The military (surely with some help from CIA and NSA) has their own reusable unmanned space plane. They aren't entirely reliant on NASA, though they do need to use them for the launch vehicle.
They did just complete a 228 day mission, according to the article. Who needs a satellite when you can just keep an orbiter up there for the better part of a year and then retask it on occasion to take snapshots of your favorite terrorist camp or what that country is doing with their nuclear research that they swear has no military application.
You know, you are absolutely right. Until municipalities figure out that private, for profit business isn't all about what is good for the customer, but what is good for the books, they aren't going to take over this segment.
Consider if the same companies had control over road construction.
1) Every road would be a toll road.
2) If even half the people who purchased a toll tag were to get on the roads, then the traffic would be so bad that it would all come to a screeching halt.
3) The road-owning company would only open up new lanes only to those people willing to pay an additional surcharge, allowing you to bypass all the traffic.
4) Big businesses that pay the road company big money get major thoroughfares right to the front door. Smaller businesses that don't pay the fee have to deal with the congestion just like everyone else.
5) You happen to live out in the middle of nowhere? You get a gravel road (if that, even) unless you are willing to pay for the road construction yourself.
You say, let the power of competition drive the prices down. Guess what? In most markets, there is no competition. If there is any competition, then it is dominated by 2 or 3 companies, and they are more than happy to work in an environment of de facto collusion and let the consumer pay in excess.
Let the municipalities own the pipes. If the municipality wants to invest in infrastructure, then they can float a bond issue with the constituency. To add to it, if a municipality wants to attract high tech industry (along with highly paid high tech workers who will own big expensive houses and pay a lot of property taxes) they can prime the pump by investing in big pipelines.
As a consumer, you would buy the size of your pipeline from the municipal utility. No content would be provided over this pipeline from the utility. It's just bandwidth. Instead of the content provider owning the pipeline, you now rent it from a public entity that could care less about what data goes over the line as long as you don't exceed the bandwidth you have purchased. To add to it, the forces of competition are at work again, since you will now be buying content and communication services directly from the source, rather than contracting for a firehose from a Cable company when all you want is a trickle.
It's true that a degree might not matter to you when you are building your team, but it does matter to the executive management team, HR and the marketing folks who write up the material that they use to sell your company's expertise. They like to point out how highly educated your team is, and that between them they hold X number of post-graduate degrees. Sometimes it doesn't really matter what degree (it could be a doctorate in basket weaving or underwater sign language for all they care).
For a lot of these folks, the only grip they have on their position is how many courses of administrative process management (or maybe managing process administration, or processing managed administration) they completed. Not that they retained anything from the courses, just that they were completed. Try to get them to write a line of code, and they will tell you that's your job. Theirs is to come up with ideas that would take years to implement.
Anyone who is serious about encoding/transcoding video on a professional level will invest real money into workstation-level hardware rather than waste their time trying to play with enthusiast processors. Granted, some folks might get a hard e-peen from this hexacore, but the last ones I would expect to get all moist over this announcement are the ones whose lives revolve around professional video. Tell them that there is a newer, faster 12-core Xeon with more cache on the way, and you will start to hear some heavy breathing...
As for the semi-pro folks who do this on occasion...you might hear a few interested parties, but only the same folks who have money to waste on bleeding edge technology that will be outpaced within 8-10 months anyway. These same folks will never really tax the full power of this hardware anyway 90% of the time. As for time savings...for most encoding/transcoding efforts, you would be shaving seconds to minutes when compared to hardware that sells for a quarter the price. Cheaper hardware means you can afford to buy coffee and take a couple coffee breaks throughout the day. Maybe even get up from your computer and go outside to enjoy the sun for a couple minutes...
The price of adoption in India and China would have to come down significantly for the average citizen to be able to afford a mobile phone. Cheap Chinese phones sold in the developing markets are priced much closer to $15-20 in local currency, and even that is a stretch in some countries where that amount of money is the equivalent of a month's wages.
Granted, as income levels continue to rise in either country, it will become easier for these luxuries to be afforded, but as it stands, manufacturers will have a difficult time making profit if their margins are so low unless they sell devices that have been stripped of every feature and bare minimum plans. In this space, the developed markets have much more potential for profit...so Nokia had best take Apple's advice and put their investment in their best products.
Just because lock-in doesn't happen by the manufacturer doesn't stop the carrier from locking in the phone. Aren't we already seeing carriers installing proprietary versions of Android on the phones purchased by their customers that will not allow them to delete applications put there by the carriers? How long until the carriers decide to lock-in the phones so that you can't use any marketplace but theirs? And tie this lock-in to access to their network?
And yes, I know that all you have to do is wipe the phone and reinstall Android from Google's source, but we are talking about the average customer here...as George Carlin said, "Consider how dumb the average person is, and realize that half the people out there are dumber than that".
I'm not saying that the iPhone is the best smart phone, just that there are different models out there for different people. IMHO, as much as some developers complain about Apple's closed garden, there are a larger number of them pleased as punch because it ensures them an open opportunity to make money for the serious development effort a lot of them make. Sure, in the end, a lot of apps out there are no better than fart-noise-makers, but a lot of them are also seriously well designed and polished programs that deserve a decent price tag. And if a developer only has to upload it to one marketplace and start watching the money roll in, where do you think they are going to put forth their greatest effort?
Android with its open policy and schizmatic marketplaces leaves an open opportunity for piracy, and thus leaves the original developer who put forth the effort to write the software with little to show for their effort, even if it is an extremely popular download. Apple's model encourages said developer to continue writing great apps because the developer eventually profits from their endeavor.
It also assumes that said tanks and healers have taken the painstaking task to level up their gear as well BEFORE they started running your sorry under-geared ass through instances, and they have all the strats figured out and never wipe to trash pulls, let alone bosses. I have leveled up my tank through all of this, with my wife as the healer, and I must have spent nearly 2,000+ gold on repairs alone just to learn encounters, death after death after death.
As a run-of-the-mill DPS, you are starting to feel some of the pain that healers and tanks have had to contend with, now that you have to use ALL of your abilities, and use them without any screw-ups. In essence, your 30 hours game time is piggy-backed on the efforts your guild tanks and healers have taken to improve themselves to the point where they can reliably run you through content that would normally be beyond you.
As one of those tanks, I am CONSTANTLY turning down random requests to come tank X heroic or Y raid. And just because you happen to be a guildie doesn't mean you get to slack off and let me run your sorry under-geared ass through instances just because you made it to level 85. I won't touch you till you have capped your gear so you can at least random heroics. Nor will I sit there and explain the strats to you...I expect you to know them since they are posted in several locations online. In other words, bring your brain and be ready to show me you are worth the effort it will take to get you raid geared.
In response to the original article...I wait to see what BioWare Austin puts out the door. Blizzard has raised the bar considerably for any other MMO product out there. Yes, there are still bugs in the game, but overall, it has the most polished feel of just about any game out there right now, MMO or otherwise. Blizzard has taken a lot of time and effort putting a quality product out the door, and this has been proven in popularity. I can only hope BioWare has put forth the same kind of effort.
The government is very sensitive about anything that could disrupt the financial sector...this includes their ability to conduct business online. Why?
Because the entire financial sector is based upon imaginary money, and just like the emperor walking down the street in his fancy "new" clothes, all it takes is for one person to figure out that there really isn't anything there other than what we choose to fantasize about. Paper money (hell, not just paper, but stuff that is nothing more than an entry in a database) is not backed up by goods, commodities or services, but rather a bunch of IOUs signed by each and every person who borrows money and promises to pay it back.
