For what reason has he waited all of this time to file said suit? It's not like the timing is great.... economy is still down, if he had waited a bit longer, perhaps the companies would have more money?
Patents are over a decade old... maybe he wanted to try and get his gold before they expired.
Fair enough... and obviously there isn't a lot of point in arguing over fictional technology... but still... two points:
The teleporter is explained; matter is converted to energy on a quantum basis, beamed down and reassembled ito its original quanta.
And all it took was a "heisenberg compensator", which is not really an explanation.;)
And Stephen Hawking says time travel is possible.
Not the kind that takes place in Star Trek...
"Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.
But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future."
do you think they would have named it teachbook, if there was no such thing as facebook? Seriously?
Would OpenOffice be named that if microsoft's dominant productivity suite was called Microsoft Works? Would IceWeasel be named that if the software it was a fork of wasn't called "FireFox"? Would FreeCraft be named that if Warcraft and Starcraft had been called something else? At the local grocery store there are even "Honey Nut Toasted O's" next to the "Honey Nut Cheerios". Would the knockoff even exist if the original didn't, never mind be named in such a way as to deliberately evoke the original?
Is there some element of trademark law that provides you control over marks and products that were influenced by the existence of an established mark or product? Of course not. As long as the teachbook logo is different enough etc, they should be in the clear.
and Star Trek was able to predict / influence how much more tech than Star Wars, example touch screens, tablet computers, cell phones, portable medical scanners, large database/network(internet), voice recognition, and so on
Star wars has what? 20hrs of source material? vs what for Star Trek?
as for accuracy of science star trek doesn't have the implausible light saber
They do have teleporters, shape shifters, and travel through time on a regular basis though.
Both have FTL travel, and goofy religions so that's a wash.
First one to go down was taken by a squad at most. Apparently he can lead the charge on the droid army for days on end without taking a scratch... but a couple dozen storm troopers... get him within a few seconds. (and he was ready) Why didn't the droids army ever bother to send
Second one gets taken down by the first shot fired. Less than a dozen troopers. Not 'ready'... but saw something was up in time to react.
Third one is in a fighter... goes down without a fight within seconds. Darth Vader himself (gifted pilot and force user) had trouble locking onto Luke in episode iv.
Fourth one on a bike... goes down without a fight within seconds. No leaping to safety, nothing.
And yoda... they figured they'd take yoda down with TWO guys. He at least saw it coming.
We all other 'lesser jedi' deal with much larger threats without breaking a sweat. Apparently the force was not strong with the 'jedi masters'; no quick reflexes, no seeing possible futures before it happens. Who knew.
That they died... sure... but my sense prior to the prequels was that they were *hunted down* by the Sith over a period of time with overwhelming forces. Not that they were largely slaughtered like lambs by lousy stormtroopers.
The trade federation ship in the first prequel had the right attitude: A couple jedi knights on board? A whole army of droids to defend us... we're boned.
The turning to the darkside was set in motion from the second one. Sure it was accelerated somewhat during the latter portions of the third one, but thats what you get from showing it in a film. Lets not forget what Yoda said "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate". It was his fear which led him down the wrong path. The fear of being taken for granted, the fear of being an outcast, the fear of losing his one true love. Fear is a powerful emotion, which has corrupted bigger men in history than some fictional character in a Sci Fi fantasy film.
That he was vulnerable to fear, sure. That he was turned to the darkside, sure. That he defended palpatine from execution sure -- but he was arguing even then that palpatine should stand trial, that killing him was not the jedi way... etc. He's pretty conflicted - he's trying to do good, but of course he wanted palpatine to live because he thought palpatine could save the girl - so he didn't want to let him die. So sure that's beleiveable, that he intervened to save him, there's some real conflict going on.
That he VERY shortly thereafter kills a classroom full of kids.. give me a break. There was no threat from them yet, no real conflict with them at all, and he wasn't anywhere near the level of cartoon evil yet, that he'd kill a bunch of kids, nevermind kids he actually knew.
Its really not scarier at all. People are already nervous about air travel... planes crash all the time. From birds to weather to bombs to faulty landing gear... terrorists are just one more in the list, and really terrorists aren't all that common.
You want to scare people, hit places they think are safe, that they go to daily.
and leads to more airport security theater, worsening the lives of the people in the target country and serving as an enduring reminder of your attack.
Our lives are only worsened because too many of US are idiots. We should have secured the pilot's cabin to prevent planes being used as weapons in the future. And then just gone on with our lives.
The daily show actually made a really good point on this line of reasoning last night.
