It's more likely these are last decades. A few more years, and people will decide the ISS is a useless money drain, which they can no longer afford.
By then Bigelow will probably have his space hotel operating with SpaceX flying tourists there on a regular basis. Maybe NASA will buy one.
Nope. We all know where the money lies. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic will "merge" to form Virgin SpaceXXX. They will open up low-G sex tourism hotels in lunar orbit and on the moon safely out of jurisdictional oversight of all. Then they will fire up the sex tourism industry (along with revenue generating internet pron feed). It'll be like printing money.
That's a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs.... that's 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip that's 9,830,400 compute units.
I read this and immediately thought of the old movie "A Christmas Story" with the line "You'll put out an eye".
Heh. "No Johnny, you can't have the toy physics kid, you'll blow up the planet":D
Since several "small town" IT folks have commented, I'm surprised that people haven't mentioned the obvious true additional costs involved. While making out a CD may only "cost" $1 (for example), you still have to consider the infrastructure costs. The CD burner has to be purchased and maintained, the IT guy has to be paid to purchase and install it, the operator has to be trained in it's use, and the labor time of the duplication probably far exceeds the cost of the media. And this ignores things like bandwidth, server maintenance and backups as a percentage share of the use.
Anyone who has been in consulting knows that it's not just the 5-10 minutes on site, it's the time to get there, the cost of getting supplies, etc. It's not just the media cost for duplication when you're doing one-off requests.
For on-line servicing, many of the above costs are reduced, but the back end still exists and must be maintained. These are costs over and above what the gov agency would need to supply in the absence of the data request. Thus the cost of the copy is real. By using a point of use charge, you remove the local tax base from funding outside people getting the info.
Don't get me wrong, I use these data services as well. Around here (Chicago area), it's an every thre-year ritual to protest your property tax assessment increase. That used to require going to the local assessors office to get data. Now we can do it from home and more accurately/cheaply. But businesses try to get the stuff for "free" too. You still see service firms use full time people in the courthouses and tax offices "requesting" all the files and transcribing the content into laptops for inclusion into their corporate databases. If they can afford to pay people like this, there is obviously "value" to the company. Why should Joe Taxpayer fund that for them.
Public in this case is interpreted as public the a person. A company is NOT a person. The CEO could walk in and request the information and they will give it to him/her...one at a time. What happens is companies request the entire database. So there is a fee involved. I don't have a problem with that as it falls outside of what an individual would normally request.
Of course it doesn't. There's "airplane mode" where all the RF sections of the iPhone are off, and there's also "off" which is of course different than the "I'm not using it right now and the screen is dark" mode. The only way their phones could have been fetching email while they were on vacation is this:
1. They configured the mail client for automatic updates (I think manual is the default)
2. They took 3 iPhones with them on vacation so they wouldn't use them (plausible?)
3. They put the iPhones into screen lock mode, rather than off or airplane mode.
It seems to me that being surprised that the device would do what you have configured it to do when you leave it turned on, is on par with being annoyed that your cellphone rings when you've already hung it up. If I could embed an image at this point, I'd pick one of the "You're doing it wrong" series.
I use a PocketPC phone. I take it with me even to other countries where I know it won't work because I use the other features on the phone (calendar, calculator, camera, mp3s, video, etc, etc). So item #2 is incredibly easy to believe as the iPhone is designed to be an all-in-one device.
It's not much of a stretch for people to believe that if they don't make calls or surf the web, that they can assume they're not making roaming data connections. Most people are oblivious to the background communications the phone is making. That doesn't make it correct, but I can easily see where less techno-savvy (a big part of the iPhone market IMHO) would fall for this false understanding.
Now, about leaving it in RF vs active mode, I'll say that 90% (probably more) people who use "smartphones" don't realize that "off" isn't off. I've pointed that out to many people, usually on airplanes (I point it out to laptop users too with their built-in wireless light flashing as it searches for signals). Do I point this out becuase I'm afraid the plane will crash? No. I point it out to them telling them their battery will drain much faster since their device is usually in active search mode sucking down power. Most are appreciative of the tip, and most are also unaware on how to actually turn the RF device on-off without powering the entire unit down.
