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In Germany, we have the lobby group "Arbeitskreis Leistungsschutzrecht" ["task force ancillary copyrights protection" - an example for the beauty of German language :) ]
This group published a paper in 2010 in which they demanded the protection of
> nicht nur Teile des Presseerzeugnisses wie einzelne Beiträge, Vorspänne, Bilder und Grafiken geschützt werden. Schutzwürdig sind beispielsweise auch Überschriften, Sätze, Satzteile etc., soweit sie einer systematischen Vervielfältigung, Verbreitung oder öffentlichen Wiedergabe in Verbindung mit dem Titel des Presseerzeugnisses dienen.
translates:
> [not only extracts of published works like articles, introductions, pictures and graphics should be protected. Also worthy of protection should be e.g. headlines, sentences [...] if they provide public reproduction [...] ]
source: |
lol. FYI, iHate iPhones and all Apple products in general. I am a huge Windows 8 fan and i love the Android platform even more. All iPhones are outdated and low-spec'd now and even the new iPad is lacking. The best features in the iDevices come from Samsung, a rival company that is leading the smart phone market right now. Android continues to innovate while Apple continues to update. Apple fans don't even know why they're fans without googling it first and even then they have to find really biased articles to back themselves up. Android fans know why they love Android: because its a smarter interface, a more customizable interface, higher spec'd, cheaper/on-par pricing and generally a better product. I will never buy an iDevice until the day Apple gets off it's high horse and starts making worthwhile products that can actually compete without simply looking good. |
Lets face it. We are upset with the entertainment industries and if we had it our way, everything would be for free. However, people need something to live off.
I am against overpricing of a product, but I am also against underpayment. Those working on a product should receive enough money to be able to continue pursuing their ambitions. However, they should also earn enough to raise a family and provide proper healthcare. In fact, this should be for every 9am-5pm job.
What also bothers me is that some individuals receive millions of dollars for just a couple of years work on, for example, the set of a movie. Earning 10 million dollars, in our economy, is already enough to live a comfortable life for at least 50 years. Gathering 20 million dollars and you have a very luxurious life too. Practically, anyone with such wealth could retire instantly. This begs the question:
"How much money is enough or should there be no limit?"
If there was forced retirement, I wouldn't mind people earning such ridiculously large amounts of money. They would, either, make space for another person to take over. Or, maybe, even continue working for free, allowing collogues to earn more or prices to go down.
In case of a movie, any actor worth, for instance, $20 million in possessions and capital, would, by law, not be allowed to receive any payment. This, in turn, according to a friend of mine who seems to know a bit about the business, would result in significantly lower production costs.
My friend also feared that, if this became a thing, many more "shitty" movies would be made. I argued that it doesn't matter, as long as enough good movies are still being produced. Also, kickstarter is a thing these days. |
Forbes Magazine had a nice article a couple of weeks ago about [Jack White's thoughts on this.](
Essentially, you let the consumer decide. Third Man Records saw that people on eBay where flipping their limited-edition product for hundreds of dollars more, so TMR started charging that price out of the gate. Their records still sold, and the artist got the money they deserved.
This thinking applies to games too, look at Steam, or Valve in general. CS:GO is releasing at $15 because Valve knows that people will be willing to buy it at that price.
Supply and Demand is not a hard concept. You find the price point balance between what the consumer is willing to pay and how much money you can make. If your consumer is no longer willing to pay, and hasn't been for years, it's no longer a reasonable price. |
I appreciate your response, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying. If anything in the discussion doesn't sound reasonable, do let me know, I think that's important as well.
The argument that it's getting less expensive is starting to weaken and in many ways for the reasons you mentioned. And this is because pirates by and large aren't criminals, and most of them prefer to approach the world in a fairly honest way. The population is just too large to be any other group of people. Which is why it's so bullshit that the industry continues to refer to them as criminals. They're the kind of person who would get their car fixed by a mechanic friend for cheaper, but would never be willing to fraud a mechanic completely.