The biggest borrower is no other than all of us , the American taxpaying public. And all it takes is for someone to feel that this money is not going to be paid back, and POP goes the economy.
The underlying root is that these DDOS attacks could very well highlight the vulnerabilities in our system and bring this whole sham to a head well before any contingency plans could take effect. So to combat this, the government will turn any and every power it has to bring these attacks, and the people behind them, to a permanent end. Or as permanent as you can get within our legal system.
Keep in mind that a police officer isn't necessarily after the truth. If they end up with the truth, then it is a happy coincidence. No, what they want is an open and shut investigation that will result in a conviction. These are the results that get them better performance reviews, promotions and pay raises, and gets the case closed so they can go on to other, more important work. In some nations, it is legal for a police officer to use any and every means at his or her disposal to get the information that will bring a case to a close. This can include, in many cases, methods that can be described as torture. In some countries, a coerced confession carries legal weight.
If it is your option, remain silent. If it is your right, exercise this right and bring any questioning to an end as quickly as possible. If officers continue to question you after you have exercised your right, then request that it be noted for the record that you requested to remain silent, and do your best to remain silent. If you are an American visiting a foreign nation, you can request a representative from the embassy who is familiar with local laws and customs. And if the crime is substantial, get a lawyer. Do not rely on the fact that you know you are innocent; get a lawyer even if you know you are.
In my area, I have access through Time Warner, AT&T and a local provider who uses AT&T to run the fiber right to your home, though you have to pay an exorbitant fee to have this put in. Right now, I am using Time Warner's service, mostly because I have had bad dealings with AT&T in the past (while I used them for wireless, they completely jacked up my bill every single month, and finally, after I had cancelled the contract and paid the termination fee, they started to get all concerned about "customer satisfaction" and "retention"...too little too late)
I will tell you the truth; I hate both Time Warner and AT&T with a passion. Just last month I started having DNS resolution issues. Websites that I had previously been able to access would suddenly pop up with a 404 page (conveniently hosted by...Time Warner!). I called the local office and they said they knew nothing, even checked to see if there were any outages, and nothing came up on their screen. Finally got through to one of their internet support and he informed me that they switched over to new DNS relay servers in our area. One switch over to my router, and I plugged in Google's public DNS servers where I had previously allowed the Time Warner DNS to relay...and all the sudden, my pages started to resolve just fine. In fact, the resolution was even faster than it had ever been before.
My wife noticed the difference immediately. She's an avid WoW player, and she said her latency went down considerably...how could DNS affect latency, I thought, unless the DNS was routing all the traffic through some sort of filter? Did I just stumble on some sort of nefarious scheme on the part of TW? I experienced the same issues with Netflix movies over the TW network as well. While under TW DNS, my netflix movies would have to recache at least once every 30-40 minutes. Now, under the Google DNS, it never has to cache. I wonder...
Germany is one of those strange European countries that actually has (gasp) laws to limit bad labor practices. If your boss wants you to work overtime, even if you work just one hour overtime, you are allowed to take the next work shift off PAID in addition to the overtime pay you receive. You have 24 days of vacation in a given year (one month with weekends). If you don't take your vacation, and November rolls around, you HAVE to take the entire month of December off. Some employers are allowed to apply for special dispensation, but the regional government labor board is usually very loathe to grant such dispensations lest they start a trend. In the US, you are lucky if you get 2 weeks paid vacation, and your employer can cancel your vacation on a whim (as has happened to me on several occasions) and you have no government labor board to take your complaint to when this happens. In fact, if you were to take this up with any government entity, they would probably laugh you out of the office, while in Germany, this can be a very serious offense and can end up with the company being sanctioned and having to pay a hefty fine.
A lot of these practices are used to make working your employees overtime more expensive than it is to actually hire new employee. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that most of Europe is combating a high unemployment rate, and the best way to get to full employment is to create more jobs. That Germany is still near the top in individual worker productivity speaks volumes about German work ethics. They are able to get as much done in a standard 7 hour day/35 hour week as most Americans do in 8 hour day/40 hour week.
What is also really strange is that the cost to hire a new worker in Germany is not nearly as expensive as it is in the US. For instance, in the US, if you hire on a new full time employee, you have to pay his/her benefits (health, dental), while in Germany, most of these are already covered under the universal health system paid for by the German taxpayers.
As to the original topic, it stands to reason that the best solution for Apple at this point is to offer a free bumper rim to all their affected customers. If they purchase it in volume, the cost is minimal, and they can tell their customers to go to the nearest Apple Store to pick one up for free. It goes a long way to placating customer relations as well as bringing those customers back into the Apple Store, where, more than likely, these people will also probably purchase one or two additional retail items, so Apple wins all the way around. If they offer it in fruity colors, all the better.
Atheist - a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
Agnostic - a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as god, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
Pride - a high or inordinate opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.
Self-righteousness - confident of one's own righteousness, esp. when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.
Mr. Khan isn't saying he doesn't believe in God, nor is he saying that God is unknowable...what he is saying, is that it doesn't matter what you think about God, but what does matter is how our existence on this earth impacts the other people living here, and if we have their welfare in our hearts, and we have the humility to see past our differences, then it doesn't matter to what diety (or none at all) we attribute this to, in the end we share the same goal, and that is what really matters.
The true enemy of society isn't religion, but rather the sociopaths who manipulate it to their own ends. They are difficult to recognize until they finally play their hands and the damage is done, but these are the people who have given religion a bad name. They take the religious zealots and turn them into weapons that tear down and destroy all that society has built. We have seen this in all the major religions to date, as well as almost any cultural divide where a schism can be made and exploited by people who want to manipulate the masses to their own ends (i.e., race, sex, creed, etc.).
That is why those of us who carry our faith close to their hearts need to be wary of anyone who tries to speak to that faith. We should always question the motives of anyone who tries to persuade us to their way of thinking. Look to the motives of such individuals, and look to how they treat with those around them. This is where religion fails.
I see general use computers becoming a niche as mobile and specific-use computers become more and more powerful and capable. We won't see them go away altogether, but when a lay person (one who is not tech savvy) is faced with the option of a relatively expensive general use computer (running Windows, Mac OS, or any other Posix distro) that has a steep learning curve, and an inexpensive specific-use device that is geared to the services they want to use (email, web browsing, games, online chat, etc.), then that person will gravitate to the path of least effort and lowest expenditure as long as it satisfies their needs.
For the technical users (programmers, designers and such) general use computers will still be available, but I would expect to see a feature-freeze come into effect as more and more features are pushed into the specific use devices. That's not saying new features won't show up, just that features will be more driven by actual function rather than UI reformation.
Maybe we can refocus efforts on the parts of the operating system that matter to us technical users, such as improvement in file system structure and interoperability of APIs within any given IDE.
Maybe even a better framework to handle multithreaded coding that leverages whatever hardware a machine has available, whether it is multiple general use processors or graphics processors (GPGPU). That way, all the programmer has to worry about is the code he needs to execute, and let the framework worry about the resources that need to be used. Apple has already taken steps in this direction (look up Grand Central Dispatch) but you have to do it in Obj C (does anyone really like using the awkward square bracket syntax? I'm still not used to it).
I've often thought a great PSA would be some soccer mom, waving a gun around in her hand while blabbing away on her cell phone with her kids all gathered around her, trying to take aim at a target. Then a narrator would say something like "You wouldn't do this with your kids around, would you?" then flash over to the same soccer mom, blabbing away on her cell phone while she is driving with all her kids in the back seat...