For all the Microsoft bashing that goes on, this may be a piece of creative marketing on Microsoft's end. Consider the management looking at this piece of Intellectual Property (IP).
Tech Guy 1: "We've got this great piece of IP with the encoder, how do we capitalize on it?"
Manager 1: "Sorry, but our market research shows that no-one will pay for it"
Manager 2: "So we've spent $$ developing this and we're going to shelve it??"
Marketer 1: "Let's give it away, but force everyone to call it *.MSjpgHD for the file extension."
Marketer 2: "Awsome. Just think of all the free advertising value."
Microsoft gains some value from the IP by giving it away. It seems the concensus here that if they try and charge for it, no-one will accept it and it will be a net loss. MS isn't (always) stupid. Perhaps they are thinking they can milk it for some free "NOT EVIL" publicity. Giving something back to the community and all so to speak.
I think Apple might run into some anti-competitive issues with this one. Recall that the ink-jet printer industry got into big trouble with the 3rd party (read 'clone') cartridges not working because they needed to be specially chipped. They attempted to sue some suppliers that copied some of the ID codes, but were denied. Since people will want other ways to charge their devices besides an Apple made charger, I think this mode of bricking would be hard to enforce.
On the other hand, the simple fact that the software wouldn't let you actually LOAD any new songs onto the iPod might be sufficient deterrent, but that is a separate protection mechanism.
There is a old phrase in the chemical and industrial sector
Dilution is the solution to pollution.
In fact, in some municipalities, waste into the sewer system is allowed below a certain concentration, but get above that concentration and get fined. So you can (and some do) simply add water when dumping stuff down the drain. Environmentally this makes little sense as it's the same amount of "bad stuff" going down the drain, but in the allowed case you're also "wasting" lots of water. (this ignores the issue of high concentrations being bad for the piping system of course).
Nope. Her asking for every claim under the sun sounds like a seriously pissed off lady whom has been accused of crimes without (sufficient) evidence, threatened, and who fought back. In doing so, the was close to having the court rule in her favor and the other side quited the case. Now she's doubly pissed off thinking the other side is going to walk away without having to face up to their false claims and have it stated in court that the was innocent.
Some times people do things for reasons OTHER than money. Not often, and in this case payback might not be motivated just for face (and I'm sure her attorney at this point is on contengency), but give her some credit for wanting the RIAA to have to lose for once, not just to plump up her retirement fund.
This is great news. We can have our support calls to India without the call lag. Now we can become frustrated instantly rather than a few microseconds later. And when expansion occurs, we can outsource phone support to Mars!
Nope, the family got taken by our lawsuit crazy legal environment (which we need a superfund to clean up).
All along the path, they were given the "correct" answers with the tone being fear of litigation. Imagine if the poison control center said "oh, that's not too bad..." Or if the EPA said "we don't care about small spills...". While in each case the answer would have probably been correct, they each err on the conservative side. Sadly these conservative replies compound. In the end the hapless homeowner calls the cleanup service. The cleanup service could say "we'll take your money but you don't have to", but then they too could be hit with a suit for "bad" advise based upon all the other conservative snowballing.
It's just a prime example that common sense falls out of the equation all too often.
I think examples of this are what we should petition congress to INCREASE funding for NASA. The simple fact is NASA has developed a culture to maximize their return on projects (and succeeding). Give them some more funds to accomplish the additional programs they have backlogged. If they can continue this culture, we all benefit.
Too bad the rest of the government can't follow this lead.
Likely outcome scenarios at this point
on
The End for Vonage?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The interesting part of all this will be how it plays out now. I can see a couple of options, probably all bad for the current Vonage stockholders.
1. Verizon wins outright, tells Vonage to stuff it and they go bankrupt. Service ends after a notification period. Bad for Vonage, bad for customers, black-eye for Verizon.
2. The "strangle" continues through the long appeal process. Vonage reaches a point of being non-viable even if they can engineer around the patents. Verizon "buys" them as part of an out-of-court settlement and continues the business (possibly with rate increases or tie-ins with their cell business.
3. Vonage can reengineer around the patents in time to survive, but will struggle due to the judgement costs (infringement) anyway. They eventually are bought out.
