I learned Turtle (elementary school), Atari Basic (video game), Commodore Assembly (1980s: on my own), TI Basic (high school course), and some Pascal and C++ in college courses.
More recently I learned VHDL and Verilog for my hardware engineering requirements. None of these languages seem all that difficult to me. All a person really needs is to learn "how to think logically & solve problems". After they learn to do that, they should be able to handle any language.
The law actually states "right to bear arms" so a phaser would technically be protected by the Constitution as a borne weapons.
Of course if you prefer a literal 1790 interpretation, then "right to a free press" only refers to ink pressed onto paper, and not more modern techniques like photocopies or inkjets or electronic media. Personally I don't think it's necessary to be that literal. It would be a major hassle to keep adding amendments just to say, "...add photocopies, inkjets, and electronic screens..."
Marketing research has also proven that stealing a TV is a good way to get cheap product (100% off!). That doesn't make it moral (it violates another person's right of property & is also theft of labor).
As I said in a previous post, that's why subliminal 1-frame images that say "buy me" or "this will make you sexy" have been banned.
Isn't it ALSO fraud to mail a camera that the seller KNEW was a worthless piece'o'junk even though he advertised it as "fully operational"??? Yes of course it is.
I'm not going to waste $50 of my money mailing a broken brick back to a Known Scam Artist (which he would then pawn off on some other poor soul). Especially since the refund was only $70, which means I'd net just $20 refund!!! Nope; not gonna do it; wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.
Well in the U.S. we have multiple long distance providers: AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et cetera. Although Bell owns the lines, they are required by law to open the long-distance connections w/o restriction.
Perhaps a similar law needs to be laid-down for internet providers like Teksaavy: Access to Bell's lines without restriction.
P.S. I have a 750 kbit/sec ADSL connection. I suppose you would call that "slow" but I think it's fantastic, and I love the cost (only $15/month). It's a wonderful improvement over the 1 kbit modems I used back-in-the-day (when it would take four hours to download just one floppy). Oh and I walked uphill in the snow to get to school.
Both ways.;-)
But seriously: I really do love my 750 kbit connection. I can download an entire season of Lost or 24 or Galactica in a single day. I can't complain about that! I can not honestly call this ADSL connection "slow" in any way, shape, or form, and I have a hard time comprehending people who use that label about this wonderfully-fast technology.
- Bell which is lower in price, but throttles the bandwidth due to limited cable availability.
- Rogers which is higher in price, but uses that higher cost to buy extra cables & doesn't need to throttle.
- (Are you sure there's no third company? Like AT&T or Sprint or MCI?)
-
So you see Teksaavy DOES have options. Each of these 2 choices has a drawback (throttling on one hand; higher price on the other), but that's life in a nutshell. You have to weigh the pros and cons, and then decide what you're willing to live with. ("Do I buy the $4 tropicana, or the $2 store-brand that tastes blah?")
If you're looking for a third option that's both Cheap and Throttle-free..... well it doesn't exist. The technology has not reached that point yet, because high-bandwidth to the home is still relatively new (5 years old). Maybe in 2020, yes, but not in 2008. (You might as well demand Intel/Motorola sell you a 3000 megahertz processor in the year 1980... not going to happen, because the tech did not exist.)
I said it elsewhere, and I'm repeat it:
- The internet is not Harry Potter. It's not magic. It has real-world limits (bandwidth on one hand; cost on the other).
What will likely happen is that Teksaavy (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
It doesn't really matter WHAT you mentioned. The point is you said a large chunk of the internet is "a waste".
Who are you to make that judgment call? What you call "waste" I might call "useful". I repeat: Don't be elitist and decide what should or should not exist on the web.
>>>"when someone said that we won't need anything faster than a 387 fpu, or more than 640K, or whatever. They were right. And were never proven wrong. Just because a market is out there for flashy gadgets that don't really work any better than 20 year old technology doesn't prove the naysayers wrong."
Well...
I gotta disagree. It's a nice modern feature to be able to hear REAL music instead of sid-music (C=64) or watch REAL movies instead of 5-minute graphics demos (Commodore Amiga). There have been quite a few improvements over the technology that existed twenty years ago. As much as I enjoyed SID music and Amiga "movies" back in the 80s, I still prefer getting the real deal with MP3s and MPEGs on a modern multi-megabyte machine.
