Um, Hong Kong has a population of about 7 million. There's a little city a bit farther north with a population of 20 million, and a reputation as the most dynamic business city in China; you might have heard of it: Shanghai.
KVJr was a member of my fraternity's chapter at Cornell, which, for those who don't know, is in upstate NY. On a road trip, we visited the Cornell chapter, which had a magnificent old stone mansion for a chapter house. That house included a large second-story verandah.
According to the brothers there, it was a long standing tradition for a few seniors to sleep on that verandah every night for their last year, and KVJr did so in his last year. Since this was many years before Al Kilgore-Trout realized the earth was getting warmer, I can assure you that in the middle of February, it got DAMN cold in Ithaca. But again, the brothers assured us he toughed it out for the entire year. So he wasn't just a damn fine writer; he was a tough SOB as well.
Geez, anyone who read Peter Wright's "Spycatcher" - published 20 years ago - would realize that this patent is merely a specific implementation of the techniques Wright described in the book. In particular, he developed the idea of monitoring radio communications from the Russian embassy in London. All the transmissions were in code, so he and his colleagues had no idea of the content of the messages. However, Wright deduced that when the Russian "Resident" left the embassy, coded traffic between the embassy and his car would increase. By simply matching the comings and goings of various individuals from the embassy with increases and decreases in radio traffic volume, he and his team were able to pinpoint Russian intelligence agents promptly. (The whole book is a great read, by the way, and available at your local public library, I'm sure.)
In fact, I tried to get Nortel to implement something similar on their Meridian phone systems back in the early 90's. I thought that by tracking internal phone calls through "Call Detail Records" (CDR - which list the calling extension, called extension, date, time, and call duration), we could see patterns of calls between departments, and determine if repetitive patterns existed, such as many calls between sales and billing at specific times of the month, etc. I thought this might help identify operational issues, inefficiencies, etc. Of course, I was blown off.
They could take a lesson from the much-maligned President Bush, and use deep groundwater (I believe he has pipes going down 300 ft at his Crawford, Texas home) to provide a heat sink. Alternately, copy Toronto, where a large pipe is being constructed in Lake Ontario that provides water at approximately 4 degree C to cool office buildings in the downtown core.
My question is "Why do they have to bathe the components in the liquid?". I seem to recall old stereo components with finned heat sinks sticking out the back. Couldn't some variant of this technology be used, where the actual PCB's don't get near the liquid, but the heat sinks are immersed in it? I realize it might not be as efficient at cooling, but I'd assume it would make the PCB's a lot cheaper to construct, and reduce maintenance costs by making it cheaper to swap out boards, etc.
Simarly climate models may be "incorrect" but they have demonstrated they can predict the climate.
How so? The models presented by some AGW groups wildly overstate both the rise in sea level and the rise in temperature due to increased CO2. For example, the IPCC model for temperature predicted that from 1979 to 1998, temps would go up by 0.8 degree C; in fact, they FELL by 0.2 degrees. Here's a link:
Please note that this link is to a group that SUPPORTS the AGW hypothesis, even though they present evidence showing that the models fail to predict temperature DIRECTION, let alone the magnitude of change. Sorry, if your model predicts a rise of 8, when the actual experience is a fall of 2, I'd say your model is pretty much worthless. But then, I'm only an engineer; we're more concerned with what we see than what we want to prove.
On the other hand, if you mean heavy human impact on the environment, then yes, there are plenty of examples. The Newfoundland cod stock collapse [bbc.co.uk] for instance. Plenty of environmentalists were warning for years that a collapse was happening. Warnings were ignored, then it happened.
Yes, just a few years after the seal hunt was outlawed. Seal stocks exploded, and those seals
had to have something to eat. They don't eat seaweed, you know. I'm not saying that there wasn't
overfishing by man, but you ask any Newfoundlander if the end of the seal hunt was the tipping
point for cod stocks, he'll probably agree.