To paraphrase:
If we build the mosque the terrorists will celebrate and be emboldened leading to greater risk to the US. If we don't build the mosque the terrorists will be outraged and further embittered leading to greater risk to the US. If we endlessly discuss and debate building the mosque the terrorists will be celebrate the divisiveness its causing. No matter what we do or don't do the terrorists 'win'. Maybe we should stop concerning ourselves with what 'the terrorists will think'.
To me it was one of the few ones who's plot was reasonably believable.
It was 'beleivable'?
That a bunch of jedi masters get executed by a few stormtroopers?
Nevermind the whole Anakin turn to the darkside which was simply unbeleivable. He was motivated to save his girl, and Palpatine was using that against him... sure he had some anger issues, angst and self-esteem issues... but he wasn't anywhere near the level of cartoon evil that he would murder a class room full of children.
The biggest epiphany one would get from this sort of exercise is just how pointless the security theatre is.
As soon as you run through an exercise like this, its impossible to reconcile it with there being a need for millimetre wave radar at airports... you can kill just as many people by detonating in the backed up line waiting to go past the damn machine as you can getting on a plane.
Or go to any of 1000 other venues where people gather... from a county fair to the line up to see a shopping mall Santa.
People specialize for a reason. If you want half-assed administration, give root to a developer. If you want half-assed code, let admins write software. If you want half-assed testing, have admins and/or developers do it.
Why exactly would a non-mission critical intranet app for doing X for department Y running on its own box (or at least VM) need to be managed the same way a mission critical app on a mission critical server?
Perhaps working class people don't want to ask for a handout, and don't want to pay for someone else's either?
Right up until life kicks them or someone they know in the nuts.
Does this ring a bell: "I ain't asking nobody for nothin', I can get it all on my own...." ?
Sure does. The man who wrote it is quite wealthy. Kind of my point really; he's one of the people selling the rubbish that the working class will get rich just like him. Strange that it so rarely comes to actually pass.
W's tax cuts lowered every tax bracket. If these cuts are allowed to expire, EVERYONE who pays taxes, pays more taxes.
So apparently support our troops stops just short of actually having to pay a couple hundred bucks a year towards paying for, you know, supporting the troops.
Sounds selfless.
I'm impressed you managed to call someone who doesn't want to pay to ensure fellow americans have access to health care "selfless". Bravo.
Maybe we should all be serious about building wealth instead of hoping the government will take care of us.
Right. Government is for making sure gays can't be married and other important stuff like that.
If the wall was labeled a "public art space" and people were encouraged to do graffiti on it, then maybe? Youtube and RapidShare encourage people to post content then basically look away until someone complains about it.
You mean like the bulletin boards at the local grocery stores, community centres, churches, gyms, skating rinks, pools, and post offices? You know the ones... where anyone can post notices and whatnot? You are seriously arguing these companies/facilities should be liable for copyright infringement?
The tax cuts republican's give out primarily benefit people who make more than them. And they are against the social programs that would actually benefit them.
They are the ultimate dupes when it comes to fiscal policy. Maybe they think one day they'll be wealthy enough to not need the social programs and benefit from the tax cuts but most won't ever get that far.
1. You download and install the Steam software and setup an account.
2. You can buy games off of steam (usually for a ridiculously low price and they have specials/packages/deals all the time). Steam downloads and installs the game to your computer with one click. Steam also manages the game files and future updates for you.
3. Now this is where it gets good. You can go to another computer (a Mac or PC) and download steam and have your same games on there. If you use the "Steam cloud" it even brings your game-specific settings over.
4. Your brother wants to try the game. You discover you can't lend it to him. You've already finished the game, and you realize you can't give it to him either.
5. Then you get married and discover your wife can't play game X online at the same time you play game Y online, and that valve expects you to buy a 2nd copy of the game, just so that 2 different people can play 2 different games at the same time.
6. Then you have to decide with each additional game you purchase which steam account it should go into. You can put it in yours and gain all the community advantages... or you can create a new one for it so that you aren't blocked from playing it when someone is playing something else... but then you have a bunch of steam logins and a fractured friends list, which is a hassle.
It's actually a nice, packaged little system which makes it easy to just have fun playing games
All the problems with steam would go away if they'd let you move games between accounts (even with sane restrictions, like not being allowed to transfer a given title more often than once every few weeks) -- that right there would solve virtually every complaint about steam I have. I'd even pay a $1 fee to do it.
Of course they'll never do it, because they'd rather hold out hope that whoever I wanted to give or lend or allow to play the game will buy their own copy. They usually won't though. And as a result I've not bought games I otherwise would have... so at least in my case they are losing sales not gaining them.
and connect with others who like playing the same games as you.
