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I was with Verizon for 8 years. I loved Verizon, I laughed at people who bought Iphones and were stuck with At&t.
Finally a couple months ago my plan was up with Verizon. I decided I would go with Android. I almost got the droid but I didn't want a slide out keyboard. After a couple of months of waiting I decided to switch carries and get an Evo from sprint.
I love my Evo. The sprint coverage is adequate, though not as good as Verizon. My plan is a couple of bucks cheaper and I am very happy with my purchase as a whole. |
First, I have to preface this with the fact that Gawker owns Engadget, so the same people are ultimately in charge of both, further, their leadership has shown to be influential and all Gawker owned sites seem to behave the same. As such, I treat them as a single entity and use Gawker/Engadget interchangeably, and do not bother discerning between the two where their motives/ethics/goals are concerned. (The contrast to this is reddit which seems to do its own thing with little or no oversight from Conde Nast).
In a sentence:
They're just smart enough to be dangerous, and have no integrity whatsoever, and have consistently, through their own voluntary actions demonstrated that profits via page views trump all other values.
To elaborate slightly:
Abject failure in software security (lost email account/password hashes)
Fucking one person over for profit (the iPhone 4 leak)
Often simply linkjack/blogwrap things
Add little to no value to the articles they linkijack/blogwrap
Their reviews and coverage of...well all of the things they cover....consistently shows a lack of sufficient depth resulting in misinforming people either innocently or with some ulterior motive, in subtle or insidious ways. As a result, how do I know that an article I read on a device I know nothing about isn't just as misleading as one where I can point out examples of misleading information? I can't, so I can't trust them at all, at least not as a solitary source of information on......anything at all.
Sensational stories for the sake of page views: iPhone 4 antenna issues - admittedly legitimate to some degree, but covered like it was the death knell for Apple. iPhone 4 cracked screen coverage (which itself was basically a glorified PR stunt from a company that sells replacement parts). iPhone 4 uncured adhesive non-story coverage (turns out basically everybody's yellow spots went away on their own, but Engadget/gawker covered the story like it was as serious as the antenna issues. Again, all for page views. Fuck reality, facts, and coverage commensurate with the problem, let's get some more page views!
If I were to imagine a news/gadget site created solely by a bunch of hipster mac-fanatic, hacker wannabes who know just enough to fool the unwashed masses that they're experts, but yet want page views (and the associated advertisement revenue) like they're a world authority, and give not a fuck about journalistic integrity, other human beings, or basic regular old integrity, that site would be exactly Engadget/Gawker. |
I'm kind of torn about this. I don't really visit Gizmodo much anymore since the whole stolen iphone thing, and the rest of the gawker sites are on thin ice with me because of the recent password leak fiasco, but I have yet to find a suitable substitute for io9 and lifehacker. I enjoy the commentary and often glean useful information from the comments on either site. There's also something to be said for the consistency of the user interface between gawker sites. I know there's a lot of hate for the gawker sites around here, but they still provide useful content occasionally enough to warrant a regular visit. |
I understand all that frustration. (It doesn't take that long from all libraries; some are faster at ILL than others; also, it shouldn't be more than one webpage to check to see if your library subscribes or not. If it is, they need a better website!)
However, I was really directing my comment to Ricktron3030 who says he's a high school teacher who can't get articles to use in his class. There's still Fair Use issues, but not being able to get the article at all makes it sound like he doesn't know how to use his school library. (Or, please no, that he's at one of those high schools that have decided they don't need actual librarians working there!) |
I do tech support, and I see countless people that don't have any clue how to use their computers. A lot of the "problems" they have are nothing actually going wrong, but the fact that they don't know how to accomplish a ridiculously simple task like connecting to wireless, typing in the address bar, finding the start menu ect... So many times I have to help someone setup their email and it takes them fucking 5 minutes to find windows live mail, even after you give them the most specific instruction possible.
On the flip side, I think incorporating mobile elements in a desktop os may just end up confusing people more. I was watching a windows 8 demo and they were showing how you can gesture to change windows, go to the aero desktop ect... and It seemed to me that this would confuse these computer illiterate types even more.
Imagine your average Joe is using windows 8, he is in the start screen UI and opens an app that does not have an immersive UI, and it suddenly switches to the totally different aero desktop. That would cause the types of people I deal with to have a fuckin heart attack lol. |
Ugh... So as somebody who got into college and the hell out of US high schools pretty recently, let me just say that all students need laptops, and none of them need any other technology. Give them laptops, and turn off wi-fi during assessments/lectures. Now that i'm in college, i save an incredible amount of time by letting my PC solve complex equations and typing instead of slow old hand writing.
So yeah, give them all laptops, typing is great and so is having a nice calculator for every student. Then we have what schools are doing, 3d projectors? touch projectors? (smart boards) not useful! They'll distract kids from learning for a week and then kids won't give a shit about them.
Use technology to keep a classic education organized and speed it up, don't toss that old fashioned stuff out the window and have them finger-paint on $1200 projectors all period. |
Bonus Upvote for including |
As much as I dislike the whole Snookie thing it really is stupid to say "Oh, a child died somewhere.. Snookie should've died instead."
Fucking stupid. Your logic doesn't work, that's not how the WORLD works, and if it did I hope you make a typographical error or have a brain fart in a conversation, be cosmically set under the 50% mark of whatever smartness scale you're using, and are smited in place of a stillborn happening. |
While you're absolutely right about Kurzweil, particularly his time line, the brain will fall to the march of understanding at some point in the future (baring the extinction of our species). That aside, there are still important differences between the questions being asked now and the questions that were asked by the Luddites who first raised these issues.
The first is that during the industrial revolution the markets were expanding even faster than the outputs of the new technology, so while each (I'm going to arbitrarily say 'blanket') was produced with fewer total hours of labor, there were dramatically more people who we could sell blankets to. Now though, our distribution chains are much better established and the room to expand isn't as great as it once was (mainly horribly poor/war torn areas and a few, extremely remote areas with small populations are the only places one can not acquire manufactured goods with relative ease). It's not inconceivable that our efficiency increases will dramatically out stripe our expansion into new markets- meaning our labor pool will eventually contract purely because of efficiency gains.
The second, and the one I think is more fun, is that the Luddites were right about one kind of worker- the horse. Prior to industrial revolution, there were almost as many beasts of burden working in the English economy as there were people, pulling carriages through the streets or barges up the Thames, turning the mill stone, plowing the fields, etc. Now the number is negligible. With AI, even weak AI that isn't as robust as a human mind, we're still talking about replacing the output of the labor, not every aspect of the laborer. We still can't engineer something that's a better horse than a horse, but we routinely build engines with the power output of hundreds of horses.
So too, with AI, we won't need to build something as robust as the human brain if we can build things that can perform the job those brains performed. For instance, we could essentially already automate away the job of pharmacists, something that requires an advanced degree. No one is arguing that the machine, little more than a logic tree and sorting machine, is as smart as the pharmacist it could replace, but it could fill the orders faster than any human.
And with the confluence of these two ideas, you can see where even the work that doesn't get automated away won't have the demand to support the number of workers needed to sustain our present economic model. (Especially if we get more efficient at designing away jobs than we are at educating people to perform those jobs.) |
If they are prepared to oppress one person they're probably prepared to oppress anyone if it becomes in their interests, so really it is oppressing us all - we're no more free just because it's currently not in their interests to violently oppress every person at every sign of discontent (authoritarianism doesn't have to come with a banner aloft and obvious, overt signs like a camera in every house), like a child is not free just because a parent has granted permission to do something in particular - it still depends on the permission of the parent and it could be withdrawn, and if they're violent parents, if they haven't given permission, it might become physically impossible for the child to do something - in the same way we still depend on the persmission of the institutions - we know they are willing to use violence to preserve the type of order they want, whether from people within or outside of the respective political borders - both can be threats to powerful organisations.
Voting makes it occasionlly a little more difficult however voters tactically voting, like voting against a party and not because they like the other party, and people being dependent on the zeitgeist for personal decisions can lead to people defending stupid stuff: 'better the devil you know'.
In the long run, voting can be beneficial for powerful people because people can be blamed and have the blame erroneously synthesised with justification for whatever's going on - 'well you voted for who did this so suck it up', and 'well you didn't vote in the election so you can't complain [preserving the narrow, rarely operational voting system by not listening to those who critically evaluate it and so decreasing the chances of discontent about it spreading]'. In my experiences, those arguments are usually coupled with an assumption that voting changes stuff - 'we have the choice [to pick our masters]' - what if people want no authoritative regional representatives and want to work together in populations small enough to not need authoritarianism to function efficiently and with stability, for example. Wouldn't the autonomy require less effort and yeild order if each individual governs themself by reason instead of relying on others for instruction? There could be enough communication to allow reason to spread so people can govern themselves, instead of obedience which requires predefined hierachies which if not backed up with violence don't stand much chance of surviving becuase, in general, people like doing what they want to do, even if it goes against the law (copyright infringement and taking illegal drugs come to mind). There can be lots of punishment in place like prison or death penalty to deincentivise those who do not understand the social constructionist (and ultimately fallacious) nature of authority (if you do understand that you're probably more likely to ignore the threats - ignorance is good for social control), which is probably a root of arguments in favour of prioritising punishment over rehabilitation come to think of it.. It's all about social control with some people.
