How would you even break a company like Google up? I mean, it's success is at least partially due to the fact that it's one giant cloud. Separating different parts of Google (gmail, wave, etc) would still require that they all use that same cloud, wouldn't it?
Actually, it might not relate to net neutrality now, but it could. Cox is dropping a service because they say it's unused by 99% of their users. However, one could argue that offering the binary groups alone could amount to a fairly large amount of their bulk data traffic. They already block port 80 outbound so that you can't host without a 'business' level plan. If they're doing this to free up their already congested network, what's next, FTP?
I understand the whole point behind having a secure, random password with a limited life. At the same time, I also have a piss-poor memory for random strings of ASCII characters. I don't work for a government agency, or a company with classified or even proprietary works, yet, even my mindlessly boring personal email account requires an 8 character random string with alpha and numerical characters, no runs, no common words, and no repeats. I don't use that account for ANYTHING secure or private, and if it were to suddenly be paraded to the world for all to see I really couldn't give a damn. So why the hell can't my password be any fraking thing I want?
Why aren't we teaching people general security practices instead of forcing them to pick a password such that the first thing they are going to do is write it down on a little post-it that they store under their keyboard.
I agree that they are dumb pipes, however, that got me thinking about the arrangement I have with my cable company. What's the difference between the data (content) I am receiving over my net connection, and the data (content) I am receiving as my television service? I don't mean the bits and bytes here, I mean the actual content. My cable company would like to call themselves a 'content' provider, but they aren't making those television programs, they are simply passing them to me through a pipe. That being said, why should that part of my service be any different from my internet?
This is sticky because I realize that the actual content providers GET PAID to have their shows broadcast/provided. Does that mean that the internet is upside down? Should the local ISP's actually be paying Google for their content?
I'm just going to rip (cough-obtain) my movies and store them on my nice compatible hard drive. It's like they WANT to make it difficult to buy and play media. Who would have thought that screwing over the consumer was an actual marketing strategy.
Actually, it's not like they are going in and writing new code or something. More like cut and paste. Color blindness is one of the most studied genetic traits. It just turns out that you can 'paste' the code for 'normal' color vision in over the defect and it works. It's a correction for something that my body missed because my mother carried a recessive gene. It's not like we can add-in something that isn't there someplace (yet). One the other hand, if we knew the exact code to cut and paste for bigger breasts, I'm sure women would be lining up in droves.
I agree. As an illustrator who has been stuck doing black & white work all their life, I say hell yes I would like to see a full palette of color. Find that morally objectionable? Try wearing red contacts for a few weeks and then see if you still feel the same way.
I'm not quite sure what an "ISP" in this situation would actually be doing, other than charging us. You mention support and home installation of equipment. So the local government would only be responsible for the cable/fiber itself, but the modem/head to actually use the service would be provided by a cable company? Here's the thing - I got tired of renting my cable modem and went out and bought my own. My cable provider allows me to "set up" my own connection, and aside from the bill I receive every month, they are nearly transparent to me. Perhaps they are providing a "service" to those lines, but if it's in the last mile, it's news to me. Their operations center is 20 miles Northwest of me. If the local government was to take over the "last mile" operations, how is this a better situation and not just a boon for the cable industry, who no longer needs to shell out $$ to rip up my street because the government gets to foot the bill (and subsequently me)? I'm not disagreeing with your idea in principle, but support would become a nightmare. If there's an outage or a connection issue, the cable company can just hold up it's hands and say that the problem is out of their control (something they do now with regularity as it is). Getting a broken line fixed would go into a local government queue, along with potholes and other 'timely' infrastructure repairs they do.
Interesting. So the infrastructure for net connection becomes something like the water or gas pipe into my home. The problem with this analogy is that gas or water connections don't change much or often. Telecommunications is exactly the opposite. Just go back less than 30 years, hell ten. People were using modems and their copper phone lines less than a couple decade ago. Then it was coaxial cable. Now we're talking about fiber. These are completely different pipes, each of which has to be laid down in that 'last mile'. If they were already there, it would be one thing, but how does the already cash-strapped city know that it isn't building obsolescence? The water pipes into my home are almost a half century old. How long before that shiny new broadband connection is outdated? I'd bet it's less than a decade. Then they would have to dig up all the streets again.
I am embarrassed to say that about a decade ago, I was one of those designers who was making ad banners for various advertising agencies. Interestingly, at the time, our specifications for design rarely included animation (as a gif - flash? what's that?) and if they were animated, it had to be tasteful and minimal. The LAST thing you wanted to do was piss off a potential customer with an invasive and annoying banner ad. In less than a decade, advertisers on the internet have completely reversed this principle, and while I no longer do this kind of work, I can't understand their reasoning. Advertising ALWAYS works better when you can attract the attention of a potential customer in a POSITIVE way rather than a NEGATIVE one. Maybe they are funny, or amazing, or even thought provoking. But successful ads are never annoying.