I don't think #1 is likely since Verizon wouldn't really gain much. #2 and #3 are more likely. Option 4 being Vonage reengineers quickly and somehow wins the appeal seems a bit remote at this point...
It's just bad management! Fry's is doing relatively well in most of their locations. Best Buy is doing okay. Circuit City is limping along. Shipping costs negate the whole buying direct thing. Who wants to spend $3 on shipping for a $5 cable?
While I agree Fry's seems to be doing something right with their megastores (and I wish they'd build another Chicago area store that was a lot closer), I think you need to rethink your economics a bit on the $3 shipping for a $5 cable. You really must consider the delivered price to your door.
With shipping the cost of the less expensive cable off the net may still be cheaper, but dont' stop there. Consider also the impact of tax (almost 9% in my area) and worse, gas. With prices pushing $3 per gallon in areas, consider a 20 mile round trip run to get that cable and you've just used up $3 of gas (and possibly more), not to mention added mileage and other assorted costs of operating a vehicle (or bus fare). I've come to realize that it's not even worth my time and gas to pick things up at the staples around the corner if I don't need it right away.
Epilog:
The first person to suggest that it could be run on an electric heating element gets a bop upside the head and sent back to thermo class.
Ahh, but what about putting one in your nice new gaming computer with it's 1kW power supply. Might be an atractive method to recover some of the waste heat generated as computers keep getting hotter and hotter. A little sterling module hooked up to the GPU and CPU might not be a bad idea... other than cost:)
I honestly think this is probably the best solution to this. Unfortunately, if you read the actual court order, it states:
Plaintiff is ordered to allow Defendants inspection of it computers, computer storage media and subject emails as outlined in Defendants' CR 34 Request for Production and Inspection within twenty (20) days of this Order.
Unfortunately the actual request isn't linked, mearly the declaration opinions of the "expert". Since the request is for the computer and the media, could one simply provide "an instance" of the viewability, namely a computer with a Knoppix (or other) bootable CD image without a hard drive? Or does the order specifically require the Plaintiff's "primary" computer that was used to generate the printouts originally supplied. Hard to say, but I think it would have been a reasonable effort and would kick the ball back to the defendant to assert that the spam viewed on the sanitized computer was different than the spam originally presented. I think at that point the momentum would have shifted for the better.
Sending 5 million death threats would be considered quite serious if he were an adult. So show him what his next steps would be.
1. Serve as a serving-line attendant in the closest penal institution. Serving food to gentlemen while they comment on how much they'd like to show a 'cute thing' like him a good time might make him think twice about having the place as his next residence.
2. Since he's shown that he can't control himself with electronics, ban him from using ANYTHING electronic for the two month sentence. No ipod, cell phone, computer, or even TV. Might be good for him to have time to reflect.
3. The curfew is silly in light of his allowed job. But fine. Let him keep the job (in fact, enforce it), but have all wages returned to the company that had to spend the money to fix his attack.
With these items inforced, I don't have any issue with a two-month sentence on a first time offense. The point is to ensure it doesn't happen again (or anything similar).
Slashdot Mirror
It's more likely these are last decades. A few more years, and people will decide the ISS is a useless money drain, which they can no longer afford.
By then Bigelow will probably have his space hotel operating with SpaceX flying tourists there on a regular basis. Maybe NASA will buy one.
Nope. We all know where the money lies. SpaceX and Virgin Galactic will "merge" to form Virgin SpaceXXX. They will open up low-G sex tourism hotels in lunar orbit and on the moon safely out of jurisdictional oversight of all. Then they will fire up the sex tourism industry (along with revenue generating internet pron feed). It'll be like printing money.
That's a total of 4,800 servers, or 38,400 processors in total; 19,200 Opterons 6200s, and 19,200 Tesla GPUs. ... that's 307,200 CPU cores — and with 512 shaders in each Tesla chip that's 9,830,400 compute units.
