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Sandboxing applications is a good start.
Never run untrusted code in an open environment. AND NEVER run untrusted code with un-restricted privileges.
And if you didn't right the code, you should be suspect of it. |
If some Google Fiber speedtests were included in this, based on speedtests I've seen other people take, GF would score "below" some of these other ISPs, despite having the smallest cost:megabit ratio.
After the summer 2011 report using this same metric, Verizon boasted the fact that it had the highest rank (112%). Cablevision took advantage and followed the next year by keeping the advertised speeds underrated and raised the speeds. |
It may appear on the surface that people who use ad blockers are scumbags who deny content providers of their hard-earned money. But I would like to argue that this is a gross oversimplification, and hope that by the end of this little essay, people like me who use ad blockers will get a little less hate.
Let's take a step back for a second. What is the #1 most popular extension for google's own chrome browser? You guessed it, adblock plus. So not only is it legal to avoid ads, but google condones it by supporting this plugin on their webstore. Being one of the richest companies in the world, you'd imagine that google would be good at making decisions which maximise their (and their content provider's) profit margin, right? So have you considered that adblock users still make google (and content providers) money?
Let's say google forced ads on everyone, and I mean totally force it and I am sure they could, then many would move to google's competitors in droves out of protest. As the competitors popularity increases, then ad-watching viewers will be drawn away from google as well. Even if you only lost the adblock users this will still hurt google and its content providers. Why? Because even these viewers help increase the popularity of the videos they watch and like by sharing the link to friends, or putting it on their website, or bringing it here to reddit, etc. This brings with it an influx of new viewers, many of which do not use adbloc, making the content providers money. You can bet your ass that google has crunched the numbers and knows this makes the most financial sense.
What about the moral implications? Your time watching ads literally means money for google and its content providers. So you are giving money to everyone whose video ads you watch, not just the videos you like. In many cases you are giving this money up front, before you even know what the video is really about. What if you end up hating the video and think the content provider is a jerk? They still make money from you whether you like it or not. Using an ad blocker means you get to choose who gets your money, which may be in the form of an actual donation, or a purchase from their webstore, or simply by telling your friends about them. But the point is, it's on your terms. |
Go read their earnings reports if you want to know how they make money.
Care to |
The UK could become a very important player in the Space game, but it wouldn't be the same kind of power as the Russian Space Agency or NASA or the Chinese Space Agency. Skylon is a private venture and it will remain that way. If Skylon becomes the pivotal element which makes space travel affordable, it will be a private company which owns that pivotal element and not the UK government.
If Skylon does become successful, it probably wont even be the UK Space Agency which benefits. It will be the ESA (European Space Agency). They'll probably be the ones to buy all of the rockets (assuming NASA and the like don't) because the UKSP doesn't do manned flights or do anything really. However, the ESA does do manned flights and has the second largest Space Exploration budget of any space Agency, second only to NASA. |
Such total bullshit that the UK government and ESA are funding it to the tune of millions of pounds? They have a working production prototype, which has been tested over 100 times at ground level and which you can see in the video. It's not some random person on the Internet telling you this can be done, it's the British Government, the European Space Agency, and a whole lot of cash.
Humans are very, very good at solving problems. We wiped out Smallpox, put a man on the moon, and extended our lifespans by 30 years or more - among any number of incredible achievements - all in the last 100 years. You think cooling air in 1/100 of a second at those speeds is something that's completely inconceivable? I think you should look around (or indeed look at the incredible piece of technology you're using right now) and see the awesome power of what we can do as a species. We fuck up a lot, yes, but we also do a lot right, and when we set our collective will and resources to it, we can do anything. |
Let me take a crack at this question. I don't know much about using [hashcat]( but it's a beast, just like [John The Ripper]( is a beast with GPU support.
These are offline attacks, that are utilized for when some asshat company doesn't secure their Gibsons properly, or from when a good company just has persistent blackhats who really want their user base's data. They dump the passwords to some site like dazzlepod, and then they use some decent machine's (or a bunch of machines) CPU/GPU cycles to rip the passwords using tools like JTR, or Hashcat. They can use dictionary attacks, massive dictionaries, can crack very good passwords. Massive dictionaries with word mangling can crack even better passwords. They can use [Rainbow Tables]( to tear into hashes with ease.
They aren't really bruteforce attacks since they compare a word, phrase, or mangled jumble to a hash in order to guess the password. So the application isn't really going through each possible digit or character, it's comparing strings. With hashcat, it's comparing a shit tonne of strings per second using GPU. |
Well I agree in some sense: if you use md5 for passwords it does not really matters if they are salted or not these days.
Bcrypt has salting built-in. |
That's only true if you take just 4 words, which is pretty weak anyway.
let's say your average word has 5 characters (bytes). And lets also work with 1000 common words.
your "jumbo dict" would have 1000 + 1000^2 + 1000^3 + 1000^4 words in it, e.g. all combinations of up to 4 words, which places it at about 4.5 terrabytes. Not that large, is it? That's because 4 words is weak. But look at 5 words. Suddenly, you're at 4.5 petabytes.
Of course, no one would use a 4 terra word list. |
Good lord, even in the first few paras there are so many links I have to click on and read to understand what he's saying. |
I don't understand what the hate is with Windows 8. 8.1 drastically improves the OS to the point of adding a start button for people that either don't know a Windows key exists on their keyboard, or we're too dense to click the lower left corner without an explicit button.
Metro is as fast, if not faster, than the traditional Start Menu. Especially since everyone just started typing in their queries instead of using the programs menu. I did items almost instantly. I dot use it for file searches, mind you, but that's because I deal in too many loose files that I have sorted in to folders. OS X has a powerful tag system that was introduced in Mavericks, and this far I am impressed with it.
The last addition I want to touch on is the fact that Windows 8 has a native UEFI installation method that cut my boot time down to 8.5 seconds or less, POST included. I am very impressed with the SSD boot speed vs older versions of Windows. |
Have you actually read the comments? The reason this is bad is because it infringes upon net neutrality. Let me give you a rough hypothetical. Say Sponsored data does become a thing. A year or two down the road I have this wonderful idea for a startup for a new type of social networking website that potentially lots of people would want to use. Let's call it Social Circles. Now over the past two years Facebook, Netflix, Google, MySpace all become sponsored data partners. Suddenly you're using 75% less data. AT&T sends you a letter in the mail saying instead of paying for 30$ for 2gb we have a new plan that's 10$ for 750mb just a little more than you typically use. Now I've started to deploy my new startup but notice people aren't on it as much as say Facebook even though there tons of registered users and everyone loves it. I find out people are afraid to go over their new lowered data can using my app so they stick with Facebook. My startup tanks.
What it would do is reduce the ability of startups like my made up Social Circles to enter the mobile playing field because giants like Facebook can subsidized their data usage but I can't. |
I was sooo pissed I got hustled into their data cap bs.. my old phone broke and had unlimited data. They were like you can upgrade to galaxy3 for $100 or replace my older lg for $100 so obviously I went with the s3.. then at the last second the guys like oh btw you'll no longer have unlimited data, but you only use about 5gb a month.. ok how much is it? Only $10 more then you pay now.... then I get the bill, and find out that $10 more actually meant my phone fee every month is $60 instead of $50 plus $60 for data plus min/text PLUS another $60 "OTHER SERVICE FEES".. literally making just my phone on our family plan go from $90 a month to over $200 because I actually use around 7-8gb a month... goddamn verizon is the devil.. I want to switch to tmobile or sprint so bad but their service is kinda shitty around here.. |
Most of the people I work with think that some of these mobile/network decisions are behind the times or headed in the wrong direction. However, we work in an entirely different department than mobile (developer.att.com) and there's no formal suggestion box to report issues such as this. It's such a large company and we don't know which people come up with these plans. We end up talking about changes in the market (t mobiles plans, Google fiber, sponsored data) over lunch, and return to our side of things back at our desks. I've tried to make my work as user friendly and fair as possible, but that is limited to my sphere of influence.
It always sounds like a new plan is in the works, but who knows if it will be the right plan at the right time (when it's out of our department). |
BAHAHAHA! - While I don't agree with bandwidth caps and throttling by any means, this isn't new.
I worked for AT&T u-verse and they don't actually enforce the caps.
They've had these "caps" for about two years. Did they enforce it? no. This website has been active since at least NOV 2011.
Rarely does the common household go over 150 GB or 250 GB if they're using the internet even for streaming shows like netflix. It's really hard to hit that cap unless you're, i don't know, downloading illegally, or something.
and to be honest - an ISP can do whatever the hell they'd like, AT&T states they can make changes to the service if they give you 30 days notice, the bandwidth cap has been in their TOS since you probably signed up.
Enjoy some TOS |
That's the problem. Tech advances and these corporate scum bags only look at how they can make more money. Don't get me wrong, I understand as a business it is your primary goal to make money, but screwing the people that provide that money to you is not the way to to do it.
It's scary to think WE are the people who are paying them to enforce these bull shit rules onto the people, and we are the ones who put food on their table. Imagine what it would be like if every person on their network just stopped paying for it and using it. The worst part is that we are in their palm as much as they are in ours. We want this service, we 'need' this service, and we just take the beating over and over.
I can only hope that one day corporate america will not be filled with rich sniveling douche bags who's ultimate goal is to increase their fiscal years profits, but a Corporate america that says we have hurdles to overcome and together with our technology, and research, and our money, we can find a solution to bring us closer together and bring America back to the top of the world where it once was. |
As someone who's now finishing the first year of CS I can honestly say the trickiest thing about math is the bloody language. Our lecturer hates our class too because unfortunately there's still many kids who have given up on the course but are riding out the year.. and people just being noisy constantly.
Ergo, we learn next to nothing most of the time. We certainly don't learn how much of the stuff we cover can be applied in anyway. Our lecturer teaches it as if it's learnt by heart and we simply treat it like that. I end up going off and doing my own research about how things like parabolas are useful.