Cars have killed more people in this country than guns. And that's saying quite a bit, since guns were specifically designed to kill. Every time I get behind the wheel of my car, I remind myself of two things. One, I am operating a loaded weapon that has no safety other than my own diligence in recognizing dangers, both to myself and the other people around me. And two, no matter what, it is better to not have an accident at all. No matter what. This is personal experience, 5 weeks in the hospital (2 weeks in an induced coma), 3 surgeries, a lifetime with pain and over $300,000 in medical bills, a portion of which was covered by insurance. And I was the victim, not the perpetrator.
Anything we can do to slow down idiots and make them more cognizant of their responsibilities as vehicle operators, the better. If we have to continually zing repeat offenders in the wallet, then let's do it. If we end up going to a point system where your license to drive (which is a privilege, btw) is suspended after a specified number of violations, then let's do it. Right now, this all just seems more like a ploy to make some authority money rather than insure public safety, though.
Just remember that the average smart phone user is less concerned about "can I develop it using XYZ and does it use OSS?" and more about "does it allow me to run app X and play game Y."
It's less about the tech geek, and more about the feature freak.
Think more like your girlfriend or wife, who (if yours is anything like mine) hears nothing but static whenever I try to speak geek with her.
But she still somehow is able to do things on her iPhone that even makes my eyes boggle.
She could care less about this article, but only because it's talking about practices "under the hood." She tends to be a more "on the road" experience kinda person, to use a car analogy (hey, this is/., right?).
No one argues that the desktop PC is essentially owned by Windows (at this current time) but Apple holds a much larger share of the desktop than Linux does, and mostly because there are so many flavors of Linux available, and even when you can agree on one distro, there is a fight over which windowing system, which development architecture, etc., since there are no real standards as everything is open. Sometimes, having too many options is as bad as having no options at all.
With the handheld market, where hardware resources are limited, in order to remain interoperable across a wide variety of devices, there has to be a requirement of some level of standardization of features. If there is no standardization, then the burden falls to the developer to either come up with a mechanism that copes with a variety of features, or to the developers responsible for the IDE that theses developers use to keep an updated framework of which features are available for which devices. In the end, you can very well end up with apps developed for Android that will only be able to run on a select list of devices, as that is the list that the developer is willing to take time to design around. If anyone wants it to work on their specific device, well, then they can damn well get in there and do it themselves (the old OSS saw, if you don't like it, here's the source code, fix it yourself).
Apple's model is both inferior and superior at the same time. By limiting the hardware, they are able to guarantee a certain level of interoperability of the software between devices. Sure, we will probably get some drift as newer, faster, bigger, more powerful devices come out. But, for now, if you develop an app for the iPhone, you can be reasonably guaranteed that any iPhone will be able to run it. That's the superiority. The inferiority is the closed development process once it leaves the developers hands. Sure it would be nice if I can load the software directly to my iPhone (I can, in fact, if I want to void my warranty and contract, that is), but for now, in order to maintain mass market appeal and compliance, developers are tied to Apples AppStore model if they want to develop on the iPhone (legally, that is).
You know, being able to take responsibility goes a long way if you have the means to afford the consequences when that you "fail" at maintaining that responsibility. But what is the consequence of having a major (or not so major) health problem? Consider that a broken leg will run you a bill of $15,000-$20,000 if there is any surgery/therapy involved. Sure, this is at the grossly-inflated rates that hospitals charge today in the US, but it is the going price nonetheless. So a responsible person will pay the full amount when it is due, right? Or would they make payments on it until it is paid?
You do see the stupidity of this situation when you start looking at the fact that you are dealing with your life and the lives of those you love. If the doctor confronts you to tell you that your wife is dying, and that he can save her, but the procedure is very expensive and you could not afford to pay it even if you worked the rest of your life, what do you say? Of course you don't say no, you insensitive clod! Hence, the reason why a personally "responsible" system will never work well (which is what we have right now in the US) as long as there is room for someone to profit off another's misery. The key word is profit.
We can look at it from an economic perspective, if you will. Currently, with our system, if someone is unable to afford health care, they go to the emergency room. Once in the emergency room, the health provider is obliged by law to provide service until the person is no longer in threat of losing their life. Since the person has no means to pay the bill, the amount ends up being "written off" by the provider. The provider then increases the amount they charge to all the other patients who are able to pay to offset the loss from those who are unable to pay. At emergency room prices. So in the end, we are paying for other people's care anyway, at the most expensive price possible.
But, economics aside, we have to ask ourselves the age-old question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It comes down to a moral argument whether or not, in a society, we are not only responsible for ourselves, but for each man and woman our lives happen to touch. I for one believe this to be very much true, and that if it is within our means to make the burden easier as a society, then we should do so. Just as we provide police forces to protect the innocent and fire departments to minimize the risk of losing large amounts of property to uncontrolled infernos, we should provide a mechanism that allows everyone access to health based upon need, not wealth. Every other major industrialized nation has already responded to this question, and they have all decided that it is better for society as a whole if society as a whole is healthy.
Do this and run new Coax alongside, as well as a slip line for any future wire pulls you may have in mind. Just be aware to use duct tape liberally and if you don't mind the mess, some line-pull lube would go a long way for tight fits. You can then put a punch-down in the attic and run patch cables from the punchdown into a switch in the closet in the floor below the attic. I recommend that if you get a 12-block punchdown (should be relatively cheap), then run all twelve patch cables down to the closet, even if you are only using half of them. It will save you some work later on.
Also, check building code in your area, as you may have to buy plenum insulated Cat6e as opposed to the cheaper PVC. Some jurisdictions actually restrict the use of PVC, even when it is behind a wall.
I went through and did this for a friend quite a few years ago (replaced all his phone cabling with Cat6e) and had an electrician friend of mine give us advice before we started. The electrician said we were OK to run the cabling ourselves, but we had to use plenum since that was what code required. The cabling was twice as expensive as PVC, even when bought in bulk. We also ran slip lines, which has been a god-send for my friend since he had to then follow up a year or so later and run more lines through to his home theater.
Hence, your best policy is to learn continuously and not rest on your laurels. There are very few professions where a person can learn all they need to know in four years of schooling and then expect to reap the rewards for the rest of their lives. Doctors are constantly having to learn new procedures and new medicines. Lawyers have to keep themselves appraised about changes in law and recent court decisions that change interpretations, as well as any changes in their profession that might force them to change their specialization. Just like there aren't any buggy-whip salesmen out there anymore, there isn't as much call for programmers who know COBOL or FORTRAN. And just like the buggy-whip salesmen had to learn a new product line to sell, so do programmers need to be in constant contact with the shifts in the industry.
But then, just like architecture, programming is as much an art form as it is a science. All we programmers really need to do is learn new tools, and the tools we use are the different languages and IDEs that contain the logic we want computed. How long would it really take an experienced COBOL programmer to pick up.NET or Java is they already understand the concepts behind the semantics? Given a reasonable level of intelligence, I would say a good programmer can probably be well enough versed in a modern language on the outside of a month at the most. Sure, they aren't going to be flying in it (that takes at least a few more months), but programming is programming, and the one thing you really can't teach is a well-organized mind that can build logic to fit the requirement. Granted, it requires management who actually views employees as an investment rather than a commodity to be able to allow for this constant retraining.
I think we also need to look at another factor as to why we don't see too many older programmers. If someone is a developer for any length of time, they tend to get promoted into management. As soon as someone spends more of their day managing projects instead of actually programming, I would say that person is no longer really just a programmer. You see a lot more of these folks climbing the corporate ladder instead of filling out the roster in the programming ranks.