> They have no fear of us or repercussions.
This is a problem with authoritative systems - who polices the police, and who polices the police police, which can theoretically go on indefinately and is impractical to do. There is no 'grand authority' being which is compeltely objective, uncorruptable, understanding, omnipotent, timeless, not even the 'majority will' of the general population; the 'majority will' usually allows new, "better" people to take charge, probably from some "party of the people" or something, and they end up screwing things up in other ways and falling to the same pressures and problems as all the other authorities - the apparent lack of non-violent methods to hold power suggests power really has to be held violently - and if history is anything to go by, systems based on inequalities of power will probably always collapse. A non-violent authority, whether defending property, intellectual or territory (territory applying both to states (collevtive "soverign" property - countries and the public property within) and to individuals (private property), will probably not survive. It appears that as long as there are individuals born who have individual will which deviates from will of authority, authoritarianism will not sustaian and just changes and restarts time and time again because nobody was listening the first time. |
I'm I the only one who doesn't like this guy? Okay today's copyright schemes are bullshit designed by greedy assholes, but this guy isn't some brave hero or selfless fighter like they are over at the pirates bay. This guy made money off copyrighted material. You cannot complain about copyrights while making money off them to! So let's stop pretending like this guy is just another innocent victim. He made money off other people's backs. |
More of a novelty than game changer really. $3000 is a lot of fuel lets say £3.40 per gallon at 20mpg would get you 17500 miles in itself or 17647 to be precise. So this system would have to give that gain over it's lifetime to provide any benefit. Now the worst thing about hybrids is that when breaking at slow speeds the electromotive force (Voltage) generated by the breaks is not strong enough to induce a current and recharge batteries. This means you are not charging at the slowest speeds i.e. breaking in town for regular traffic lights.
So lets say you fit this to your old car possibly you will get a 3mpg improvement so to pay back for the system you would have to save $3000 of fuel. 23mpg for at $3.4/gallon would get you 20294 miles which is 2794 more than 20mpg. Since we know that $3000 will get you 17500 miles we can divide 17500 by 2794 to give you 6.26 times 17500 by that and you get 109609 miles. The distance your car would have to travel to break even with your investment. |
I will repost this in this thread so maybe some more people can read this:
This is a misleading article. What everyone else is forgetting that both the SEJournal and Limited Run's test were only shown based on Facebook like pages.
There is no mention (as far as I know) or case study for ads pointing at real landing pages outside of Facebook. I do run ads on Facebook and my activity can vary day to do on people who click, some days I have 33% conversions and if you want to compare that to 20% that are "real" users, not all of those people would buy what I'm selling. Hell, sometimes conversion rates are 5-10%. So pretty much if bots did click on my ads, I would be getting 1-2% conversions on my products. |
I can confirm this. I used Facebook to advertise my page and went from ~2000 fans to over 6000 within several months. Awesome, right?
Wrong.
I thought it was weird that the new fans would never, EVER interact with the pages. So I started stalking their profiles. Guess what?
Bots/hijacked accounts/fake accounts. How do I know? Many of them have NO friends. Then I noticed something really scary...repeats. Actual pictures showing up more than once for new likes.
Very, very few of the accounts were from the USA.
I started casually messaging the accounts that looked suspicious. Not a single one with no friends responded. Out the ones that looked legitimate (although with a list of likes that is in the thousands), only a handful replied, and 100% of those people confirmed they found my page through affiliated sites, and not through Facebook itself.
I ended the ad program recently and the bots stopped. |
In the old days of the Internet a site would be hosted at a single physical location. Now sites, especially popular sites, are often hosted at many locations to cut down on latency and bandwidth issues. In order to save bandwidth, and to keep Facebook running smoothly, "Likes" from one region of the world, or the US, are only shared between servers every few hours- or days, in some cases.
Add a few Russians on Facebook and see how long it takes for their comments to show up on your page. In my experience, it sometimes takes as much as 3 days. |
There's also the problem of context. When you're asking your friends for a good restaurant, for example, you're not asking a robot to do the job -- you're asking that friend for X reasons (trust, likes same foods, talked about it offline a few weeks ago, etc etc).
When you're on facebook, you're not looking for answers. Ads on facebook are like an annoying guy in the room. You're talking to your friends and he comes to you with suggestions for stuff related to your actual conversations, but you're not really interested, you're trying to have a conversation with someone.
Google answers a question. That's what it does, and while it does it, it suggests something relevant to what you're asking.
The mental context difference between facebook and Google is huge. |
I want to talk from the point of view of the advertiser. I have not see a lot of advertisers doing Facebook advertising right and I want to share some of the thinks that are working really well for me (and hopefully save you some money).
Let’s say you are a Game store. Someone searches on Google for Creed III, you know exactly what he wants, you can provide it, he buys from you and the deal is done, you have 1 extra sale from a customer who may or may not buy from you again.
Now, Facebook is a bit different, on Facebook you build an audience, you don’t sell your shit. Facebook knows that you are into gaming, but they don’t know your purchasing intent, you may not be getting any games soon, yet you see a lame ad for Creed III for only $159. You don’t care about Creed, you are a Portal guy, and you ignore the ad and forget about it. Now, if the advertiser uses the fact that you like gaming to get you, he offers a Sweepstakes for a PS3 or he is giving away free game boy games is more likely that you click on it. As an advertiser this is great since a higher CTR (Click thought rate) means lower CPC (Cost per click), Facebook is happy since he knows you are showing relevant ads, and you are happy since you are getting free games/cool stuff, thus you like the Gaming store.
Now the store has the opportunity to build a new brand-loving user, they have to offer really good promotions, trick, tips, discounts etc. Premium content so they position themselves as the go-to guy of games, you may even share some of their post to your gamer friends since their post are awesome. Next time you need a game you won’t search for the name of the game, you search for the name of the company.
Some more tips:
Don’t send users outside of Facebook
Target as much as possible; don’t have more than 100,000 users on each ad, less useless clicks.
Move from fan gating to content creating
Keep your users engage
Listen to them
Don’t sell them shit unless you are selling a PS3 for $50.
Make them brand advocates
We all win, advertisers get more costumers and sales, costumers get more interesting/free stuff, and facebook makes money. |
I have had the same results as everyone else when advertising on Facebook. So I also consider it a scam.
What does work, however, is posting good content. The traffic facebook generates to my site is among the best referrals. |
Just a personal appeal. It's ads not adds. Sorry, my prof harped on that long enough in school that I do it too.
Other wise, thanks for the |
Here's my completely unsubstantiated theory, which I am typing up while drinking a few pale ales.
It's Googlebot.
Google is crawling the shit out of Facebook in an effort to perfect its algorithm, and they've decided they might as well destroy Facebook's reputation by clicking on all those ads at the same time.
Think I'm insane? Maybe. But...
Google has far better coders and way more resources than Facebook (for fuck's sake, they just built a "brain" capable of identifying pictures of humans and YouTube cats without any training from humans).
Keep in mind, Google is a company that has bypassed Apple's privacy settings to boost their own ad revenues, and was caught tracking Safari and Internet Explorer users, and they rolled out that privacy update despite warnings from the EU that it might be illegal there (boy, what does that say about America Kids?).
/End drunken conspiracy rant |
It could be one of many issues though. Reports show that mobile safari is used significantly more than Android browsers, plus iPhone users download more apps, and the iPhone still sells like hotcakes. It's not too hard to reason that iPhone users therefore use more data than their Android counterparts. Combine all that with the fact that the iPhone is still the "it" phone and a poster child for smartphones in general (agree or not, I'm just referring to the media in general) and again it's easy to see why the iPhone is the one being singled out. |
Funny, reddit user complaining about CL interface.
And how is CL like MPAA/RIAA? CL charges you nothing to use it while MPAA/RIAA try to squeeze every dime possible out of everything they can get their hands on. CL's data is CL's data and they can deny anybody trying to use it for profit. If Reddit told all their third party app creators that they can't run a profit, it would be a dick move, but fully understandable. |
Have you ever tried to break an iphone, not just the glass, without using tools? Chances are it will give you trouble. I watched a stupid girl try to rip her 4s open to get the sim card out with a hammer, a screw driver and few other tools. Yes. I said stupid.. I came on the scene too late. Anyways, she had dropped it in the water and believed to be rendered useless. Needless to say, she did not succeed. I watched her beat the fuck out of it with a hammer and try to pry it open with the hook, screwdrivers, etc; When I showed up and tried to get it out for her, the sim tray was locked in from her beating it with a hammer...so i just let her continue. Finally, after I couldnt take it anymore, I jumped in and used one screw driver to pry it open a bit, the hammer to pry it open more and then another screwdriver to pop out the sim.
The moral of the story is that there is not another phone out there right now, excluding the old nokia bricks.., that can take the punishment I witnessed that day. Of course the glass breaks.. but it does on all phones. In my opinion the iphone is still the most durable smart(actually competing) phone on the market. |
I didn't say there is a 51% failure rate, I said that is all it takes to qualify as "most".
I'm not making anything up, it's called a rebuttal to your unsubstantiated claim.
Edit: To further explain what I mean... you made the claim that most people don't have problems with these displays. That means there could be a failure rate of anywhere between 0-49% and your claim would still hold true.