I spent so much of my time just trying to bring my grades up for maths (picked up a 77% on my last test), while everything else I find is incredibly easy.
Thankfully I had done programming before, both in my spare time and on another course. We do web design, business and hardware/software too. Most of it I feel anyone with a passion with computing would easily excel at, yet our class, like most people have said here, has dwindled to incredibly small numbers from 100+
I'm going to say something probably controversial which can be debated to no end, but I feel maths needs to be overhauled for Computer Science. The focus needs to be more on application versus a crash course in mathematics. Maybe this is just my course though.
Someone who has advanced experience in how mathematics integrates with computing will be able to comment on this better, but take for example a game engine;
Complex physics, data, algorithms, etc. A good knowledge of maths still doesn't exactly layout how a physics engine works or how to implement that in say C++.
So while I'm learning all this maths which is fabulous, I really have no idea how I implement much of it in code, either in assembly x86 or in Java/C++
So I guess my question is, with regard to applied computing do people find that in 2nd year onwards does the maths they learnt start to integrate more with the code they write or is it really still just about know-how when it comes to programming? |
That is exactly what is wrong with the right to be forgotten: It grants the ability to eliminate transgressions on the internet (which should ostensibly be considered public information) and grants a means by which to retroactively remove it due to regrets etc. The individual therefore intends to remove the material expressly for the purpose of maintaining their privacy. The original communique may not have been private but their desire to have it removed, and their reasons for wanting it removed are private. |
Their explanation for this is that I transferred over a phone from AT&T so it doesn't use the T-Mobile network (huh?) and this is expected.
AT&T uses different bands and frequencies than TMO. I believe the 4S has unified CDMA/GSm radios, but since it lacks LTE, at best, you'd default to HSPA on TMO, if not EDGE. Depending on the status of TMO's spectrum in Seattle.
> Their solution - buy a new phone from us. I even asked if they could update the firmware on the phone, and they cannot do that.
Slightly irritating, I know, but the 4S is well past its prime. I believe you can do any firmware upgrades yourself on the 4S, iOS 8.1.1 should be the most current available.
> If I do buy an iPhone 6, that pretty much wipes out the savings from a cheaper plan.
Sell the 4S, buy the 6, be happy.
> Wi-fi calling: This is not entirely T-Mobile's fault except that I had no reason to believe my iPhone 4S won't support Wi-fi calling from reading snip
Wifi Calling has been a big push for them, but its not available on all models. They only claim support for currently shipping phones, and, as I said, the 4S is ancient in today's world.
> Free LTE data for a year: They don't add this automatically even though you go through a link emailed to you when you sign up. Initially I was told that this referral based perk was only for tablets while the webpage does not mention this. When I argued that the webpage did not mention any such restrictions, I was told I need to go to a webpage and sign up for a data pass to get my perk. I go to the page and it just keeps spinning when I try to sign up!
Your 4S doesn't support LTE in any capacity, so I'm not sure what good the free data for a year is going to do for you?
> |
It should film before!!!!!!! It should film all the time!!!!!
Yeah, but those are still perfectly valid criticisms. 64gb of class10 microsdhc memory costs around $30 now. Even at netflix's 1080p 6mbit
"superHD" quality, that's still enough storage for 24 hours of video, far longer than any single shift. Why should we throw everything out EXCEPT for the 30 seconds around the taser deployment!?!?!
In order to enable "pre-event" video, the cameras already have to be recording fulltime. That means you are already using power, writing the video out, etc., and then just throwing out everything that falls out of the buffer. Why do that instead of write it out to a larger memory card? |
They needn't bother. Since watches get a lot of their functionalities from phones, and the iphone will only support the iwatch , swatch's watches will offer less than the iwatch(for iphone owners - which are the sort of people,m general, who are more prone to buy such watch. ) |
Yea sorry was on mobile, gut reaction couldn't remove it. Please can you find it in you heart to forgive me?? Like seriously I never meant to double post, or reiterate a joke or another's comment.
It's people like you who are the true MVPs
Making sure the bottom of a page is in order and are aware of their mistakes. No if I could only figure out how to give gold. I have looked in r/mining but that has only left me with other unrelated questions and concerns.
Mainly the miss use of canary birds in the early part of last century. More canaries died from CO2 poisoning then to the common household cats. Which in my eyes invalidates the whole premise of WB "I thought I saw a pussy cat" but this is neither here nor there..
Back to my mining for gold, though most major deposits in the us have been mined, I was considering to set up a heist of some of the U.S. Gold reserves. Though as I was assembling my team, I was notified this has been done in movies.
Now back square one. Not wanting to copy someone else, because it is morally and socially unacceptable. And the whole mining industry to corporate for me. I can not give you any gold for this comment but can I suggest you go buy a canary, to notify you that the room you are in is running out of breathable air, so you can stare at new comments on a thread that is obviously entered beating a dead horse stage at this point in the life cycle of the post. |
So John Carmack talks about all of this at length in several videos available on youtube.
He talks about being approached over the "smartphone holder" several times, and about the limitations of these devices.
Mainly CPU power. VR was tried before, but the CPU power was garbage at the time, and just couldn't provide the effect necessary for a good VR experience.
Going to Smartphone holders for your VR would be like taking a time machine back to repeat the same mistakes of ~25 years ago.
He does stress thought that VR with smartphones is the future. In 10-20 years when the CPU/GPU/Battery power catches up.
In the short term though, this is going to be marketed from an entertainment angle, moving into a business angle. The applications for gaming are huge, people are currently buying 3 monitors for their PC's that could be replaced by 1 headset. A headset that provides a better experience, and more screen space.
This extra screen space is going to be fantastic for any sort of desk job currently requiring a computer. Everything around you will become a work area. You could leave papers just hanging in the air, or covering the VR desk, or pull up a video feed to hang behind your desk as you work, the applications for business are going to be massive.
Which brings us back to the smartphone. A virtual desk is good, a virtual desk inside your smartphone you can take anywhere is amazing, much better than VR chained to your desktop. |
I feel like the whole premise of the article hinges on all the Borders stores closing, and to me that wrecks the whole premise. Maybe Borders is closing because it's a terrible store*, or perhaps it's because more people find it convenient to buy their books online instead of having to drive over to a store that may or may not even have what they're looking for.
Barring the apparent leap of logic from "Borders is closing" to "People don't care about whole books anymore," lots of people still read books. I'm not sure if this is true across the board, but from what I've seen at work more middle/high schoolers are reading now than when I was in school. They may choose to do it in electronic format, but they're still reading.
Perhaps I was supposed to skip the first two segments and skip to the end, because I feel like the article's extremely disjointed with whatever point it's trying to make. The third section, I /think/, makes the actual point of the article. It does it in a ridiculously roundabout way though, comparing the way we learn to packet switching, which I'm pretty sure most people don't think or care about.
*I have a personal vendetta against Borders because all of them in my area are terrible and deserve to have closed years ago, except the one where I bought Life narrated by David Attenborough. That one may live. |
I see what you're saying, but the reality of these kinds of headlines is that the 10x is purely theoretical, based on mass production processes that don't exist and will probably never be commercially viable. For example, if you have an unlimited budget and don't need to recharge, then you CAN get a team of PhDs to assemble you a battery that's substantially better(would easily run all day at max) than the average li-ion battery that comes with your laptop.
Oh and manufacturing advanced batteries is quite...advanced. It can take years to build the assembly line for a marginally improved battery using mostly understood technology, like for example a li-ion battery with a clever cathode solution or something, so something entirely new could have a substantially higher lead time. And something entirely new could have some show-stopping problem that makes mass-production impossible with current technology. |
You are 100% completely wrong.
Using pirated versions is not a valid bussiness strategy for long. You will get nailed either by random control, an angry employee or customer, or just a naive employee calling a hotline. No business owner in his right mind would choose to use pirated software when there are affordable legal options.
And it may come as a surprise for you, but most people prefer to operate within the law. It's safe and cozy.
And why do you think they have cheap student, educational, and home versions of most of their software? Those are to better compete with cheaper alternatives in the market segments where price matters the most. |
Good article but lets not forget that people were looking at Apple 20 years ago as a dead company. I bet in 5 years they are solid again. Not saying MS will be "Apple Like". I just don't think things are dire at all.
MS has some challenges ahead but I don't see them collapsing anytime soon. Windows Phone is starting to see a turn and MS will invest more in the next year to drive it into a solid 3rd. I have an Android and I am seriously considering moving to a Windows phone as soon as Verizon get some decent handsets. Amazon is rumored to come out with its own smartphone in 2012 based on the windows Phone OS. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Kindle Fire 2 be a Windows OS.
MS had a big win with Kinect and they will build upon that success with a focus on Live next year. Xbox Live is key next year. They realize its about Content now and will find ways to strengthen their position on the entertainment hub in the Living room. Hopefully the build upon some of the strengths they had in Windows Media Center. Their partnership with Comcast and Verizon Fios for the Xbox as STB will help grow that market share.
Window 8 will be a huge win as they develop an OS that doesn't require huge processing power. Window 8 is more than a start menu update. Window 8's success will be depending on manufacturers producing tables in the sub $400 level. MS will work closer with OEM this time around (as they are with the Windows Phone) to develop some "Apple Like" qualifications.
Office - They blew it by not releasing an free online Office suite and letting Google Docs get a foothold. MS needs to learn Apples strategy and start eroding market-share with their own products rather than letting competition take them away. Otherwise like Kodak, they will focus to much on High Margin products (Film) and fail.
Skydrive and Skype - two "connector" services that I think MS will need to focus on in the future. Along with Xbox Live and Phone, I think are key to their success.