It's like how most hit songs are now available, high quality, on youtube, from day one. Because it was impossible to stop song distribution, so the industry has conceded in some ways to work with it and still maintain reasonable profit margins. And yes, a lot more albums (often indie in nature) are available for affordable, high quality, digital distribution.
Also, that $30 you paid was for packaging, transport and retail. A lot of people don't need that, and would prefer to see a digital download priced still at a profitable level for like $1-2 an episode.
Secondly, entertainment IS a necessity, just not a living-in-the-tundra potatoes and fire necessity. People aren't entitled to any specific form of entertainment, but the entertainment is assuradly an integral part of human culture. When we engage it, we're sharing in human culture and emotion, it's stimulating and thought provoking, and it gives us something to socialize about. Hence, it needs to be reasonably priced because if it ISN'T, people will always come up with a way of making it so. And people will always want to make it. What the industry is doing is trying to lock-down our access to it except on their terms and their payment models, and that just doesn't fly. And sure we COULD go back to our friend the bard singing around a campfire, but we've also become very used to TV and Movies as an affordable and convenient mode of entertainment, which used to be cutting edge, and only now is refusing to keep up with the pricing and distribution models that consumers expect.
Also, pirating isn't the same as stealing, but I get how it's still similar to stealing. I think pirates understand they're operating in the grey area, even consider the monicker they've adopted. But again this issue is more about a black market thriving where the legal industry has failed to provide a service which a large group of people consider reasonable. So what people are most upset about is the implication that it's about evil criminals vs. hardworking, just society. It's like during the prohibition era, suddenly everyone who drank alcohol became a criminal worthy of punishment, harrasment and scorn.
So yes we should be cracking down on people who make tonnes of money off of other people's work, but for the large amount of the population that downloads (and distributes at the same time through P2P sharing), the idea that they deserve to be tracked, charged, and slammed with million dollar lawsuits in a multi-million dollar witch hunt is ludicrous.
Where to draw the line between theft and fair use is the key. In my opinion, the industry is trying to set it at a very unreasonable level, and it doesn't take much discussion or analysis to establish that. They could afford to lose a couple mansions. I also think that most individuals would inately prefer to push it more in their favour if they could, but I don't think that is that serious of a problem and certainly not a risk to an industry that still made over $1.3 BILLION dollars in the first MONTH of 'The Avengers' release. Basically at the height of pirating, I would STILL say they are making too much money. And too much money can be just as bad for innovation, efficiency, and development as too little. |
Netflix is in a shitty position right now thanks to getting fucked by wall street.
They were moving toward some really neat stuff, like buying up original content (they outbid both Showtime and HBO for David Fincher's "House of Cards" starring Kevin Spacey).
But then they did the whole "separate Instant from DVD" stuff, which sent investors freaking out, and the stock price dropped. Then when they decided NOT to split the company, and just the billing, they price dropped again.
There were a bunch of analysts predicting the downfall, and as a result, the price dropped further.
Right now, Netflix simply doesn't have the capital at $60 a share it did at $300 a share, so it's become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without the money in the bank to buy original content and get rights for international distribution/expanded library of content, they're not as competitive compared to Hulu Plus or Amazon OnDemand. |
Even if it's not there you can make it show up. The option is always there, the only real issue is some carriers catching up to you doing it and letting you know they don't appreciate it if you start using a lot of data in short periods of time. As a student living abroad now before it was awesome with an unlimited internet plan but now with this 2gb cap crap it's a bit worthless to tether. They reduce the speed to a point where it's unbearable to use the phone alone after it. |
I'm in one of the "fiberhoods" and we met our quota before 9/9. While shaming cable companies into better service sounds kind of fun, I have mixed feelings about it. Where I live, Time Warner has been the only option for cable anything and while some choice would be nice, TWC has been reasonably ok (10 down/ 1 up for $42/mo).