It will be a combination of iTunes revamp for video digital content and a synergy in both Apple and third-party apps for the iPad that will drive its success. To date, there is very little in the way of enhancement to a truly digital lifestyle, even though all the pieces are avaialable. If you download a video on one device, it only exists on that device.
But what if I were to introduce something new. What if I set up a small web of machines that are all linked to my account, so that if I purchase the rights to a specific digital property on my smart phone, and get home to discover that the wife wants to watch it too but the screen is much too small for both of us, then I have to take the trouble to download it again to another device (such as my laptop or set-top device) so we can watch it on the big screen.
How about if, instead, I have preferences set that if I download it on to my smart phone (or tablet) it also downloads to my desktop system and is available to any other devices in my home that are connected via network. If it is located on my computer, then it can stream to my smart phone or tablet as long as it has enough bandwidth, thus eliminating my need for large amounts of storage on my phone or tablet when I am just browsing content at home.
All of the pieces of this technology are available now, but what doesn't exist commercially are the ties that bind them together under one umbrella. Sure, if you know what you are doing, you can make this happen, but remember that people like you are a minority of the users out there with both the need for this kind of lifestyle and the discretionary income to afford it. But you still have to find or buy your digital content from multiple sources, and the devices you use do not automatically synchronize themselves to each other without a lot of technical work under the hood. This is where a company like Apple or Google will dominate, by bringing everything together for the end consumer who doesn't have the capability or time to figure out how to make it all work together.
To be honest, anyone working at home doing anything other than an RDP session to their local box at work needs to negotiate on good terms with their employer for compensation. Figure out what percentage of internet traffic is work related vs. personal, and how much overall use of the equipment will be dedicated to work vs. personal and divide that by the total value of that machine, depreciate that over the length of time you reasonably expect to own that computer (i.e., 3 years) and present that figure to your management. As long as you don't pad it too much, I'm sure that management will most likely be willing to compensate you for use of your personal equipment if they expect to have work-for-hire rights to anything you create with that equipment. If they argue with you regarding the need to do this, you can always bring up the fact that many companies will reimburse employees who use their personally owned vehicles to perform company tasks, such as delivery people or on-the-road salespeople. This is, in essence, no different. If they still continue to argue, then you have every right to refuse to work from home until such time as you are either provided with the equipment and internet connect with which to work or they are willing to provide you with compensation for the use of your personal equipment and connections. All said and done, it should come out to be about $45 to $50 a month. Not much, but you can use that to defray the cost of your internet.
Ah, the kicker...
Biodiesel is better for the environment than diesel or gasoline. For one, with petrodiesel and gasoline, there is always a certain amount of sulfur and other pollutants from the refinement process that gets into the atmosphere. With coal, it's not just sulfur, but you have other chemicals, such as uranium (more radioactivity is spread into the atmosphere by coal-burning plants than by all the nuclear power plants in the world).
While hydrogen may be seen as a panacea:
(1) our infrastucture and economy is not designed for it. The vehicles we have on the road today are not designed to run on hydrogen. We do not have a viable hydrogen distribution network. Hydrogen generation in our infrastructure, at present, is tied to a petrochemical process. Hydrogen is extremely volatile. While gasoline is combustible, hydrogen can explode in the mere presence of oxygen. All it takes is a significant enough leak and an ignition source and you will have an explosion. Not so much with gasoline or diesel.
(2) If we turn to using solar, wind, or nuclear to source most of our electrical generation on the grid, we can get away from the need to burn coal or natural gas for electricity. Electrical power is less of a waste than using electrolysis to generate hydrogen from water and then distributing it to vehicles. We already have an electricity distribution network, and battery and super-capacitor technology is making leaps and bounds as more money and focus is being brought upon that research. Modern lithium-polymer batteries, where the market is headed now, are extremely recyclable, with a large percentage of the material actually being able to go back into use with new batteries. Super-capacitors can be charged in a matter of minutes, and there are lithium-polymer batteries on the market now that are able to attain a 90% charge in a fraction of the time it would take to charge to 100%. It would not be unreasonable to see an electric car with a nearly 1500 kilometer range with the next generation of silicon lithium batteries due to market in the next few years.
A friend of mine went through a nasty divorce a few years back, and his wife was able to hold up the divorce proceedings for nearly a year by filing for bankruptcy. This made it so that she was able to collect separate maintenance checks (half his paycheck, since she "conveniently" quit her job a couple months before she filed) as well as live in the house he was paying for and forcing him to move out. Since the house and mortgage was in both their names, it was also tied up in the bankruptcy, which left him in legal limbo when he tried to find another place to live (not many landlords will rent to someone whose house is tied up in bankruptcy and has several liens against it).
Needless to say, he paid through the nose to finalize the divorce. She, on the other hand, took several trips to Vegas and at least one trip to the Bahamas with her new boyfriend, while he was living at my house eating PBJs and ramen, and working like a dog to keep his good credit from being completely destroyed.
Yep, I know full well about this tactic. It's a nasty way to stave off any kind of court proceeding until it is resolved. My friend ended up paying half his income for a year and a half (roughly about $150,000) just because of it, and then spent most of the rest of his income paying for lawyers, child support and making payments on a house he couldn't live in. Be careful who you marry, is all I can say if you are looking for a moral to this story.
If I remember my biology correctly, in addition to several bacteria that can break cellulose into less complex sugars, there is the entire fungal kingdom that has made it their existence to break down any number of plant and animal material (to include cellulose, I'm sure) and to do it efficiently (possibly more efficient than bacteria).
We know how to grow and culture fungus. We know how to grow and culture e. coli. Essentially, what we are left with is a brewing process that feeds wood pulp, straw, recycled paper, livestock waste, etc., on one end, and outputs refined gasoline on the other. And I'm sure the biomass that is generated besides the gasoline will find some productive use, even if all it does is become fertilizer (after it has been irradiated to keep any GM fungi or bacteria from getting into the wild).
I'm sure if someone were to market their gasoline as "green" or "organic", there would be a segment of the population willing to pay a premium to make use of it. The same segment of the population that buys organic milk, organic produce, and drives their biodiesel Jetta or hybrid Prius to their Sierra Club meetings.
OK, I am all for fair competitive practices. But right now, in this country, there is nothing fair or competitive about wireless broadband. You have large monopolistic companies working in tight collusion with one another, fixing the price of "air". What AT&T (and Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, et al) are afraid of is someone (like Google) coming in over an "open" spectrum and offering the latest generation in broadband access without having to pay for legacy compatibility (ie, they don't have to maintain a network of antiquated technology just to service customers who are too cheap to upgrade).
Just look at the standard wireless service model here in the US. If you want to access the latest generation of broadband, you have to buy the latest generation of phone and sign your name to a one or two year contract, since the wireless provider is obviously subsidizing the phone you are buy (obviously), because buying the phone from your wireless provider is prohibitively expensive unless you sign up or renew your contract, and if you do happen to buy one of those grey market unlocked phones you can find on the internet, you mysteriously don't have access to broadband through your wireless company, and they won't offer any support unless it's hardware you buy from them. Who is stifling innovation in the wireless broadband industry? The industry itself is stifling innovation under it's own model of capitalize once, and run it for profit until the public realizes they are getting peanuts at caviar prices compared to what they could be getting otherwise. This is why we are seeing emerging markets like Southeast Asia and China with better wireless networks than our supposedly developed US market.
Stifling innovation? Why is Europe already using 3G technology and we have yet to roll out a comprehensive 2G technology in most major regions? Maybe it's about time to open up bandwidth to entrepreneurs who can make the wireless industry finally sit up and realize just how transparent their real intentions are.