Microsoft has the ability to partner with Facebook and Amazon against Google and Apple. Samsung will also be a great partner going forward in the TV, Tablet and Phone space. Nokia partnership brings them some solid footing in the EU. MS will actually become a very good company to partner with in the future. Yes, the Evil Empire will be the company that people look to partner with in the future. |
So the Wii has consistently outsold the Xbox and PS3 but the thing is Nintendo has captured primarily the casual market. You don't see the adoption rate for games and accessories on the Wii that you see with either the 360 or the PS3. The only thing that the Wii has really moved much of is first party Nintendo games and carnival games only because it came with a free wiimote. If you look at software attachment Microsoft is killing it with a much higher average games sold per system than Nintendo does and they see a lot of post system sale money from that. Compared to the Wii where I know people who have had it since day one for it only to become a Wii sports/netflix machine. There is a reason that Nintendo just saw a bad quarter and it is due to the fact that they don't get very many game sales after the initial purchase. Hell I am a hardcore gamer and only have 5 games for my Wii vs the 30 I have for my Xbox and the 70+ I have for my PC. This is still ignoring the massive amount of money Microsoft makes post sale with Xbox live subscriptions and live arcade sales. Hell I'm pretty sure that Microsoft even has a higher attach rate for kinnect than Nintendo does for Wii motion plus. |
My favorite calls as an intern were those that went as such:
Me: Senator XX's office, how can I help You?
Constituent: Hi, I'd like to give the Senator my input to vote no on the Protect IP Act.
Me: Okay, great. (If the area code is unfamiliar) Can I have your zipcode please?
Constituent: 55555
Me: Okay thank you for calling Senator XX's office. Have a great day!
Less than 10 seconds. If you don't want to debate or talk about an issue any further, you don't have to. The people answering phones probably don't want to either. Save the phone lines for more people to actually get through to the office, or the seniors who call because they have no one else to yell at. |
I haven't spoken with the author, but I believe it scans only parent level comments in certain, possibly default, subreddits. I believe its set to a timer of some sort too, or it's getting spamblocked really quickly - check out the time posted. 1 hour for like 5, 4 from 4 hours ago.
To me, and I'm no coder - I'm just a civil engi grad with some C - I would think it'd be on a computer that's on all the time. It seems to be super consistent - just from a few comment history pages, it doesn't miss. Scans for a certain points threshold, and somehow counts syllables or accesses a database of words to count 'em, and just rearranges the formatting. Disregard things like [9] for the trees, |
Such as the Swastika in some countries, it seems.
I still remember having an American tourist come my way as I was a teenager, working at the town hall. There was a building in town with a huge swastika as the most prominent corporate logo nailed to it. It was the logo of a big business that dated the Nazi party by decades. The sign had nothing to do with Nazism.
Yet this American screamed at me for 15 minutes about the whole thing, as I calmly tried to explain to him that the swastika on the building was not the Nazi swastika, to which he essentially argued all swastikas are evil. This, of course, was because of the fact the Nazi party had used the swastika.
When I asked him what would have happened if the Nazi party had chosen a cross as their symbol, opposed to the swastika, he just got even angrier, telling me it was different.
Eventually, the business was forced to change its near century old logo, because some American businesses actually refused trading with them. |
If we were actually following our Constitution you would be correct, but we haven't been for a long time. The President absolutely is effectively the most powerful.
One of the biggest reasons is his position as Commander in Chef of the Armed forces. Our Constitution requires that wars be declared by Congress, but in the last century we have abandoned this idea on a technicality. The President, as Commander in Chief, can order troops to go somewhere and start shooting at people and doing things, but that's just a "military action". It can have exactly the same effect as a war and be identical to a war in every way, but it isn't called a war, so it doesn't require Congressional approval. Congress seems to like this because it removes any accountability from them, if a war becomes unpopular they can blame it on one guy instead of having to take responsibility for their part in a declaration of war.
The other big change over the last century is the creation and multiplication of executive agencies. Here Congress takes its legislative power, creates an agency, gives that agency power and authority to enact their own regulations, and then basically hands over the reigns of that agency to the Executive branch (the President). The President can now order this agency about and appoint its directors, who can then enact regulations that have the power of law. Isn't this an unconstitutional surrender of the legislative authority to the executive? Of course it is, but the Supreme Court is too busy shitting on our Constitution to actually read it.
Third major way in which the President has risen to become the most powerful person in government is more unofficial, it's his position as the de facto leader of his party and his power to present issues through the media. Although he can't actually introduce legislation or vote on it, he can draft legislation and give it to someone else to introduce into Congress and sponsor, and he can send a very clear message that he expects the bill to be supported, and that any party members who oppose it may lose the support of the national party. Further, he has the veto power, and can say "unless you put X into that bill or take Y out, I will veto it." The power to stop a bill in its tracks like that (unless a super-majority passes it over his veto, which is extremely rare) has a huge influence on what laws are passed or even considered. |
Spoken like every Polish person I have ever met : "It's not my fault the system is broken, i'm just here to exploit it"
2 small things:
who do you think hires polish people ? It's other polish people who were here before the gates opened and who opened a completely legit business.
and polish police lol please. With the exception of that one murder a few years ago, every request for information goes unanswered (it's on the news here too after some guy got pulled over after having been flashed over 100 times)
(disclaimer: none of this was directed at you, fellow redditor, but I had frustration to vent since I had to pay a lot of money for a car in which a polish person crashed, without insurance. He just walked away and abandoned if POS 500€ polo and that was it then for him... |
Our ultimate last line of defense against something like this is to build a legal case of constitutionality to force upon the supreme court. I'm not educated enough in law or the processes of our judicial branch, but i'm sure we have redditors who are vastly better at it than I. In which case, I beseech any redditor with a greater capacity for it to begin developing a last line of defense to disallow CISPA as a violation of the constitution. |
That's a very nice list but it already passed out of that committee and out of the House of Reps. entirely so NONE of these people have anything to do with this bill unless some of them were chosen as members of a conference committee IF the Senate passed a similar bill. |
Vehicles moving on rails controlled by computers would be the PERFECT thing for "millions of drivers with millions of destinations over a vast area." With computers controlling all of the movement of vehicles through the area not only would we almost eliminate most traffic congestion and the possibility of collisions, but potentially, as technology gets better, we'll be able to pilot these vehicles at faster and faster velocities with even less risk of accident.
There is a Nova Science Now special that addresses this very concept and is definitely worth a watch although off the top of my head I can't remember which one it was. I would guess it is the "What's the next big thing?" episode. Don't quote me on that though. |
Yes the implications that this company owns both software are pretty fucking serious.
That being said they are only implications and without solid evidence that this company is compromising the anonymity of its users we can't say they do. We simply don't know. Therefore unjustly accusing them of wrong doing and expecting them to refute the evidence is no worse than a government falsely accusing its citizens and unfairly demanding a trial to prove innocence. |
flatly"? Whatever
"unusable"? I use it all the time, utilizing all the keyboard commands out there to avoid the Metro elements, and I can do about everything much faster then Win 7.
"stupidly"? It is faster, lighter, some basic OS functions got a much needed overhaul in terms of design and functionality. It also has about zero compability issues.
"insultingly"? Yep, I have to give you that one. The Metro UI is useful for launching apps (I like to keep my desktop clean) and a good replacement for the horrbile Win7 widgets, but the design really is insultingly. But that shall remain a matter of taste. I also think the OSX design is just as "insultingly".
I am also really surprised about how few bugs and other nasties I encountered. Only thing that annoyed me so far were some driver issues (Sound card and Wireless adapter to be specific) that got fixed pretty quickly and some major issues with alt-tabbing to the desktop and opening the task manager, that simply does not work with some applications |
Cause it would turn out like that episode of Futurama where Hermes becomes a robot by getting rid of his real body parts and replacing them with robotic upgrades. In the end, Hermes realized he wasn't even him anymore and went back to having his own body parts. |
I wanted to get a refund from EA as a german. You know, the guys that kicked valves ass back then. This is in their [ToS](
>If you reside in Germany, the following applies: the Cooling Off Period does not start before you receive your purchase confirmation email, and if you purchase a physical product, not before you received the purchased physical product. If you purchase a service and expressly consent to the service commencing, you will lose your right of withdrawal once both parties' obligations are fulfilled before the end of the Cooling Off Period. If you purchased a physical product, you will lose your right of withdrawal if you remove or unseal the shrink-wrap packaging from your physical product.
I tried Livechat a couple of times. First rep asked me for the reason why i wanted a refund. I refused, as it is well within my rights to do so without a reason within 14 days. She said i have to. Which i dont. But i gave her server issues, low quality and removal of features as reason thinking "i should be nice". "Then i cant give you refund" was the answer. After threatening a chargeback she just said "as you wish"
Second rep was more promising until he claimed that accepting the EULA and downloading the game was "expressly consenting" to the service. Which is a laughable claim.
I think i forgot one or two tries here.
Next one was the most promising. He seemed to accept the part and referred to the ToS part about opening the contact us page and clicking the Email US tab. Thing is that doesn't exist anymore. In fact EA has no email support at al these days. He then said i should call phone support under 0870 243 2435 or +44 870 243 2435 as it would be the only way to continue my process. That's not an optin for me as i only have a cell phne right now and dont want to sit in waiting line for 3 hours on long distance.
Tried it yet again and now they started to notice that i opened multiple tickets. Nothing out of this rep except another "do as you wish" when i mentioned a chargeback.
Tried it again for the last time and he was also pissed at my repeated request and threatened to close my account if i continue opening tickets for the same issue. "We don't ban people asking for refunds" my ass. "not if they ask 5 times" was his answer. I wonder when they said that in public. I mentioned that my laptop has not enough ram (which it doesn't) to try the hardware route and he said it's "my fault for not reading the minimum requirements" and that "just have to buy a new PC to play" before disconnecting me.