The reason I made this comment is because, yes, you may find that most people have great success with those cheap korean displays... but they still have much higher failure rates than most other respected brands. If "no-name korean displays" has 40% of their displays come out with dead pixels, and Samsung has 10%, your statement holds true, but doesn't tell the full story. |
I don't understand why people think the patent system is so fatally flawed, we are seeing a single well publicized case and now the whole system has to be wrong.
The only thing that is wrong is the lack of quality manpower for the Patent Department.
If there were more people properly skilled in the field of electronics and software development then these patents would be more difficult to get because patents are supposed to be "non-obvious", unfortunately when you aren't the some of the more knowledgeable people in the field most things are not obvious.
The patent system is extremely effective for 99.99% of all things that go through it, now one company starts taking someone else to court on a technicality and its time to rewrite the whole system!
For some reason this one instance has everyone thinking the patent system is fatally flawed. IT'S NOT.
If you want to see a flawed patent system look at China, where original development is at a near standstill because there is little protection for new inventions.
The patent systems in the North America and Europe are fantastic, they protect inventions and give people and companies true incentive to develop new products and techniques. It is the only thing keeping the world driving forward and not standing still.
Rant over; |
It's a deterrent. The range of damages under the statute is from $750 to $30,000 per work, but that can go up to a cap of $150,000 if the infringement is found to be intentional.
The idea is that some people/companies might intentionally infringe for business purposes. If they hide their profits well, then those profits can be nearly impossible to prove in court (especially if the defendant doesn't appear and the plaintiff has no opportunity to investigate their business records).
This actually happened once in a case in Puerto Rico where the latin music subsidiary of a major record label had several of their artists (I think it was a total of 16) make their own recordings of a guy's songs without permission. Since the guy was dead, I think the record label may have thought they could get away with it, but his relatives figured it out and sued them. There were only two different songs used, so the company's maximum liability was only $300,000. They didn't even show up to court, choosing to just eat the fine, which was presumably less than what they'd made by using the guy's songs.
What's messed up is that the whole system is perverted. The maximum fines are now being used on file sharers, who, the evidence shows, aren't really deterred by the threat of lawsuits. So we have these huge penalties being meted out to grandmothers and minors who download recklessly or unknowingly, whereas big companies that infringe don't have too much to worry about so long as the number of copyrighted works is small. I mean, $300,000 is definitely less than they would expect to spend just paying their lawyers to defend a federal copyright action. |
Government databases are troubling on so many levels.
The main question is, what is the benefit of these databases? Data mining them is problematic, the sheer size of them means that they flag up thousands of false positives in most cases. This means that either a) no one looks at anything they do until someone is a suspect and they check the database or b) they use it to generate lists of suspects when they have no actual clue.
Now case a is actually pretty hopeless, if someone has come to the authorities attention for whatever reason then by far and away the most likely way to uncover their evil plot to blow up freedom is to look at the action that brought them to your attention.
Happily enough though, case b is much worse. When you don't know who to suspect but know that something is afoot , then a broad approach like this is actually really unlikely to bring up the actual suspect because if they are smart enough to avoid coming to your attention directly, they are smart enough to stay off this sort of database. This means that you waste lots of effort in what is presumably time-critical endeavor. |
That is still complete and total BS. The contract is not a loan, the device is not collateral. You own the phone. A service contract is just that, a contract to retain services for a set amount of time, with an ETF in the event that the contract is broken. The device is still yours to do as you please. As an example, when I deployed to Afghainstan I took my GSM phone (T-mobile) with me, unlocked so I could use it on Roshan. The contract was fulfilled (I still paid the T-mobile bill), but I used my device (my property) in the manner I desired. Had I chosen to do this AND break my contract, no damage would have been done to Tmobile as I would have owed an ETF which would have more than covered the phone subsidy. |
To be sure, the Samsung Galaxy S4 includes Google Play, as confirmed by Michael Gartenberg in the tweet above, but after watching that event I can't help but wonder how long that will be the case
Google Play is where the apps are. Even with all these new gimmicky features. |
Easy tiger. Your statement that it can happen is based solely on the fact that it's a possible timetable frame. In other words, your opinion is even less informed than parent's whose opinion is based on at least some public information.
Tesla is a publicly traded company, and thus we do have some knowledge of their short term plans. These plans do NOT include announcing a $30k electric car any time in the near future, and most likely would come after the engineering of the Model X is complete (and perhaps even later). |
That's why they're rich.
If you're able to get a return on your investment of 7% and the cost of borrowing the money is 5% (aka c* or cost of capital), you should leverage the debt to create value.
People shouldn't be blindly afraid of debt. It's much different in the business world than it is in the personal world. If you borrow $1000 for personal use, well that could be bad because you're not getting a return on that. When a business does it, they're getting a return on that investment, hopefully, of higher than they're paying. Further, the money that they borrow doesn't just disappear in a cloud of smoke. When the liability is put on the books, a cash asset is also put on the books (balance sheet). As this cash is used, it is converted to another type of asset and this asset stays on the balance sheet as well. |
It comes with an 8 year warrantee, so you know you're getting at least 3 years out of it.
The bigger (85kwh) battery costs $12k. Assuming it drops dead the moment the warrantee is up each time, you're looking at an average annual battery cost of $1500. Higher end luxury cars (S class Mercedes, 7 series BMW, etc) usually depreciate much more than this every year due to their high maintenance expense. |
I don't completely disagree, but I don't like ideas that put gun remedies so soon when we have been given so many others. We have many remedies available before threats are justified. For instance we can have complete, non-violent revolution and replacement of government any time we want: A MASSIVE media campaign to vote them all out, just out, for ANYONE else - we cannot possibly do worse but we may have a few nutjobs in the short-term. However, on the heals of a successful 'vote them all out' election, the fear would reside where it is supposed to.
The Vote is our gun and the implication of that is why it's more scary that it's being removed as a preemptive remedy to arms. |
Source? How does a country that is founded upon the concept that government is of, by and for the people suddenly become one where government (read our ) employees are there to protect the state, and not us? |
From /u/downhomegroove on /r/Starcraft:
"Thanks for doing an article on this, Slasher. I was the person in the AMA that posed the TWC question to Mr. Shear. Although I am currently away on business this week, I can say without question, that the situation has NOT improved as of last week. In fact, I had to purchase a separate VPN service that circumnavigates Time Warner Cable's laughable CDN handoff (Level3) that many sites including Youtube, and Twitch.tv go through. A paying customer shouldn't have to pay extra just to get the service that is advertised when they sign up with an ISP.
Before I get into anything, I want to mention that this is all possible due to the fantastic world of good 'ol American Oligopoly. Since most US areas only have 1 choice for an ISP, we have to eat whatever they shovel us. And in the case of TWC, it's barely edible.
TWC saying "we don't throttle" is practically a crime, although they technically can get away with it. TWC has been known for crippling service to streaming sites (big surprise there, the competition!!!) in a couple different ways.
Over a year ago with Netflix, TWC's DNS servers would reroute customers to far away Netflix streaming servers in order to provide a less than usable experience. Since Netflix uses airport codes for the server you are connecting to, it wasn't hard to for me to see that I was connecting to a server close to Newark while living in LA. Switching to an external DNS provider fixed that issue.
Second, and this is what is currently crippling our streams, is that they have a network peering agreement with Level3. Think of peering as the door between rooms (rooms being networks). In order to go from one network to the other, you have to traverse the door. When peering is setup, sometimes one company benefits more than the other, and payment is generally exchanged in those cases. TWC most likely cheaped out bought a doggie door for its users. TWC should have bought a bigger door, and they didn't, and most likely it was an intentional oversight. So while technically TWC isn't turning a dial to throttle people, they have a non-interactive choke point that essentially does the same thing. Now, not everything goes through this door, but you can bet good money that pretty much anything that competes with their own streaming and content services does. Youtube and twitch.tv both fall under that list.
Then you have certain ways to try to get around it. People have been blacklisting Youtube's IP Scope that traverses level3, and that has generally worked. However, you can't do that as easily for twitch, since their IPs are all over the place. People like myself have purchased a VPN service that utilizes a different route to twitch's streaming servers, and streaming 1080p and 1200p is as smooth as butter, even though I have the encryption overhead from the VPN.
In the end, this really is a Time Warner Cable issue, and unless they stop choking the flow of data with their inadequate peering with level3, I don't see this problem going away. Pretty much business as usual for TWC. |
we've only had FiOS available for about a year. signed up immediately and it's been great. was supposed to have half price hbo for 6months and they have not yet bumped it up, plus they randomly added showtime to my package for free.
internet did go down one day(tv still worked). i used my phone to tweet at their support, they had me fill out an online form, and 10 minutes later it was working again
back when i had comcast(only for tv), they couldn't even get that right. on demand never worked. shit i was paying extra for kept locking me out. they kept sending guys out who would punch some shit into the box and it would work again for about 2 weeks.. and then the same shit all over again. by the 3rd time i took a half day off work to wait for them i said fuck it and cancelled, and then went without pay tv for about 5 years until FiOS came. |
Among other things, this phone would be a brick , not a block. People vastly underestimate how much effort goes into integration of phone systems.
Those little "blocks" would be microscopic segments of a chipset on most phones. This thing is going to be huge .