Fail. No HDMI. :)
Soon all cell phones will be banned because of their dangerous IP infringement, and the landline will return as the obviously superior technology
And to solve the EV battery problems, we can let the phone cord do double duty as an electric extension cord :D
Flash, from the department for redundancy department, it's a Feeding Black Hole :)
I read this and immediately thought of the old movie "A Christmas Story" with the line "You'll put out an eye". Heh. "No Johnny, you can't have the toy physics kid, you'll blow up the planet" :D
That was the big reason I switched: I started developing RSI in my right hand (I'm married, it wasn't caused by THAT).
Heh, you just haven't been married long enough :)
Perhaps it was full of lawyers. Many would claim them to be organisms...but not life. Then again, the same might be said of politicians!
Yes, and it will be featured in a new extension called "Google Inner Earth".
Anyone who has been in consulting knows that it's not just the 5-10 minutes on site, it's the time to get there, the cost of getting supplies, etc. It's not just the media cost for duplication when you're doing one-off requests.
For on-line servicing, many of the above costs are reduced, but the back end still exists and must be maintained. These are costs over and above what the gov agency would need to supply in the absence of the data request. Thus the cost of the copy is real. By using a point of use charge, you remove the local tax base from funding outside people getting the info.
Don't get me wrong, I use these data services as well. Around here (Chicago area), it's an every thre-year ritual to protest your property tax assessment increase. That used to require going to the local assessors office to get data. Now we can do it from home and more accurately/cheaply. But businesses try to get the stuff for "free" too. You still see service firms use full time people in the courthouses and tax offices "requesting" all the files and transcribing the content into laptops for inclusion into their corporate databases. If they can afford to pay people like this, there is obviously "value" to the company. Why should Joe Taxpayer fund that for them.
Public in this case is interpreted as public the a person. A company is NOT a person. The CEO could walk in and request the information and they will give it to him/her...one at a time. What happens is companies request the entire database. So there is a fee involved. I don't have a problem with that as it falls outside of what an individual would normally request.
1. They configured the mail client for automatic updates (I think manual is the default)
2. They took 3 iPhones with them on vacation so they wouldn't use them (plausible?)
3. They put the iPhones into screen lock mode, rather than off or airplane mode.
It seems to me that being surprised that the device would do what you have configured it to do when you leave it turned on, is on par with being annoyed that your cellphone rings when you've already hung it up. If I could embed an image at this point, I'd pick one of the "You're doing it wrong" series.
I use a PocketPC phone. I take it with me even to other countries where I know it won't work because I use the other features on the phone (calendar, calculator, camera, mp3s, video, etc, etc). So item #2 is incredibly easy to believe as the iPhone is designed to be an all-in-one device.
It's not much of a stretch for people to believe that if they don't make calls or surf the web, that they can assume they're not making roaming data connections. Most people are oblivious to the background communications the phone is making. That doesn't make it correct, but I can easily see where less techno-savvy (a big part of the iPhone market IMHO) would fall for this false understanding.
Now, about leaving it in RF vs active mode, I'll say that 90% (probably more) people who use "smartphones" don't realize that "off" isn't off. I've pointed that out to many people, usually on airplanes (I point it out to laptop users too with their built-in wireless light flashing as it searches for signals). Do I point this out becuase I'm afraid the plane will crash? No. I point it out to them telling them their battery will drain much faster since their device is usually in active search mode sucking down power. Most are appreciative of the tip, and most are also unaware on how to actually turn the RF device on-off without powering the entire unit down.
Tech Guy 1: "We've got this great piece of IP with the encoder, how do we capitalize on it?"
Manager 1: "Sorry, but our market research shows that no-one will pay for it"
Manager 2: "So we've spent $$ developing this and we're going to shelve it??"
Marketer 1: "Let's give it away, but force everyone to call it *.MSjpgHD for the file extension."
Marketer 2: "Awsome. Just think of all the free advertising value."
Microsoft gains some value from the IP by giving it away. It seems the concensus here that if they try and charge for it, no-one will accept it and it will be a net loss. MS isn't (always) stupid. Perhaps they are thinking they can milk it for some free "NOT EVIL" publicity. Giving something back to the community and all so to speak.
On the other hand, the simple fact that the software wouldn't let you actually LOAD any new songs onto the iPod might be sufficient deterrent, but that is a separate protection mechanism.
Dilution is the solution to pollution.