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The military (surely with some help from CIA and NSA) has their own reusable unmanned space plane. They aren't entirely reliant on NASA, though they do need to use them for the launch vehicle.
They did just complete a 228 day mission, according to the article. Who needs a satellite when you can just keep an orbiter up there for the better part of a year and then retask it on occasion to take snapshots of your favorite terrorist camp or what that country is doing with their nuclear research that they swear has no military application.
You know, you are absolutely right. Until municipalities figure out that private, for profit business isn't all about what is good for the customer, but what is good for the books, they aren't going to take over this segment.
Consider if the same companies had control over road construction.
1) Every road would be a toll road.
2) If even half the people who purchased a toll tag were to get on the roads, then the traffic would be so bad that it would all come to a screeching halt.
3) The road-owning company would only open up new lanes only to those people willing to pay an additional surcharge, allowing you to bypass all the traffic.
4) Big businesses that pay the road company big money get major thoroughfares right to the front door. Smaller businesses that don't pay the fee have to deal with the congestion just like everyone else.
5) You happen to live out in the middle of nowhere? You get a gravel road (if that, even) unless you are willing to pay for the road construction yourself.
You say, let the power of competition drive the prices down. Guess what? In most markets, there is no competition. If there is any competition, then it is dominated by 2 or 3 companies, and they are more than happy to work in an environment of de facto collusion and let the consumer pay in excess.
Let the municipalities own the pipes. If the municipality wants to invest in infrastructure, then they can float a bond issue with the constituency. To add to it, if a municipality wants to attract high tech industry (along with highly paid high tech workers who will own big expensive houses and pay a lot of property taxes) they can prime the pump by investing in big pipelines.
As a consumer, you would buy the size of your pipeline from the municipal utility. No content would be provided over this pipeline from the utility. It's just bandwidth. Instead of the content provider owning the pipeline, you now rent it from a public entity that could care less about what data goes over the line as long as you don't exceed the bandwidth you have purchased. To add to it, the forces of competition are at work again, since you will now be buying content and communication services directly from the source, rather than contracting for a firehose from a Cable company when all you want is a trickle.
It's true that a degree might not matter to you when you are building your team, but it does matter to the executive management team, HR and the marketing folks who write up the material that they use to sell your company's expertise. They like to point out how highly educated your team is, and that between them they hold X number of post-graduate degrees. Sometimes it doesn't really matter what degree (it could be a doctorate in basket weaving or underwater sign language for all they care).
For a lot of these folks, the only grip they have on their position is how many courses of administrative process management (or maybe managing process administration, or processing managed administration) they completed. Not that they retained anything from the courses, just that they were completed. Try to get them to write a line of code, and they will tell you that's your job. Theirs is to come up with ideas that would take years to implement.
Anyone who is serious about encoding/transcoding video on a professional level will invest real money into workstation-level hardware rather than waste their time trying to play with enthusiast processors. Granted, some folks might get a hard e-peen from this hexacore, but the last ones I would expect to get all moist over this announcement are the ones whose lives revolve around professional video. Tell them that there is a newer, faster 12-core Xeon with more cache on the way, and you will start to hear some heavy breathing...
As for the semi-pro folks who do this on occasion...you might hear a few interested parties, but only the same folks who have money to waste on bleeding edge technology that will be outpaced within 8-10 months anyway. These same folks will never really tax the full power of this hardware anyway 90% of the time. As for time savings...for most encoding/transcoding efforts, you would be shaving seconds to minutes when compared to hardware that sells for a quarter the price. Cheaper hardware means you can afford to buy coffee and take a couple coffee breaks throughout the day. Maybe even get up from your computer and go outside to enjoy the sun for a couple minutes...
The price of adoption in India and China would have to come down significantly for the average citizen to be able to afford a mobile phone. Cheap Chinese phones sold in the developing markets are priced much closer to $15-20 in local currency, and even that is a stretch in some countries where that amount of money is the equivalent of a month's wages.
Granted, as income levels continue to rise in either country, it will become easier for these luxuries to be afforded, but as it stands, manufacturers will have a difficult time making profit if their margins are so low unless they sell devices that have been stripped of every feature and bare minimum plans. In this space, the developed markets have much more potential for profit...so Nokia had best take Apple's advice and put their investment in their best products.
Just because lock-in doesn't happen by the manufacturer doesn't stop the carrier from locking in the phone. Aren't we already seeing carriers installing proprietary versions of Android on the phones purchased by their customers that will not allow them to delete applications put there by the carriers? How long until the carriers decide to lock-in the phones so that you can't use any marketplace but theirs? And tie this lock-in to access to their network?
And yes, I know that all you have to do is wipe the phone and reinstall Android from Google's source, but we are talking about the average customer here...as George Carlin said, "Consider how dumb the average person is, and realize that half the people out there are dumber than that".
I'm not saying that the iPhone is the best smart phone, just that there are different models out there for different people. IMHO, as much as some developers complain about Apple's closed garden, there are a larger number of them pleased as punch because it ensures them an open opportunity to make money for the serious development effort a lot of them make. Sure, in the end, a lot of apps out there are no better than fart-noise-makers, but a lot of them are also seriously well designed and polished programs that deserve a decent price tag. And if a developer only has to upload it to one marketplace and start watching the money roll in, where do you think they are going to put forth their greatest effort?
Android with its open policy and schizmatic marketplaces leaves an open opportunity for piracy, and thus leaves the original developer who put forth the effort to write the software with little to show for their effort, even if it is an extremely popular download. Apple's model encourages said developer to continue writing great apps because the developer eventually profits from their endeavor.
It also assumes that said tanks and healers have taken the painstaking task to level up their gear as well BEFORE they started running your sorry under-geared ass through instances, and they have all the strats figured out and never wipe to trash pulls, let alone bosses. I have leveled up my tank through all of this, with my wife as the healer, and I must have spent nearly 2,000+ gold on repairs alone just to learn encounters, death after death after death.
As a run-of-the-mill DPS, you are starting to feel some of the pain that healers and tanks have had to contend with, now that you have to use ALL of your abilities, and use them without any screw-ups. In essence, your 30 hours game time is piggy-backed on the efforts your guild tanks and healers have taken to improve themselves to the point where they can reliably run you through content that would normally be beyond you.
As one of those tanks, I am CONSTANTLY turning down random requests to come tank X heroic or Y raid. And just because you happen to be a guildie doesn't mean you get to slack off and let me run your sorry under-geared ass through instances just because you made it to level 85. I won't touch you till you have capped your gear so you can at least random heroics. Nor will I sit there and explain the strats to you...I expect you to know them since they are posted in several locations online. In other words, bring your brain and be ready to show me you are worth the effort it will take to get you raid geared.
In response to the original article...I wait to see what BioWare Austin puts out the door. Blizzard has raised the bar considerably for any other MMO product out there. Yes, there are still bugs in the game, but overall, it has the most polished feel of just about any game out there right now, MMO or otherwise. Blizzard has taken a lot of time and effort putting a quality product out the door, and this has been proven in popularity. I can only hope BioWare has put forth the same kind of effort.
The government is very sensitive about anything that could disrupt the financial sector...this includes their ability to conduct business online. Why?
Because the entire financial sector is based upon imaginary money, and just like the emperor walking down the street in his fancy "new" clothes, all it takes is for one person to figure out that there really isn't anything there other than what we choose to fantasize about. Paper money (hell, not just paper, but stuff that is nothing more than an entry in a database) is not backed up by goods, commodities or services, but rather a bunch of IOUs signed by each and every person who borrows money and promises to pay it back.