...
And the kids on my street believe that "ain't", "cuz", and "kinda" are perfectly acceptable expressions, written or otherwise. Just because something is grammatically accepted in the "the Queen's English", does not mean it should be fine on a resume, or in a book.
My point was, people don't even try to speak or write properly anymore.... And you meant to say, "because of" has been used for "due to" in the Queen's English since about 1955.
Are they going to have a test for how much of an asshole you are as well? Because there sure seem to be a lot more assholes on the road causing accidents than people talking on their phones.
It will be interesting to see how much they charge, and if they continue to include ads in the paid online version. Personally, I too might pay for a top notch news site if they removed the ads and charged me about the same as a yearly subscription to a print magazine.. say $20 annually. I know that doesn't sound like much on their end, but if the point is to get customers then they have to prove that there's something special about them compared to the dozens of free news sites that will be more than happy to pick up those that aren't willing to pay. If you're going to shift the paradigm, then SHIFT the paradigm.
Since the business end is floating, one could assume that it could be moved. ie: you can aim it. Sure, you could put a pizza into orbit... or not quite.
The difference is that you're not begging for work.
Would you go to a job interview looking like a slob? You may be "at the top of your game in what you do", but if you're in line with a hundred other candidates, all of whom may be "at the top of their game", taking five minutes to grab a more professional email address is about equivalent to putting on a suit and tie instead of your grungy jeans and a t-shirt. Because, obtuse as you may think it is, most HR managers will indeed judge you on how you present yourself and your resume. That's their job.
That argument completely falls apart when you can take five minutes and get a forwarding gmail address so you can keep your dumbass AOL address (for whatever reason). It's amazing to me that people will spend hundreds of hours fine tuning multiple versions of their resume for each employer, but yet not take the time to come up with a decent email address, which, other than your name, is probably the one piece of information about you that a possible employer might remember.
That's a horrible fallacy. Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't make it "highly unlikely." Reason.
You have an interesting way of looking at statistics. The "odds" that you will get into a car accident are based on the number of times you step into a vehicle. If I drive one a day for a year and have one accident in that time, then my odds are 1/365. If you take the number of people in the nation driving per day, let's just say it's a third of the population, or 100 million people, and 3000 of them died, then the odds of dying in an accident on any one day are 3000/100,000,000, or 1/33,333 or.003% chance on any one day that you will be killed on the road. That's pretty highly unlikely to me. I wasn't attempting to put any value as to human life into the equation. Sorry that offends you.
We went to war over 3000 deaths on 9/11, yet we consider the 3000 deaths per month on the road as a normal hazard of our transportation system.
That's why I compared it to the life of a soldier in Afghanistan. Neither of these events is a "normal hazard", but since the parent was comparing road deaths to fighting terrorism... Of course it's stupid. That was the whole point.
While I agree that making cars safer would be nice, you don't do that by making the car think for you. Anti-lock brakes work because it doesn't matter what the situation is. Locked brakes are never good. But how does a collision avoidance system that "swerves cars out of collision paths" know what direction is the right one? Great, the car swerves you to the right and avoids hitting the truck that just slammed on it's brakes... and drives you right off the side of a cliff. No thanks. If you want to save lives, how about a campaign to DRIVE SLOWER, or increase the testing needed to actually get a license. Give bigger insurance rate cuts to people who haven't had an accident in multiple years, and actually enforce the laws regarding using a phone while driving. Save the high tech for your living room. When you're in your car, DRIVE.
And as bad as 3000 deaths a month sounds, the part of that sample you don't mention are the number of people who go from point A to point B each day unscathed. Looked at that way, cars seem downright safe compared to say, being shot at in Afghanistan.
Let me see if I understand this: The company in question is getting rid of the ability to give it's employee's productivity enhancing drugs (which they are taking willingly) so that they can trim a little off the overhead? Times are tough, sure, but you would think management would want their employee's to work harder and longer, yes?
I have to wonder though, about those millions of people who bought "The Lost Symbol"... It would be easy to assume that they did so because they are good and honest people. But it could simply be that 9 out of 10 people don't have any idea where to find pirated digital books, or have access to do so.
In my eyes, the publishing market has always been about convenience. People, in general will pay for something if it is convenient for them to do so. As soon as it becomes more convenient to simply download it off the net (including the risk of breaking the law) they will. Sure, there are still lots of people willing to then buy the book after reading a pirated copy, but I'd be willing to bet it's a LOT less than 9 out of 10.
Slashdot Mirror
"You are NOT prepared!"
How would you even break a company like Google up? I mean, it's success is at least partially due to the fact that it's one giant cloud. Separating different parts of Google (gmail, wave, etc) would still require that they all use that same cloud, wouldn't it?