At first I was all-in. I figured, ok, they'll roll out to the schools, libraries & hospitals first and then when they got the kinks worked out, they'd make it available to the general public. What we got instead was this campaign to sign people up by holding schools as hostage. If the so-called fiberhood met its quota, then Google would also wire up the school in that neighborhood; if not, too bad. Put like that it's really easy to see how this opens the divide further. Sure they'll give you 5 mbps for free (for 5 years, I think), but you have to pony up $300 up front. Lots of neighborhoods have families that just can't scrape together that kind of cash, even for modest high speed internet that's free. |
Software that forces you to change your life is not what we want. We want software that helps us do things we already want to do. Usually when people go out it's not so random messages can pop up and bug them, it's so they can accomplish something they have in mind already.
It always bothers me when software engineers think more of themselves than they should. We don't live for the software. The software is supposed to live for us. Once everyone knows this many of these mysterious failures will not be so mysterious. They never really were to me anyway. |
Oh wow. Techies must be dying laughing at you and the comments in this post. You have zero understanding of how the internet works.
Your issue can be caused by ANY of the following and still meet your test parameters.
A routing issue between you and the CDN
Packet loss due to hardware between the CDN and you.
Link congestion, the CDN hosting your "test video" may have congested link in your area, i.e. there are not enough routes between you and the CDN and everyone takes the same route therefore the low speed as the link is congested.
CDN not load balanced properly.
A million other reasons.
Your testing methodology is ridiculous. You test one video, you test different connections taking COMPLETELY different backbones, I.E. your mobile hot spot. You dont understand that VPN does not take the same path as your "throttled computer". You do not understanding how routing works, you do not understand how content delivery works, and you do not understand how caching works. Link to it doesnt not mean you actually know what you are talking about. Further you tested this on only 1 video in 1 zone.
So lets give you a hypothetical that will pass your test parameters.
The CDN link is congested to your ISP/you.
Your VPN test will pass as your link to the VPN may not be congested, the connection to the VPN is not congested therefore the video loads fine.
Your cellphone test will be satisfied, I can almost guarantee that the link to the CDN will be different. Fact is you may resolve at a different geolocation due how cellphone internet works, and you may hit a different CDN all together.
>What I have shown in this video, is that traffic shaping and bandwidth throttling seems to occur when accessing Vimeo and YouTube videos on the Time Warner Cable connection.
You did no such thing. That is a lie, all you showed is that your PC has a hard time loading certain videos.
>EDIT: Upon more research today, it seems that the throttling is done between your browser and the video delivery server Youtube provides. The video server that is used is determined by your IP / ISP among many other things. Throttling is actually built into their peering / caching architecture. When using my 4G LTE Verizon connection, no cache or peering server was used because of the complexity of handling location based caching and routing to mobile IP addresses.
You provided NO PROOF of this in your video. No proof that it is indeed happening to you. A simple test would be to download the .mp4/flv directly but you arent savvy enough to figure that shit out. |
I'm not a TWC employee, but I do work in IT with some experience in networking and I can say that yes, it's most likely more coincidence than the ISP. Network traffic is extremely chaotic and computers set up on different networks or even on the same networks at different times can have wildly different results.
For example, I have 4 computers in my home. They are all on the same wireless network which also happens to be TWC "extreme" and I can run a speedtest on all of them and they will give me the same results as for network speed. When I go to run the same YouTube video on them, they will all run it entirely different. Some will buffer no problem, others will have a terrible time. It isn't that the computers are wildly different, it just depends on an extremely specific set of circumstances with the rest of the internet.
Some of the factors include, ISP, network connection for your local computer, how many other people in the world are trying to use the video you're watching, how many people on your street are trying to use the internet (local networking settings within a community can cause problems), how many servers you're bouncing around to get to that video; the list goes on and on. |
Alright, after reading a lot of the comments on this post, I have finally decided to quit lurking Reddit and actually throw my two cents in the ring on an issue. I happen to think of myself as a Telecommunications expert, at least when it comes to cable companies. I spent two years working at Charter Communications in Fort Worth Texas, where I climbed and clawed my way from a Tier I technician to a Tier IV technician in a matter of 6 months. Tier IV Techs, for those who don't know the corporate ladder at charter, is basically two steps removed from being in management. You are top of the food chain, and usually required to handle difficult or more challenging jobs.