You'll probably want some numbers. The government of Canada estimated seal stocks in the late 70's as being 1.8 million; by the end of the 80's, there were 5.2 million, nearly 3 times as many. The Canadian government estimates that harp seals consumed nearly 1,000,000,000 cod in 1994 (note: that is less than 1 codfish per day, and seals need more than 1 fish/day to live, but they do eat other species as well; I just point out that 0.6 cod/day is not an unreasonable number), and it stands to reason that many of these would be smaller cod that haven't had a chance to mate yet.
I'll certainly agree that huge commercial trawlers using sonar and dredge nets were no help at all to the situation, but various governments were trying to make some progress there. But, as with the global warming crowd, the hysteria about the seal hunt overwhelmed the evidence, and the the views of such important scientific figures as Brigitte Bardot and Paul McCartney were allowed to prevail, just as the views of noted scientist and hypocrite Al Gore are being lauded now.
What a moron you are. The nearly 400 years of telescope observations
are confirmed by scores of astronomers in different countries. Not
only that, the article says the report was published by European
scientists from the University of Zurich, which last time I checked
was nowhere near the US, but you state "stupid americans".
Go look in a mirror if you want to see something stupid. Then go learn
how to read.
Advertising a competing product when potential customers search for a trademark is exactly what trademarks were supposed to accomplish.
How the heck did this get modded informative? Trademarks were established so that the time and effort a company spends establishing its brand won't get hijacked by someone offering a substandard product with the same name. How useful would it be if you went to the store to get "Aspirin", and there were 10 different versions with the same name, but half of them were weaker and less effective products? Yes, you can always read the ingredients but look at a can of generic corn vs., say, Del Monte. I've found through experience that the Del Monte version is always crisper and sweeter (meaning it was probably canned more quickly from fresher corn) than the generic version. However, both labels will read "corn, water, salt". If the generic maker was able to copy Del Monte's tradename, buying canned corn would be a crapshoot.
Now, you may say "canned corn, big deal", but what if the "Michelin" tires you paid for were actually retreads or substandard tires? Not only do you get ripped off by paying the premium price, but I don't really want to risk a blowout at 60 mph.
There is a ton of marketing research - from both ad firms and university professors - that shows that brand names are useful to consumers. The brand provides information and assurance about a certain level of consistency and quality to the consumer. For example, having tried Hunt's, Aylmer, and generic ketchup, I'll stick to Heinz. I have tried some generic products (e.g. hot dogs - for some reason I have food on the brain tonight!) that I find perfectly acceptable to their brand name versions. Here's another - I take a generic version of metformin to help control my diabetes; it's less than half the price of the brand name version, and it works perfectly well. But I've also tried many generic products (rough toilet paper, inferior laundry detergent, lousy frozen food to name a few) that were completely disappointing.
But those are inexpensive products where the cost of testing them is a few bucks. When I upgrade to an HDTV, it's going to be a Toshiba or Sony or Samsung or LG; it's not going to be an Avanti. When I spend $2,000, I want the assurance of a brand name (quality, warranty, likelihood the maker will be around in five years).
That's what brand names are supposed to accomplish, not to make it easier for competitors. Sheesh!
I wish the article had defined the term "keyword", and what he means
by adware. For example, if I search for "Coca-Cola" on Google, does
this mean I'll see ads for Pepsi? (Actually, I just tried it; you
don't. And if you search for "cola" only, you get a few hits for Coke,
then a whole page of "cost of living adjustments" before you get Pepsi.
However, on the first page, there is an e-bay ad "Get great prices on
cola"; I certainly don't object to that.)
I guess my beef with TFA is he uses a word like "keyword" that has a
very specialized meaning for me - it's a reserved word in a programming
language - without defining what the heck he means it to be.
I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, but Ottawa is Canada's equivalent of Silicon Valley.
I am so tired of this canard. I worked at Mitel in Kanata in the 1980's, and people were saying the same BS back then. Markham, a suburb of Toronto, had more high tech employees then, and has more high tech employees now. Sure BNR had big labs there, but they also had a bunch of labs scattered across Toronto. IBM has huge plants, although some of them were turned over to Celestica. Just drive up the 404, and you'll see names like CGI, Sprint, Hummingbird, GEAC, OpenText, etc.
I'm not trying to dump on Ottawa; I'm just tired of seeing this misinformation repeated.
