Posts by P. Lee

Re: Obama Plan for Internet?? - Nooooo!

>it was about making young, healthy people pay for the healthcare of older, unhealthy people.

Wait... so no more people are claiming insurance, but costs have gone up 40%

Was it that the old sick people weren't getting insured before and now they are, but it costs a lot?

Re: One does wonder... or at least should wonder.

Most people running email clients will be forwarding to their ISP email servers anyway, not running SMTP servers which connect directly to the destination SMTP server. If they are running direct to end-points, its a VPN and the ISP should stay out of the conversation.

Re: Oops!!

>what is the iMessage delivery system supposed to do with the iMessages that your chums are still sending you?

Well it magically knew to turn SMS into imessages, it can magically unknow it. You know, by checking to see if the message had been sent in X minutes via iMessage and dropping back to SMS if it hasn't.

Delivery-receipts - we've heard of them.

>"The driver for this is 802.11ac, since it's silly to have multi-gigabit wireless access points served by blue cables that can only limp along at 1 Gbps."

It depends on your traffic pattern. Wired is 1G full duplex, radio broadcast media is... not.

Still, there isn't that much headroom.

Re: This seems as good an approach as any

<See the first post>

It was never about not prioritising traffic, its about not prioritising/blocking organisations.

We don't want the ISP to be the toll-gate for everything online because they have the local ISP monopoly.

The cable companies get dragged in first because they have an obvious conflict of interest.

> And if we don't trust any of them?

I trust Snowden now more than I did before he leaked anything.

Re: This argument has been made before

What will be interesting to see is, if TV migrates to tablets and computers (as it has in our house - we have no communal TV at all), will the overall amount of TV viewed drop?

I suspect a lot of TV is there just because its there, not because people are actually interested in it.

Re: Rand Rand Rand

>Rand Rand Getty Rand Ja! Krugerrand.

I get yer Rand

Re: The REAL problem was building it in San Francisco, California

>Liberal has also become a word that right-wing USA republicans use to describe anything they don't like.

Liberal: also "generous."

--

Laissez-faire usually has trade/commerce/corporate connotations whereas liberal usually refers to individual freedom.

However, politics in general appears to be less tolerant than it used to be, with both sides trying to ram their ethics down the others' throats. The normal way of solving this is to have "self-determination" (the objective of democracy), enacted by different states allowing different laws. However, it is apparently easier to "get things done" by bypassing the democratic process using the judiciary.

Re: Hang on:

The investment money keeps pouring in because interest rates are at zero. When that happens, money leaves the savings markets and will move towards anything that offers any hope of any ROI at any time. High risk is better than guaranteed no return.

Of course, this encourages stupid borrowing so that when interest rates do go up the effect will be horrendous.

Re: But against the backdrop of your British readership...

So, when the rapist breaks into your daughter's house, who is he going to shoot? The person cowering in the closet, or the person holding the gun?

> i thought the point of removing the SD card was so that manufacturers didn't have to pay Microsoft for usage of FAT file system.

I think that's only required if you have are creating unique 8.3 file names from long file names. I could be wrong there too.

I'd like removable storage because in the future it might be possible to stack all my movies on as SD card,or I can take a stack of tiny SD cards with me on holiday. Sometimes its easier to transfer data by card than by setting up a wifi point blah blah blah.

Re: Madness

Assuming there is competition...

Re: Depends on your view...

>To replace a solid BSD?

And there was me thinking OSX was built on MACH...

OSX just makes things hard, like trying to do NFS. I tried sharing out an iTunes directory over samba and getting Amarok to suck it in. It didn't go well with (I think) samba on OSX falling over a lot. I rsync'ed the same content to a linux and shared out over NFS and it was so fast I thought it had failed. I think mostly the problem is that so few people use OSX for server tasks, things aren't well tested. There's no FLOSS ISCSI for OSX either as far as I can tell.