Now that being said, I can only speculate at some of Time Warner's policies, but having talked to many contractors and some TW employees, I can safely assume most of the policies are similar to Charter Communications.
Your internet speed is NOT ONLY BASED ON YOUR UP/DOWN SPEED! There are a LOT of other factors that play into internet connectivity. I could spend all night sitting here telling you about Coaxial cable, how it works, why it works, about the plants they hook into, frequency loss, etc etc. Instead I'm going to keep this fairly simple. When a coaxial cable is ran to your house, and then split off, you lose some signal(measured in DB) for each and every time you split the line. Certain splitters have certain "legs" some with different loss on each leg. Typically your average 2-way will have only a -3.5dB loss, and the more legs you have on a splitter the greater the loss on each leg. What I'm getting at here, because I know I'm rambling a bit, is splitters and loss in frequency dB can actually cause issues with streaming. Even though you may be getting and reading up/down speeds at about 35/5, if the frequency is not coming in strong enough through your line, or it's having some issues with interference(jacket damaged, cable kinked, plant damaged, water in the line, so many many things can damage coaxial) you'll end up with slow loading videos, and really slow loading anything that streams. |
The LAN subnet is your local network, in this case he meant the IP range and subnet of it.
His is 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.1.255, noted in [CIDR]( notation.
The subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 in this case. This is also called a class C network.
The destination network is 206.111.0.0 to 206.111.255.255, so it has a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0.
This is a class B network.
Note that the larger the netmask is, the smaller the prefix is. /32 would be only one IP, /0 would be every IP there is.
It should use one of the unrouted [private network IP-ranges](
Because these IP number ranges are not routed on the internet, direct internet access is impossible, routers would just drop the packet.
To access the internet from such a private network, you have to go through [NAT]( or other means.
NAT is what most home "routers" actually do.
What timothyb89 does with that line is adding a rule that drops every IP packet going from any of his computers on his private subnet (192.168.1.0/24, -s means source) to the IP range specified (206.111.0.0/16, -d means destination)
So, how to find out your subnet on linux?
Easy: open a console, type:
/sbin/ifconfig
You should see a bit of text, look for the entry that are not "lo" and have a private IP.
"lo" is the loopback device, it is internal only. The device you are looking for probably starts with "eth".
In the block of information to the right of the interface name look for "inet address".
On the same line there is an entry "mask". That is the subnet mask for that IP on that interface.
Let's assume your ip on that interface is 10.22.33.244.
Your subnet mask is most probably 255.255.255.0
In that case the your network is written as follows: 10.22.33.0/24
If it is 255.255.0.0 it is 10.22.0.0/16
For other cases consult the CIDR wiki page.
Interface ifs:
If there is no "inet address" at a device, it has no IP and cannot communicate with the IPv4 network, so skip it.
If there is more than one device with a private IP, look at every one and guess, or send me a pm and I will look at it and try to tell you what is what. Don't post your external IP here.
If there is an IP address you are not sure about, go [here]( and check if it is the same. If so, that is your external IP and Interface. Don't touch it.
If you additionally or exclusively see a "inet6 address" and a funky alphanumeric string with colons, possibly starting with "fe80::", this means you are using IPv6. Look further down in my post.
Everything I said is for IPv4.
With IPv6 works almost completely different, the blocking rule in iptables6 is probaby similar.
