Also, as anyone who makes things (any things) knows, sharp corners have thin edges, which break, get dinged up and worn down. Chamfering edges and corners makes them last longer. It's also easier to mold, and to make molds - you can use a rotating mill bit rather than hand-chiseling.
> But gold only has value because it's rare and shiny,
Gold has value because it's virtually the only useful metal that doesn't corrode. There are objects made 10,000 years ago that still look pretty much new because they are gold. Steel lasts maybe 1-30 years, depending on the environment. Copper even less. Aluminum corrodes almost instantly, but it's a very thin layer of corrosion at first, so it's okay for many uses.
Tungsten carbide can't be bent, molded, or cut, so it's not particularly useful, though it doesn't corrode.
You're not wrong. Not too much, anyway.
> People create governments and governments create corporations, therefore corporations have what rights we say they have and nothing more.
Because politicians can grant certain privileges to people and corporations, and can take thos privileges away, they are not rights. That's the difference between rights and privileges. By definition, rights are inherent, they can be violated but cannot be revoked. Privileges can be granted or revoked, rights can recognized, violated, or protected, but not granted. They pre-exist.
Corporations, therefore have no rights themselves. PEOPLE may have a right of association, which may mean that the people have a right to come together as Electronic Freedom Foundation Inc. to take cooperative (corporate) action. That's the right of people to work together toward a common cause. The EFF is merely a mechanism the people use to exercise their rights, it can have no rights of it's own.
The decision the court had to make was more difficult than many realize. If you and several like-minded individuals come together, do you lose your first amendment rights? Does a crowd of protesters no longer have rights because they joined a crowd? Do the members of the Occupy organization have a right to print pamphlets? Clearly you disagree with decision. You think that people don't have a right to form Occupy Inc for the purpose of making videos and posting them online. Some people disagree, and reasonable people can disagree on this question.
It seems to me that one side focuses on the logic and the other on the effect, alomg with their feelings about that effect. Some pay attention to exactly what question is being asked "does exercising the right of free association strip you of your right of free speech?" When you look only at the question, one answer is clear - people SHOULD be able to get together and make a video expressing their point of view. Others focus on "a group of people who disagree with me wanted to get together as a recognized group (corporation) and make a video that I don't agree with. This could effect an election in a way I don't like." If you focus on the fact that this organised group of people (corporation) disagrees with you, it's much easier to say they shouldn't be allowed to exercise freedom of speech together, as a group.
I'm not the least bit surprised that an assembly programmer, who really understands what's happening in the CPU, can write very fast C. I bet for most software, your asm version will be at least twice as fast as a C version written by a typical programmer, who doesn't even realize that the CPU caches have any effect on how well their software runs. More to the point, the typical C programmer would never think about how writing their code differently might allow the inner loop to run from cpu cache. Hell, the typical C# programmer doesn't often even think about the fact that memory is thousands of times faster than disk.
I wouldn't suggest writing much in asm, but being ABLE to do so, having a clue what your C or
> a right granted by the power of the US government
I'm off topic, but government can protect rights or violate rights, it can't GRANT rights. That's a key part,of the definition of a right, vs a privilege or desire. (Therefore there is no RIGHT to have a corporation recognized by the state.)
Consider the right to free speech, the right to talk. That does not mean you're allowed to say whatever the government bureaucrats want you to say, or that you're allowed to agree with the majority. It means you have an inherent ability, as one human living with other humans, to say stuff that pisses other people off. If the politicians prevent you from saying you disagree with them, they have VIOLATED your right of free speech, they have done a wrong to you. As long as they continue to prevent you from talking, they are continuing to wrong you. That continuing violation shows that they did not previously revoke your rights; you still have them and the government is still violating them. The government bureaucrats can violate your rights but cannot remove your rights precisely because your rights didn't come from the politicians in the first place. If the government did GRANT you your rights, it would be fair that they could revoke those rights whenever they please.
Rather, you and the politicians both had the right to free speech. The states granted the federal politicians a license to regulate specific things, after the populace granted the state politicians certain powers. The people gave certain powers to the politicians, not the other way around.
That's why the Constitution says "the federal government may do the following things, and may not violate THE right of free speech in the process ". It's THE right of free speech, not A right of free speech, meaning it existed before the Constitution barred the government from violating it.
Fyi for anyone unfamiliar with the story, her term ends in 2016. Governor Rick Perry insisted that she resign. When she refused, he said he would veto funding for her office. So far that sounds like Perry was doing a good job, truing to get rid of a bad DA.
However, her office, the public accountability office, was ALSO investigating Perry. So she claims that he wanted to get rid of her because she was investigating him. She got him indicted for the threatening to veto her funding and otherwise trying to get rid of her.
It seems to me that probably both sides are true. Perry would have liked for her to go away because he was a thorn in his side, then she did things that gave him very good, legitimate reasons to try to get her out of office.
> How many get to approach the bench and say...
> "Y'onour...I'm offering this much to make this all go away.
Over 90% of all criminal cases are settled. Trials are fairly rare in the US. FYI the companies didn't, and you don't, make the deal with the judge - you make a deal with the prosecutor or other entity bringing the complaint. Virtually ANY time you are charged with any crime the prosecutor will offer you a deal.
