chap with the fan site is really at the mercy of the Discovery Channel Legal Department, since the Marketing Group involved him in their extra-legal adventure in gurellia marketing.
In a perfect world the Marketing Group would own-up to the problem and protect the fan site, but I expect full CYA-mode from them and the poor folks running the fan site will suddenly find themselves without a fan site anymore.
In hindsight, the fan site owner should have verified the legality of the clips/info he was sent - it sounds dumb, but ultimately he is responsible for the information on his site.
I can't wait until the Mainstream Media latches on to this and we get "Balloon Boy"-like coverage of this chunk of ice floating out to sea goes 24x7, until it melts, and the seas don't measurably rise (not that any reasonlable person on either side of th edebate would expect them to), they'll move on to the futile "disaster"...
Or maybe a better analogy would be that this will be the world's biggest slow-motion white bronco chase...
You said: The Artic is warming at about 3X the rate of temperate zones, the phenomena is called Polar Amplification [wikipedia.org], it was predicted by one of James Hansens models in the 80's and has since been confirmed by obsevation. (Emphasis added)
So, without any intensive investigation into the matter, it would seem that James Hansen had several different computer models, and this one model, the one that predicted "Polar Amplification," was proven correct after the fact. What of his other models? Were they all equal until one was "confirmed" by history? To me, this underscores that we don't really know about the climate, but we have lots of ideas.
I believe the saying is "thorw enough stuff against the wall, something is bound to stick"...
So those kids that picket everytime their tuition bills go up (for example here at US Berkeley) are buyng macintoshes instead of the more affordable PCs? Why, how can this be? To hear them rant on and on everytime tuition increases you'd think they were down to their last nickle - oh wait, I was just reminded that Apple offers discounts to students and faculty - what is it 5%? THat must be how they afford all that cool Apple Tech...
I can hear the commenters all across the internet now - "I've never studied anything about the arctic or the antarctic ice caps, climatology, or for that matter earth sciences in any real depth, but I KNOW this is proof of (insert really bad thing here)!"
Of course, to save time, most folks leave off the pre-amble and get right to the "I KNOW this is proof of (insert really bad thing here)!" (The not knowing what you are writing about is just assumed...)
How is this evil? Seriously, two companies partner to provide better service to their mutual customers and you consider it evil? How about when AAA teams up with hotel chains to give me a discount, is that evil too? Or, when AAA partners with towing companies to ensure I am towed within a certain period of time (a form of tow truck QOS), is that evil? Google wants to provide a better service to it's customers/users - when did that become evil?
How? QOS doesn't reduce available bandwidth for all non-QOS traffic (it doesn't carve out a percentage of available capacity), it merely ensures that when the network is congested some traffic will take precedence. The actual difference for non-QOS traffic will only be during peak congestion periods and when there is no QOS traffic to carry, there will be no impact to the non-QOS traffic. Of course, this all assumes ISPs would never upgrade their networks using the revenues from those QOS agreements - if they did, then the net impact on non-QOS traffic would be positive.
It makes no sense for an ISP to actively worsen the service it provides it's customers - that would create a market opportunity for a competitor. Don't have competition in your market? Work on that issue the free market only works when there is competition - fighting to try and manage a monopoly is a losing battle.