All the while i continued to threaten a chargeback. Which i will do now. I have gotten a product that rarely works and if it does it does not work as advertised (no cheetah speed for example makes it tiring to play. Global market and not working regional play among other things). I could either continue to bother them until i am banned (not banned from Help. No they threatened to completely CLOSE my account) and then get a chargeback or get a chargeback and then get banned. Since i only have BF3 and SC on that account i will go with the latter and lay my business with EA to rest. |
For those that don't read the comments section, I found this comment to be very telling:
"yogibbear says:
DISCLAIMER I have enjoyed my time with the game so far, but these are ultimately HUGE failures and signs that despite the server issues this game should NEVER have been released yet ***
WHO CARES ABOUT THE DAMN SERVERS, I have played the game for ~50 hrs and let me tell you at the CORE it is ROTTEN and BROKEN as a city simulation.
a) Only 10% of your workforce will actually WORK. 90% are retirees supposably. So you will ALWAYS have high demand for workers and everyone will complain that they are broke once you reach tier 3. Numerical density development of your town is F ** beyond low wealth initial starting where a more REASONABLE 66% of your population WORKS.
b) 16 player maps CANNOT share between all 16 regions as you need to be connected by road/rail/water/etc. which are limited usually to only 3-4 other cities for each city meaning it isn’t a 16 player share fest asides from tech + research unlocks which don’t require roads
c) mid-late game ALL services (fire/police/recycling/sewage/etc.) are ALL BROKEN. Once you build 2 x sewage plants, buildings will constantly get backed up sewage as it is simulated wrong, paying $10k/hr for those 4 x fire departments, and you’ll have buildings NEXT DOOR TO YOUR FIRE DEPARTMENT that they will NEVER RESPOND TO, and sit there saying “ready to respond”.
d) If you don’t own the DLC you can’t reclaim other people’s cities that have that DLC
e) Region trade/tourism/etc. is all SERVER SIDE and because the servers are terrible this means if they go down/you lose connection while playing… guess what you GET 0 TOURISTS for that month and your casino town is now BROKE. RESTART YOUR CITIES
f) there is no undo button. No way to get cash back for incorrect placement of buildings
g) layout maps are INCORRECT and do not correctly show you the placement for maximum density |
Taking the picture of the guys was not cool.
Blogging and tweeting racist and sexist defenses of posting that picture was super not cool (claiming logical criticism = "straight white male privilege" is pretty fucked up).
Still acting like the victim when one of the guys lost his job was uber not cool.
When your entire fucking job is to be a community liaison, calling yourself "Joan of Arc" and having a hero-complex in the face of overwhelming criticism from that very community = fireable offence. |
Highly-externalized locus of control, blah blah blah, divide by 6, carry the 2... sounds like a narcissist to me.
None of the work below is mine, all of the emphasis that has been added IS mine.
[Narcissist's Reactions to Deficient, Fake, Negative, Low-grade, or Static Narcissistic Supply](
The narcissist presents to the world a facade of invincibility, equanimity, superiority, skilfulness, cool-headedness, invulnerability, and, in short: indifference.
This front is penetrated in times of great crises that threaten the narcissist's ability to obtain Narcissistic Supply, or when the Narcissistic Supply is spurious (fake or low-grade), negative, or static.
In the majority of cases, narcissists react to deficient narcissistic supply by resorting to several adaptive solutions:
The Delusional Narrative Solution
The narcissist constructs a narrative in which he figures as the hero - brilliant, perfect, irresistibly handsome, destined for great things, entitled, powerful, wealthy, the centre of attention, etc. The bigger the strain on this delusional charade - the greater the gap between fantasy and reality - the more the delusion coalesces and solidifies.
The Antisocial Solution
The narcissist renounces reality. To his mind, those who pusillanimously fail to recognize his unbound talents, innate superiority, overarching brilliance, benevolent nature, entitlement, cosmically important mission, perfection, etc. - do not deserve consideration. The narcissist's natural affinity with the criminal - his lack of empathy and compassion, his deficient social skills, his disregard for social laws and morals - now erupt and blossom. He becomes a full-fledged antisocial (sociopath or psychopath). He ignores the wishes and needs of others, he breaks the law, he violates all rights - natural and legal, he holds people in contempt and disdain, he derides society and its codes, he punishes the ignorant ingrates - that, to his mind, drove him to this state - by acting criminally and by jeopardizing their safety, lives, or property.
A variant of this pattern of conduct is the Passive-Aggressive solution.
Passive-aggressiveness wears a multitudes of guises: procrastination, malingering, perfectionism, forgetfulness, neglect, truancy, intentional inefficiency, stubbornness, and outright sabotage. This repeated and advertent misconduct has far reaching effects. Consider the Negativist in the workplace: he or she invests time and efforts in obstructing their own chores and in undermining relationships. But, these self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors wreak havoc throughout the workshop or the office.
Despite the obstructive role they play, passive-aggressives feel unappreciated, underpaid, cheated, and misunderstood. They chronically complain, whine, carp, and criticize. They blame their failures and defeats on others, posing as martyrs and victims of a corrupt, inefficient, and heartless system (in other words, they have alloplastic defenses and an external locus of control).
Passive-aggressives sulk and give the "silent treatment" in reaction to real or imagined slights. They suffer from ideas of reference (believe that they are the butt of derision, contempt, and condemnation) and are mildly paranoid (the world is out to get them, which explains their personal misfortune). In the words of the DSM: "They may be sullen, irritable, impatient, argumentative, cynical, skeptical and contrary." They are also hostile, explosive, lack impulse control, and, sometimes, reckless.
The Paranoid Schizoid Solution
When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others' allegedly malign attention. The narcissist becomes his own audience and self-sufficient as his own, sometimes exclusive, source of narcissistic supply.
The narcissist develops persecutory delusions. He perceives slights and insults where none were intended. He becomes subject to ideas of reference (people are gossiping about him, mocking him, prying into his affairs, cracking his e-mail, etc.). He is convinced that he is the centre of malign and mal-intentioned attention. People are conspiring to humiliate him, punish him, abscond with his property, delude him, impoverish him, confine him physically or intellectually, censor him, impose on his time, force him to action (or to inaction), frighten him, coerce him, surround and besiege him, change his mind, part with his values, victimize or even murder him, and so on.
The Paranoid Aggressive (Explosive) Solution
Other narcissists who develop persecutory delusions, resort to an aggressive stance, a more violent resolution of their internal conflict. They become verbally, psychologically, situationally (and, very rarely, physically) abusive. They insult, castigate, chastise, berate, demean, and deride their nearest and dearest (often well wishers and loved ones). They explode in unprovoked displays of indignation, righteousness, condemnation, and blame. Theirs is an exegetic Bedlam. They interpret everything - even the most innocuous, inadvertent, and innocent comment - as designed to provoke and humiliate them. They sow fear, revulsion, hate, and malignant envy. They flail against the windmills of reality - a pathetic, forlorn, sight. But often they cause real and lasting damage - fortunately, mainly to themselves. |
She made women in tech a threat to men.
Yes, precisely. There is so much pent up anti-white-straight-male hate, and it's directed at the easiest targets -- socially reserved technical people, who build all the great things society uses.
Nerds don't run the patriarchy; in fact, they are exploited by it. Socially adept "alpha males" are the CEOs and other executives, by and large, who assign themselves much greater power and wealth than the people who actually do the work at the companies the Alphas set themselves up on top of. They are experts at social engineering in primate social hierarchies.
There is far more sexism in any number of other professions, but it's interpreted completely differently when dominant males are perpetrating it.
The real problem is that nerdy males take too much shit from everyone, and try to accommodate people making unfair demands, and this makes those people hold them in contempt and treat them even worse.
Effectively, self-proclaimed feminists have found a lightning rod at which to misdirect their rage: nerdy white males who will take it, and keep granting more and more leverage to these professional victims who are simply cynically exploiting any angle to aggrandize themselves in their mission to climb a staircase of bowed nerdlings to the top of the nerdheap. Having conquered Mount Pasty White, they will suck up all the resources produced by those under them, while engaging in dalliances with precisely the kind of Dominant Straight White Patriarchy Male that they claimed to oppose. Human nature 101. |
Surface did indeed sell badly but it was never designed to sell. It was designed to show OEMs what they could achieve if they tried.
Windows Phone has been an utter failure to be fair although it's starting to get a little bit of traction now.
Windows 8 sold terribly. Just like every windows ever. I'm tried of people bringing up windows 8 sales as a metric. Windows never sells. People always always always buy computers and THATS how they get their next windows version. Windows 8 has been doing fine, meaning it hasn't taken the market by storm but new PC sales are the same as ever.
Having said that they should still be careful with the next xbox. There's been a lot of off putting rumours being knocked around, hopefully they will prove them wrong when they finally announce it. Xbox is probably the only MSFT product that, traditionally at least, people have used because they enjoyed using it and weren't using it just because they have to. |
Do you really want me to jump ship Microsoft? Do you? Because that's where this is heading. I bought an Xbox on day one, I bought a Xbox 360 on day one. I bought a second Xbox 360 once my launch console died. I have reasonably large library of 60+ games, and had XBL for years and years.
"Online only" coupled with no-backwards compatibility is the last straw. It really is. I have a family, and hardly any time to game anymore, and when I do it's usually single player. I haven't played CoD since MW2, and Halo since the original Xbox. All I want to do is sit down and play a game, regardless of whether the console is online or not. I just don't have the time or the compulsion to go on XBL anymore. Why would I? I don't want to play multiplayer games with ass-hat 12 year olds. Why would I pay $60 a year for that?
You're also going to destroy the one thing you had going for you, the price advantage. Without it, I have no reason to buy your console over the PS4. I don't play Halo, and you've got no other exclusives. At least with a PS3/4 I can play Uncharted.
Also, if the new Xbox isn't backwards compatible, my entire game library is now obsolete. I still have an Atari. I still have my NES/SNES/Genesis, etc. I can still play those games whenever I want. You inability to make a console that can last more than 5 years means I can't expect my current 360 to last very long, and you've taken away any legacy support going forward.
So, I have zero motivation to buy your new console Microsoft. Zero. In fact, I have just the opposite. I have a fairly strong desire to go to my mortal enemy, GameSuck, and trade in my whole collection. Or sell it on ebay, or at a garage sale.
You've made me not only disinterested in your new console, you've made me bitter about your last one. |
Keep in mind these are all still rumors at this point. Someone saying a rumor, and then someone else saying that rumor again doesn't confirm it. I'm hoping that with all of the issues with Orthy these past couple of weeks MS is shifting away from an always-online model if it was even like that to begin with.
