superdupersheep - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Its not the speed that is the problem. (Score 1) 1026

by superdupersheep on Thursday February 10, 2011 @09:32AM (#35161216) Attached to: Obama Calling For $53B For High Speed Rail

The 100% state-owned thing was tried and didn't work very well, nostalgia notwithstanding. The people who say "bring back British Rail" must have short memories, the system was a freaking disaster.

While BR had its faults (nepotism, excessively strong union, a fairly relaxed attitude to punctuality on occasion), the current system is "freaking disaster". The rails themselves are owned by National Rail, previous Railtrack. What happened to Railtrack? Well, they were forcibly taken over because they put profits before safety (c.f. the Hatfield crash). Who ended up footing the bill for the emergency maintenance required? The taxpayer! The trains are owned by the "rolling stock" companies. The TOCs (train operating companies) lease (yes, lease, not buy) the trains from them, and run the actual passenger services. Of course, making trains is a huge capital investment, which the rolling stock companies don't want to risk, because the TOCs don't want to put any more money than necessary into their leasing arrangements. This means we're stuck with horribly out-of-date trains on almost every line. The split into track/stations, TOCs and rolling stock was supposed to relieve the Government of the financial burden of the railways. What actually happened was that each link in the chain (National Rail to TOCs, TOCs to rolling stock, National Rail to rolling stock) had a vested interest in making money from each other body. So the overall price to the consumer has risen, because each body is now a privately owned corporation with the duty to make a profit for its shareholders. We've seen enormous fare rises since privatisation. Hilariously, these rises still aren't enough to meet the TOCs running costs, so they have to receive what is euphemistically referred to as "revenue support" from the Government (aka a subsidy). The whole arrangement now costs MORE than BR ever cost, while providing a measurably worse service. The fragmentation of the system means proper future planning is almost impossible, and coordination that was possible under BR is simply unfeasible due to the number of individual companies involved. To see the present situation is better than BR is simply nonsense. See the last chapters of "Fire & Steam" by Christian Wolmer for a very good explanation of why you're wrong.

Pirate Bay's Anonymity Service Enters Beta Testing 137

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 23, 2009 @01:19PM from the counting-grains-of-sand dept.

schliz writes "Developers of The Pirate Bay have launched their new Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to some 180,000 pre-registered beta testers. An e-mail to beta testers read. 'IPREDator does not store any personal details about its clients. IPREDator does not store any traffic habits you might have. IPREDator is the key to a free internet in the renaissance of censorship!' The new service was launched to protect file sharers in response to the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that went into effect in April."

Transformers Special Edition Chevy Camaro Unveiled 299

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 23, 2009 @03:28AM from the nerds-roll-out dept.

roelbj writes "Automotive stories are few and far between on Slashdot, but today's news from Chevrolet might just make a few readers' mouths water at the chance to own their own Bumblebee. Today at Comic-Con, General Motors officially announced the 2010 Chevy Camaro Transformers Special Edition. The $995 appearance package can be applied to LT (V6) and SS-trim Camaros in Rally Yellow with or without the optional RS package."

One Year Later, "Dead" XP Still Going Strong 538

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @07:32PM from the killed-the-wrong-one dept.

snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."

Beamed Space Solar Power Plant To Open In 2016? 512

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday June 25, 2009 @09:25AM from the duck-duck-burn dept.

Eric_S writes "Anybody who managed to get a decent city going in Sim City 2000 remembers the microwave power plant; now it seems like a real-world equivalent might be coming up on the horizon. The Pacific Gas and Electricity Company, per this 'interview' with the CEO of Solaren on their affiliated site, announced PG&E's plans to buy 200MW of base-load power from a Solaren beamed space solar power plant by 2016." I wish the skeptic in me would be quiet.

Doctorow Says Google & Amazon Stifle Progress 162

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 20, 2009 @10:21AM from the among-others dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google and Amazon are 'a danger to everyone involved in the creative industries' because they act as the intermediary between creators and audiences, says Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow. He warns that the corporate giants will 'only fear competition from other established giants ... companies whose character as gatekeepers of video distribution and discovery won't be substantially different.' The solution, he says, is to use copyrights to lower the cost of entering the market. 'For so long as copyright holders think like short-timers, seeking a quick buck instead of a healthy competitive marketplace, they're doomed to work for their gatekeepers,' he says."