The biggest borrower is no other than all of us , the American taxpaying public. And all it takes is for someone to feel that this money is not going to be paid back, and POP goes the economy.
The underlying root is that these DDOS attacks could very well highlight the vulnerabilities in our system and bring this whole sham to a head well before any contingency plans could take effect. So to combat this, the government will turn any and every power it has to bring these attacks, and the people behind them, to a permanent end. Or as permanent as you can get within our legal system.
Keep in mind that a police officer isn't necessarily after the truth. If they end up with the truth, then it is a happy coincidence. No, what they want is an open and shut investigation that will result in a conviction. These are the results that get them better performance reviews, promotions and pay raises, and gets the case closed so they can go on to other, more important work. In some nations, it is legal for a police officer to use any and every means at his or her disposal to get the information that will bring a case to a close. This can include, in many cases, methods that can be described as torture. In some countries, a coerced confession carries legal weight.
If it is your option, remain silent. If it is your right, exercise this right and bring any questioning to an end as quickly as possible. If officers continue to question you after you have exercised your right, then request that it be noted for the record that you requested to remain silent, and do your best to remain silent. If you are an American visiting a foreign nation, you can request a representative from the embassy who is familiar with local laws and customs. And if the crime is substantial, get a lawyer. Do not rely on the fact that you know you are innocent; get a lawyer even if you know you are.
In my area, I have access through Time Warner, AT&T and a local provider who uses AT&T to run the fiber right to your home, though you have to pay an exorbitant fee to have this put in. Right now, I am using Time Warner's service, mostly because I have had bad dealings with AT&T in the past (while I used them for wireless, they completely jacked up my bill every single month, and finally, after I had cancelled the contract and paid the termination fee, they started to get all concerned about "customer satisfaction" and "retention"...too little too late)
I will tell you the truth; I hate both Time Warner and AT&T with a passion. Just last month I started having DNS resolution issues. Websites that I had previously been able to access would suddenly pop up with a 404 page (conveniently hosted by...Time Warner!). I called the local office and they said they knew nothing, even checked to see if there were any outages, and nothing came up on their screen. Finally got through to one of their internet support and he informed me that they switched over to new DNS relay servers in our area. One switch over to my router, and I plugged in Google's public DNS servers where I had previously allowed the Time Warner DNS to relay...and all the sudden, my pages started to resolve just fine. In fact, the resolution was even faster than it had ever been before.
My wife noticed the difference immediately. She's an avid WoW player, and she said her latency went down considerably...how could DNS affect latency, I thought, unless the DNS was routing all the traffic through some sort of filter? Did I just stumble on some sort of nefarious scheme on the part of TW? I experienced the same issues with Netflix movies over the TW network as well. While under TW DNS, my netflix movies would have to recache at least once every 30-40 minutes. Now, under the Google DNS, it never has to cache. I wonder...
Germany is one of those strange European countries that actually has (gasp) laws to limit bad labor practices. If your boss wants you to work overtime, even if you work just one hour overtime, you are allowed to take the next work shift off PAID in addition to the overtime pay you receive. You have 24 days of vacation in a given year (one month with weekends). If you don't take your vacation, and November rolls around, you HAVE to take the entire month of December off. Some employers are allowed to apply for special dispensation, but the regional government labor board is usually very loathe to grant such dispensations lest they start a trend. In the US, you are lucky if you get 2 weeks paid vacation, and your employer can cancel your vacation on a whim (as has happened to me on several occasions) and you have no government labor board to take your complaint to when this happens. In fact, if you were to take this up with any government entity, they would probably laugh you out of the office, while in Germany, this can be a very serious offense and can end up with the company being sanctioned and having to pay a hefty fine.
A lot of these practices are used to make working your employees overtime more expensive than it is to actually hire new employee. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that most of Europe is combating a high unemployment rate, and the best way to get to full employment is to create more jobs. That Germany is still near the top in individual worker productivity speaks volumes about German work ethics. They are able to get as much done in a standard 7 hour day/35 hour week as most Americans do in 8 hour day/40 hour week.
What is also really strange is that the cost to hire a new worker in Germany is not nearly as expensive as it is in the US. For instance, in the US, if you hire on a new full time employee, you have to pay his/her benefits (health, dental), while in Germany, most of these are already covered under the universal health system paid for by the German taxpayers.
As to the original topic, it stands to reason that the best solution for Apple at this point is to offer a free bumper rim to all their affected customers. If they purchase it in volume, the cost is minimal, and they can tell their customers to go to the nearest Apple Store to pick one up for free. It goes a long way to placating customer relations as well as bringing those customers back into the Apple Store, where, more than likely, these people will also probably purchase one or two additional retail items, so Apple wins all the way around. If they offer it in fruity colors, all the better.
Atheist - a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
Agnostic - a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as god, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
Pride - a high or inordinate opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.
Self-righteousness - confident of one's own righteousness, esp. when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.
Mr. Khan isn't saying he doesn't believe in God, nor is he saying that God is unknowable...what he is saying, is that it doesn't matter what you think about God, but what does matter is how our existence on this earth impacts the other people living here, and if we have their welfare in our hearts, and we have the humility to see past our differences, then it doesn't matter to what diety (or none at all) we attribute this to, in the end we share the same goal, and that is what really matters.
The true enemy of society isn't religion, but rather the sociopaths who manipulate it to their own ends. They are difficult to recognize until they finally play their hands and the damage is done, but these are the people who have given religion a bad name. They take the religious zealots and turn them into weapons that tear down and destroy all that society has built. We have seen this in all the major religions to date, as well as almost any cultural divide where a schism can be made and exploited by people who want to manipulate the masses to their own ends (i.e., race, sex, creed, etc.).
That is why those of us who carry our faith close to their hearts need to be wary of anyone who tries to speak to that faith. We should always question the motives of anyone who tries to persuade us to their way of thinking. Look to the motives of such individuals, and look to how they treat with those around them. This is where religion fails.
I see general use computers becoming a niche as mobile and specific-use computers become more and more powerful and capable. We won't see them go away altogether, but when a lay person (one who is not tech savvy) is faced with the option of a relatively expensive general use computer (running Windows, Mac OS, or any other Posix distro) that has a steep learning curve, and an inexpensive specific-use device that is geared to the services they want to use (email, web browsing, games, online chat, etc.), then that person will gravitate to the path of least effort and lowest expenditure as long as it satisfies their needs.
For the technical users (programmers, designers and such) general use computers will still be available, but I would expect to see a feature-freeze come into effect as more and more features are pushed into the specific use devices. That's not saying new features won't show up, just that features will be more driven by actual function rather than UI reformation.
Maybe we can refocus efforts on the parts of the operating system that matter to us technical users, such as improvement in file system structure and interoperability of APIs within any given IDE.
Maybe even a better framework to handle multithreaded coding that leverages whatever hardware a machine has available, whether it is multiple general use processors or graphics processors (GPGPU). That way, all the programmer has to worry about is the code he needs to execute, and let the framework worry about the resources that need to be used. Apple has already taken steps in this direction (look up Grand Central Dispatch) but you have to do it in Obj C (does anyone really like using the awkward square bracket syntax? I'm still not used to it).
I've often thought a great PSA would be some soccer mom, waving a gun around in her hand while blabbing away on her cell phone with her kids all gathered around her, trying to take aim at a target. Then a narrator would say something like "You wouldn't do this with your kids around, would you?" then flash over to the same soccer mom, blabbing away on her cell phone while she is driving with all her kids in the back seat...