Also a subscription model is easier for some people. Rather than shelling out tons of cash all at once, you spend money over time to pay it off. Like a car, but a lot less money.
My girlfriend bought her 360 with their subscription plan and she got a 250 gb 360 with two free games for $99, and has to pay $15 a month for two years of xbox live. I know that eventually ends up being about the same price as a brand new 360, but it is a lot easier to pay for, and the $15 doesn't go up or down month to month. |
No one else remembers the brief period of time that Microsoft was giving people 200+ of free money at best buy if you locked into a 2 year dialup plan? Until it all backfired because of a california legal loophole and everyone got $200 for free? |
I am a former XBOX fan boy. But after the latest rumors and that dipshit microsoft marketers comments I think I will pass on the next generation of consoles and either invest in a high performance PC or gardening, maybe go to nursing school, start rock climbing or mnt. biking. |
Games aren't all about graphics I know this, but we've reached a point where game creators can get incredibly close to their visions and it's difficult for them to sacrifice that just to be on every platform.
Ehh, they've been doing that for the last few years, really. PC hardware has been more stagnate over this last console generation because developers have continued making cross-platform games that don't require much horsepower at 1920x1080. The biggest thing pushing PC hardware have been a few keynote titles and multi-monitor setups that current-gen consoles would never hope to accomplish, but would never need to in a living room anyway.
But yes, with the Wii even further behind MS and Sony offerings, it certainly isn't worth dropping back that far or trying to redesign interfaces to include the Wiimote. |
A decent gaming rig that can and will undo the PS4 and Next Xbox costs about 800$. Considering the cost of games and all the sales you actually spend less money over time. It's an investment. I now have over 150 games, games I was willing to pay full price for before I had built my rig. Now that I'm on PC, I have not bought a games that wasn't on sale. I've saved myself an incredible amount of money. Go check out /r/GameDeals and you'll see what I mean. So yes you may only pay 300 - 600$ on your console but you pay full price for games (60$) While a gaming rig that can run pretty much everything on high or better can be built for 800$ and the games on average are 10 to 20$ cheaper. Here's a recent example:
Bioshock Infinite Pre Orders on Consoles: 60$ on consoles and some dlc when pre ordered
Bioshock Infinite Pre orders on PC: 60$ + a free copy of Bioshock 1 + a free copy of XCOM + A free game of your choice from a pre determined list + 15 dollars cash back.
Essentially I paid 45 dollars and got 4 games while before I built my rig I would have happily paid 60$ for it. So it technically is more money to build a rig but the cost for games is much lower and a PC can be used for much more than gaming. Mine is used for pretty much everything. |
Build one. I just did. For $600, I have an 8 core processor, 8 GB RAM, decent graphics card (HD 7770 2GB)....all in all a computer that has yet to run a game on ultra, including Planetside 2. |
I have a friend who bought a late 2009 27 in iMac with all the trimmings. With that he started playing WoW and Portal, etc. And realized that consoles are not the end all be all.
Well, the time came that he wanted to play some Windows only games and he was screwed. He asked me to build a machine for him in early 2011 and nearly died when he found out that his iMac was about 1.8x as expensive as a very competent gaming rig.
He now uses it to play everything and keeps his iMac as his browsing/word processor. |
Why not look forward to valves pc console.
It will more than likely be way more reasonably priced than any new console coming out.
You would be able to play games on your tv, with any controller you want to use.
You can even use emulators to play some older games. It is very easy to do and free.
There are a plethora of free to play games that are just awesome, check out hawken and black light if you are into FPS.
Steam has sales all the time and generally I get the bigger titles from 30-60% off the big 60 or 50 dollar price tags.
I have yet to pay full price for any game I buy, even cheaper than the used prices I see for consoles.
You can also use it as a Media device. I mean it is still a comp.
Get a cheap 20 dollar wireless keyboard and mouse and you can easily watch netflix, Hulu, YouTube and hopefully if HBO is awesome. You could even get HBO GO with out cable subscription. |
Agreed. A good new laptop costs around $600, so why do phones cost the same amount? The answer is they don't, they're significantly cheaper to manufacture, however since people want the item they're willing to pay the premium. It's somewhat of a monopoly if you think about it.
Microsoft doing this with their new Xbox is possibly the shittiest thing they could have done. You know they're not going to release it at cost for any reason. Even at $300, they're making a healthy profit.
What really gets me is all the troubles people had with the original Xbox 360. If you buy a device, bar you doing something stupid, it should last. Apparently Xbox is the only thing you expect to buy two to three of in it's lifetime. I was hoping, considering that I've personally purchased two of the damn things (then had to repair one), that this would be a bit cheaper. |
I'm currently trying to switch over to PC. The problem with PC vs Console is that PC is on average 2-3x more expensive (right now at least) to get into than a console. I can buy a used 360 for $50-100 and flash the drive to play burned games. Total investment? $100-200 (factoring cost of 50 discs for burning and a drive.) A decent PC that can keep up with current and some future titles at 60fps is $800+ plus the cost of games (not much). Most people would rather pay $300 than $800+. Just my two cents. |
So, aside from times when your house burns to the ground, how often would you say that you're connected to the internet when you're playing a game?
I mean, I can't remember the last time I WASN'T connected to the internet. Usually when my internet is out my power is out as well, therefore no video games for me.
I hate to break it to you people but "Always Online" is where everything is headed. Hell, everything is already there. Almost every other product I use, from my computer to my cell phone, uses a program or app that is always online. I'm sorry, but that's just the way things are going to be. Of course, "Always Online" isn't the demon that EVERYBODY is in an uproar about.
Here's the thing, though: These are not PC's. Both the XBox and the PS4 have their own networks that the games work through. The "Always Online" feature is, more or less, going to be used for product registration. You log on to XBox live, pop in your new game, and it registers the game to your account. Whether or not you can play single player portion of the game when offline, well, I remain optimistic.
I'd be willing to bet that, one way or another, the PS4 will run on the "Always Online" model as well, whether it runs through the OS or the games themselves. The advantage that consoles have over PC is that services like this can be managed through either the PS Network or XBL. This means that we probably wouldn't experience ridiculous screw ups similar to those that plagued SimCity and Diablo 3.
What it comes down to is this: Always Online is the future. EVERYTHING is moving that way, and our consoles are no different. There's no need to get into an uproar and start with the "I'm not buying this crap" comments because, let's face it, you're going to buy it anyways. No? You're going to buy a PS4? Yeah, sorry to say, the PS4 will more than likely have Always Online as well. |
Starting from childhood I have owned turbo graphics 16, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, several gameboys, game gear, i think sega at some point, playstation 1 and 2, first xbox right when it came out, and several xbox 360's. That being said I still have an xbox 360 at my moms house and only use it when I go down to ptown to visit.
She does not have the internet and will not have it. I have pc at my place so I don't need a console unless I go to my moms and to avoid caring my pc everywhere.
With the new xbox being "always on" and being reasonably close in price to a beasty computer I will not be getting it. No reason to have it at my moms house when she wont have internet. Not being able to play without internet is just fucking stupid. Ya I'm one person but what about our soldiers deployed that might not have access or people in secluded places with shitty internet. I think this is gonna hurt MS alot in the long run. |
The problem with google's various services, from a user's perspective, is that they have too many balls in the air at any given time. That's a problem because if they don't completely corner a market for whatever given demand, they'll just phase out that service, nevermind that hundreds of thousands of people have grown, to whatever degree, dependent on that service. They're phasing out google reader, for instance (!!!) They're big enough that they can afford to use the shotgun approach: throw a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks.
To their credit, they do a good job of making those shifts as seamless as possible by then finding another company that can fill the void they left when phasing out services (in the case of google reader, Feedly is set up to fill the void, for example), and I'm certain they make a tidy sum every time that happens (I can't imagine otherwise). I'm sure that's all part of the strategy, they're no idiots. |
But MU's own ToS did not provide any safeguard on the data. Using MU as a back-up service was retarded for the very reason that if both systems went down at the same time then he was fucked, and the back-up service he used provided zero safeguards. RAID AND SAN STORAGE SHOULD NOT BE RELIED ON AS YOUR SOLE METHOD OF MAINTAINING DATA INTEGRITY! So what if it had been a hurricane, or water leakage or a fire or any of the other many reasons that those servers could have been destroyed.
And good luck suing the government as a third-party beneficiary when they were acting in arresting a major criminal conspiracy. You'll never prove the government wasn't warranted in their actions unless Kim comes to the U.S. to face trial. Good luck on that happening.
And why the fuck should LeaseWeb continue to keep the servers when they are losing money if fatboy isn't paying up? I see absolutely ZERO reason why Leaseweb should be held to blame if they want to free up the servers so they can start making money off of them again. They were under no obligation if Fatboy wasn't paying them.
So please please stop trying to find other people to blame for this. Lack of back-ups by DotCom, his own criminal organization, and being stupid enough not to read the terms of service that MU itself stated it was not liable for any loss of data ---that is who is to blame if anyone lost data. |
Archives were indeed driven by librarians and scholars, but that actually leaves us with a large gap in terms of culture. Determining what a significant piece of art is easy to do now, but the the time, that was very difficult. It's even more significant when it comes to classic culture, as in behaviour. We have little to no understanding of how the average roman handled romance and such. This was not deemed significant by the contemporaries, so all we really have from dedicated sources is some satirical books. The most interesting part of Pompeii, a roman city covered in volcanic ash, might very well be the graffiti on the walls, because it gives a unique insight into their culture and life in a way that no book ever could. |
Honestly though, it's improved so drastically since I cut teeth on Debian in '93 I barely notice the snobbery anymore.
Sifting through megs and megs of USENET posts on a 28.8kbps dialup connection (oops, catch-22, you need help with isapnp and no one hears your screams!), hours sifting through worthless AltaVista results, finding IRC channels like oases in info-deserts only to find out the people who won't call you names and actually know the answer to your questions are in Sweden and they won't be on till 5am local time.... I don't wonder about the origins of my adolescent fury.