Unless those people happen to be in your household. In which case, its just a royal hassle. I now have a wife and 2 kids that all play games... steam is a royal-pain-in-the-ass in our household. Which game is in whose account, and the exclusions... if your brother is playing X,Y,Z then you can't play A,B,C.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issues buying 2 or more copies of a game that people want to play together, or at the same time.
There is always this interesting push between what I like to term the Computer Science Vs. Software Engineering people, in which the former always wants to play with new interesting toys, write code, and generally act like an impulsive teenager, while the latter wants to be an old man, being safe, writing plans, timetables, and those middle management bits that drive CS people up the wall.
I think when we're young (mentally) we're CS, and as we age we gradually turn into Software Engineers.
Agreed - except for the terminology. The group you call CS are just 'software hackers' (in the good sense of the word).
CS is a completely separate item...its actual computer science (algorithms, complexity theory, logic, network topology, relational calculus, etc...).
Hackers and engineers both benefit from CS... but it really has no bearing on whether you hack a ruby on rails (lanuage selected as place holder for 'trendy new language you also learned while doing the project') project together in an afternoon based on the 'specs in your head' or take a month to architect it in java (language selected as place holder for older language developer has lots of experience with) with defined project milestones, spec's documentation, interface documentation, etc.
And yet i've never heard of a Telco cutting anyone off for using the phone too often, or trying to bill per-minute beyond a certain amount of local calling usage.
You've clearly never lived in region where there were serious limits on available telco access. When I grew up I had a party line with 6 other homes. We did indeed have terms of service that would have had us disconnected had we abused the line.
These days the telcos are basically ahead of demand for voice circuits and demand for circuits doesn't grow at an absurd rate (like bandwidth consumption has. the more capacity they build the more we consume. They haven't gotten ahead of us yet... maybe once we've reached the point where we can stream 3 HD movies simultaneously while gaming, then it won't be an issue, but they can't lay cable fast enough)
But that plant still has to be maintained. Those turbines are expensive, and every time they are turned, there is some amount of mechanical wear incurred. It's not like an ISP's switch, which does not experience mechanical wear as it forwards each packet.
Nonsense. Cooling fans die, power supplies burn out, lines are cut, capacitors leak, switches develop faults, old equipment needs to be replaced / upgraded. Yes, the scales are a bit different, but your fooling yourself if you think the internet doesn't need stupid amounts of maintenance.
Electricity is scarce enough commodity, that there is a limited supply and a market for it, and it can be bought and sold easily.
Not really. Its difficult to move where its needed, and doesn't really "store" at all, and in many respects is very much like bandwidth.
If your ISP has a 3 Gigabit pipe to a node in your city, which is barely utilized, it is not like they can sell off the unused portion on the market to other providers, unless of course they can find someone who needs that kind of bandwidth, in or through your city.
And if a power company in Quebec has extra electricity it can't just up and sell it to an Australian consumers... or even Mexican ones.
Once all the river flow is used up, the plant operator cannot just build another river.
He can however lay down more solar panels, or build a nuclear plant.
This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.
No. Actually it isn't necessarily a violation of net neutrality at all.
Net neutrality (as understood by most rational people) is violated when someone who is NOT a customer of the ISP gets charged for better access to the ISPs customers. e.g. throttling google traffic but boosting bing traffic becasue google didn't pay and bing did.
Yes, there are some nitwits who try and conflate net neutrality as being in conflict with QoS or Tiered ISP service levels like offering (slower lite vs regular vs higher speed connections), etc, etc, but that's not the "net neutrality" that net neutrality advocates are interested in.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with CUSTOMERS paying to have their traffic, or some subset of their traffic given priority. And in fact I EXPECT customers to be able and willing to pay for faster speed for their traffic within their ISP.
You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences? (Lord save me from do-gooders trying to save my soul, or impose their morals upon me.)
You see how conflating two network management issues that are unrelated creates FUD about the unrelated issue? People like you are as bad as the do-gooders.
Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials that produce an equivalent amount of electricity. Electricity is a finite scarce, consumable resource, generating it is expensive.
Where I live electricity is generated by water falling out of the sky, collecting in a river, and eventually turning a turbine. Where other people live its generated by wind / solar. Where other people live its geothermal. Where other people live its by incinerating garbage.
And then yes, where some people live its gas, coal, nuclear. But in the former cases in particular, and even in the final case to a large degree the cost of electricity is primarily the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. The small army of people fixing power lines, replacing transformers, laying cable, replacing it, troubleshooting it, monitoring the system, customer service, billing, advertising,... the cost of the actual 'fuel' ranges from zero to a small percentage of total operations. Running a nuclear plant costs far more in maintenance than in actual fuel.