Actually, it might not relate to net neutrality now, but it could. Cox is dropping a service because they say it's unused by 99% of their users. However, one could argue that offering the binary groups alone could amount to a fairly large amount of their bulk data traffic. They already block port 80 outbound so that you can't host without a 'business' level plan. If they're doing this to free up their already congested network, what's next, FTP?
I understand the whole point behind having a secure, random password with a limited life. At the same time, I also have a piss-poor memory for random strings of ASCII characters. I don't work for a government agency, or a company with classified or even proprietary works, yet, even my mindlessly boring personal email account requires an 8 character random string with alpha and numerical characters, no runs, no common words, and no repeats. I don't use that account for ANYTHING secure or private, and if it were to suddenly be paraded to the world for all to see I really couldn't give a damn. So why the hell can't my password be any fraking thing I want?
Why aren't we teaching people general security practices instead of forcing them to pick a password such that the first thing they are going to do is write it down on a little post-it that they store under their keyboard.
I agree that they are dumb pipes, however, that got me thinking about the arrangement I have with my cable company. What's the difference between the data (content) I am receiving over my net connection, and the data (content) I am receiving as my television service? I don't mean the bits and bytes here, I mean the actual content. My cable company would like to call themselves a 'content' provider, but they aren't making those television programs, they are simply passing them to me through a pipe. That being said, why should that part of my service be any different from my internet?
This is sticky because I realize that the actual content providers GET PAID to have their shows broadcast/provided. Does that mean that the internet is upside down? Should the local ISP's actually be paying Google for their content?
I'm just going to rip (cough-obtain) my movies and store them on my nice compatible hard drive. It's like they WANT to make it difficult to buy and play media. Who would have thought that screwing over the consumer was an actual marketing strategy.
Perhaps, but I'd bet none of them is a musician for a living. As an artist, I can tell you flat out, I would LOVE to be able to see a full palette.
Actually, it's not like they are going in and writing new code or something. More like cut and paste. Color blindness is one of the most studied genetic traits. It just turns out that you can 'paste' the code for 'normal' color vision in over the defect and it works. It's a correction for something that my body missed because my mother carried a recessive gene. It's not like we can add-in something that isn't there someplace (yet). One the other hand, if we knew the exact code to cut and paste for bigger breasts, I'm sure women would be lining up in droves.
I agree. As an illustrator who has been stuck doing black & white work all their life, I say hell yes I would like to see a full palette of color. Find that morally objectionable? Try wearing red contacts for a few weeks and then see if you still feel the same way.
I'm not quite sure what an "ISP" in this situation would actually be doing, other than charging us. You mention support and home installation of equipment. So the local government would only be responsible for the cable/fiber itself, but the modem/head to actually use the service would be provided by a cable company? Here's the thing - I got tired of renting my cable modem and went out and bought my own. My cable provider allows me to "set up" my own connection, and aside from the bill I receive every month, they are nearly transparent to me. Perhaps they are providing a "service" to those lines, but if it's in the last mile, it's news to me. Their operations center is 20 miles Northwest of me. If the local government was to take over the "last mile" operations, how is this a better situation and not just a boon for the cable industry, who no longer needs to shell out $$ to rip up my street because the government gets to foot the bill (and subsequently me)? I'm not disagreeing with your idea in principle, but support would become a nightmare. If there's an outage or a connection issue, the cable company can just hold up it's hands and say that the problem is out of their control (something they do now with regularity as it is). Getting a broken line fixed would go into a local government queue, along with potholes and other 'timely' infrastructure repairs they do.
Interesting. So the infrastructure for net connection becomes something like the water or gas pipe into my home. The problem with this analogy is that gas or water connections don't change much or often. Telecommunications is exactly the opposite. Just go back less than 30 years, hell ten. People were using modems and their copper phone lines less than a couple decade ago. Then it was coaxial cable. Now we're talking about fiber. These are completely different pipes, each of which has to be laid down in that 'last mile'. If they were already there, it would be one thing, but how does the already cash-strapped city know that it isn't building obsolescence? The water pipes into my home are almost a half century old. How long before that shiny new broadband connection is outdated? I'd bet it's less than a decade. Then they would have to dig up all the streets again.
I am embarrassed to say that about a decade ago, I was one of those designers who was making ad banners for various advertising agencies. Interestingly, at the time, our specifications for design rarely included animation (as a gif - flash? what's that?) and if they were animated, it had to be tasteful and minimal. The LAST thing you wanted to do was piss off a potential customer with an invasive and annoying banner ad. In less than a decade, advertisers on the internet have completely reversed this principle, and while I no longer do this kind of work, I can't understand their reasoning. Advertising ALWAYS works better when you can attract the attention of a potential customer in a POSITIVE way rather than a NEGATIVE one. Maybe they are funny, or amazing, or even thought provoking. But successful ads are never annoying.