When I found linuxquestions.org it was like taking a first breath of fresh air after being held prisoner in solitary for over half a decade. |
Imagine being a small company and wanting to pass a bill but not being able to have a voice because some small other company with totally different needs asked for help first. Its not bad to wait your turn righy? Now imagine having a breakthrough drug and not being able to get your voice heard because your waiting for these two smaller companies to get their attention. So if they pay to get their voice heard. We can all admit wed be less hostile towards lobbying. Now imagine not being able to control who pays what to get their voice heard? Thats where we are. |
There's actually a wiki about it:
>It will not be considered a deceptive practice for a marketer to make an unqualified U.S. origin claim if, at the time it makes the claim, the marketer possesses and relies upon competent and reliable evidence that: (1) U.S. manufacturing costs constitute 75% of the total manufacturing costs for the product; and (2) the product was last substantially transformed in the United States.[2] (FTC Proposal) |
Since people seem to be having some misconceptions about what "hackers" do at MHacks, I thought I'd clear the confusion.
We here at Michigan Hackers use the original definition of "hacker," which is just someone who creates applications/programs using a computer that are useful and/or technically challenging. Most people create some really interesting things (like a iphone app that acts as an effects pedal for a guitar, or morse code based texting for blind people, etc.), while a minority do go and try and break things (a group at PennApps last weekend showcased a zero-day vulnerability to get free Google Books). |
They have only announced the availability of 2.5GB on the pre-paid plans at 60/70$ price-points. Tmobile is notorious for allowing something while still setting a contractual limit on paper so that if they decide to start capping the tether, no one can have an issue with it. |
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.]( |
Tax revenue is a huge messy thing to work out in general. One of our biggest problems is that any tinkering with the tax code is a major headache, so it seems most politicians would just rather avoid it altogether.
For example, we need to eventually rework the entire way we fund roads. That system was built on fuel taxes when every vehicle went to the pump. The idea was that you get taxed based on your usage of roads (and the wear and tear you put on them) based on the gallons of gas you buy. Well, actually we've never scaled that to keep up with more efficient vehicles because voters are very sensitive to the price of gas. That's one reason why the roads trust fund doesn't have the money to pass the next federal highway bill. On top of that, we now have vehicles that don't stop at the pump at all but who certainly use the roads and put wear and tear on them. So eventually we're probably going to have to switch to some sort of tax you pay when renewing registration that looks at your odometer. But that will be super fucking messy to work out. |
Really dont understand why youre being downvoted with this- it is a fundamental point.
Much as I would love renewables to play a bigger part in energy generation, the fact seems to be that actually manufacturing the kit needed to produce renewable energy requires a considerable amount of fossil fuel. This leads to the problem that, as fossil fuels become increasingly scarce, we lose our ability to roll out renewable energy. |
I know every time I see something with a Green message of any description on a product I am instantly suspicious and wonder how its trying to fuck me over...because I just fucking love having to keep a plunger in the bathroom these days, or to buy really expensive light bulbs with a worse warmth of light or wipe my ass with scratchy post-recycled paper (that took more oil and pollution than simply planting and harvesting fresh pulp).
Or perhaps the a green workgroup switch that will randomly disable ports to save energy (but cost tons of money in IT costs), or green power strips that work the same way...randomly disabling outlets to "save power"
All I have learned is green products, in general, are crappier than their non-green counterparts.
Its not "being green" that makes me distrustful of the products...its the fact they tend to be made shitty on purpose for that express purpose. Remember, they had to lobby the government to make it illegal to sell incandescent bulbs because consumers wouldn't buy them unless there was no other choice, same with with low flow toilets, or anything with an Energy Star rating. All products nobody would buy, so the government demanded people do so at the request of the companies selling the stuff.
So |
I was using the percentage reference as a guide to:
It's easy enough, however, to gather from that graphic that the majority of wind potential resides from North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Strictly on a land area basis.
You'll notice certain parts of other states have heavy wind potential on their east/west sides, but North Dakota indisputably has the most.
I remember reading not too long ago, that theoretically speaking, North Dakota could power the entire Midwest of the US and a vast area of Canada as well. If I find that article I'll throw it in. |
YOU FUCKING SUCK YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT.
THANKS FOR KILLING REDDIT, NOW I HAVE TO FIND SOMEWHERE ELSE TO GO FOR WHIMSICAL CAT PICTURES. |
The thing is, though... Why would the mods step down? What do they have to gain personally? Nothing. What to lose? A mod spot on a very high profile sub and with it, a lot of power and income opportunities.
So let's say they just wait it out. Even if all of the users that are mad now end up leaving the sub (which is optimistic), there will be plenty of users left. The biggest thing they had to lose, they already lost; being a default sub. This means it will become harder to grow but unless /r/tech becomes a default, it won't be that bad. |
Monsanto does some shifty things. Some farming practices do have dangers. And GMO can be misused. For example, most would consider GMO rabies a bad thing. And as the article points out a lot of genetic engineering is solving industrial farm problems, not environmental problems.
However GMO plants are basically the best possible tool we have for improving our farming practices. It can provide vastly better solutions than anything else we have had in the past. It lets us lower our dependence on the pesticides, fertilizer, or massive water use that cause so much damage.
Oh and the mention of conventional breeding.
>When I mentioned that Monsanto, in addition to making genetically engineered seeds, has also become one of the world’s largest producers of conventionally bred seeds
Conventional breeding will alter a lot more than just inserting one gene. Worse it can create new genes wholesale. And it can have all sorts of [unintended consequences]( Its basically GMO except with less benefit and more risk.
Oh and the patents? They expire. Then everyone can use the genes for free. |
Sorry for the rage and the venting, but here i go.
I have Verizon, so I can't speak for AT&T, but I was grandfathered into Verizon from a company they bought called Alltel. I had unlimited data for a long time, but I eventually had to get a new phone, and to do so, I had to update my service. That meant loosing my unlimited data. I was told I ran around 5 gigs a month on average, so I chose a 6 gig plan to make sure I wouldn't go over. No lie, a week after I changed my plan, I was getting texts from Verizon saying 50%,75%, and, 100% of my data package was used. Within a week? I think not dick face. I go back to the store and they say I have used well into my second data overage. I had not used my phone any differently than before. Yes it was a new phone, and being shiny and all I liked being on it, but there is no way in hell I went over my data that quick. Fast forward a few months, and Verizon is now saying I'm using an average of 9 gigs a month. This process continues until I'm paying for 14 gigs a month PLUS overage charges. Pretty much like rape with no lube at this point. How did I go from 5 to over 14 gigs a month without changing anything I do? I had a smart phone before, so it's not like I suddenly had access to internet I had never seen before and went crazy. These companies get away with overcharging people all the time. We just accept it as truth. "Well, I must have used that much data when I got on Facebook to check my messages!" Don't fool yourself. These companies will screw you every chance you have. |
They will send you infinite modems, seriously. My parents must have had 50 by the time I intervened. I got on the phone and yelled at people all the way up the chain until they agreed to send a line tech (or similar?) out. They let it slip that he had to be there to do some things so they could run some tests on their end and I asked them what exactly he'd do and told them I'd do it right then. They let me, can't remember what it was exactly but it was all stupid stuff you could do without much difficulty and the internet got fixed. |
This is what pisses me off most about all the wireless carriers (but aiming this at Verizon specifically). I pay Verizon $120/month for 30GB of their 4G data via a home setup . That's right, a router/modem and antenna on the roof. You would think a service exclusively for home use only would offer more data than 30GB, especially when I get 30Mbps speeds which could theoretically blow through that limit in less than half a day (few hours if it was a steady 30).
Sad thing is, they are the best and only real choice available unless I move. No, I'm not moving just for internet, that's the stupidest reason to move if there ever was one. Service works great, I just need to be able to use it like a real internet connection. |
Ignoring all appliances other than the refrigerator let's look at their claim. From the original article, let's assume that the average power consumption for a cable box while on is 25 Watts and 20 Watts while in sleep mode. If we assume 8 hours of use each day that puts the total daily average power consumption at ~22 Watts rounding up. So we have 22 Watts 24 hours 365 days = 192.192 kWH for our example cable box. In 1990 the average refrigerator size was 20 cubic feet and it has been increasing since. [This]( is a 6 year old refrigerator with 25 cubic feet of space and is probably a pretty good representation of the average American refrigerator in use today. This refrigerator uses 713 kWH per year compared to under 200 kWH for the cable box, the cited study was done by some environmentalist group and evidently their biases affected the study. [Here's]( a brand new mini fridge for a dorm room, it still uses more power than the cable box for just a 4 cubic foot fridge.
To get their results just for the figure of total amount of cable boxes with their claim of 80% of households having cable, the average amount of set top boxes per household would need to be 3.4 boxes. This is also completely ignoring every other energy hungry appliance such as a hot water heater, [here's]( the energy guide for a regular electric hot water heater. Every other appliance I listed is also going to be a huge energy hog, much more than a cable box. |
What's the upload? What's the price, and how does it compare to Google with their $70 1000/1000Mbps synchronous internet or municipal networks that charge even less? |
They're garbage, even for the size. Equivalently sized SD encodes (eg DVD) will look and sound better due to higher audio and video bitrate. Bitrate starving is worse than upscaling resolution, especially if you use better upscaling algorithms such as lanczos (easily enabled in mpv, which is currently the best video player you can get). Not to mention YIFY, for some reason, probably to reduce the visibility of color banding and compression artifacts, suck all the color out of their movies. |
OOOOooooo someone in the field. I have a question for you.