Or else buy a CPU that's not 6 years old.;-) He's got the same CPU I bought back in 2002! Of course a 2002-era CPU can not handle 1080p. I don't even think 1080p existed back then, and 1080i was mainly just a pipe dream reserved to only $10,000 TV sets, not PCs.
However a modern 2007-designed CPU should be able to handle that movie just fine.
So why upgrade if the 2007-designed CPU can play 1080p movies flawlessly? What possible *real world* (not star trek) application could make someone want to get a faster cpu.
>>>"The thing is, most PCs have plenty of computing power as a single core system
>"And 640k ought to be enough for anyone."
No not really, but I think PCs will follow a progression similar to cars. When cars were first available they were a mere 10-20 horsepower. As the technology developed, engineers learned to make better cars until the 1950s when a family car might have 400-500 horsepower. In theory engineers could have continued building more-and-more powerful cars, so that we would have 4000-5000 horsepower today, but there simply was *no need* for anything more than 400-500 hp, so that's where the power curve stabilized for family cars. (And eventually dropped as fuel economy became a higher priority than power.)
Same with PCs.
I've watched them progress from 1 megahertz to almost 4000 megahertz with 4 cores... but now we are reaching the point where PCs have more power than what most people need. We are coming to the top of the power curve where engineers will be able to build 10-20,000 megahertz machines (someday), but there simply won't be the need to buy anything higher than 4-5000 megahertz. The average consumer will buy just enough power to play the latest High-Def movies.
Same way that today's average consumer buys a car with just enough power to get to work & back home.
No big surprise. Terrorists are essentially combatants. We may not agree with HOW they combat, but they are combatants. It has long been established that a well-engineered army will be an effective force:
- When Hannibal built (from scratch) a bridge to cross the Rhine(?) River and invade Roman Gaul.
- When Rome responded by building their very first fleet, and soundly defeated the Carthage navy thanks to superior engineering.
- When Julius Caesar built siege walls to starve Vercingeterix into submission.
- When Roman soldiers formed a "tank formation" and, like a machine, marched across Britania killing everything in sight, including Queen Boudica and her rebellion.
- And in more modern times (1991 and 2003; Iraq), the way that U.S. engineering can wipe-out ground stations, effectively blinding the enemy and winning the battle.
Engineering can make the difference between success and failure on the battlefield, whether it's a terrorist squad or a national army.
VISTA was like a trip down memory lane. It showed me a beloved screen that I have not seen since my Commodore 64 days:
"STILL LOADING" "please wait 5 minutes"
Ahhhh. The more things change, the more they stay the same. My PC's only ~12,000 times faster* than my old 1 megahertz Commodore, and yet it still has that fatal flaw of slow disk access. How nostalgic.
*
* (Aside: I calculated 12,000 times in a very simple matter. 3000 megahertz times dual-edge clocking times dual processor == 3000 x2 x2 == approximately 12,000 times. Is there a better way to measure how much faster a Core Duo 3000 is compared to the venerable 1 megahertz C=64 CPU?)
>>>"MAFIAA can tell Jobs to stick that 99 cents up his ass, because they are going to stop supplying music to itunes for sale - instead they will switch over all of their product to myspace and it's $2.99 prices."
Wouldn't such an action violate several anti-trust and anti-cartel laws with both the U.S. and the E.U.?
(just curious)
BTW $3.00 for a music datafile is ridiculous. I used to buy 45s or Cassettesingles, and they cost about $3.00 which made logical sense because they were made of plastic (which costs money) and had to be shipped cross-country (also costs money). But a music datafile has No physicality, therefore no material or shipping cost. The only cost required is to pay the wages of the producer & engineers behind the product. About 50 cents per datafile. And that's it.
Being an expert in demolition does NOT make you an expert in building collapses. In truth there really aren't that many experts in Trade Center-style collapses, since it happens so rarely. However engineering computer simulations show exactly what happens when 30 floors of a building suddenly "drop" onto the bottom part of a building. i.e. Pancaking.
>>>Quote from the Slashdot story: "In the face of widespread, escalating online piracy, music sales dropped..."
Funny, but let's examine this seriously. Have music sales dropped? Yes. And no.
- CD sales have dropped. That's true.
- But Single sales have soared to the highest level EVER experienced by record companies. Single sales on Itunes and other online stores have sold more units than any time in history. (Funny how the record companies conveniently forgot to mention that fact. What's that old saying? "Lying with statistics"?)