Additionally, simple things like GPS rely completely on sensor fusion with accelerometers, compasses, cell tower power ratios, etc., to do their job these days, and the coordination and testing of components so that they work together to make a phone is a large fraction of the developing time/cost. These replaceable parts aren't going to work properly together, and there would be no practical way to test that they do, in the ridiculous number of possible configurations that would be created by replacing them piecemeal.
And if they did, they wouldn't have FCC system certification because that would be impractical, and wouldn't be legal to use as phones as a consequence. |
Well, everyone knew that was Job's M.O.
Shareholder expectations was part of the reason he was run off in the first place, and they brought in Sculley.
When he came back, Apple's stock was so shitty, that they were willing to give him free reign to do whatever he wanted. By the time they were booming, cash was flowing in at such a high rate, that their innovative R&D Costs were NEXT TO NOTHING compared to the cashflows... |
Taking on the power of babel headfirst! Google vs old testament god; Its on! (This is in my opinion, the most fucked up thing old testament god ever did...)
From Wikipedia; [The Tower of Babel]( forms the focus of a story told in the Book of Genesis of the Bible. According to the story, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where they resolved to build a city with a tower "whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."
God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they purpose to do." "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, so that they would not be able to return to each other, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth" |
It'll be a while before Google Translate can even hope to get Indonesian right. I'm a translator for Indonesian-English and vice versa and while I have to admit Google Translate does make my job easier, it will never be able to translate like a normal person. |
Google is an example of capatilism done perfectly. They pool together some of the smartest minds in the world, along with their titanic amount of resources and use them to work on projects that, if successful, would greatly benefit the human race as a whole. They do this all while taking the long view, and creating the technology first then figuring out how to profit off of it later. |
There is one other critical detail, at least for PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric) customers (and probably SDG&E and SCE too).
The utility does not pay out at a rate of 35c/kWh. They apply the positive credit to your account up to $0. Any credit earned above $0 is only paid out if the meter is a net-energy producer over a one-year period. In other words, the panels must produce more energy than the property uses. Any credit earned above $0 is paid at a market price, near 4cents/Kwh (below the consumer price for power).
This is the reason residential solar companies like Solar City don't oversize homeowners systems. They look at your power bill, and size a system to exactly offset your usage. Kwh's shaved off the top are far more valuable than KWh's added to the grid.
Another reason for the changing kwh-value, besides time-of-use pricing (for some customers) is rate tiering (for all customers). Every month, the power you use at the end of a billing cycle likely costs more than power at the beginning. Regulations have made the difference between tier 2 and tier 3 prices pretty significant.
In reverse, just a little solar can keep a property out of the tier 4 and 3 pricing brackets for the month. Combine this with Time-of-use pricing, and you will earn more for power produced (30cents-weekdays) than power purchased (5 cents-night). So a small investment has a decent financial return. However, a large investment doesn't mean you start ripping off the power companies. As described, they have their programs structured to prevent oversized payouts to solar homeowners.
Rather, the utilities view distributed solar as demand reduction. Demand reduction allows utilities to reduce spot market purchases. The utility doesn't "eat the cost of contracting backup production capacity" - residential solar is rather insignificant compared to their contracted capacity. California utilities, to varying degrees, make up the balance between contracted power and demand in the spot market (see CAISO random readers). So a small demand reduction due to solar means adjusted forecasts for those purchases, not contracted oversupply.
Also, a reduction in demand at the very end of their lines has huge potential benefits to their T&D systems, and in the CAISO marketplace. One market tool is Congestion Revenue Rights. Some utilities wisely use their pricing to incentivize solar systems in locations which have a net-benefit to their transmission networks. Utilities are avoiding budgeted system upgrade costs since solar/EE is slowing the increase in demand.
The idea that solar customers get big paychecks, and provide nothing in return, is false. |
A 10 year lifespan is a wild assumption. The only thing that could even facilitate something like that will be the CPU slowdown in the next half of this decade, and even then GPUs(Where a shit tonne of the processing power goes these days) will keep on going for a while longer until the thermodynamics no longer permit it.
I highly doubt XBO will have a 10 year lifespan, especially if Sony pushes on developing the PS5(Which would put XBox out of the game if they didn't have another one ready to ship themselves), and especially with the major resurgence in the PC gaming market(Which is projected to pass out all consoles by 2015, it already individually beats every console on the planet). |
The simple truth is that Microsoft's Windows, Office and enterprise business is very high margin and high return on capital. Bing is just a poorly positioned brand and doesn't merit more capital expenditure. Xbox is a good brand in a bad business. The idea of a corporation is to make money for shareholders. Selling the latter two businesses and returning the capital invested in them to shareholders, in combination with rationalizing the expense base in their software and enterprise businesses, and returning all of that excess cash flow to shareholders (or using it to acquire other high return on capital businesses at attractive prices), will make Microsoft a hugely successful stock to own for many years and likely ensure the prosperity of the entity long into the future. But it will not make it a popular place to work in the tech industry nor will it be renowned for its internal innovation - both are overrated from a shareholder perspective though (and arguably, the company isn't well regarded in either category right now anyway). With all of that said, Elop almost certainly is not the guy to make this model into a reality. Only a handful of people can, none of which will be considered for the job. |
Much of the extra cost was due to the rather deliberate decision to make it a blu-ray player. When the PS3 was released the blue lasers were scarce and expensive, making that a costly decision. But the resulting early lead in "players sold" may have been the deciding factor in blu-ray defeating HD-DVD. I think that was a stupid decision because physical media for movies is dying at the high-end and regular DVD is continuing to dominate at the low end. |
Also, without Bing around, Google would have no real competition and could be deemed anti-competitive. |
I spent more time deciding whether or not it was a mullet than I did reading the article. Then I remembered that I could just Google him. |
It was more like $150
The practice of selling the console at a loss and making the money back selling games was first used by sony for the PS2. Sega knew that sony was going to include a DVD player but assumed that they could survive it because the PS2 would have a much higher launch price. Instead Sony launched at $299. $100 more than the dreamcast.
It wasn't that sega couldn't take a hit on the launch price. It was that they hadn't even considered it. Their plan was to make a small profit on every console sold.
At the time DVD players were pretty new and a stand alone DVD player would cost you around $200. If you wanted a dvd player and a console it was far cheaper to get the PS2. In Japan the PS2 was the cheapest DVD player on the market.
As for myself and the majority of the market. I decided that it was better to spend the extra $100 on the PS2 than to spend an extra $200 buying a dvd player.
The PS2 also had an ethernet port allowing for high speed internet access, while the dreamcast had a dial up modem. Online offerings for both consoles ended up being sparse, but we didn't know that at the time. |
Personally I just wish Microsoft would support the existing OSes.
If they did that, [we'd be stuck with Windows 3](
Not that there aren't some crazy people out there who thinks Windows attained UI perfection in Windows 3.1.
My father still thinks [his TI-99/4a was the most usable interface ever]( He even orders things that let him hook up SATA SSDs to it. |
That's not how corporations work.
Either Microsoft owns the company or they don't. Putting the subsidiary offshore might give them a tax benefit, but will not excuse them from responding to a US court order.
If Microsoft owns the company, controls the company, or just has access to the data, they will be subject to a US court order, no matter where the data center resides. Even if it's not a subsidiary, if Microsoft engineers have access to the data, they would be subject to US court orders.
Any specific US Microsoft employee to refuse a US court order could be held in contempt and jailed, up to and including the CEO of Microsoft. National security letters are secret. Microsoft employees who talk about them can be jailed. |
The main complaint is there is a significant number of companies out there that just buy rights to patents or grab as many patents as possible and then sit on them until the patent expires. This creates several issues. It stagnates the industry because you can't use that particular patent now nor can you build off it. Imagine if someone patented a tube TV design and then didnt update or build off the TV design for the duration of the patent; Or even worse they didnt make any TVs either! Wed still have basic tube TVs today! This also touches on the next issue is that patent trolls specifically dont produce anything. They just grab up patents and sit on them so they dont contribute or produce anything. This leads some people to ask: Why bother having patents when these guys just collect them and prevent anyone from developing new technologies or devices off these patented ideas? Patent trolls do not benefit society in anyway, unless youre a lawyer which brings us to the final main issue: They only have these patents to sue people. By collecting all these patents they hope to catch someone infringing on one of their patents and then suing them for profit. So now you have people trying to create an updated TV like device since the current patent holders aren't using theirs but then get sued because their TV like device is based on the original tube TV patent. Which brings us to the main issue surrounding all this controversy: How does one identify a patent troll versus someone trying to secure funding or production for their product. Neither patent holder is producing something while holding the patent and both will fight to protect their patent by suing infringing designs. |
It still seems like every one of those points is simply conducive to good design though.
Of course Samsung would make the touch screen rectangular, it's functional: developers utilize the xy coordinates in their programming.
Of course Samsung would make the phone rectangular, why would they have the housing unit a different shape from the screen?
Of course Samsung would make the casing have four rounded corners, who'd put something sharp in their pocket?
Of course Samsung would have narrow borders of casing around the screen. Functional design would be to maximize screen size while protecting it from drops, knocks, etc.