Consider TV: You can get free (as in paid by advertising) broadcast TV with your rabbit ears. Or you can pay money for cable (which probably includes the same channels you can get for free, plus a lot of channels you'll never watch, and advertising).
I don't know where you live, but in Toronto, you can get maybe 20 stations on broadcast; by cable, I can get over 300 channels of TV, about a hundred music stations, and a whole bunch of pay-per-view channels. And, except for a few shows like "Lost" or "Law and Order", I find that I don't spend a whole lot of time on the lower tier (where are the big networks are) but I end up watching the specialty channels like "History" or "Bravo". So, to me, cable is definitely a superior offering and worth the $80 for digital service and high speed internet.
And because Shaw is part of the Rogers network, and Rogers has their own telco service, Shaw can offer digital phone service at a much reduced rate.
There is no corporate connection between Shaw and Rogers. A few years back, Rogers traded their cable systems in Western Canada to Shaw in exchange for Ontario systems. Perhaps this is what confused you.
ISDN is packet-switched, and is designed to carry multiple types of data, not just calls. All data is carried by asynchronous "cells", as they are called by the guys with bell-shaped-heads. Each cell has a header, with routing information, and a payload of data.
ISDN is synchronous; that's why they need framing bits. I think you are referring to ATM - asynchronous transfer method. I'll agree that almost all telco's use ATM for high speed transport.
Er, who did you think provided those "tie lines"? AT&T, Centel, and all the other public phone companies. And once the calls reached the CO, they were routed over the PSTN just like every other call. If you think IBM created their own facilities, you're deluded.
If CanCon hadn't mandated SCTV to "be more Canadian",
This seems a bit revisionist. In an interview with Moranis and Thomas, they said that Canadian broadcast law at the time allowed two fewer minutes of commercial time per half hour than US law allowed. As a result, the show had to create two more minutes of airtime for the Canadian version, but it wasn't mandated to be "CanCon". Moranis: "So we said 'What are we supposed to do? Sit around wearing toques, drinking beer, and saying "Eh?" a lot?', and they said 'Perfect'!"
The beer store was the only place to get beer in the 1980's in Ontario. Wine and spirits were from the LCBO, beer from Brewer's Retail. Thank god times have changed.
All three of the above posters are idiots who understand nothing about current media policies. The big shows in the US are licensed by various Canadian networks, who use their licenses to create various "mini-markets" across Canada. You don't see exactly the same ads while watching "24" on Global Toronto as you see on Global Vancouver.
Do some global brands get advertised on this show? Of course! Ford, or Toyota, or Coke: many global brands advertise here. Do some regional brands advertise on this show? Absolutely! I see ads for Toronto services on one channel, and Vancouver services on another. Do some absolutely city specific ads get advertised here? Yes. So, when you talk about 'smart,targeted advertising' in the context of cities like Calgary or Edmonton with roughly 1 million viewers apiece, it seems to me that they are already breaking ads down into the kind of granulation you speak of.
How is a site consisting only of user created content supposed to adhere to content laws? How are they supposed to control the amount of Canadian content?
But the broadcasters, at least, (I have no comment on CanCon freaks; they are nuts IMHO) are not complaining about "user created content" - they are complaining about the retransmission of content the broadcasters have paid for by people who aren't doing anything in the way of changing or adding to the original content. For example, if someone wanted to cut and clip a bunch of scenes together, as Steve Martin did in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", I'd defend that as 'fair use'. But to just post entire episodes of TV shows without any significant value added - I don't think that's right.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, Hong Kong has a population of about 7 million. There's a little city a bit farther north with a population of 20 million, and a reputation as the most dynamic business city in China; you might have heard of it: Shanghai.
According to the brothers there, it was a long standing tradition for a few seniors to sleep on that verandah every night for their last year, and KVJr did so in his last year. Since this was many years before Al Kilgore-Trout realized the earth was getting warmer, I can assure you that in the middle of February, it got DAMN cold in Ithaca. But again, the brothers assured us he toughed it out for the entire year. So he wasn't just a damn fine writer; he was a tough SOB as well.
mod parent +5 funny; as if anyone at /. has a girlfriend..