The analagy is more apt than you think.
For example, if 10 million people want to watch a live video feed that starts at exactly 6:00 PM EST.
That causes a hell of a lot more network congestion, than if 20 million people want to download a Linux ISO over BitTorrent over a 5 day period.
Ironically this situation is also reflected in the electricity situation. The electrical system has a maximum load it can deliver as well. There is a huge spike in the morning as millions of people wake up and turn on the lights, the coffee maker, the electric razer, take a shower (triggering the hot water heater to step up), etc.
In less developed countries (and California during energy crises) they don't have the capacity to actually satisfy peak levels of demand, and we get rolling brown outs when too many people hit it at once.
In most cities, the city can actually deliver all the electricity anyone demands when they demand it. But this isn't a characteristic of electricity. This is the result of slower growth in demand, and metered pricing which has led to the development of such things as "energy star", and 'green' drives to consume less.
I actually dug around on his site, his "NAS" is an atom/miniITX windows xp mce box he built. Further the player he's using is capable of streaming audio from Windows Media Centre... so his NAS might be doing a lot more than you think.
Yes, I know, but I read that too. Take a look at his statement again. That too is not possible. One cannot introduce or lower the noise ceiling on music via protecting the binary data bits running through the cable. It's not possible. It's called a data or I/O error if non "Super" cables allowed that. Look at how he worded it. "The (CABLE) rejects (the) interference", thus changing the sound of the music by reducing the noise floor. That's impossible. The digital data gets transmitted properly, or an I/O error occurs.
Yes. I agree he is absolutely wrong that the "cable rejects the interference". But there is at least a theoretical chance he's right that its lowering the noise level, even though he is utterly wrong in how. The point I was making was that this one 'improvement' he noted is theoretically possible... although not for the reason he claimed, and of course the rest of his audiophile blather was complete nonsense.
In all other similar scenarios, the noise is transmitted through the motherboard (PC or NAS) into the audio output/chipset/amplification circuitry. That isn't even a possible factor here, as the NAS is not decoding the binary stream and turning it into music.
It may well be doing *exactly that*. Given his NAS is really a PC running XP MCE (did some digging around on his site). Its unclear how its connected to his stereo equipment for this particular test. (Yes I know he mentions ethernet is involved... but then I notice the specific "Naim" equipment he is using is capable of playing music "streamed" from Windows Media Center.) So who the heck knows what his 'NAS' is really doing.
Personally, I'm with you, I think he's full of it as much as everyone else. But I don't like the overly simplistic analysis I've seen from -most- (but not all)/. posters:
"Sata is digital, therefore he's wrong." Weird things happen. One needs to look at the whole picture.
I once debugged a program that crashed when I remvoed a COMMENT from it; it ran fine when the comment was in place. Crashed when I took it out. Reproducibly. I was told it was "unpossible".
Turned out it was an unitialized variable in my code. With the comment out, the ide I was using used just enough less memory, that when the debugger compiled and ran the code it ran it in a part of memory where the unitialized variable started with an illegal value. With the comment in, it ended up getting run in a different part of memory where it happened to be "initialized" correctly as '0'. The object code generated was identical. I was stumped for quite a while.
While your statement is correct, and something I considered, please re-read the person's blog. He talks about improvements in all sorts of sound related aspects (range, vocals, and on and on)... not in hum reduction and stuff due to EMF.
Indirectly. Just prior to that he wrote:
"My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail..."
lowering the 'noise floor' is the sort of thing one would expect. The flowery nonsense he writes after that is what invariably comes out of a happy audiophiles mouth, and can largely be ignored.
Perhaps that's possible, but Steward is using those SATA cables on his NAS device, so the noise would also have to propagate across his network to the audio system.
Digging around on his site reveals that his "NAS Device" is an Atom based PC he built on some miniITX ASUS motherboard with a copy of Windows XP MCE...
Its not clear exactly how how the audio is getting from the NAS to his audio system, or where the "NAS" physically sits relative to his audio equipment. His "NAS" may be doing more of the audio processing than you'd normally attribute to NAS.
Slashdot Mirror
For what reason has he waited all of this time to file said suit? It's not like the timing is great.... economy is still down, if he had waited a bit longer, perhaps the companies would have more money?
Patents are over a decade old... maybe he wanted to try and get his gold before they expired.
Fair enough... and obviously there isn't a lot of point in arguing over fictional technology... but still... two points:
The teleporter is explained; matter is converted to energy on a quantum basis, beamed down and reassembled ito its original quanta.
And all it took was a "heisenberg compensator", which is not really an explanation. ;)
And Stephen Hawking says time travel is possible.