Of course Samsung wouldn't put ornamentation around a screen who's primary purpose is to provide a multi-functional interface (replacing functional ornamentation) and who's secondary purpose is to provide pretty pictures to look at (replacing aesthetic ornamentation). |
There is no such thing as security, there are only ways to temporarily prevent unauthorized users from gaining what they want. The battle between cryptographer and cryptanalyst has been going back and forth since the dawn of time, and every time an "unbreakable" system is invented, it is thereafter broken. Sometimes it takes a few years, sometimes it takes a new field of research, whatever. There are no assurances here.
At a certain point, anyone using the internet has to realize that anything they post will be picked up by an unintended audience, and stored indefinitely. It doesn't have to be the NSA, it can even be that drunk text you sent last night, or the idiotic rant you posted from a reddit account that someone recognized. |
Interesting article but nothing in it contradicts my position or my reasoned opinion. In fact, there's probably much more alignment than not.
Bear in mind too, that I wasn't addressing why Metro was designed the way it was, rather why the desktop remained in place. There are probably numerous reasons why the desktop remained and one of them being that the disruption incurred to existing applications in replacing the desktop (and all the UI elements with it) would have been massive and severely impacted numerous Windows applications. Even the designer speaking in the article said the same thing referencing power users.
Consider for example why Windows desktop apps don't magically look like Metro apps in Windows 8. Because they need to be redesigned, retooled, and recompiled for Windows 8 Metro. Keeping the desktop is an interim fix while sheparding developers over to Metro. |
To all the "Do we need a study for this hurrrrrr?" comments.
Yes, even if you have ideas about the outcome there are real benefits to quantifying the relationship between the factors you are interested in.
Sure, it's easy to say "patent trolls are bad for jobs or innovation". But if you stop there you don't actually understand the actual relationship between those two things. You don't have a basis for determining what level of patent litigation is harmful, which has important implications for determining policy. Do you want policy based solely on someone's gut instincts, without any data to support it?
Generating and analyzing these studies cause people to look more closely at the factors involved. How are you measuring innovation? What metrics can we use to quantify the economic impact of litigation? etc
You can often find nuances or subtleties in data sets that would be missed if purely qualitative anecdotal information is used. In the example above, they actually detected a positive association between VC and Patent suits at the lower end of the spectrum, which is useful information. |
Haha. I have a story for you. I am part of a racing club at my university. We build a formula SAE car every year from the ground up. Designed and built by students (with the exception of really rims, tires and wheels those are purchased). There is another club that is ASME (american society of mechanical engineers). Most of us in SAE are mech engineering students so we know what they know. They had built an Electra thon vehicle from steel one year. The next year, they decided to switch to aluminum... They didn't do much thinking apparently because they purchased aluminum piping with a thick sidewall not thinking about it. They I guess assumed aluminum is always lighter than steel. Turns out they made a heavier frame from aluminum than the previous steel one (not to mention losses in stiffness but that's something they don't work on). They proceeded to drill holes in the aluminum literally in the most stressful areas of the frame because I guess they thought it was a good idea. Hilarious when you think about it. USFracing.com is the club I'm apart of if you want to take a look. |
That seems to be Nissan's "design language".
I bought a Leaf about 2 weeks ago. Walking around the Nissan dealership, there are random edges sticking out where they don't belong all over that place. The Leaf isn't close to the only car with headlights that don't fit in. I also saw taillights that don't fit with the trunk lid and generally just bizarre blocking shapes that don't make sense. |
Looking at how he started the company:
Before him, "personal computers" weren't really a thing. They were mostly electronics kits, which were marketed to, bought and used by electronics geeks. The whole field was produced and consumed by mostly a small group of university students and graduates.
It was basically a hobby project. Steve Jobs saw a potential in that beyond just electronics geeks using it as a hobby. He thought he could make it into an actual device that "normal people" could use. He came up with the idea (which, at first Wozniak, and then many others, realized into reality) of making actual complete computers and selling them not to labs, universities, or even students, but "regular people".
Would Wozniak (or someone similar) come up with the idea without Jobs? Maybe. Would he be as successful as Jobs in actually introduce it to the market? I doubt it. Yes, eventually computers would probably have gained popularity even without people like Jobs, but at the very least he accelerated the process.
At the time, IBM famously claimed that personal computers are a fad and a toy and they didn't have to take them seriously. Without Jobs, would they have reversed their position? Eventually, probably, but I don't think it would have been that fast and that abrupt.
What has he contributed? He took technologies which were the realm of geeks and hobiests and brought them to the mass market.
To put it in another way, before Jobs introduced the iPhone, I was already using smartphones and even touch screen ones (the old windows mobile PDAs with optional mobile antenas). But they were big and bulky and nobody understood why I was excited about them. And then he introduced the iPhone. And not only did it lead to a lot more companies taking the market a lot more seriously, it lead to people taking those devices more seriously, which in turn lead to manufacturers putting more effort into those devices.
Look at old smartphones and the progress they made between 2000 and 2007 and look at the progress they made between 2007 and 2009. The first "graph" would be linear, the 2nd, exponential.
So while I don't like his products, in a way, the reason I have a device like the Nexus 4 and for this cheap, and not in 10 years from now and much more expensive has a bit to do with him. |
You like paying for a costless service? Digital copying and down/uploading is costless.
Taking musicians as an example, they shifted their income generation to live shows instead of records sales. Encouraging obsolete product sales through enforcement is unhealthy for the industry.
Selling infinitely, costlessly copiable and transferable files makes no economical sense.
It's up to the content producers to change their business model to account for the technological progress, not to force their customers to pay for an obsolete service or product that has become costless and available for free to anyone with an internet connection.. |
I think the main objection is that it's opt-out, i.e. preselected so if you don't carefully examine every page/option in the installation process you will (unwittingly) get it installed.
One could always argue that people should read through every single page and the full contents of every EULA of every software they download and install but that's not the reality we live in. The uTorrent crew (just as all others, like Oracle with the Ask.com-toolbar bundling in Java or Adobe with their annoying Lightroom and McAfee crap history) full well knows that most installation today is done almost on autopilot, we're used so used to the installers that if they sneak in a pre-selected option somewhere a lot of people will miss it because there was no reason to suspect it being there.
I actually find the blog post you linked to be a bullshit argument, because he was aware of the crap 3rd party bundling before running the installer thus was in a heightened state of awareness regarding reading through every single step. Not very representative for most situations.
And just because it is the user's responsibility to thoroughly check installation steps and examine each page carefully it doesn't make the sudden bundling of preselected (opt-out) 3rd party software any less of a bitch move from uTorrents part since they full well know people will miss it. (If not, why not make it opt-in? I'll tell you why: Because they knew hardly a handful would fill out that checkbox.)
And if one wants to see conspiracy in this and speculate freely they might even have replaced the installation file with one that is more clear in the directions after they deleted the thread on the forum. (Why would they even delete the thread to start with? Except for the reason it had people in it that had examined the installation process |
Yeah, I know what you mean. Shareware has made me read very carefully through offers during installers. I learned the hard way a LONG time ago.
I still think this is being blown out of proportion though. uTorrent has been bundling stuff with their software for a long time. Hell, even the JRE does it with Ask toolbar. |
Essentially, bitcoins (a type of anonymous currency) needed a distribution system. Since they designers didn't want to cause inflation by just "making" more bitcoins, they decided to create a finite amount of bitcoins, but bitcoins are no good until they are "mined", kind of like gold.
The way bitcoins are mined is by computers doing incredibly complex math problems. Once the problem is solved, the user is rewarded with a bitcoin. As more and more bitcoins are mined, the problems become harder and harder (just like how it's harder to find gold once more gold is mined). As the problems get harder, more CPU power is required to solve the problems efficiently. What this program is trying to do is use your CPU power without your consent to mine bitcoins for themselves. They're essentially stealing your computer's CPU abilities for themselves. |
VLC is still a good option for certain tasks, especially the task it was designed for: streaming/transcoding within a local network.
But in most areas which matter to the average consumer (video playback), players like MPC-HC are objectively superior.
VLC's selling point was that it plays everything, that it's free and open source. But it doesn't play everything well , performs poorly when it comes to things like motion interpolation, poorly predicts color profiles, provides only partial support for many formats. There are many subtle "bugs". If you switch subtitles, it can take a while before it shows them. Subtitle rendering is horrible. With many video formats you can't seek (skip around) through the video without the image becoming all garbled. VLC can use up quite a lot of resources when rendering 1080p/4k video, which could be offloaded to the CPU... etc. |
The tech can't get "more efficient" in terms of energy per unit of surface area.
Actually it can get more efficient in terms of energy per unit of surface area. And it does.
It'll be the key driver of solar cost decrease as time goes on, as the PV cell cost in a solar power system is becoming a small fraction, the overall size of the system per unit energy will be a bigger factor in the cost. |
Fuck all that. Just switch to an ISP which doesn't throttle or censor.
Why would you ever give money to the shitty bix-box ISPs who fuck with your packets, bitch about it, then go through all this bullshit rigmarole to get around the restrictions put in place by a company you're paying money to .
It makes no sense whatsoever when there are dozens of smaller ISPs who don't do any of this who would gladly take your custom and not treat you like a criminal. |
Options are mainly for hedging, offsetting risks from other positions. Unless you have inside information, a detailed understanding of a particular business, or a sophisticated computer model, you should assume the market is efficient and sets accurate prices. |
I currently work in tech in the SF Bay Area/Silicon Valley and my office is in the same building Twitter is in.