Btw, the deal the prosecutor offers you is an opening bid. You can and often should negotiate, just like buying a car. In my most recent case, the offered to take $270 and a guilty plea to was driving without insurance, a class B misdemeanor. I didn't mind paying the $270, but didn't want a class B on my record, so I just told the prosecutor "I can $270, I can't pleae to a class B. I can take a class C." He had no problem with that, he just changed it to "driving without proof of insurance".
Of course we all know that phone companies are bad in general. By "if they guilty" I mean if all of these specific companies were proven to have committed these specific acts, during the specific time period covered by the allegations. None of which was proven in court, so that's one reason the penalty was lower than it would have been if the government had to prove anything.
Current law does allow for treble damages (triple) in a civil suit, IF the defendant intentionally engaged in wrongful behavior. So there could be a class action that could cost them much more the FCC settlement.
It should be noted that the amount in this story is how much they agreed to pay, without a trial. Had they fought it in court, they may have had to pay more, or it could be found that they actually didn't do anything illegal.
Consider also the transition to 64-bit. Intel developed the Itanium. AMD choose to extend i386 with amd64. Intel ended up losing big time - they had to give up on Itanium and start naking AMD-compatible chips. There's no reason to think they won't make a similar mistake again.
Intel was significantly ahead of everyone else. Then AMD provided better performance per dollar even at a larger process size by choosing a better design. Then Intel beat them again. Next, ARM was suddenly outselling both when performance- per-watt became the key yardstick. Things change in the CPU market.
Ten years from now, 64-core processors may be competing against 128-core processors and there's no guarantee that either Intel or ARM would have the best design. Mybe in ten years it'll be all about not RISC vs CISC but EIS, Expanded Instruction Set.
You might not even need a power adapter. The price on this compares favorably to an Arduino, so I might use it where I would have previously used and Arduino. My Arduino projects have never needed a power adapter because they've always borrowed power from whatever they were connected to.
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You don't need a server. You need a COTS router running OpenWRT and OpenVPN (with hardware acceleration), a couple of well-placed antennas, and a commercial- (not carrier-) grade symmetric DSL, cable, or wireless connection.
In other words: You don't need a million spinning-disks server with its own abilities to serve content, you need a a million low-power NAPs with a gateway to your own content.
How much traffic does google.com see from my small Ohio town of ~45k citizens? Answer: Not enough to swamp a well-proportioned 802.11a link. Or a 45Mbps T3. Or a 75Mbps symmetric DOCSIS connection from TWC...all of which are cheaper than hosting actual servers
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You used Google.com as your example. I want to understand what you're suggesting. Are you saying that your router , which is "cheaper than actual servers" is going to serve Google.com search results? It's going hold and query the database of over 5 billion webpages, while doing all of the calculations to rank them for each search term people type in? That's pretty impressive for a little OpenWRT router. If you find a way to do that you'll get really, really rich because right now companies like Google spend hundreds of millions of dollars putting together racks and racks of equipment to be able to rank sort through billions of pages in under a second.
Perhaps that's not what you're saying. Perhaps you're suggesting that you and your neighbors could use wi-Fi or coax to connect to each other, then the neighborhood would be connected to the backbone as usual. I've seen something like that work with television. The neighborhood had one big antenna tower, then there was coax running to each house from the antenna. It was called Community Antenna TV, or catv. Today it's better known as "cable tv".
You see what happens is that in your neighborhood , one family has two Netflix streams running constantly every evening and another guy just wants to check his email. The neighborhood has a 100 Mbps backbone connection, so when a bunch of people try to watch Netflix and Youtube from 6:00 PM - 9:00PM, it gets bogged down. The people just checking their email don't want to pay $80 / month for the neighborhood to have a true gigabit backbone to the internet. Rather, they think the families with multiple Netflix streams should pay their fair share - since they are using ten times as much, they should pay most of the cost. So you end up having different people paying different rates to get different speeds, and someone has to manage all of that. You can hire a company to manage all that for you, making sure everyone is paying their share for the backbone, the shared equipment, line maintenance, etc. The companies who manage all that stuff for your neighborhood are called "ISPs".
It's pretty obvious you've never so much as been in a datacenter, not have any idea how CDNs work (or more _fail_ to work, because few pay any attention to the http spec on proxies).
Some of us actually build this shit and know how it works.
Of the just over 1 billion web sites currently online, fewer than 0.000001% have more than 3 servers per CONTINENT. To have a server in each province / state would increase the costs several thousandfold.
There are about ten web sites in the world that could actually have servers in thousands of locations without going bankrupt.
There is a reason your neighborhood street that you live on isn't 2,000 miles long. It connects to a minor collector (street with several stop signs), which then connects to a major collector (street with a few stop signs), which then connects to an arterial (street with stop lights), which connects to a major arterial (three or more lanes each way), which then connects to a freeway, which then connects to an interstate. Streets are laid out like that because a hierarchy of larger and larger paths is the only halfway efficient way to move stuff from any house in the country to any other house. That's just as true with digital stuff - it only works when you put fat fiber under the rivers, through the deserts, and over the mountains.
Which means someone has to decide where to spend $20 million on the next chunk of backbone, and someone has to fork over $20 million and hope that it's the right technology, in the right place, at the right time, and implemented properly.
If all else fails, lower your standards.