Not the kind that takes place in Star Trek...
"Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.
But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future."
do you think they would have named it teachbook, if there was no such thing as facebook? Seriously?
Would OpenOffice be named that if microsoft's dominant productivity suite was called Microsoft Works?
Would IceWeasel be named that if the software it was a fork of wasn't called "FireFox"?
Would FreeCraft be named that if Warcraft and Starcraft had been called something else?
At the local grocery store there are even "Honey Nut Toasted O's" next to the "Honey Nut Cheerios". Would the knockoff even exist if the original didn't, never mind be named in such a way as to deliberately evoke the original?
Is there some element of trademark law that provides you control over marks and products that were influenced by the existence of an established mark or product? Of course not. As long as the teachbook logo is different enough etc, they should be in the clear.
and Star Trek was able to predict / influence how much more tech than Star Wars, example touch screens, tablet computers, cell phones, portable medical scanners, large database/network(internet), voice recognition, and so on
Star wars has what? 20hrs of source material? vs what for Star Trek?
as for accuracy of science star trek doesn't have the implausible light saber
They do have teleporters, shape shifters, and travel through time on a regular basis though.
Both have FTL travel, and goofy religions so that's a wash.
or robots controlled by a biological brain.
orly?
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg-queen
A few stormtroopers? We're not talking about a handful here, we're talking about being outnumbered by huge amounts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09n0qd_n4c0
First one to go down was taken by a squad at most. Apparently he can lead the charge on the droid army for days on end without taking a scratch... but a couple dozen storm troopers ... get him within a few seconds. (and he was ready) Why didn't the droids army ever bother to send
Second one gets taken down by the first shot fired. Less than a dozen troopers. Not 'ready'... but saw something was up in time to react.
Third one is in a fighter... goes down without a fight within seconds. Darth Vader himself (gifted pilot and force user) had trouble locking onto Luke in episode iv.
Fourth one on a bike... goes down without a fight within seconds. No leaping to safety, nothing.
And yoda... they figured they'd take yoda down with TWO guys. He at least saw it coming.
We all other 'lesser jedi' deal with much larger threats without breaking a sweat. Apparently the force was not strong with the 'jedi masters'; no quick reflexes, no seeing possible futures before it happens. Who knew.
That they died... sure... but my sense prior to the prequels was that they were *hunted down* by the Sith over a period of time with overwhelming forces. Not that they were largely slaughtered like lambs by lousy stormtroopers.
The trade federation ship in the first prequel had the right attitude: A couple jedi knights on board? A whole army of droids to defend us... we're boned.
The turning to the darkside was set in motion from the second one. Sure it was accelerated somewhat during the latter portions of the third one, but thats what you get from showing it in a film. Lets not forget what Yoda said "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate". It was his fear which led him down the wrong path. The fear of being taken for granted, the fear of being an outcast, the fear of losing his one true love. Fear is a powerful emotion, which has corrupted bigger men in history than some fictional character in a Sci Fi fantasy film.
That he was vulnerable to fear, sure. That he was turned to the darkside, sure. That he defended palpatine from execution sure -- but he was arguing even then that palpatine should stand trial, that killing him was not the jedi way... etc. He's pretty conflicted - he's trying to do good, but of course he wanted palpatine to live because he thought palpatine could save the girl - so he didn't want to let him die. So sure that's beleiveable, that he intervened to save him, there's some real conflict going on.
That he VERY shortly thereafter kills a classroom full of kids .. give me a break. There was no threat from them yet, no real conflict with them at all, and he wasn't anywhere near the level of cartoon evil yet, that he'd kill a bunch of kids, nevermind kids he actually knew.
But taking down a plane is much scarier
Its really not scarier at all. People are already nervous about air travel... planes crash all the time. From birds to weather to bombs to faulty landing gear... terrorists are just one more in the list, and really terrorists aren't all that common.
You want to scare people, hit places they think are safe, that they go to daily.
and leads to more airport security theater, worsening the lives of the people in the target country and serving as an enduring reminder of your attack.
Our lives are only worsened because too many of US are idiots. We should have secured the pilot's cabin to prevent planes being used as weapons in the future. And then just gone on with our lives.
The daily show actually made a really good point on this line of reasoning last night.
To paraphrase:
If we build the mosque the terrorists will celebrate and be emboldened leading to greater risk to the US. If we don't build the mosque the terrorists will be outraged and further embittered leading to greater risk to the US. If we endlessly discuss and debate building the mosque the terrorists will be celebrate the divisiveness its causing. No matter what we do or don't do the terrorists 'win'. Maybe we should stop concerning ourselves with what 'the terrorists will think'.