People are comparing what is going on to a the .com bubble. While there is no way of knowing this for sure, I don't think these are similar events. People have been around the Bay Area long enough to still remember the .com bubble. As a result, investors are much much more wary about investing then they were in the past. The more ridiculous company valuations, such as Uber at $51b, is because these companies show strong revenue growth. The Valley isn't just filled with shitty social media/app companies, the system in place has a good way of weeding them out. Most successful companies in the area consist of tech companies who provide technologies that can be easily monetized over the Internet. The thing is though, these companies aren't as "sexy" as the social media or app companies so they don't get as much publicity.
Companies like Yapstone, Zuora, Twilio, Launchsquad etc. are companies pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars of investment with strong performance metrics but are companies the average person wouldn't have heard about because they provide business facing SaaS products.
Even if the bubble popped tomorrow, these companies with proven business models and great metrics would continue to exist and operate, whereas a majority of the companies in the .com bubble didn't have revenue of any kind. |
How so? You're given more free time to do things you care about. Automation takes the monotony out of things. I don't need to waste time making a list of errands, my stuff does it for me. Instead of running out and ordering things and going to get stuff I can get a list put in front of me, and confirm or edit it while my car drives me to some activity with my friends.
If your autonomy relies on keeping a shopping list, checking what your running out of in your house, etc, I feel sorry for you. I want to have all that stuff streamlined so I can spend all of my day doing things I want to do and not things I have to do because otherwise they won't get done.
I'd rather my computer just give me a "hey you're almost out of toilet paper, order the same brand, or here's what else is on sale" while I'm taking a crap than having to remember to write it down after or go check how many rolls are left.
Maybe my car can go get gas while I'm in the store and save me 20 minutes.
What you claimed is literally the opposite of the effect I'm imagining. |
I love you |
That's the part of people's dislike for the iPad that confuses me. For me, screen size makes the device so much more useful (replacing the kindle, wacom tablet, nintendo ds, and 90% of computer usage). At this stage in tablet software, I could care less about processing power (what would I use it for?). If I want to use processor intensive apps, I'll do it on my desktop/laptop.
I realize that for more geeky people it must be a letdown to see that there weren't significant improvements in some respects. But in terms of use all I want is my hand held multi-purpose "replaces everything that's flat" internet connected as-seen-in-science-fiction device. It's the format I love. |
It all stems from Ma Bell. In the beginning, there was Bell, and she was a pervasive monopoly who built the entire system. The thought, for a long while, was that telecom was a natural monopoly, and that to have a unified telecom system required one company to manage it. And so, Bell, or AT&T, whatever you want to call it, had monopoly over telecom, with certain restrictions forbidding them from entering certain markets. Coincidently, the ban on bell creating computer hardware likely is responsible for the creation of Unix, as the need for a consistent interface to varying hardware became critical to operating the phone system. After a time, the decision was made to split Ma Bell into the baby bells, each of whom had dominion over a different region, had to compete with local companies that might wish to enter the market, and was restricted from operating outside a certain area, to prevent the rise of another Ma bell. Most local companies were and are unable to compete effectively against even a diminished baby bell, so certain restrictions were placed on them, to force them to provide assistance to local companies. For example, the internet provider I had when I was a kid was founded by a man who really, really, really liked MUDs, so he started a small dial-up ISP, used regulation to coerce MI-bell (Ameritech) to lay wire to his house, at substantial cost to them, and used his new ISP to bankroll his MUD servers and he got free connection to boot. Of late, the baby bells have been able to argue in court, whenever a company tries to take advantage of legislation passed to promote competition, that the law is anti-competitive, and places and unfair financial burden on them, and the courts almost always agree, with the result being that the big company no longer has to play nice with the startup or small company. Additionally, the SEC has been allowing the baby bells to buy each other, resulting in a [corporate family tree]( that draws certain similarities between Ma Bell and the liquid metal terminator to light. So really, to ask if a local monopoly was granted is to look at it backwards: the local monopolies were an attempt to restrict a national monopoly, and impose some semblance of competition. I personally think we never should have broken up Ma bell, she actually provided last mile service quite effectively, by leveraging profitable areas of the country to subsidize rural areas, like how the post office does. |
Forget about it. A solar panel might generate 200 watts in peak sun. If you're lucky you might get 6 peak-sun-hours in a day, so 1200 Wh. According to the article, a car needs 18 hours to charge at 110 V (I assume that's 1200W... Sorry, I'm in Australia where we use 220 V). So 21600 Wh for a charge.
So you'd need 18 panels to fully charge your Leaf in a day (that's a lot of roof space).. and that's in summer in a very sunny part of the world.. and you're willing not to drive your car during sunlight hours. (or maybe you could get another set of batteries, for another $150/month, and charge those). In Winter here in Melbourne it goes down to 3 or 4 peak-sun-hours per day, so double the number of panels. |
The way I think of it is this, the friends that I talk to I already have their phone-number. If you want to talk to me you can phone me or come over to my house, it's more 'human'. This goes without saying that all relationships that are based off of drama-inducing facebook whores are almost all completely without worth. After I removed facebook it appeared that all my relationships with friends, etc. were more personal and normal. I understand some of the people needing to contact far away relatives and the like, but I have an email address contact list/phone number list to use as well. One of my favorite movies, says it as the following....
"The things we own end up owning us"
Meaning technology (and by implication facebook) is only as useful as we make it to be. Without notice, it can slowly creep up on us and make our life surround it. |
I took Amtrak to Miami, it did take a while, but it was pretty cool and very worth it if you have a group of friends. You can take anything you want on the train. Like a cooler full of food and alcohol if you want. There is no checking whatsoever of anything you have for security. There was a lounge car which had some food, snacks, and liquor drinks and probably beer. There was another car that had like restaurant booths. There was a kitchen somewhere because you could preorder meals that were served at specified times. The seats were much larger than planes. There's regular AC power plugs everywhere. Cell phone service the whole way as far as I can tell. You can actually see all the scenery and get to see some pretty crazy shit like Bum Villages along the outskirts of major cities, as well as extremely rural country side. When we boarded the train it was around 4 AM and we were put into a separate car that was empty so we could all go stretch out across two seats and sleep just fine until about 11 when they woke us up and made us move to a more filled car so they could close that one. Not sure why. The staff was cool, they let us open the doors on the train and stand down there while the train was going. |
I learned something valuable recently about public transportation in the USA. It seems that if you get rid of public transportation in your city then the poor people move to another one that has public transportation. Witness Clayton County, GA. Before the '96 Olympics everyone who lived there was affluent middle class. The Olympics moved a lot of inner city poor people away from where the city wanted to have the Olympics (and Georgia Tech) making the city of Atlanta appear more affluent and less dangerous. Those people moved out of Atlanta were in large part relocated to Clayton county which saw the property values drop precipitously. Now they can't afford the public transportation, so the poor people are moving back to the city or other locations that have public transportation. |
I agree that the wiggle room is a serious problem. However, have you ever actually studied the structure of the Internet and Internet routing? Internet routing is split into two levels: internal autonomous system (AS) routing (e.g. inside AT&T's network) using protocols like OSPF and external routing between ASes using BGP. ASes also have a hierarchical structure because Tier X ISPs buy bandwidth from Tier X+1 until you get to Tier 1 ASes. At both levels routing is already discriminated against based on the contracts (peering agreements and service level agreements) that make up the Internet. Fortunately, these contracts thus far have maintained a fairly neutral network with no obvious slowness between different services. Although there are already systems like MPLS virtual circuits and attempts at QoS that subvert this all the time in the background without you noticing (e.g. if a corporation wants to do a video conference with investors in Singapore and doesn't want the link to go down, it might pay L3 for an MPLS link to pipe their traffic).
Basically, I'm saying that all of the bad stuff that we net neutrality advocates fear already happens daily. The reason that we don't live in an Internet dystopia is simply because of the incentives of the various parties that make up the Internet never conspire to ruin the overall system. That and the services that are provided in such a way really don't add that much value for their cost over just old-fashioned fairly neutral (within the context of routing contracts) and best effort traffic. Verizon and Google have certainly moved in that direction, but overall, by themselves they will not be able to make a huge difference. That said, I am extremely angry at Google changing their position. But we had to expect them to do it. "Don't be evil" was always a marketing slogan and they are a publicly traded company that has to make profit first and foremost.
What we need to do as net neutrality advocates is provide a system that removes the incentives for screwing with the overall neutrality in the network. My solution to this has always been extremely simple. The US government needs to make a law that states the following: content and network service cannot be owned by the same company. That eliminates the conflict of interest that is inherent if something like the Comcast/NBC merger happens or bullshit situations like how Verizon and AT&T want to dominate the services provided on smartphones, which are as capable as many computers these days. There will still be other issues involved (e.g. collusion), but that is the law I think we need as the 90% solution. The other 10% solution can simply be better enforcement of service level agreements and pressure by the government to remove extraneous clauses that give the ISPs unnecessary from such agreements.