Advertising, "Check out our new car; you'll love it," is fine with me, but when the advertising starts using techniques that can rewrite the brain, then it's crossed the line. (That's why subliminal advertising with 1 frame "buy me" or "you are sexy" images that sink directly into the subconscious part of the brain have been banned.)
Go ahead and market your wares.
But don't use brainwash techniques. That's as bad as hacking into somebody's computer & changing their personal data.
Inflation (or as I call it: devaluation) doesn't affect "real" money like gold, silver, or diamonds. Devaluation only affects the fake paper money.
I don't have any gold now but I'm planning on getting some. It's the only way type of wealth that keeps its value, even if the paper system collapses and/or banks close & take your money with them.
If you're a seller, it's extremely easy to scammed: - your buyer uses counterfeit money order (no money for you) - your buyer claims non-receipt (instant refund if you can't prove delivery) - your buyer pays with stolen card (money gets sucked out of your account)
As a buyer, it's extremely easy NOT to be scammed: - use paypal - use credit card - return item with Confirmed Delivery
I've found it extremely easy to return damaged items to a seller (even when the seller refused), and then file a claim with both Paypal and my Credit card to recover the money. ----- In one case the post office wanted to charge me $50 to return a large, heavy camera, which was waaaay too much money. So instead I returned an empty box to the seller, and threw the non-operational camera into the dumpster. I got a refund from Visa because the empty box showed "delivered".
Stop using credit cards then. No more trail for them to track. (Yes I know: inconvenient.) (It's a choice; convenience of cards? Or anonymity of using no cards? You decide.) I continue using credit cards because they offer me 1-5% off everything I buy. I don't mind the tracking as long as I'm getting back ~$1000 a year. However if that 1-5% discount ever stops, I'll switch back to cash/checks.
Also:
Congress recently passed a law that entitles the citizens to request One credit report per year from each of the agencies. So you are no longer barred from accessing your own data.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned Turtle (elementary school), Atari Basic (video game), Commodore Assembly (1980s: on my own), TI Basic (high school course), and some Pascal and C++ in college courses.
More recently I learned VHDL and Verilog for my hardware engineering requirements. None of these languages seem all that difficult to me. All a person really needs is to learn "how to think logically & solve problems". After they learn to do that, they should be able to handle any language.
That's not funny. That's insulting to the parent.
The law actually states "right to bear arms" so a phaser would technically be protected by the Constitution as a borne weapons.
Of course if you prefer a literal 1790 interpretation, then "right to a free press" only refers to ink pressed onto paper, and not more modern techniques like photocopies or inkjets or electronic media. Personally I don't think it's necessary to be that literal. It would be a major hassle to keep adding amendments just to say, "...add photocopies, inkjets, and electronic screens..."
I find it ironic you've been labeled "flamebait". ;-)
Marketing research has also proven that stealing a TV is a good way to get cheap product (100% off!). That doesn't make it moral (it violates another person's right of property & is also theft of labor).
As I said in a previous post, that's why subliminal 1-frame images that say "buy me" or "this will make you sexy" have been banned.
Isn't it ALSO fraud to mail a camera that the seller KNEW was a worthless piece'o'junk even though he advertised it as "fully operational"??? Yes of course it is.
I'm not going to waste $50 of my money mailing a broken brick back to a Known Scam Artist (which he would then pawn off on some other poor soul). Especially since the refund was only $70, which means I'd net just $20 refund!!! Nope; not gonna do it; wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.
Well in the U.S. we have multiple long distance providers: AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et cetera. Although Bell owns the lines, they are required by law to open the long-distance connections w/o restriction.
Perhaps a similar law needs to be laid-down for internet providers like Teksaavy: Access to Bell's lines without restriction.
P.S. I have a 750 kbit/sec ADSL connection. I suppose you would call that "slow" but I think it's fantastic, and I love the cost (only $15/month). It's a wonderful improvement over the 1 kbit modems I used back-in-the-day (when it would take four hours to download just one floppy). Oh and I walked uphill in the snow to get to school.
;-)
Both ways.
But seriously: I really do love my 750 kbit connection. I can download an entire season of Lost or 24 or Galactica in a single day. I can't complain about that! I can not honestly call this ADSL connection "slow" in any way, shape, or form, and I have a hard time comprehending people who use that label about this wonderfully-fast technology.
No. Actually Teksaavy has TWO options:
- Bell which is lower in price, but throttles the bandwidth due to limited cable availability.
- Rogers which is higher in price, but uses that higher cost to buy extra cables & doesn't need to throttle.