Cars have killed more people in this country than guns. And that's saying quite a bit, since guns were specifically designed to kill. Every time I get behind the wheel of my car, I remind myself of two things. One, I am operating a loaded weapon that has no safety other than my own diligence in recognizing dangers, both to myself and the other people around me. And two, no matter what, it is better to not have an accident at all. No matter what . This is personal experience, 5 weeks in the hospital (2 weeks in an induced coma), 3 surgeries, a lifetime with pain and over $300,000 in medical bills, a portion of which was covered by insurance. And I was the victim, not the perpetrator.
Anything we can do to slow down idiots and make them more cognizant of their responsibilities as vehicle operators, the better. If we have to continually zing repeat offenders in the wallet, then let's do it. If we end up going to a point system where your license to drive (which is a privilege, btw) is suspended after a specified number of violations, then let's do it. Right now, this all just seems more like a ploy to make some authority money rather than insure public safety, though.
Just remember that the average smart phone user is less concerned about "can I develop it using XYZ and does it use OSS?" and more about "does it allow me to run app X and play game Y."
/., right?).
It's less about the tech geek, and more about the feature freak.
Think more like your girlfriend or wife, who (if yours is anything like mine) hears nothing but static whenever I try to speak geek with her.
But she still somehow is able to do things on her iPhone that even makes my eyes boggle.
She could care less about this article, but only because it's talking about practices "under the hood." She tends to be a more "on the road" experience kinda person, to use a car analogy (hey, this is
No one argues that the desktop PC is essentially owned by Windows (at this current time) but Apple holds a much larger share of the desktop than Linux does, and mostly because there are so many flavors of Linux available, and even when you can agree on one distro, there is a fight over which windowing system, which development architecture, etc., since there are no real standards as everything is open. Sometimes, having too many options is as bad as having no options at all. With the handheld market, where hardware resources are limited, in order to remain interoperable across a wide variety of devices, there has to be a requirement of some level of standardization of features. If there is no standardization, then the burden falls to the developer to either come up with a mechanism that copes with a variety of features, or to the developers responsible for the IDE that theses developers use to keep an updated framework of which features are available for which devices. In the end, you can very well end up with apps developed for Android that will only be able to run on a select list of devices, as that is the list that the developer is willing to take time to design around. If anyone wants it to work on their specific device, well, then they can damn well get in there and do it themselves (the old OSS saw, if you don't like it, here's the source code, fix it yourself). Apple's model is both inferior and superior at the same time. By limiting the hardware, they are able to guarantee a certain level of interoperability of the software between devices. Sure, we will probably get some drift as newer, faster, bigger, more powerful devices come out. But, for now, if you develop an app for the iPhone, you can be reasonably guaranteed that any iPhone will be able to run it. That's the superiority. The inferiority is the closed development process once it leaves the developers hands. Sure it would be nice if I can load the software directly to my iPhone (I can, in fact, if I want to void my warranty and contract, that is), but for now, in order to maintain mass market appeal and compliance, developers are tied to Apples AppStore model if they want to develop on the iPhone (legally, that is).
You know, being able to take responsibility goes a long way if you have the means to afford the consequences when that you "fail" at maintaining that responsibility. But what is the consequence of having a major (or not so major) health problem? Consider that a broken leg will run you a bill of $15,000-$20,000 if there is any surgery/therapy involved. Sure, this is at the grossly-inflated rates that hospitals charge today in the US, but it is the going price nonetheless. So a responsible person will pay the full amount when it is due, right? Or would they make payments on it until it is paid?
You do see the stupidity of this situation when you start looking at the fact that you are dealing with your life and the lives of those you love. If the doctor confronts you to tell you that your wife is dying, and that he can save her, but the procedure is very expensive and you could not afford to pay it even if you worked the rest of your life, what do you say? Of course you don't say no, you insensitive clod! Hence, the reason why a personally "responsible" system will never work well (which is what we have right now in the US) as long as there is room for someone to profit off another's misery. The key word is profit.
We can look at it from an economic perspective, if you will. Currently, with our system, if someone is unable to afford health care, they go to the emergency room. Once in the emergency room, the health provider is obliged by law to provide service until the person is no longer in threat of losing their life. Since the person has no means to pay the bill, the amount ends up being "written off" by the provider. The provider then increases the amount they charge to all the other patients who are able to pay to offset the loss from those who are unable to pay. At emergency room prices. So in the end, we are paying for other people's care anyway, at the most expensive price possible.
But, economics aside, we have to ask ourselves the age-old question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It comes down to a moral argument whether or not, in a society, we are not only responsible for ourselves, but for each man and woman our lives happen to touch. I for one believe this to be very much true, and that if it is within our means to make the burden easier as a society, then we should do so. Just as we provide police forces to protect the innocent and fire departments to minimize the risk of losing large amounts of property to uncontrolled infernos, we should provide a mechanism that allows everyone access to health based upon need, not wealth. Every other major industrialized nation has already responded to this question, and they have all decided that it is better for society as a whole if society as a whole is healthy.
Do this and run new Coax alongside, as well as a slip line for any future wire pulls you may have in mind. Just be aware to use duct tape liberally and if you don't mind the mess, some line-pull lube would go a long way for tight fits. You can then put a punch-down in the attic and run patch cables from the punchdown into a switch in the closet in the floor below the attic. I recommend that if you get a 12-block punchdown (should be relatively cheap), then run all twelve patch cables down to the closet, even if you are only using half of them. It will save you some work later on.
Also, check building code in your area, as you may have to buy plenum insulated Cat6e as opposed to the cheaper PVC. Some jurisdictions actually restrict the use of PVC, even when it is behind a wall.
I went through and did this for a friend quite a few years ago (replaced all his phone cabling with Cat6e) and had an electrician friend of mine give us advice before we started. The electrician said we were OK to run the cabling ourselves, but we had to use plenum since that was what code required. The cabling was twice as expensive as PVC, even when bought in bulk. We also ran slip lines, which has been a god-send for my friend since he had to then follow up a year or so later and run more lines through to his home theater.
Hence, your best policy is to learn continuously and not rest on your laurels. There are very few professions where a person can learn all they need to know in four years of schooling and then expect to reap the rewards for the rest of their lives. Doctors are constantly having to learn new procedures and new medicines. Lawyers have to keep themselves appraised about changes in law and recent court decisions that change interpretations, as well as any changes in their profession that might force them to change their specialization. Just like there aren't any buggy-whip salesmen out there anymore, there isn't as much call for programmers who know COBOL or FORTRAN. And just like the buggy-whip salesmen had to learn a new product line to sell, so do programmers need to be in constant contact with the shifts in the industry. But then, just like architecture, programming is as much an art form as it is a science. All we programmers really need to do is learn new tools, and the tools we use are the different languages and IDEs that contain the logic we want computed. How long would it really take an experienced COBOL programmer to pick up .NET or Java is they already understand the concepts behind the semantics? Given a reasonable level of intelligence, I would say a good programmer can probably be well enough versed in a modern language on the outside of a month at the most. Sure, they aren't going to be flying in it (that takes at least a few more months), but programming is programming, and the one thing you really can't teach is a well-organized mind that can build logic to fit the requirement. Granted, it requires management who actually views employees as an investment rather than a commodity to be able to allow for this constant retraining.
I think we also need to look at another factor as to why we don't see too many older programmers. If someone is a developer for any length of time, they tend to get promoted into management. As soon as someone spends more of their day managing projects instead of actually programming, I would say that person is no longer really just a programmer. You see a lot more of these folks climbing the corporate ladder instead of filling out the roster in the programming ranks.