WHO Declares H1N1's Spread Officially a Pandemic 368

Posted by timothy on Thursday June 11, 2009 @01:37PM from the didn't-you-see-pandemic-in-concert-with-sepultura? dept.

juggledean writes "The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global flu pandemic after holding an emergency meeting, according to reports. It means the swine flu virus is spreading in at least two regions of the world with rising cases being seen in the UK, Australia, Japan and Chile." Whether it's called a pandemic or not, there's a hopeful note in the story about H1N1's spread: "...there were people who believed we might be in a kind of apocalyptic situation and what we're really seeing now with H1N1 is that in most cases the disease is self-limiting."

Sarah Connor Chronicles — Why It Died 834

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday May 21, 2009 @08:44AM from the because-it-was-boring dept.

brumgrunt writes "Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network. The two were never going to get on. Plus: how the Terminator name proved more hindrance than aid."

Unmasking Blog Commenters Not a Huge Threat To Freedom 105

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday May 20, 2009 @11:01AM from the hiding-behind-the-internet dept.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with his take on a recent court decision about the rights of online commenters. "Although a court has ruled that the police can subpoena the identities of users who posted comments in a newspaper's blog, I think this is not as big of a threat to journalistic integrity as it might seem. And in any case when the judge ruled against the privacy rights of 'bloggers,' he didn't actually mean 'bloggers." Read on for the rest of Bennett's thoughts.

Mozilla Preparing To Scrap Tabbed Browsing? 554

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday May 18, 2009 @08:36AM from the if-it-ain't-broke-fix-it dept.

Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. 'Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were "many browser sessions,"' Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. 'Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless.' Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)."

Turn Your iPhone Into a Web Server 158

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Friday May 15, 2009 @01:52PM from the because-you-can dept.

miller60 writes "A Japanese company called Freebit has released ServersMan, an app that turns the iPhone into a web server. It debuted in Japan in February, has now been launched in the US, and is being touted as a 'Personal Data Center.' Freebit also has a video with additional information on server-enabling your iPhone. 'Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.'"

Think-Tank Warns of Internet "Brownouts" Starting Next Year 445

Posted by timothy on Thursday April 30, 2009 @01:24PM from the malthus-was-right dept.

JacobSteelsmith writes "A respected American think-tank, Nemertes Research, reports the Web has reached a critical point. For many reasons, Internet usage continues to rise (imagine that), and bandwidth usage is increasing due to traffic heavy sites such as YouTube. The article goes on to describe the perils Internet users will face including 'brownouts that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace,' and constant network 'traffic jams,' similar to 'how home computers slow down when the kids get back from school and start playing games.' ... 'Monthly traffic across the internet is running at about eight exabytes. A recent study by the University of Minnesota estimated that traffic was growing by at least 60 per cent a year, although that did not take into account plans for greater internet access in China and India. ... While the net itself will ultimately survive, Ritter said that waves of disruption would begin to emerge next year, when computers would jitter and freeze. This would be followed by brownouts — a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.'"

RMS Says "Software As a Service" Is Non-free 715

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday April 27, 2009 @11:00AM from the ok-thats-a-bit-inflammatory dept.

BillyG noted an RMS interview where he says "'Software as a service' means that you think of a particular server as doing your computing for you. If that's what the server does, you must not use it! If you do your computing on someone else's server, you hand over control of your computing to whoever controls the server. It is like running binary-only software, only worse: it's even harder for you to patch the program that's running on someone else's server than it is to patch a binary copy of a program running on your own computer. Just like non-free software, 'software as a service' is incompatible with your freedom."

Grad Student Project Uses Wikis To Stash Data, Miffs Admins 268

Posted by timothy on Monday April 13, 2009 @12:06AM from the going-on-the-beg-forgiveness-principle dept.

Anonymous writes "Two graduate students at the Ivy League's Brown University built a P2P system to use abandoned wiki sites to store data. The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites to send data between users as an alternative to BitTorrent. There was immediate backlash as site operators quickly complained to the University. The project appears to be shutdown, but many of the pages still remain on the web. The project homepage was also taken down and the students posted an apology this afternoon." The same submitter links to two different forum discussions on the project.

Cory Doctorow Calls Death To Music, Movies, Print 336

Posted by timothy on Sunday February 22, 2009 @06:37PM from the low-hanging-fruit dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow depicts an unfortunate near-future for a handful of media industries being transformed or killed by the Internet. Predicting a large-scale transformation of the music, movie, book, and newspaper industry, Doctorow says, 'The Internet chews up media and spits them out again. Sometimes they get more robust. Sometimes they get more profitable. Sometimes they die.' While the Internet has the potential to help the dying book industry, for example, Doctorow predicts the 'imminent collapse' of the American newspaper industry because advertisers are uninterested in spending money on the remaining offline readership, such as senior citizens, who prove less valuable."

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