In fact, I tried to get Nortel to implement something similar on their Meridian phone systems back in the early 90's. I thought that by tracking internal phone calls through "Call Detail Records" (CDR - which list the calling extension, called extension, date, time, and call duration), we could see patterns of calls between departments, and determine if repetitive patterns existed, such as many calls between sales and billing at specific times of the month, etc. I thought this might help identify operational issues, inefficiencies, etc. Of course, I was blown off.
Anyone want to give me a job?
In this /., we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
My question is "Why do they have to bathe the components in the liquid?". I seem to recall old stereo components with finned heat sinks sticking out the back. Couldn't some variant of this technology be used, where the actual PCB's don't get near the liquid, but the heat sinks are immersed in it? I realize it might not be as efficient at cooling, but I'd assume it would make the PCB's a lot cheaper to construct, and reduce maintenance costs by making it cheaper to swap out boards, etc.
Why is this modded "troll"? Hope I get to metamoderate on this discussion...
How so? The models presented by some AGW groups wildly overstate both the rise in sea level and the rise in temperature due to increased CO2. For example, the IPCC model for temperature predicted that from 1979 to 1998, temps would go up by 0.8 degree C; in fact, they FELL by 0.2 degrees. Here's a link:
http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm#Message53
Please note that this link is to a group that SUPPORTS the AGW hypothesis, even though they present evidence showing that the models fail to predict temperature DIRECTION, let alone the magnitude of change. Sorry, if your model predicts a rise of 8, when the actual experience is a fall of 2, I'd say your model is pretty much worthless. But then, I'm only an engineer; we're more concerned with what we see than what we want to prove.
Yes, just a few years after the seal hunt was outlawed. Seal stocks exploded, and those seals had to have something to eat. They don't eat seaweed, you know. I'm not saying that there wasn't overfishing by man, but you ask any Newfoundlander if the end of the seal hunt was the tipping point for cod stocks, he'll probably agree.
You'll probably want some numbers. The government of Canada estimated seal stocks in the late 70's as being 1.8 million; by the end of the 80's, there were 5.2 million, nearly 3 times as many. The Canadian government estimates that harp seals consumed nearly 1,000,000,000 cod in 1994 (note: that is less than 1 codfish per day, and seals need more than 1 fish/day to live, but they do eat other species as well; I just point out that 0.6 cod/day is not an unreasonable number), and it stands to reason that many of these would be smaller cod that haven't had a chance to mate yet.
I'll certainly agree that huge commercial trawlers using sonar and dredge nets were no help at all to the situation, but various governments were trying to make some progress there. But, as with the global warming crowd, the hysteria about the seal hunt overwhelmed the evidence, and the the views of such important scientific figures as Brigitte Bardot and Paul McCartney were allowed to prevail, just as the views of noted scientist and hypocrite Al Gore are being lauded now.
Go look in a mirror if you want to see something stupid. Then go learn how to read.
How the heck did this get modded informative? Trademarks were established so that the time and effort a company spends establishing its brand won't get hijacked by someone offering a substandard product with the same name. How useful would it be if you went to the store to get "Aspirin", and there were 10 different versions with the same name, but half of them were weaker and less effective products? Yes, you can always read the ingredients but look at a can of generic corn vs., say, Del Monte. I've found through experience that the Del Monte version is always crisper and sweeter (meaning it was probably canned more quickly from fresher corn) than the generic version. However, both labels will read "corn, water, salt". If the generic maker was able to copy Del Monte's tradename, buying canned corn would be a crapshoot.
Now, you may say "canned corn, big deal", but what if the "Michelin" tires you paid for were actually retreads or substandard tires? Not only do you get ripped off by paying the premium price, but I don't really want to risk a blowout at 60 mph.
There is a ton of marketing research - from both ad firms and university professors - that shows that brand names are useful to consumers. The brand provides information and assurance about a certain level of consistency and quality to the consumer. For example, having tried Hunt's, Aylmer, and generic ketchup, I'll stick to Heinz. I have tried some generic products (e.g. hot dogs - for some reason I have food on the brain tonight!) that I find perfectly acceptable to their brand name versions. Here's another - I take a generic version of metformin to help control my diabetes; it's less than half the price of the brand name version, and it works perfectly well. But I've also tried many generic products (rough toilet paper, inferior laundry detergent, lousy frozen food to name a few) that were completely disappointing.