Another important component is more competition in ISPs. Basically, I want the government to dig up every neighborhood in the country and install fiber to the home. That fiber will then be routed to a few central boxes in each city where various private regional ISPs can sell service. Ideally, each customer would be able to pick a different ISP with this infrastructure. This is how some fiber to the home systems work in other countries and it can provide both cheap and high performance access and since there is actual competition rather than duopolies, enforcing draconian policies on users is much more difficult. |
Very impressed, but I'm not really feeling intimidated here. The "what is leg" answer really reveals Watson's limitations. The clue was:
>It was the anatomical oddity of U.S. gymnast George Eyser, who won a gold medal on the parallel bars in 1904.
The problem here is that the answer is a prepositional phrase acting as an adjective to the object of the clue. 90% of the time or more the answer is a simple noun or gerund. Watson is great at giving these (the 2nd and 3rd answers Watson considered was '1904 Summer Olympics' and 'men's parallel bars'). But if the answer is a more ephemeral concept like an adjective -- "missing a leg" -- Watson was not designed to formulate such an answer. It can parse adjectives from the clue text, but it cannot answer in kind. I suspect to get it to answer "what is 'missing a leg'" is another 3-5 years of serious development. If the producers crafted only prepositional phrases as answers, Watson's performance would collapse entirely.
On the other hand, look at how the human approaches the question.
Ken Jennings said "he only had one hand." He got the fact wrong, but the intelligence is not in the recall of fact but in comprehending in the first place that the answer must be a prepositional phrase describing George Evans. Even more intimidating is that Jennings knew he didn't have the fact, but was able to venture a guess that a missing body part is the most likely answer. He knew, for example, that humans rarely have extra body parts. So his answer is telling, he buzzed and said "he only had one..." then a grimace as he knows he's gotta roll the dice. ".... hand."
Ken Jennings had no idea who George Eyser was but was able to give a sensible answer. Watson knew exactly who George Eyser was but was unable to give anything but a bizarre non-sequiter.
I don't want to downplay the achievement here, however. Watson is dominant in its given domain -- nouns. It understands when it's being asked for a book title or a person's name or -- most impressively in the show -- a decade, which is a more abstract concept. It's definitely more impressive than chess. |
Actually, "Turn of Phrase" is a very common turn of phrase. |
I think you're overanalyzing this. "What is a wooden leg" would have been a perfectly fine answer and "What is a missing leg" was probably the "official answer", as Mason11987 says below.
"What is " __ "?" demands a noun; offering an answer like "missing a leg" does not showcase people's ability to think abstractly, but their frequent imprecision in speech.
If "George Eyser had missing a leg" were a properly formed sentence, it would likely appear in one of the texts in Watson's memory and Watson would be able to impress with that answer. Instead, when I read about George Eyser on Wikipedia I find that "Eyser competed with a wooden prosthesis for a left leg"--if I extracted the phrase "a wooden prosthesis for a left leg" from that sentence, I would have an excellent question for the clue "It was the anatomical oddity of U.S. gymnast George Eyser."
Of course, "What is leg" was nonsense in any case. I just don't agree that this has anything to do with its part of speech. |
That is exactly how Windows 7 behaves. There is a dialog with a countdown but since I was in a full screen game I didn't see it. Here is the [article]( with the steps I followed to disable to auto restart after this happened.
The situation I stated is the default, without going into gpedit.msc like the article I linked stated your Windows Updates options are:
Install updates automatically (recommended) <- this is the default option and will force an auto restart unless you cancel it.
Download updates but let me choose when to install them
Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them
Never check for updates (not recommended)
Now since I only use bootcamp for gaming I want the Install updates automatically setting selected because in a few hours I will be rebooting to OS X anyway so my system will only be at risk for 0-day exploits for a limited amount of time. |
I hope you all see the blatant hole this can be exploited through. Any cyber attack can be left up for determination of rather it's an act of war, which would allow for unprecedented power to get the ones who staged the attack. I bet if someone DDoS'ed a large company's site they'll find a loophole to classify it as legitimately attacking U.S. citizens.
And with it open for determination anything that is going for the big companies can be declared as otherwise. If someone took down Pirate Bay it wouldn't be an 'act of war' I guarantee you(which is somewhat how it actually is), but if someone shuts down one of the Koch Brothers' many personas it will instantly be declared an national threat. (which it absolutely isn't) Of course there is that one rare case it will come to good use but I project FAR more damage than good coming from this. |
That's fairly well thought-out for disk encryption, but in the case where you're sending any network traffic you're still vulnerable. It would be fairly easy to set up a packet sniffing / spoofing program on your network, albeit not on your machine, but on another computer in your network unless you're directly connected to a router or switch. In either case though, the program could be installed on your ISP's network and target your IP Address assuming it's not intentionally more dynamic than even typical DHCP address assignments. If it were, I'm sure the routing tables could be retrieved easily by sending fake requests and receiving routing table information.
I'm not sure how secure SSL or SSH communication would be; I'm assuming it could be decrypted since I believe they've both been successfully hacked now. |
If you can't turn the metro UI completely off if you really want to then I already hate it honestly. I just don't like the metro UI, and I don't want to be constantly switching back and forth. Sure, it may work well on tablets but on PC I don't think it's going to be successful. As a few others in the comments have pointed out, the metro UI, will be an absolute flop in the corporate environment.
I like my desktop the way it is now. Automatically hide the taskbar, all desktop icons hidden, some rainmeter gauges to keep track of various system information, and an object dock on the bottom of the screen set to show up on mouse hover after about 3-5 seconds. Simple, clean, and effective. That's just how I like it.
And seriously Microsoft, what is up with this "Well it appears people aren't using the start menu, so let's just make the thing take up your entire screen so you have to use it." You guys aren't thinking here at all.
Anyway, that's just my two cents. |
This is not why they were shut down. All the poker sites of any user base have a third party run over their their logs and audit them regularly. They don't cheat and would be stupid to do so since it's a cash machine. It'll be super easy to check anyway through statistics.
Some of them were running ponzi schemes and the like. However, no poker site of any decent size has ever been found out of cheating. People who lose money will always blame someone else.
Here's a list of companies that certify online casinos and poker rooms.
Obviously if one of the poker rooms certified by one of these gets caught cheating (again super easy to find out), that certification company will become bogus, so I think you can trust them. Especially if they certify many top sites. |
That's not cheating. Having an app keeping stats for you is quite common for anyone who plays online poker regularly.
Online poker is also all about stats. You can't see the other player so there are no tells. Ofcourse there is the amount of time he takes and the amount he bets, but those aren't tells in the normal sense. It's a completely different game when you sit face to face with other players.
Anyone can tell a lie on the internet. Not everyone can tell a lie in real life.
Cheating would be having a program that shows the cards of other players, which is pretty much impossible the way they have it setup. The cards of the other players are only stored on the server. Also, colluding is another way of cheating (if you play at the same table with some friends, you can eliminate cards and possibilities, bet together in a way so people fold when they wouldn't normally). In any case, if someone is cheating using any method that leads to something statistically impossible, the poker room will and does find out constantly. It's really simple data analysis. Statistics programs will not give you something statistically impossible. Also, colluding can generally be figured out by the people at the table since it's obvious after a while. |
I'm assuming that the plaintiffs are going to argue that Comcast is guilty of "predatory pricing." People are generally wary of predatory pricing because of this hypothetical scenario:
Comcast costs $50 a month in Nowhereville, and it's the only ISP. LittleNet decides to open up and charge $40, which is only $1 above their operating costs. Comcast responds with a promotion - $30 a month for two years of internets! Even if this means Comcast is making almost no profit or even taking a loss, it doesn't really matter because Comcast is a huge corporation and they're playing the long game here. LittleNet on the other hand is a locally-owned relatively small business, and when everyone switches over to Comcast, LittleNet's business model is fucked. LittleNet goes out of business, wishing they'd just taken Comcast's offer to buy them out in the first place. All of a sudden, promotion over! New low price: $55 a month. What are you going to do, switch carriers? Now Comcast has a monopoly, prices go up, and service remains stagnant.
Internet & cable are particularly susceptible to this because of high "barriers to entry" - that is, it costs a lot of money to enter the market.
[Here is an economics lecture about predatory pricing.]( |
This is true. I find it most depressing that they are just so out of touch with their customers on the consumer end of business though.
Enterprise isn't perfect, but they do have a better understanding of the corporate environment than the home.
What I want to see is the "Microsoft" brand say with Businesses, but then see it have two or three subdivisions that are more specialized for the market they are capturing.
A subdivision for consoles, a subdivision for home users, and a subdivision for PC gaming.
At least this way we could keep Xbox out of our operating systems, allow home users to have an OS that is balanced for typical home use (or slightly higher end professional use like they have had as well), and then have a final version that is lightweight and oriented at those who are PC enthusiasts and want an OS that is lightweight and speedy, but also has some advanced features here and there too.
I know it all sounds farfetched, but it seems like MS is just trying too hard to do everything with Windows. If there is one thing i've learned, I'd rather have 4 devices with dedicated tasks that work great, rather than 1 device that performs multiple tasks and is only okay or worse.