In fact, in some municipalities, waste into the sewer system is allowed below a certain concentration, but get above that concentration and get fined. So you can (and some do) simply add water when dumping stuff down the drain. Environmentally this makes little sense as it's the same amount of "bad stuff" going down the drain, but in the allowed case you're also "wasting" lots of water. (this ignores the issue of high concentrations being bad for the piping system of course).
Nope. Her asking for every claim under the sun sounds like a seriously pissed off lady whom has been accused of crimes without (sufficient) evidence, threatened, and who fought back. In doing so, the was close to having the court rule in her favor and the other side quited the case. Now she's doubly pissed off thinking the other side is going to walk away without having to face up to their false claims and have it stated in court that the was innocent. Some times people do things for reasons OTHER than money. Not often, and in this case payback might not be motivated just for face (and I'm sure her attorney at this point is on contengency), but give her some credit for wanting the RIAA to have to lose for once, not just to plump up her retirement fund.
This is great news. We can have our support calls to India without the call lag. Now we can become frustrated instantly rather than a few microseconds later. And when expansion occurs, we can outsource phone support to Mars!
All along the path, they were given the "correct" answers with the tone being fear of litigation. Imagine if the poison control center said "oh, that's not too bad..." Or if the EPA said "we don't care about small spills...". While in each case the answer would have probably been correct, they each err on the conservative side. Sadly these conservative replies compound. In the end the hapless homeowner calls the cleanup service. The cleanup service could say "we'll take your money but you don't have to", but then they too could be hit with a suit for "bad" advise based upon all the other conservative snowballing.
It's just a prime example that common sense falls out of the equation all too often.
Too bad the rest of the government can't follow this lead.
1. Verizon wins outright, tells Vonage to stuff it and they go bankrupt. Service ends after a notification period. Bad for Vonage, bad for customers, black-eye for Verizon.
2. The "strangle" continues through the long appeal process. Vonage reaches a point of being non-viable even if they can engineer around the patents. Verizon "buys" them as part of an out-of-court settlement and continues the business (possibly with rate increases or tie-ins with their cell business.
3. Vonage can reengineer around the patents in time to survive, but will struggle due to the judgement costs (infringement) anyway. They eventually are bought out.
I don't think #1 is likely since Verizon wouldn't really gain much. #2 and #3 are more likely. Option 4 being Vonage reengineers quickly and somehow wins the appeal seems a bit remote at this point...
With shipping the cost of the less expensive cable off the net may still be cheaper, but dont' stop there. Consider also the impact of tax (almost 9% in my area) and worse, gas. With prices pushing $3 per gallon in areas, consider a 20 mile round trip run to get that cable and you've just used up $3 of gas (and possibly more), not to mention added mileage and other assorted costs of operating a vehicle (or bus fare). I've come to realize that it's not even worth my time and gas to pick things up at the staples around the corner if I don't need it right away.
Unfortunately the actual request isn't linked, mearly the declaration opinions of the "expert". Since the request is for the computer and the media, could one simply provide "an instance" of the viewability, namely a computer with a Knoppix (or other) bootable CD image without a hard drive? Or does the order specifically require the Plaintiff's "primary" computer that was used to generate the printouts originally supplied. Hard to say, but I think it would have been a reasonable effort and would kick the ball back to the defendant to assert that the spam viewed on the sanitized computer was different than the spam originally presented. I think at that point the momentum would have shifted for the better.
> Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
... and atomic bombs. Gotta get you into the modern age at least :)
Sending 5 million death threats would be considered quite serious if he were an adult. So show him what his next steps would be. 1. Serve as a serving-line attendant in the closest penal institution. Serving food to gentlemen while they comment on how much they'd like to show a 'cute thing' like him a good time might make him think twice about having the place as his next residence. 2. Since he's shown that he can't control himself with electronics, ban him from using ANYTHING electronic for the two month sentence. No ipod, cell phone, computer, or even TV. Might be good for him to have time to reflect. 3. The curfew is silly in light of his allowed job. But fine. Let him keep the job (in fact, enforce it), but have all wages returned to the company that had to spend the money to fix his attack. With these items inforced, I don't have any issue with a two-month sentence on a first time offense. The point is to ensure it doesn't happen again (or anything similar).