But those are inexpensive products where the cost of testing them is a few bucks. When I upgrade to an HDTV, it's going to be a Toshiba or Sony or Samsung or LG; it's not going to be an Avanti. When I spend $2,000, I want the assurance of a brand name (quality, warranty, likelihood the maker will be around in five years).
That's what brand names are supposed to accomplish, not to make it easier for competitors. Sheesh!
I guess my beef with TFA is he uses a word like "keyword" that has a very specialized meaning for me - it's a reserved word in a programming language - without defining what the heck he means it to be.
Perhaps we can get Senator Blutarsky to reconsider some copyright laws.
I am so tired of this canard. I worked at Mitel in Kanata in the 1980's, and people were saying the same BS back then. Markham, a suburb of Toronto, had more high tech employees then, and has more high tech employees now. Sure BNR had big labs there, but they also had a bunch of labs scattered across Toronto. IBM has huge plants, although some of them were turned over to Celestica. Just drive up the 404, and you'll see names like CGI, Sprint, Hummingbird, GEAC, OpenText, etc.
I'm not trying to dump on Ottawa; I'm just tired of seeing this misinformation repeated.
Um, ten hour flights are usually overseas. I'm not aware of many call towers built on the ocean.
I don't know where you live, but in Toronto, you can get maybe 20 stations on broadcast; by cable, I can get over 300 channels of TV, about a hundred music stations, and a whole bunch of pay-per-view channels. And, except for a few shows like "Lost" or "Law and Order", I find that I don't spend a whole lot of time on the lower tier (where are the big networks are) but I end up watching the specialty channels like "History" or "Bravo". So, to me, cable is definitely a superior offering and worth the $80 for digital service and high speed internet.
As opposed to a 2,000,000 microsecond delay? Or a 2,000,000,000 nanosecond delay?
Why not just say 2 sec?
There is no corporate connection between Shaw and Rogers. A few years back, Rogers traded their cable systems in Western Canada to Shaw in exchange for Ontario systems. Perhaps this is what confused you.
And the Blue Jays - the only product of theirs I like.
ISDN is synchronous; that's why they need framing bits. I think you are referring to ATM - asynchronous transfer method. I'll agree that almost all telco's use ATM for high speed transport.
Er, who did you think provided those "tie lines"? AT&T, Centel, and all the other public phone companies. And once the calls reached the CO, they were routed over the PSTN just like every other call. If you think IBM created their own facilities, you're deluded.
This seems a bit revisionist. In an interview with Moranis and Thomas, they said that Canadian broadcast law at the time allowed two fewer minutes of commercial time per half hour than US law allowed. As a result, the show had to create two more minutes of airtime for the Canadian version, but it wasn't mandated to be "CanCon". Moranis: "So we said 'What are we supposed to do? Sit around wearing toques, drinking beer, and saying "Eh?" a lot?', and they said 'Perfect'!"
The beer store was the only place to get beer in the 1980's in Ontario. Wine and spirits were from the LCBO, beer from Brewer's Retail. Thank god times have changed.
Do some global brands get advertised on this show? Of course! Ford, or Toyota, or Coke: many global brands advertise here. Do some regional brands advertise on this show? Absolutely! I see ads for Toronto services on one channel, and Vancouver services on another. Do some absolutely city specific ads get advertised here? Yes. So, when you talk about 'smart,targeted advertising' in the context of cities like Calgary or Edmonton with roughly 1 million viewers apiece, it seems to me that they are already breaking ads down into the kind of granulation you speak of.
But the broadcasters, at least, (I have no comment on CanCon freaks; they are nuts IMHO) are not complaining about "user created content" - they are complaining about the retransmission of content the broadcasters have paid for by people who aren't doing anything in the way of changing or adding to the original content. For example, if someone wanted to cut and clip a bunch of scenes together, as Steve Martin did in "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid", I'd defend that as 'fair use'. But to just post entire episodes of TV shows without any significant value added - I don't think that's right.