If you want a *nix-like OS for the desktop, I'd go with linux. You can do the others, but its just harder, especially if you have to compile the stuff on ageing hardware. It tried it on a dual cpu G5. KDE took around 14 hours to compile and then it failed. Debian (not my favourite distro), on the other hand, works fine. If you have specific server-type stuff, BSD could be more stable there. X on OSX is a second-class citizen. It's horrifically slow, especially over the network, even gigabit.

With recent developments, I'd go with Linux over OSX for gaming too. Thanks Valve and all you indie devs!

Regarding the new model though, it says something when releasing a new model sends prices for the old one through the roof.

Re: @cray74

Porches aren't just about sitting outside. They dramatically reduce the warming of the building by the sun in the heat of the day, while allowing pleasant light in during the early morning and evening.

Re: Why supply-side / trickle-down failed...

So, Americans are rubbish at making nice things! ;)

I don't agree with the conflation of supply-side and trickle down, but closer to the point, trickle-down is normally used as an excuse for unfettered wealth creation policies. The problem with this is that wealth tends to concentrate. Branson's space plane program is no excuse to have a "we love branson" tax regime.

Trickle-down in tech does work but the article seems to think that this therefore applies to economics. It doesn't. Left to its own, the rich get richer until the revolution.

If you want to make people richer, you have to do it slowly. Give them a lump sum and they'll go on holiday with it. You need to reduce debt and encourage saving. That makes you unpopular with banks and business. Encouraging people to dissipate their accrued value (wealth) by spending it in order to increase aggregate accrued value seems like nonsense to me. I missed the bit in history when we went from realising economic policies of the 70's were disastrous to rehabilitating Keynes. I know inflation destroys debt, but eventually, interest rates have to rise to finance our stupid government borrowing which funds demand management (and war) and that means lots of repossessions and more recession.

Far better to adopt policies which make production cheap. By "cheap" I don't mean profitable, just make sure barriers aren't set so high that only incumbents can afford to produce. Encourage competition - competition increases personal wealth at the expense of corporate profits.

Government is an ideal target for open-source due to its vast size. How many billions are you spending on Word and Excel? Money which goes almost straight abroad? Make an investment (in the proper sense of the word) and pay your own local citizens and companies to improve / customise software for your purposes. That improves your nation's software production capacity and reduces future government spend. Yes other people will benefit, but as long as the value is right for the government, stop being mean-spirited.

Re: Apple NEVER pays for product placement...

Given the number of MS tablets and phones I see in the real world, whenever I see them on TV I automatically think, "product placement."

I may be prejudiced, but I think the same if a shot lingers on a Dell logo too. I mean seriously, super-secret mega-bucks-funded spy agency and you're buying Dells?

Re: Phone for biz? Too small

The greatest asset to productivity? A second 24" screen.

Also, who thinks its a good idea to trust your business to phone security?

>I wonder if that pricing disparity will encourage artists to write music that people want to listen to more than a handful of times.

Who thinks a good product is all you need? Its all about the marketing and the advertising and you have to make all the money you can before Cowell soaks up all the media space for the next addition of Britain's got no x-factor. Do you really thing 1D would get where they are today on their musical merit?

Yes, you need a reasonable product to be long-lived, but the whole point of the pop industry is to churn. They need one-hit wonders they can take advantage of for their first contract but who won't interfere with next season's offering. Besides, there's only so long you can listen to high-energy bright/loud stuff before it leaves you feeling tired.

Unlike "classical" which has generally stood the test of time.

Re: Yay, more survey based "science"

>People on the whole are very much alike

In that case, why bother with research, they could just write down their own ideas.

Filed in the "Bad methodology, but nobody cares" folder.

Re: does this fix anything?

>What's wrong with one Windows licence per system (physical or virtual) running Windows???????

Someone would find a way to fire up multiple desktops or have multiple users log in to the same server under the same username.

Per User across the enterprise is the only sensible way to prevent Windows RT-Full fat Windows/weak CPU/Strong CPU licensing problems. My guess is that Enterprise licensing costs just went up but end users will still license per device.