- (Are you sure there's no third company? Like AT&T or Sprint or MCI?)
-
So you see Teksaavy DOES have options. Each of these 2 choices has a drawback (throttling on one hand; higher price on the other), but that's life in a nutshell. You have to weigh the pros and cons, and then decide what you're willing to live with. ("Do I buy the $4 tropicana, or the $2 store-brand that tastes blah?")
If you're looking for a third option that's both Cheap and Throttle-free..... well it doesn't exist. The technology has not reached that point yet, because high-bandwidth to the home is still relatively new (5 years old). Maybe in 2020, yes, but not in 2008. (You might as well demand Intel/Motorola sell you a 3000 megahertz processor in the year 1980... not going to happen, because the tech did not exist.)
I said it elsewhere, and I'm repeat it:
- The internet is not Harry Potter. It's not magic. It has real-world limits (bandwidth on one hand; cost on the other).
OOOPS! (hides head in shame). Let me rephrase:
What will likely happen is that Teksaavy (the consumer) will located a new ISP provider that will not throttle their bandwidth and then say, "Goodbye Bell". That's how the free market works.
We vote with our dollars.
It doesn't really matter WHAT you mentioned. The point is you said a large chunk of the internet is "a waste".
Who are you to make that judgment call? What you call "waste" I might call "useful". I repeat: Don't be elitist and decide what should or should not exist on the web.
>>>"when someone said that we won't need anything faster than a 387 fpu, or more than 640K, or whatever. They were right. And were never proven wrong. Just because a market is out there for flashy gadgets that don't really work any better than 20 year old technology doesn't prove the naysayers wrong."
Well...
I gotta disagree. It's a nice modern feature to be able to hear REAL music instead of sid-music (C=64) or watch REAL movies instead of 5-minute graphics demos (Commodore Amiga). There have been quite a few improvements over the technology that existed twenty years ago. As much as I enjoyed SID music and Amiga "movies" back in the 80s, I still prefer getting the real deal with MP3s and MPEGs on a modern multi-megabyte machine.
Or else buy a CPU that's not 6 years old. ;-) He's got the same CPU I bought back in 2002! Of course a 2002-era CPU can not handle 1080p. I don't even think 1080p existed back then, and 1080i was mainly just a pipe dream reserved to only $10,000 TV sets, not PCs.
However a modern 2007-designed CPU should be able to handle that movie just fine.
So why upgrade if the 2007-designed CPU can play 1080p movies flawlessly? What possible *real world* (not star trek) application could make someone want to get a faster cpu.
>>>"The thing is, most PCs have plenty of computing power as a single core system
>"And 640k ought to be enough for anyone."
No not really, but I think PCs will follow a progression similar to cars. When cars were first available they were a mere 10-20 horsepower. As the technology developed, engineers learned to make better cars until the 1950s when a family car might have 400-500 horsepower. In theory engineers could have continued building more-and-more powerful cars, so that we would have 4000-5000 horsepower today, but there simply was *no need* for anything more than 400-500 hp, so that's where the power curve stabilized for family cars. (And eventually dropped as fuel economy became a higher priority than power.)
Same with PCs.
I've watched them progress from 1 megahertz to almost 4000 megahertz with 4 cores... but now we are reaching the point where PCs have more power than what most people need. We are coming to the top of the power curve where engineers will be able to build 10-20,000 megahertz machines (someday), but there simply won't be the need to buy anything higher than 4-5000 megahertz. The average consumer will buy just enough power to play the latest High-Def movies.
Same way that today's average consumer buys a car with just enough power to get to work & back home.
No big surprise. Terrorists are essentially combatants. We may not agree with HOW they combat, but they are combatants. It has long been established that a well-engineered army will be an effective force:
- When Hannibal built (from scratch) a bridge to cross the Rhine(?) River and invade Roman Gaul.
- When Rome responded by building their very first fleet, and soundly defeated the Carthage navy thanks to superior engineering.
- When Julius Caesar built siege walls to starve Vercingeterix into submission.
- When Roman soldiers formed a "tank formation" and, like a machine, marched across Britania killing everything in sight, including Queen Boudica and her rebellion.
- And in more modern times (1991 and 2003; Iraq), the way that U.S. engineering can wipe-out ground stations, effectively blinding the enemy and winning the battle.
Engineering can make the difference between success and failure on the battlefield, whether it's a terrorist squad or a national army.