To me it was one of the few ones who's plot was reasonably believable.
It was 'beleivable'?
That a bunch of jedi masters get executed by a few stormtroopers?
Nevermind the whole Anakin turn to the darkside which was simply unbeleivable. He was motivated to save his girl, and Palpatine was using that against him... sure he had some anger issues, angst and self-esteem issues... but he wasn't anywhere near the level of cartoon evil that he would murder a class room full of children.
It would be helpful to provide a correct construct rather than just pointing out its wrong.
i.e...
Naturally all this should raise the question...
or
Naturally, this situation begs that we ask the question...
EXACTLY!
The biggest epiphany one would get from this sort of exercise is just how pointless the security theatre is.
As soon as you run through an exercise like this, its impossible to reconcile it with there being a need for millimetre wave radar at airports... you can kill just as many people by detonating in the backed up line waiting to go past the damn machine as you can getting on a plane.
Or go to any of 1000 other venues where people gather... from a county fair to the line up to see a shopping mall Santa.
People specialize for a reason. If you want half-assed administration, give root to a developer. If you want half-assed code, let admins write software. If you want half-assed testing, have admins and/or developers do it.
Why exactly would a non-mission critical intranet app for doing X for department Y running on its own box (or at least VM) need to be managed the same way a mission critical app on a mission critical server?
Perhaps working class people don't want to ask for a handout, and don't want to pay for someone else's either?
Right up until life kicks them or someone they know in the nuts.
Does this ring a bell: "I ain't asking nobody for nothin', I can get it all on my own...." ?
Sure does. The man who wrote it is quite wealthy. Kind of my point really; he's one of the people selling the rubbish that the working class will get rich just like him. Strange that it so rarely comes to actually pass.
W's tax cuts lowered every tax bracket. If these cuts are allowed to expire, EVERYONE who pays taxes, pays more taxes. So apparently support our troops stops just short of actually having to pay a couple hundred bucks a year towards paying for, you know, supporting the troops. Sounds selfless. I'm impressed you managed to call someone who doesn't want to pay to ensure fellow americans have access to health care "selfless". Bravo. Maybe we should all be serious about building wealth instead of hoping the government will take care of us. Right. Government is for making sure gays can't be married and other important stuff like that.
If the wall was labeled a "public art space" and people were encouraged to do graffiti on it, then maybe? Youtube and RapidShare encourage people to post content then basically look away until someone complains about it.
You mean like the bulletin boards at the local grocery stores, community centres, churches, gyms, skating rinks, pools, and post offices? You know the ones... where anyone can post notices and whatnot? You are seriously arguing these companies/facilities should be liable for copyright infringement?
Which policy?
Fiscal policy mostly.
The tax cuts republican's give out primarily benefit people who make more than them.
And they are against the social programs that would actually benefit them.
They are the ultimate dupes when it comes to fiscal policy. Maybe they think one day they'll be wealthy enough to not need the social programs and benefit from the tax cuts but most won't ever get that far.
1. You download and install the Steam software and setup an account.
2. You can buy games off of steam (usually for a ridiculously low price and they have specials/packages/deals all the time). Steam downloads and installs the game to your computer with one click. Steam also manages the game files and future updates for you.
3. Now this is where it gets good. You can go to another computer (a Mac or PC) and download steam and have your same games on there. If you use the "Steam cloud" it even brings your game-specific settings over.
4. Your brother wants to try the game. You discover you can't lend it to him. You've already finished the game, and you realize you can't give it to him either.
5. Then you get married and discover your wife can't play game X online at the same time you play game Y online, and that valve expects you to buy a 2nd copy of the game, just so that 2 different people can play 2 different games at the same time.
6. Then you have to decide with each additional game you purchase which steam account it should go into. You can put it in yours and gain all the community advantages... or you can create a new one for it so that you aren't blocked from playing it when someone is playing something else... but then you have a bunch of steam logins and a fractured friends list, which is a hassle.
It's actually a nice, packaged little system which makes it easy to just have fun playing games
All the problems with steam would go away if they'd let you move games between accounts (even with sane restrictions, like not being allowed to transfer a given title more often than once every few weeks) -- that right there would solve virtually every complaint about steam I have. I'd even pay a $1 fee to do it.
Of course they'll never do it, because they'd rather hold out hope that whoever I wanted to give or lend or allow to play the game will buy their own copy. They usually won't though. And as a result I've not bought games I otherwise would have... so at least in my case they are losing sales not gaining them.
and connect with others who like playing the same games as you.