What's this, "if you're away from the office" rubbish? How is that going to be clear or policed? If round-trip times are too low will it simulate a high-latency link response time?

Re: Disney patents internet search censorship

Its patented... so no one else can use it...

Re: Knowledge-based ID verification

>The government already has lots of ID verification data it could use without calling on Experian.

But the parties do not of lots of funding without...

Re: Simple in theory, not so simple in practise.

>When you distinguish between "investment" and "consumption", you simply create a vast tax consultant industry which launders consumption categories into investment categories.

+1

Take the example of investment properties. Buying ever more houses as investments drives up the costs of housing so the poor become renters. That portion of their income becomes taxed "consumption" whereas for those who can afford to get on the ladder, it becomes tax-free capital. The wealthy acquire ever more wealth (because it is tax efficient which accelerates the process) forcing up the prices and making it impossible for the poorer people to get to the point where they can get on the ladder.

You've created a situation where the poor pay a higher percentage of their income in tax than the wealthy, which is generally seen as unfair. The notion that "its ok because they'll pay tax when they consume" doesn't hold because what happens is that they acquire the vast majority of the wealth pie and the consumption portion of it is relatively small. We then have lots of wealth locked away in the hands of the very few, with little consumption and therefore tax to keep things afloat.

We've seen a similar effect when mortgage rules were relaxed. Prices go through the roof and everyone becomes "wealthy" except that after the first generation, they also become mired in massive debt. Eventually, people realise that no-one can afford to pay the mortgages and the whole system collapses. Well, not the whole system. Those who are wealthy enough to make it through the collapse without selling can pick up lots of cheap housing that gets auctioned off from defaulters (who keep the debt despite losing the assets) and again the wealth is concentrated. The banks get a handout, paid for from tax (mostly from those who are poor and are consuming rather than "investing") and the whole cycle starts again. Unfortunately, eventually, there isn't enough tax to support the government because the poor people have nothing, and the rich have to move their assets to a more stable location, leaving behind a mass of debt, both personal and governmental. This is the kind of thing which makes governments go to war in order to distract the populace and to get them into a frame of mind where they are willing to accept deprivation.

Re: I am somewhat comforted

And here's why they need the data - the standard of evidence for criminal cases is much higher than for civil.

I'm not entirely sure how they are going to prosecute a criminal case when they won't know which member of the household committed the offence, even if they have the data. If it was civil, they might get away with prosecuting the adsl link renter, I can't see how a criminal case would stick unless the person lives alone.

Re: Pride

Its still typical American emotional claptrap.

Which god does he serve? What exactly is the nature of the link between his god and him being gay?

Re: Gotta love the religious nutbags

Homophobic trolls are not the only fruit.

In the Christian story, God takes the punishment for sin (death) on himself through Jesus' crucifixion so we can live forever. I'm not sure where that leaves the wife-beater analogy.

Its nice that Cook can appreciate being an oppressed minority. Now, perhaps he could use some of Apple's billions to improve the lives of some miserable Foxconn employees. Perhaps he could open his own factory to make the things he designs and sells. Then he could do something significant in terms of looking after at least the Poor who make the things which have made him so very, very wealthy.

I can understand Cook not wanting to support America's war-based foreign policy, but perhaps he could calculate how much tax Apple would have paid had US profits not been siphoned off abroad and donated an equal amount to charities who provide healthcare to those who would otherwise die early because they can't afford it.

Word of support for the oppressed are cheap. Of all the oppressed to support, those who are oppressed in terms of picking up their dead partners' assets due to their sexual deviancy (yes, that is the correct term) seems like a very "First World Problem" to try to solve. I'd have gone with the poor, the widows and the orphans, as representing a larger problem which needs to be dealt with.

Re: I suppose some will buy it

> perhaps that is the real reason MS is waking up, because people are having the audacity to use other products and worse than that those products are free.

More likely, they've realised mac owners haven't given them any money in almost 5 years.