Assume we manage to get speeds of data transfer up this high in one single jump from some kind of new tech discovery. Let's say today we are all sitting at 10Gbps network speeds (I do 10g networks all the time for schools and datacenters), and then suddenly this new tech comes out that allows for 1Tbps over the same existing tech (say new fiber flux capacitor). I know datacenters operate at 10Gbps speeds already with some expensive servers, but how long would it take to get hard drives that can handle data transfers that can happen at 1Tbps? Just the hard drives. The servers would magically work at those speeds, and the hard drives are the only thing that need to be upgraded.
Just how long would something like that take to develop? |
copy pasting my other comment:
They're garbage, even for the size. Equivalently sized SD encodes (eg DVD) will look and sound better due to higher audio and video bitrate. Bitrate starving is worse than upscaling resolution, especially if you use better upscaling algorithms such as lanczos (easily enabled in mpv, which is currently the best video player you can get). Not to mention YIFY, for some reason, probably to reduce the visibility of color banding, blocking and compression artifacts, suck all the color out of their movies. |
this is NOT accurate. Thailand here and that must include business connections. even here IN Bangkok, you can't always get a 10Mbps down - and you're left with 512k up. 19Mpbs down is NOT the average consumer speed. the highest connection available at my condo in central Bangkok one of the 3 busiest roads is 10Mbps down. my friend, who is closer to the city center than me, can only get 5Mbps down. however, at my new condo where i am moving to in a few weeks, i am told it is a 30Mbps down connection - although it's shared in the building - and that's a business connection. so... we'll see. |
Probably never. Things dont jump by am order of magnitude. For example, the PHY on a drive (the transfer rate youre talking about) on a server (enterprise) drive is 12Gbps. This is how fast you can spit data at it and it'll interpret said data. I dont work a ton with this so I might be a bit wrong but whatever.
Anywho, you're limited by the rotation rate (5400, 7200, 10k, 15k are normal speeds) disk size and areal density. What this means, is that your performance is limited by how big the angular velocity is of the rotating media underneath the heads. This means the outer disk has a faster data rate than the inner by simple physics.
Back to your 1Tbps drive, signals start to break down at such high speeds. We don't have 24 Gbps drives (they're being worked on I think) because end customers dont want it as it would cost a shit load and consume a bunch of power as higher speed means more power. Not to say you or I, but large customers like Google, and stuff. |
Overall you've got the idea of latency right. You're just not knowing some finer points.
Guy, I need to ask you to drop the condescending tone.
That 56k unit you mentioned is a unit of bandwidth. It's the volume of data that can be fit through the 'pipe'. Specifically, 56,000 bits of data per second can fit.
Once that packet is through the modem it's delivery speed is based on a combination of propagation speeds over the physical medium and queuing/retransmission delays from the various gateways. Your number of 186,000 miles/second is the speed of light in a vacuum . Fiber and copper are not vacuums, each induces a different signal propagation delay. Light moves through fiber runs about 2/3 as fast as vacuum, with huge variation with the various flavors of copper. Then there are delays imposed by every single gateway along the packet route.
The reason your 56k dialup modem suffered from latency problems was literally because the copper wiring used to carry dialup internet is crap. The infrastructure was built over a period of 150 years to carry analog voice calls. Shitty, impure copper was used to build those lines. That literally slows down the propagation of signal through the medium.
Finally, at the risk of being a pedantic prick, Latency is a term for a tool used to measure round trip latency. |
give us 2 weeks, we'll forget over something major that actually counts. It's not a bad plan. And the edits stay. |
No, what I mean is that the computers used in the back office and the computers used in clinical areas aren't the same.
In a lot of clinical areas you have computers which run equipment and if the manufacturer doesn't support an upgraded OS on that device, which is often the case, you're kind of stuck. In offices they ought to be using at least 7. |
I assume a VM won't be able to access physical media at the block level if the host OS doesn't support it--am I wrong?
I'm not in a position to dedicate a machine entirely to Linux. I only have this one laptop in working condition--unless you know of a source of free 60Gb 2.5" HDs using. ..whatever the bus was that we used before SATA... I forget...)--then I could resurrect my previous laptop. I don't want to permanently remove Windows (I never discard anything unless I'm certain I can get it back without spending significant money). I'd be more-or-less okay with making it dual-boot, but I don't think I can, because it has lost the ability it once had, to boot from devices (CD, thumbdrive, other external USB device) other than its internal HD--and, as far as I know, the only way to install a new OS of any kind is to boot some sort of media-other-than-the-hard-drive -- such as a Windows installation CD. (If not for this problem, I would have reinstalled XP itself, long ago.) I can't even boot a tool to create dual partitions in the first place, unless there's something that runs under Windows. Please advise!
(I'm told this loss of external-boot ability "sounds like a BIOS problem," and have downloaded the available BIOS updates--but they all require booting from external media. Catch-22! I can't load the fix until after it's fixed.) (But...! It occurs to me that the real crux of the matter is that the OS (e.g. Windows) can't be running during a BIOS update -- but the HD, per se, might not matter. I've seen software (e.g. Norton Ghost 2003) that temporarily hijacks HD boot to reboot into itself without OS interference, then back to the OS afterward -- so there ought to be a way to set up something like this to boot a BIOS update from HD. Anybody know how?)
In any case, dd isn't the only affected software. I'm super-old-school and am fascinated by keeping old OSes going, either on old hardware or in emulation (and for free --I don't have actual money to spare on such impractical shenanigans). And one thing I've never had at all, and have had a hankering to tinker with, is a DOS PC. There used to be--and hopefully still is--a website that had/has downloads of e.g. MS-DOS 6.22 boot (or installation) floppies. But consider the question of downloading an entire floppy: the only way to do it, and be sure you've got all the bootblocks etc., is for the originating party to block-image the original disc -- exactly as you would make an ISO (image) file from a CD -- and put that 'image' up for download; it's then up to the recipient to deal with turning that image back into a floppy. Both ends of this process require the ability to first read, then later write, a physical floppy's individual storage blocks.
You could do both ends of this under Linux, to be sure. Except... the downloads on that particular website aren't the images themselves. Presumably in an effort to make things trivially easy for the recipient, each download is a little Windows (maybe DOS) program (.exe) which, when run, extracts the desired floppy-image data from within itself and writes it to the individual blocks of the physical floppy. That program won't run on Linux, and on any version of Windows later than XP the block-writing operation is prohibited and the program fails. And that , dear sirs, is my beef with Windows post-XP: they've disabled an operation that is crucial to my pursuit of happiness. ;-)
A VM isn't entirely out of the question--I like Oracle VMware--but floppy support wasn't enabled right-out-of-the-box last time I looked. You could get it going, so I read, but had to fool around in Windows PowerShell if I recall--and I haven't had time to look into it yet. And in any case, I'm pretty sure that, at some point, I'm going to want to make actual physical floppies for installation on actual resurrected hardware.
So let this be an example to you, if you ever find yourself responsible for deciding what features/functions "are okay to remove" from a popular product. No matter what features you think people do or don't use, someone out there is counting on something you think is trivial and expendable. At the very least, provide-and-document an alternative. |
I'm old and I'm not happy. Everything today is improved and I don't like it. I hate it! In my day we used Al Gore's Internet. If you wanted to surf the web you dialed up your Internet provider at 2400 bps and launched Mosaic. Your porno wouldn't arrive quickly, but you could fap and fap while an interlaced GIF slowly revealed Cindy Margolis' side boob in 8-bit color. And that's the way it was and you liked it! You loved it. Whoopee, I've been fapping for 4 hours and still haven't seen a nipple.
We didn't have this YouPorn and r/nsfw. In my day if you couldn't uudecode your porno from Usenet you were a freak. There was nothing you could do about it. Children would spit at you and Mr. T would eat your balls so you couldn't pass on your disgusting non-uudecoding genes. You were a public menace, a Usenet outcast by age 20 and that's the way it was and we liked it! We loved it. Hallelujiah look at me, I'm a Usenet outcast and Mr. T Ate My Balls, oh happy day! Not like today, everybody downloading their snuff films in HD over broadband and passing along far more clever Internet memes than the ones we had. I hate it!
In my day we didn't have these fancy popup blockers; so you could enjoy giving yourself sexual pleasure. In my day we had to watch as our Windows 95 taskbar filled up with new browser windows because we clicked on the wrong link. It made you want to have a rabbit skin wrapped around your privates and tied off with a bungee cord so you couldn't feel nothing! And half the time you didn't even notice your computer lab partner was there. And you'd just click the same link over and over again! 'Cause we were ignorant morons! Just a bunch of uudecoding, ball-less, Usenet outcasts standing around with rabbit skins on our dinks waiting for our porno to download and that's the way we liked it! |
I realize this is going to be a very unpopular opinion and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be downvoted into oblivion for saying this, but honestly I just don't care. I understand both sides of the issue, but I really just don't care. Either way it goes, I doubt it's going to alter my way of life that much. If I'm condemned for being indifferent, so be it. Maybe I'll care when years from now some evil twisted plot to destroy this or that affects me in some way. But for now, I care about net neutrality about as much as I care about the next vampire-related movie/TV show to come out of Hollywood. |
True, but there is a difference between the two.
Googles' data collection is unobtrusive and unless you have an account for/with one their services they may not necessarily have close personal information such as your actual name or date of birth.
Facebooks' "Facebook Connect" can be rather irritating depending on implementation. Last couple times I visited TV.com they continously prompted me to connect to them with my FBook account. And this is what I don't like Facebook has my email addy, pictures of me, my list of friends, etc et al. That is information I don't want shared outside of the group of friends I allow, and certainly not with some 3rd party advertising company and/or website.
"Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For" -
"Many of Facebook's most popular apps are sharing personally identifiable information of their users with dozens of advertising and internet tracking companies" - |
You should take in to consideration that we (Sweden) have a government that prioritizes broadband (both the current right wing gov and the previous left wing gov). Also we had some really strong competition between a few companies that really pushed the mentality "broadband for all" and where willing to take an economic hit to try and accomplish that. You can today get 100/100 Mbits (and in a few cases 100/1000) fiber/ethernet connections in apartments in most major cities for ~10 - 20 Euros / month.