Unless those people happen to be in your household. In which case, its just a royal hassle. I now have a wife and 2 kids that all play games... steam is a royal-pain-in-the-ass in our household. Which game is in whose account, and the exclusions... if your brother is playing X,Y,Z then you can't play A,B,C.
Don't get me wrong, I have no issues buying 2 or more copies of a game that people want to play together, or at the same time.
There is always this interesting push between what I like to term the Computer Science Vs. Software Engineering people, in which the former always wants to play with new interesting toys, write code, and generally act like an impulsive teenager, while the latter wants to be an old man, being safe, writing plans, timetables, and those middle management bits that drive CS people up the wall.
I think when we're young (mentally) we're CS, and as we age we gradually turn into Software Engineers.
Agreed - except for the terminology. The group you call CS are just 'software hackers' (in the good sense of the word).
CS is a completely separate item...its actual computer science (algorithms, complexity theory, logic, network topology, relational calculus, etc...).
Hackers and engineers both benefit from CS... but it really has no bearing on whether you hack a ruby on rails (lanuage selected as place holder for 'trendy new language you also learned while doing the project') project together in an afternoon based on the 'specs in your head' or take a month to architect it in java (language selected as place holder for older language developer has lots of experience with) with defined project milestones, spec's documentation, interface documentation, etc.
CS is orthoganal to project management.
And yet i've never heard of a Telco cutting anyone off for using the phone too often, or trying to bill per-minute beyond a certain amount of local calling usage.
You've clearly never lived in region where there were serious limits on available telco access. When I grew up I had a party line with 6 other homes. We did indeed have terms of service that would have had us disconnected had we abused the line.
These days the telcos are basically ahead of demand for voice circuits and demand for circuits doesn't grow at an absurd rate (like bandwidth consumption has. the more capacity they build the more we consume. They haven't gotten ahead of us yet... maybe once we've reached the point where we can stream 3 HD movies simultaneously while gaming, then it won't be an issue, but they can't lay cable fast enough)
But that plant still has to be maintained. Those turbines are expensive, and every time they are turned, there is some amount of mechanical wear incurred. It's not like an ISP's switch, which does not experience mechanical wear as it forwards each packet.
Nonsense. Cooling fans die, power supplies burn out, lines are cut, capacitors leak, switches develop faults, old equipment needs to be replaced / upgraded. Yes, the scales are a bit different, but your fooling yourself if you think the internet doesn't need stupid amounts of maintenance.
Electricity is scarce enough commodity, that there is a limited supply and a market for it, and it can be bought and sold easily.
Not really. Its difficult to move where its needed, and doesn't really "store" at all, and in many respects is very much like bandwidth.
If your ISP has a 3 Gigabit pipe to a node in your city, which is barely utilized, it is not like they can sell off the unused portion on the market to other providers, unless of course they can find someone who needs that kind of bandwidth, in or through your city.
And if a power company in Quebec has extra electricity it can't just up and sell it to an Australian consumers... or even Mexican ones.
Once all the river flow is used up, the plant operator cannot just build another river.
He can however lay down more solar panels, or build a nuclear plant.
This prioritizing of gaming traffic would be illegal if Net Neutrality existed.
No. Actually it isn't necessarily a violation of net neutrality at all.
Net neutrality (as understood by most rational people) is violated when someone who is NOT a customer of the ISP gets charged for better access to the ISPs customers. e.g. throttling google traffic but boosting bing traffic becasue google didn't pay and bing did.
Yes, there are some nitwits who try and conflate net neutrality as being in conflict with QoS or Tiered ISP service levels like offering (slower lite vs regular vs higher speed connections), etc, etc, but that's not the "net neutrality" that net neutrality advocates are interested in.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with CUSTOMERS paying to have their traffic, or some subset of their traffic given priority. And in fact I EXPECT customers to be able and willing to pay for faster speed for their traffic within their ISP.
You see how seemingly "good" laws can cause unintended and harmful consequences? (Lord save me from do-gooders trying to save my soul, or impose their morals upon me.)
You see how conflating two network management issues that are unrelated creates FUD about the unrelated issue? People like you are as bad as the do-gooders.
Electricity has to be generated, by consuming raw materials that produce an equivalent amount of electricity. Electricity is a finite scarce, consumable resource, generating it is expensive.
Where I live electricity is generated by water falling out of the sky, collecting in a river, and eventually turning a turbine. Where other people live its generated by wind / solar. Where other people live its geothermal. Where other people live its by incinerating garbage.
And then yes, where some people live its gas, coal, nuclear. But in the former cases in particular, and even in the final case to a large degree the cost of electricity is primarily the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. The small army of people fixing power lines, replacing transformers, laying cable, replacing it, troubleshooting it, monitoring the system, customer service, billing, advertising, ... the cost of the actual 'fuel' ranges from zero to a small percentage of total operations. Running a nuclear plant costs far more in maintenance than in actual fuel.