Maybe i'm just bad at conveying what I mean. I just feel like MS shouldn't be so out of touch with their users. I mean they have been the de facto OS for gaming for almost two decades now. Something tells me GFWL shouldn't have failed so miserably and Steam shouldn't be as popular as it is. MS should have been on top of all of that way before Valve was. Yet somehow they weren't. |
The problem is allowing companies to patent vague ideas, while having no actual intention of actually creating any invention, usually due to a lack of perceived purpose at the time. When someone else comes along and actually produces and finds a market for said invention, said patent troll swoops in and threatens to sue. Technically the first person/organization actually making good on following through with intent to create an invention can win rights to the patent if they can prove that the original owner of the patent had no intention to ever produce. But that takes a lot of time and money in legal battles. |
The bigger problem is that everything builds off of more basic building blocks. Lets say he has created a wormhole generator, so he goes and patents 2 of the 10 integral parts to the generator (like patenting the wormhole EM stabilization gizmo) leaving the actual key ideas to creating the wormhole a trade-secret. He now has a wormhole generator but hasn't really explained to anyone how to create one. He then goes and does basically nothing with this amazing technology, and refuses to license out the bottlenecks he patented for anything less than infinite money. So basically advancement completely stops for 20 years in the technology, and he hasn't contributed anything of value to society in terms of new information.
edit: Actually lets take this a step further. Lets say he doesn't license it at all because he wants to have a monopoly on selling the wormhole stuff. Then he does keep incrementally making it better, just slowly, and patenting it every year. Then, never can another company enter the field of wormhole generation until 20 years down the line, and even then they can't make it any better than the 20 year old wormhole generation because they can't take advantage of any of the improvements in the last 20 years because they are patented. They can't get to the point of making wormhole generation better because they will always be 20 years behind the other company. |
sigh Here we go. The accusations against Amy have to do with a fan board, Evthreads. They have nothing to do with her personally, as she rarely visits the board. This whole thing sprouted from some fan drama a couple years ago, as Evheads are notorious for fan drama. The theory is a butthurt fan (Sam Smith, who created the UK petitions and whose internet alias is Vordrak) is retaliating against the band because he was banned.
The "suicide cover-up" is false. A girl posted she was going to commit suicide and a moderator deleted the thread, as it is against the rules to post about committing suicide. The girl is alive.
There may perhaps have been porn posted to the board, but it would have been taken down quickly by the mods. In addition, the mod that it claims has been bullied by the Amy, has never communicated with the singer.
The UK parliament petitions do not actually mean anything. [Anyone can submit a petition.](
If you look at the comments, no legitimate evidence has been posted. In addition, the comments themselves really put this claim on shaky foundation. Most of the "Anonymous" that posted can no way in hell be over 12. |
Nah, it's because Apple is now the most valuable (and arguably the most popular) tech company.
People don't whine about Microsoft any more because they're no longer the biggest target. |
You will always feel most comfortable on the OS you use the most and do what you like on, which for you seems to be Windows. I do a lot of cross-platform work that forces me to switch between Mac, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu with Gnome3) constantly, so I really notice the differences. I also cannot remap the keystrokes to be more similar, because that would hurt my ability to create a good user environment for someone who uses only that OS.
In my opinion, Gnome3 is the most visual, efficient environment (but difficult for everyday users for other reasons), Mac is the most user friendly overall, and Windows has generally the same navigation speed but with compatibility and security issues that are a timesink.
I prefer to use keyboard navigation wherever possible, and for that I would rank Gnome3 best, then Windows (though rebooting windows from the keyboard is easier), then Mac (though this isn't fair because the mac trackpad is becoming more efficient than the keyboard). One of my testing boxes is a netbook with a broken trackpad running gnome3, and it is surprisingly usable (USB mouse for everything else).
Overall, if you want a beautiful UI, go for mac unless you know what you're doing and feel comfortable in Ubuntu and gnome3; but if you want DirectX games, go for Windows. The differences in productivity aren't all that great assuming Windows is running well and the user knows the OS they're working on.
Personally, if it isn't Linux at the core, then I can't stand doing any serious work. That only matters at a more technical level, though. |
Did you read the article? The difference is due to how the space is calculated (decimal vs. binary).
The reason the usable HDD space is less is because of the installed programs and the OS. Notice that in the case of the 32 GB drive (which is reported as 29 GB by File Explorer) you lose 5 GB for Windows recovery tools. You lose an additional 8 GB on built-in apps, Office, and RT. 29 - 5 - 8 = 16 GB.
The space these programs take up do not change as HDD space increases. So with a bigger drive, you get 59 - 5 - 8 = 46 GB which is a loss of 12% of your HDD storage.
As the size of the storage medium increases, the percentage decreases. So if your 931 GB HDD had those programs installed, you would have 931 - 5 - 8 = 918 GB left. This is only a 1.4% loss of disk space due to installed programs!
You could go the other way too and use a theoretical 13 GB drive. In that case you would have a 100% loss of storage. |
Tmobile is rapidly converting markets to 1900mhz HSPA+, and a good number of major markets have already been converted to HSPA+ on 1900mhz, which is fully compatible with the iPhone 5. Additionally, the are about to launch LTE on 1700mhz, which is fully supported by the iPhone 5. |
The correct answer is, 2 step authentication requiring a physical object in combination with a password. In this case you keep the "good enough" security aproach of a password, and combine it with an object.
In this way you do 2 things. If the object is ever lost, comrpomising of the account that the object protects has a time frame for when the crack can be accomplished, giving the authorised person time to have a new authentication object issued, and the previous one rendered inactive.
The best example of 2 step verification that virtually everyone is familiar with? Debit cards. |
This is only partially true (the administrative difficulty and 'a bit more security').
The real problem with single-factor passwords is that you face one of three primary challenges:
1) The password remains consistent and not changed: this is easily recalled by a human and is the easiest for the user. (Tied in: passwords are also often re-used.) As a result, the password is compromised in some fashion one time - and that's it. The unauthorized individual now has access to whatever it is (or possibly even multiple things).
2) The password policy follows secure guidelines of some sort; multiple types of characters, no dictionary words, aging/expiration, can't be re-used or the same as other passwords and so on. As a result a compromise of the password is at worst a compromise of a single access point for a limited timeframe, but it becomes difficult for a human to track this.
3) As an adjunct to 2, the human (or dog, whatever - it's the internet, so who knows?) follows good policies with regard to keeping passwords unique, changing, and complex. However, the human brain is limited in it's capacity to recall things (most of the time) and so they use some sort of credentials vault (1Password, KeePass, PasswordSafe, CyberArk, etc). However, credentials are still required for this vault which circles back to 1 and 2.
Passwords are vile, evil and terrible things - but they are, at least currently, a necessary evil. Many businesses require that your 'main' password (for the corporate windows domain or whatever) be changed every 90 days. It can't be changed to any of the previous X passwords (12-18 aren't uncommon values here). This requires people to create and memorize a new, complex password on a regular basis - there are great ways to handle this (such as using a lengthy but easily-recalled sentence) - however that can become especially onerous if you are working with systems that require entering the password on a semi-regular basis.
In my current company, I've had a number of positions, and in some of them your password has to be re-entered for various applications on a semi-regular basis, often whilst in the middle of doing things that are somewhat time-sensitive.
Adding a yubikey to the mix helps address the problem; the human portion of the password is less crucial, and of course - what to do when the token is lost is the same as when a password or a driver's license or credit card is lost. Report it lost/stolen, it's deactivated, issue a new one. Even pure-hardware tokens aren't particularly expensive.
Ultimately, the real issue is that passwords, as an authentication scheme, really, really, really suck. It's just that we don't really have anything better to offer. |
Passwords are only a problem, because it is difficult for humans to remember sufficiently strong passwords, especially at a rate of one-per-website, especially especially when pretty much every website wants you to create an account. Password generators and managers like SuperGenPass and LastPass are working to fix this problem.
There are three significant ways to authenticate a user:
Something they know.
Something they have.
Something they are.
Google is simply talking about trading the first for the second. They would be better off keeping the first and adding the second. Which is already what they do with two-factor authorization using mobile devices. |
God damn it. I am so fucking tired of this bullshit of password security. Authenticators are the best way to fix it but there is a problem with logins. Every password is supposed to be unique. The problem is that we don't have the memories or the time to deal with 8 different passwords (a conservative number) at a given time. Then throw in authenticators, passwords that require capital letters, numbers, special characters, or requires all or bans special characters. This whole bullshit of forced password security just makes it harder to remember the damn things so we keep papers and files for passwords. I can tell you I have 6 passwords at the moment. I know them all but I hardly remember what password goes to what so I try 3 times and get locked out for 10 fucking minutes or I have to change my password again. Also they require a new password every 90 days and you can't use the same password twice in a year so you have to rotate 4 passwords a year for that. |
By no means am I familiar with all the Sinologists in the world or universities. But my question was, Who the fuck is Wes Cecil?
I took a look at his credentials as a "PhD" and his appeal to authority is only in those there letters. He didn't study China, his website doesn't suggest he even studies China. On the faculty bio at Peninsula University, he's listed as a professor of Philosophy and English.
I didn't spend the whole time listening to his lecture but beyond some really basic info I would caution taking his word (if he does introduce any) on his pet theories on China. |
The 21" (245/35/R21) summer tires have a lower profile than the 19" (245/45/19) all seasons which means that their overall radius is almost identical. The actual radius of the tire is the radius of the rim plus the height of the sidewall. The overall difference in speed should be about 0.3% or 0.2mph difference at 60mph . [Source]( |
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