We just had the correct combination of the "right" businesses with the right visions and a government that thinks hi speed connectivity is important for democracy. Denmark lacked the businesses but had a government with the same policy as the Sweden the end result still ended with slower and more expensive connections. Finland on the other hand had even better businesses and government initiative. I think being able to get broadband is a civil right in Finland. |
There's so much misinformation in these comments and the article. As a person who actually does this job for a living, let me clear some of this up. I'm a junior associate at a huge, international law firm and I've done a handful of 2+ million document doc reviews.
First, we already use computers to sift through the vast majority of documents before a human ever touches it. There is no client in the world who would pay for humans to go through even 1 million documents. The computers use search terms and algorithms based on a host of advanced criteria--such as senders, recipients, date of origin, word groupings, key terms, file types, etc-- to narrow down the review for us. The computers usually do a great job of this, leaving us with about 10-20% of the documents. If you do the math, we're still talking about 100-500k documents for humans to review.
Even then, young associates usually aren't tasked with going through these documents. We bill at over $400 per hour (maybe more, I've lost track), so clients usually force us to let contract attorneys do the first-level review. Contract attorneys are lawyers who demand far lower rates than firm associates and specialize in only reviewing documents. The contract companies usually charge the client between $25-50 per hour for their reviewers, and pay their contract reviewers between $15-20 per hour. The rates they charge may still sound like a lot to a normal person, but they are pretty much just a write off to a company like Walmart or Goldman Sachs.
So after their review, they knock out anywhere between 20-60% of the documents depending on how good of a job the computer did. That still leaves us with 30-40k documents for the firm attorneys even with the most conservative of estimates. Often times firm attorneys are left with 200k+ documents, of which maybe 300-2000 are useful.
As you can probably imagine, it takes an extremely long time to sift through tens of thousands of the filtered documents. Depending on the type of case we're doing, it can be thousands of complicated financial spreadsheets or contract negotiation emails. I'm not saying this process is particularly hard--it's not, anybody off the street could probably do it--but it is extremely time intensive and important and must be done before either side can begin to formulate their legal arguments.
So even if the computer sorting got exponentially better, there will always be a need for high-level, expensive attorneys to sort through the results. Even if the computer knocked out 99% of a 3 million document review, that would still leave 30k documents for humans to go through. But more than that, if your billion dollar case rested on these documents, would you trust a computer's judgment in knocking out 99% of the relevant document universe? Would you be confident that there is absolutely no relevant information in those millions of discarded documents? If I were a client whose entire company depended on winning the case, I certainly would want humans doing the filtering. |
While I strongly advocate privacy rights, I actually appreciate a reasonable amount of tracking. Basically, tracking a demographic enable advertisers to show me ads that are relevant to me, like deals on gadgets as opposed to industrial corn herbicides. Isn't that a good thing? And because of this, content producers can charge more for their impressions, enabling them to create the same content while showing fewer ads.
Look, the internet isn't free. It may seem like it is because it doesn't cost you money, but it costs publishers something to produce and host their content. We've been paying for this for years through our personal information.
That being said, I agree that those of us who would like to be tracked deserve to not be. But it's the consumer's responsibility to monitor this, not advertisers. If any legislation is enacted, I'd like to see advertisers required to provide more information to consumers, but not necessarily restricted in what they can and can't collect. Along these lines, I really like the "more information" icon that I've seen on a few ads that will tell you why you've been shown a targeted ad. |
For cellphone carriers? I'm not sure. I don't know if they pay for bandwith or how data use impacts the performance of thier network.
For a medium-large scale ISP's providing DSL/Cable connections is absolutly nothing more than a money grab.
Simple fact is this: If you have the bandwith capacity for all of your subscribers, then it doesn't matter how much they download or how active they are; it will not cost you anything for them to be downloading/uploading 24/7. (once again, I can only verify that this applies to Cable/DLS providers)
In Canada, data caps are becoming a large issue as Bell and Rogers are caping thier network access on Cable and DSL lines. I think they are doing this because they're losing a large portion of their profits from television broadcasting to netflix. (which apparently in Canada is pretty fail compared to its American counterpart) |
I wouldn't object to a pay-as-you-go data plan in principle, as long as the following conditions are met:
1) Accurate and transparent methods of bandwidth monitoring. In my home market, it's not unusual for ISP data usage figures to be off by a factor of 10.
2) A realistic starter/basic bandwidth tier. Any ISP that advertises a "broadband" connection but sets data usage limits so low that a household exceeds the basic rate with two evenings of Netflix streaming is being deceptive.
3) Charges for additional bandwidth usage that are proportionate to the ISP's actual costs. Some ISPs, cough COMCAST cough , tell me that providing an extra 4 gb/month to a cable connection is more expensive than Fedexing a DVD cross-country. That's either a lie, or an indication of massive technical incompetence. |
I'm just a lowly lawyer who did some work for the EFF as a law student, and who studied IP law almost exclusively in my second year.
You're describing what patent law was supposed to be, not how it is actually used in all cases. You know for example that patent trolls do the exact opposite of using patents to promote innovation. You know that medical patents are preventing research into potentially life-saving cures for cancer and other diseases because people are afraid of getting sued for patent infringement. I hope you know this, at least.
>To even get a patent, the invention has to be novel, nonobvious, and actually useful.
You absolutely know this is bullshit. Yes, that is the standard, but you know that it isn't rigorously applied particularly when it comes to design patents and software patents, like the ones involved in lawsuits among the cell phone manufacturers. Many of these patents are the very definition of obvious or non-novel, and maybe the court will eventually agree with the party who is in the right, but only after millions are wasted and after injunctions stall further advances. If you don't have millions of dollars to stand up to a company claiming you infringed on their nonsense patent? Sucks to be you, maybe you can defend yourself and win, but not before they've bankrupted you.
You should also be aware of [tax patents]( which allowed the motherfucking assholes who helped write the god damn tax code to go back to being tax attorneys an patent methods of reducing taxes in the code that they themselves helped write! Apparently President Obama just this month signed some legislation to stop this bullshit, but this was exactly the kind of thing our current patent system was allowing to happen. |
Samsung might, yes. But some of these things should have no mental attachment to Apple in the first place.
My sister's DSi USB to wall adapter is in the exact same square shape and is gray. So I should post a pic claiming Nintendo copied Apple? I can understand that their tablet has a lot of the same copied features and design, I see that, but some things like USB types and charging cords or wall adapters aren't fair. It's silly.
The Macbook Air has a sleek wedge design with a silver matte color and it is unique, they have every right to eliminate competition, but can we not admit that throwing a fit over a square wall adapter that is almost generic in design is unfair? In all fairness, there's not a whole ton you can do when designing a flat tablet. The UI looks copied, sure, but are companies supposed to make circle, oval, trapezoid, or octogon, tablets, just so people who think basic shapes are copying their beloved Apple don't complain? |
Don't worry about being a dick, you're proving my point. Nobody cares about why I don't like the Oatmeal, just that I don't. so they downvote and move on. If I provided points as to why, most would say "I don't agree with that", downvote, and move on. You didn't want to further discussion by asking why and instead use sarcasm, downvote, and move on. |
Brace yourself for a wall of text.
I have been thinking about this situation a lot lately. [Yesterday, there was a Kickstarter campaign]( started to create an Android based gaming console. I saw this post near the beginning, and when I went to the Kickstarter page to view it, less than $100,000 had been raised. A few hours later, it had exploded across the internet. This morning, it has raised more than double the initial goal in less than 24 hours.
You want to know what scares businesses. The internet. Not with a big I, but the little i. This is because it enables people to do so much more without the middle men, and those areas that require middle men get a far smaller cut. The upside to them though is that while there is a smaller percentage taken off the top, there is a vastly larger audience at play. All of the corporations fighting to get SOPA/ACTA/CETA passed are scared. They're scared because the internet has made them obsolete. Not yet, but they can see it coming and many of them know that their days are numbered unless they can stop this massive force coming at them.
Don't get me wrong, many are fighting because business inherently resists change, but those leading the charge have seen the future, and it is not good for them. The internet is still transforming the way the world interacts with each other, even 15 years after AOL was the hulking behemoth no one could touch. Then came Microsoft. Now Apple, Google, and Facebook are the stars. This all in less than two decades. Fortunes are made and lost within a generation and entire industries are killed off or forced to change drastically in the span of a few years. The internet is one of the biggest advancements that the human race has seen in its entire existence. I would put it up there with fire and gunpowder.
Hear me out. That Kickstarter campaign is a great example. Instead of a manufacturer taking a chance with some idea, sinking millions into it, then millions more to advertise it, and then having to compete against the anit-advertising campaign by its competitors, all without any idea of what type of market there is for the product until it is released, is gone. The barrier for entry into even a capital heavy field of manufacturing is disappearing. Now, the funds to build the initial run are determined by the consumer without the need to spend much other than a prototype (which is likely what helped this campaign even more). Then, the device is manufactured for next to nothing in China and sold to an already built in market.
The Oatmeal's fundraising campaign is another great example. He initially intended to raise $20,000, and was able to raise more than 10 times that amount. Again, this didn't require the use of a middle man (I know that technically there was, but the barrier to entry was far lower). These are the types of things that show that the internet's potential has not even been close to fully realized. Three years ago, these two examples were unheard of. Now, their news spreads over the internet in a matter of minutes and reaches millions of people.
This is why bills like these keep getting brought up, shot down, then brought up again in new ways. What the internet has done is taken away the ability for some corporations to siphon off hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The corporate form is not going to go away any time soon, because what other legal construct allows for people to aggregate wealth on such a staggering level, all while limiting personal liability for those making the decisions and simultaneously granting themselves enormous sums of cash for doing so. However, this may be the start of the long fall of the corporate power while giving this power to the average person. All of this could go away though if people don't fight it, and then we end up in a Corptocracy where corporations have the political power and people have nothing. Think of all those dystopian sci-fi plots like Johnny Mnemonic and Blade Runner. The only way to prevent it is for everyone to keep fighting. |
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