The analagy is more apt than you think.
For example, if 10 million people want to watch a live video feed that starts at exactly 6:00 PM EST.
That causes a hell of a lot more network congestion, than if 20 million people want to download a Linux ISO over BitTorrent over a 5 day period.
Ironically this situation is also reflected in the electricity situation. The electrical system has a maximum load it can deliver as well. There is a huge spike in the morning as millions of people wake up and turn on the lights, the coffee maker, the electric razer, take a shower (triggering the hot water heater to step up), etc.
In less developed countries (and California during energy crises) they don't have the capacity to actually satisfy peak levels of demand, and we get rolling brown outs when too many people hit it at once.
In most cities, the city can actually deliver all the electricity anyone demands when they demand it. But this isn't a characteristic of electricity. This is the result of slower growth in demand, and metered pricing which has led to the development of such things as "energy star", and 'green' drives to consume less.
with apple you pay for crappy graphics and a nice monitor
And have to throw both away when you upgrade.
with Wintel you can buy nice graphics but the monitor won't be as good
Actually with Wintel you can buy whatever you like.
He says a lot of things that don't make any sense. ;)
I'd quote from the full article... but he has withdrawn it from his site.
I actually dug around on his site, his "NAS" is an atom/miniITX windows xp mce box he built. Further the player he's using is capable of streaming audio from Windows Media Centre... so his NAS might be doing a lot more than you think.
Yes, I know, but I read that too. Take a look at his statement again. That too is not possible. One cannot introduce or lower the noise ceiling on music via protecting the binary data bits running through the cable. It's not possible. It's called a data or I/O error if non "Super" cables allowed that. Look at how he worded it. "The (CABLE) rejects (the) interference", thus changing the sound of the music by reducing the noise floor. That's impossible. The digital data gets transmitted properly, or an I/O error occurs.
Yes. I agree he is absolutely wrong that the "cable rejects the interference". But there is at least a theoretical chance he's right that its lowering the noise level, even though he is utterly wrong in how. The point I was making was that this one 'improvement' he noted is theoretically possible... although not for the reason he claimed, and of course the rest of his audiophile blather was complete nonsense.
In all other similar scenarios, the noise is transmitted through the motherboard (PC or NAS) into the audio output/chipset/amplification circuitry. That isn't even a possible factor here, as the NAS is not decoding the binary stream and turning it into music.
It may well be doing *exactly that*. Given his NAS is really a PC running XP MCE (did some digging around on his site). Its unclear how its connected to his stereo equipment for this particular test. (Yes I know he mentions ethernet is involved... but then I notice the specific "Naim" equipment he is using is capable of playing music "streamed" from Windows Media Center.) So who the heck knows what his 'NAS' is really doing.
Personally, I'm with you, I think he's full of it as much as everyone else. But I don't like the overly simplistic analysis I've seen from -most- (but not all) /. posters:
"Sata is digital, therefore he's wrong." Weird things happen. One needs to look at the whole picture.
I once debugged a program that crashed when I remvoed a COMMENT from it; it ran fine when the comment was in place. Crashed when I took it out. Reproducibly. I was told it was "unpossible".
Turned out it was an unitialized variable in my code. With the comment out, the ide I was using used just enough less memory, that when the debugger compiled and ran the code it ran it in a part of memory where the unitialized variable started with an illegal value. With the comment in, it ended up getting run in a different part of memory where it happened to be "initialized" correctly as '0'. The object code generated was identical. I was stumped for quite a while.
While your statement is correct, and something I considered, please re-read the person's blog. He talks about improvements in all sorts of sound related aspects (range, vocals, and on and on)... not in hum reduction and stuff due to EMF.
Indirectly. Just prior to that he wrote:
"My only guess is that the Super SATAs reject interference significantly better than the standard cables and in so doing lower the noise floor revealing greater low-level musical detail..."
lowering the 'noise floor' is the sort of thing one would expect. The flowery nonsense he writes after that is what invariably comes out of a happy audiophiles mouth, and can largely be ignored.
Perhaps that's possible, but Steward is using those SATA cables on his NAS device, so the noise would also have to propagate across his network to the audio system.
Digging around on his site reveals that his "NAS Device" is an Atom based PC he built on some miniITX ASUS motherboard with a copy of Windows XP MCE...
Its not clear exactly how how the audio is getting from the NAS to his audio system, or where the "NAS" physically sits relative to his audio equipment. His "NAS" may be doing more of the audio processing than you'd normally attribute to NAS.