VISTA was like a trip down memory lane. It showed me a beloved screen that I have not seen since my Commodore 64 days:
"STILL LOADING"
"please wait 5 minutes"
Ahhhh. The more things change, the more they stay the same. My PC's only ~12,000 times faster* than my old 1 megahertz Commodore, and yet it still has that fatal flaw of slow disk access. How nostalgic.
*
* (Aside: I calculated 12,000 times in a very simple matter. 3000 megahertz times dual-edge clocking times dual processor == 3000 x2 x2 == approximately 12,000 times. Is there a better way to measure how much faster a Core Duo 3000 is compared to the venerable 1 megahertz C=64 CPU?)
I currently have a 3000 megahertz machine.
I want a new 3000 megahertz dual-processing machine. But I want XP. I guess I'm just outta luck?
DRM is easily defeated by dumping it to a Type IV Metal cassette recorder (like the one I've used the last 20 years). Or a Hi-Fi VCR for that matter.
Perhaps that's why companies are deliberately yanking these old analog devices off the market.
>>>"MAFIAA can tell Jobs to stick that 99 cents up his ass, because they are going to stop supplying music to itunes for sale - instead they will switch over all of their product to myspace and it's $2.99 prices."
Wouldn't such an action violate several anti-trust and anti-cartel laws with both the U.S. and the E.U.?
(just curious)
BTW $3.00 for a music datafile is ridiculous. I used to buy 45s or Cassettesingles, and they cost about $3.00 which made logical sense because they were made of plastic (which costs money) and had to be shipped cross-country (also costs money). But a music datafile has No physicality, therefore no material or shipping cost. The only cost required is to pay the wages of the producer & engineers behind the product. About 50 cents per datafile. And that's it.
$3.00 is a 600% markup. Nuts.
Being an expert in demolition does NOT make you an expert in building collapses. In truth there really aren't that many experts in Trade Center-style collapses, since it happens so rarely. However engineering computer simulations show exactly what happens when 30 floors of a building suddenly "drop" onto the bottom part of a building. i.e. Pancaking.
>>>Quote from the Slashdot story: "In the face of widespread, escalating online piracy, music sales dropped..."
Funny, but let's examine this seriously. Have music sales dropped? Yes. And no.
- CD sales have dropped. That's true.
- But Single sales have soared to the highest level EVER experienced by record companies. Single sales on Itunes and other online stores have sold more units than any time in history. (Funny how the record companies conveniently forgot to mention that fact. What's that old saying? "Lying with statistics"?)
I agree.
Advertising, "Check out our new car; you'll love it," is fine with me, but when the advertising starts using techniques that can rewrite the brain, then it's crossed the line. (That's why subliminal advertising with 1 frame "buy me" or "you are sexy" images that sink directly into the subconscious part of the brain have been banned.)
Go ahead and market your wares.
But don't use brainwash techniques. That's as bad as hacking into somebody's computer & changing their personal data.
Inflation (or as I call it: devaluation) doesn't affect "real" money like gold, silver, or diamonds. Devaluation only affects the fake paper money.
I don't have any gold now but I'm planning on getting some. It's the only way type of wealth that keeps its value, even if the paper system collapses and/or banks close & take your money with them.
If you're a seller, it's extremely easy to scammed:
- your buyer uses counterfeit money order (no money for you)
- your buyer claims non-receipt (instant refund if you can't prove delivery)
- your buyer pays with stolen card (money gets sucked out of your account)
As a buyer, it's extremely easy NOT to be scammed:
- use paypal
- use credit card
- return item with Confirmed Delivery
I've found it extremely easy to return damaged items to a seller (even when the seller refused), and then file a claim with both Paypal and my Credit card to recover the money. ----- In one case the post office wanted to charge me $50 to return a large, heavy camera, which was waaaay too much money. So instead I returned an empty box to the seller, and threw the non-operational camera into the dumpster. I got a refund from Visa because the empty box showed "delivered".
Stop using credit cards then. No more trail for them to track. (Yes I know: inconvenient.) (It's a choice; convenience of cards? Or anonymity of using no cards? You decide.) I continue using credit cards because they offer me 1-5% off everything I buy. I don't mind the tracking as long as I'm getting back ~$1000 a year. However if that 1-5% discount ever stops, I'll switch back to cash/checks.
Also:
Congress recently passed a law that entitles the citizens to request One credit report per year from each of the agencies. So you are no longer barred from accessing your own data.