It will be a combination of iTunes revamp for video digital content and a synergy in both Apple and third-party apps for the iPad that will drive its success. To date, there is very little in the way of enhancement to a truly digital lifestyle, even though all the pieces are avaialable. If you download a video on one device, it only exists on that device. But what if I were to introduce something new. What if I set up a small web of machines that are all linked to my account, so that if I purchase the rights to a specific digital property on my smart phone, and get home to discover that the wife wants to watch it too but the screen is much too small for both of us, then I have to take the trouble to download it again to another device (such as my laptop or set-top device) so we can watch it on the big screen. How about if, instead, I have preferences set that if I download it on to my smart phone (or tablet) it also downloads to my desktop system and is available to any other devices in my home that are connected via network. If it is located on my computer, then it can stream to my smart phone or tablet as long as it has enough bandwidth, thus eliminating my need for large amounts of storage on my phone or tablet when I am just browsing content at home. All of the pieces of this technology are available now, but what doesn't exist commercially are the ties that bind them together under one umbrella. Sure, if you know what you are doing, you can make this happen, but remember that people like you are a minority of the users out there with both the need for this kind of lifestyle and the discretionary income to afford it. But you still have to find or buy your digital content from multiple sources, and the devices you use do not automatically synchronize themselves to each other without a lot of technical work under the hood. This is where a company like Apple or Google will dominate, by bringing everything together for the end consumer who doesn't have the capability or time to figure out how to make it all work together.
To be honest, anyone working at home doing anything other than an RDP session to their local box at work needs to negotiate on good terms with their employer for compensation. Figure out what percentage of internet traffic is work related vs. personal, and how much overall use of the equipment will be dedicated to work vs. personal and divide that by the total value of that machine, depreciate that over the length of time you reasonably expect to own that computer (i.e., 3 years) and present that figure to your management. As long as you don't pad it too much, I'm sure that management will most likely be willing to compensate you for use of your personal equipment if they expect to have work-for-hire rights to anything you create with that equipment. If they argue with you regarding the need to do this, you can always bring up the fact that many companies will reimburse employees who use their personally owned vehicles to perform company tasks, such as delivery people or on-the-road salespeople. This is, in essence, no different. If they still continue to argue, then you have every right to refuse to work from home until such time as you are either provided with the equipment and internet connect with which to work or they are willing to provide you with compensation for the use of your personal equipment and connections. All said and done, it should come out to be about $45 to $50 a month. Not much, but you can use that to defray the cost of your internet.
Ah, the kicker... Biodiesel is better for the environment than diesel or gasoline. For one, with petrodiesel and gasoline, there is always a certain amount of sulfur and other pollutants from the refinement process that gets into the atmosphere. With coal, it's not just sulfur, but you have other chemicals, such as uranium (more radioactivity is spread into the atmosphere by coal-burning plants than by all the nuclear power plants in the world). While hydrogen may be seen as a panacea: (1) our infrastucture and economy is not designed for it. The vehicles we have on the road today are not designed to run on hydrogen. We do not have a viable hydrogen distribution network. Hydrogen generation in our infrastructure, at present, is tied to a petrochemical process. Hydrogen is extremely volatile. While gasoline is combustible, hydrogen can explode in the mere presence of oxygen. All it takes is a significant enough leak and an ignition source and you will have an explosion. Not so much with gasoline or diesel. (2) If we turn to using solar, wind, or nuclear to source most of our electrical generation on the grid, we can get away from the need to burn coal or natural gas for electricity. Electrical power is less of a waste than using electrolysis to generate hydrogen from water and then distributing it to vehicles. We already have an electricity distribution network, and battery and super-capacitor technology is making leaps and bounds as more money and focus is being brought upon that research. Modern lithium-polymer batteries, where the market is headed now, are extremely recyclable, with a large percentage of the material actually being able to go back into use with new batteries. Super-capacitors can be charged in a matter of minutes, and there are lithium-polymer batteries on the market now that are able to attain a 90% charge in a fraction of the time it would take to charge to 100%. It would not be unreasonable to see an electric car with a nearly 1500 kilometer range with the next generation of silicon lithium batteries due to market in the next few years.
A friend of mine went through a nasty divorce a few years back, and his wife was able to hold up the divorce proceedings for nearly a year by filing for bankruptcy. This made it so that she was able to collect separate maintenance checks (half his paycheck, since she "conveniently" quit her job a couple months before she filed) as well as live in the house he was paying for and forcing him to move out. Since the house and mortgage was in both their names, it was also tied up in the bankruptcy, which left him in legal limbo when he tried to find another place to live (not many landlords will rent to someone whose house is tied up in bankruptcy and has several liens against it). Needless to say, he paid through the nose to finalize the divorce. She, on the other hand, took several trips to Vegas and at least one trip to the Bahamas with her new boyfriend, while he was living at my house eating PBJs and ramen, and working like a dog to keep his good credit from being completely destroyed. Yep, I know full well about this tactic. It's a nasty way to stave off any kind of court proceeding until it is resolved. My friend ended up paying half his income for a year and a half (roughly about $150,000) just because of it, and then spent most of the rest of his income paying for lawyers, child support and making payments on a house he couldn't live in. Be careful who you marry, is all I can say if you are looking for a moral to this story.
If I remember my biology correctly, in addition to several bacteria that can break cellulose into less complex sugars, there is the entire fungal kingdom that has made it their existence to break down any number of plant and animal material (to include cellulose, I'm sure) and to do it efficiently (possibly more efficient than bacteria).
We know how to grow and culture fungus. We know how to grow and culture e. coli. Essentially, what we are left with is a brewing process that feeds wood pulp, straw, recycled paper, livestock waste, etc., on one end, and outputs refined gasoline on the other. And I'm sure the biomass that is generated besides the gasoline will find some productive use, even if all it does is become fertilizer (after it has been irradiated to keep any GM fungi or bacteria from getting into the wild).
I'm sure if someone were to market their gasoline as "green" or "organic", there would be a segment of the population willing to pay a premium to make use of it. The same segment of the population that buys organic milk, organic produce, and drives their biodiesel Jetta or hybrid Prius to their Sierra Club meetings.
OK, I am all for fair competitive practices. But right now, in this country, there is nothing fair or competitive about wireless broadband. You have large monopolistic companies working in tight collusion with one another, fixing the price of "air". What AT&T (and Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, et al) are afraid of is someone (like Google) coming in over an "open" spectrum and offering the latest generation in broadband access without having to pay for legacy compatibility (ie, they don't have to maintain a network of antiquated technology just to service customers who are too cheap to upgrade). Just look at the standard wireless service model here in the US. If you want to access the latest generation of broadband, you have to buy the latest generation of phone and sign your name to a one or two year contract, since the wireless provider is obviously subsidizing the phone you are buy (obviously), because buying the phone from your wireless provider is prohibitively expensive unless you sign up or renew your contract, and if you do happen to buy one of those grey market unlocked phones you can find on the internet, you mysteriously don't have access to broadband through your wireless company, and they won't offer any support unless it's hardware you buy from them. Who is stifling innovation in the wireless broadband industry? The industry itself is stifling innovation under it's own model of capitalize once, and run it for profit until the public realizes they are getting peanuts at caviar prices compared to what they could be getting otherwise. This is why we are seeing emerging markets like Southeast Asia and China with better wireless networks than our supposedly developed US market. Stifling innovation? Why is Europe already using 3G technology and we have yet to roll out a comprehensive 2G technology in most major regions? Maybe it's about time to open up bandwidth to entrepreneurs who can make the wireless industry finally sit up and realize just how transparent their real intentions are.