... And the kids on my street believe that "ain't", "cuz", and "kinda" are perfectly acceptable expressions, written or otherwise. Just because something is grammatically accepted in the "the Queen's English", does not mean it should be fine on a resume, or in a book. My point was, people don't even try to speak or write properly anymore. ... And you meant to say, "because of" has been used for "due to" in the Queen's English since about 1955.
How about "due to". I guess people write like they speak.
Are they going to have a test for how much of an asshole you are as well? Because there sure seem to be a lot more assholes on the road causing accidents than people talking on their phones.
Software Engineer: "It's a complete mess... The vulnerability is present in IE6, 7, and 8 and it won't be an easy fix."
Marketing Shill: "Excellent! Now they've no reason not to upgrade to IE8. Get out a Security Advisory at once!"
It will be interesting to see how much they charge, and if they continue to include ads in the paid online version. Personally, I too might pay for a top notch news site if they removed the ads and charged me about the same as a yearly subscription to a print magazine.. say $20 annually. I know that doesn't sound like much on their end, but if the point is to get customers then they have to prove that there's something special about them compared to the dozens of free news sites that will be more than happy to pick up those that aren't willing to pay. If you're going to shift the paradigm, then SHIFT the paradigm.
Since the business end is floating, one could assume that it could be moved. ie: you can aim it. Sure, you could put a pizza into orbit... or not quite.
"Nice, er... gun... you have there."
The difference is that you're not begging for work.
Would you go to a job interview looking like a slob? You may be "at the top of your game in what you do", but if you're in line with a hundred other candidates, all of whom may be "at the top of their game", taking five minutes to grab a more professional email address is about equivalent to putting on a suit and tie instead of your grungy jeans and a t-shirt. Because, obtuse as you may think it is, most HR managers will indeed judge you on how you present yourself and your resume. That's their job.
That argument completely falls apart when you can take five minutes and get a forwarding gmail address so you can keep your dumbass AOL address (for whatever reason). It's amazing to me that people will spend hundreds of hours fine tuning multiple versions of their resume for each employer, but yet not take the time to come up with a decent email address, which, other than your name, is probably the one piece of information about you that a possible employer might remember.
That's a horrible fallacy. Just because it didn't happen to you doesn't make it "highly unlikely." Reason.
You have an interesting way of looking at statistics. The "odds" that you will get into a car accident are based on the number of times you step into a vehicle. If I drive one a day for a year and have one accident in that time, then my odds are 1/365. If you take the number of people in the nation driving per day, let's just say it's a third of the population, or 100 million people, and 3000 of them died, then the odds of dying in an accident on any one day are 3000/100,000,000, or 1/33,333 or .003% chance on any one day that you will be killed on the road. That's pretty highly unlikely to me. I wasn't attempting to put any value as to human life into the equation. Sorry that offends you.
We went to war over 3000 deaths on 9/11, yet we consider the 3000 deaths per month on the road as a normal hazard of our transportation system.
That's why I compared it to the life of a soldier in Afghanistan. Neither of these events is a "normal hazard", but since the parent was comparing road deaths to fighting terrorism... Of course it's stupid. That was the whole point.
While I agree that making cars safer would be nice, you don't do that by making the car think for you. Anti-lock brakes work because it doesn't matter what the situation is. Locked brakes are never good. But how does a collision avoidance system that "swerves cars out of collision paths" know what direction is the right one? Great, the car swerves you to the right and avoids hitting the truck that just slammed on it's brakes... and drives you right off the side of a cliff. No thanks. If you want to save lives, how about a campaign to DRIVE SLOWER, or increase the testing needed to actually get a license. Give bigger insurance rate cuts to people who haven't had an accident in multiple years, and actually enforce the laws regarding using a phone while driving. Save the high tech for your living room. When you're in your car, DRIVE.
And as bad as 3000 deaths a month sounds, the part of that sample you don't mention are the number of people who go from point A to point B each day unscathed. Looked at that way, cars seem downright safe compared to say, being shot at in Afghanistan.
Let me see if I understand this: The company in question is getting rid of the ability to give it's employee's productivity enhancing drugs (which they are taking willingly) so that they can trim a little off the overhead? Times are tough, sure, but you would think management would want their employee's to work harder and longer, yes?
I have to wonder though, about those millions of people who bought "The Lost Symbol"... It would be easy to assume that they did so because they are good and honest people. But it could simply be that 9 out of 10 people don't have any idea where to find pirated digital books, or have access to do so.
In my eyes, the publishing market has always been about convenience. People, in general will pay for something if it is convenient for them to do so. As soon as it becomes more convenient to simply download it off the net (including the risk of breaking the law) they will. Sure, there are still lots of people willing to then buy the book after reading a pirated copy, but I'd be willing to bet it's a LOT less than 9 out of 10.