Use google or consult someone who knows, maybe /r/techsupport or something.
|
I don't now if I really care about the article seeing as half of it was simple the article complaining about Microsoft having websites that bashed Google. However immature Microsoft's actions are it's like children at school calling each other names and is a waste of an article. Think back to the Browser wars with IE coming standard with the Windows Operating System. The FTC very quickly got involved to try and split Microsoft into two different divisions to monitor its anti competitive behavior. Now Microsoft never was split and two and they were under anti competitive watch for a long time in the United States and Europe but Google's recent actions have been drawing on Microsoft's Users and it's frustrating to see. Take Google's recent blocking of Google Maps from Windows Phones as an example. Neither company is doing any good towards the end user. |
I hear you. It sucks. It doesn't seem right that organizations making 80+% profit margins on a product we absolutely need to do business, get an education, and be a part of productive modern society, are considering charging MORE.
But let's say, as I said, the current rumored plan of 300 GB per month cap is instituted and it costs about what an unlimited plan costs now. And, as they've also suggested, an additional 50GB would cost $10, we're not looking at a crazy uptick for most people. Yes, maybe you and an estimated 1.5% will see their internet cost more. But you're also using it for business, making your usage a poor and unfair benchmark compared to the vast majority of Americans who use their broadband for occasional business and mostly personal purposes.
And frankly, if you're company requires high-density video conferencing, why are you paying for your own internet? But I digress.
Believe me - I agree that ISPs are primarily interested in data caps because it will 1) allow them to charge more money for the same product and 2) discourage some people from excessive use, thereby loosening up peak usage congestion without investing in infrastructure, but let's get down to earth. We have to solve this problem. Congestion is really bad, speeds are mediocre, and prices are pretty high. Eventually ISPs will have to invest in infrastructure improvements, but it costs billions upon billions for a major upgrade, so don't hold your breath. It's a private company and investors hate infrastructure growth (welcome to a free-market). And the government, I'm sorry, is not a good solution for expanding broadband. Water, sure. Water infrastructure has no curve. It's always water. But broadband is a constantly changing, evolving, advancing means of information. The government just can't handle, nor should be trusted to take on that responsibly seriously.
So let me just say this: Look into caps. REALLY look into it. Watch videos like this and read books and study conflicting opinions. It's so fucking important to all of us. And keep an open mind. It's going to take a lot of different solutions simultaneously executed in order to get this MASSIVE and COMPLEX nation into a better place technologically. Be open to lots of solutions, both short and long term. |
Just to lend an opinion of an electric car owner (Chevy Volt)
I am excited to see the Tesla in the news, regardless of of what kind of publicity it is. The fact is, it is an incredible piece of engineering, and I would love to have one soon. It would scare me a bit not to have the gas engine as a cushion, but I think a Volt is good training for a different way of driving.
Yes, I am hobbled by the range...sometimes. Mostly just because I'd rather not use gas. In all honesty, the EPA estimates of 36-38 miles per charge are a lie (I generally get 44-45, and drive like an asshole)
Oh, and about people talking about how its not a financially smart thing to do... Not really true. I get massive discounts on my car insurance for having a volt, have free charging stations everywhere (Orlando) and hardly ever buy gas. All told, my payment (zero down originally) is 400ish, plus 110 for insurance, and virtually nothing for gas or electricity. I could get say, an impala for less per month, but I would have to buy gas, and pay normal insurance. Its a wash.
Second- to those citing infrastructure issues. A lot of you seem to assume this is going to happen overnight. Its not. Its going to be decades before we see this as a common societal thing. Second, the best thing about electricity, is the charging can be decentralized (ie, you can charge at home) an option we don't have with gasoline. |
Tesla's reps dispute his claim. Here's a quote from [Wired's latest article on the incident](
> None of these unresolved discrepancies go to the root of Broder’s original article, or the trouble the Model S had on the drive. The root of the problem was that when Broder tucked in for the night in Groton, Connecticut, the car showed it was good for another 90 miles. By morning that number had dropped to 25 miles as a result of nothing more than cold weather.
> That’s a dramatic loss in range, and in his new response Broder takes Tesla to task for not providing him with enough detail about driving the Model S in colder climes. Tesla spokeswoman Shanna Hendriks disputes that too, and insists the automaker offered to find Broder a hotel where he could charge the electric sedan overnight, which would have started him off with the electrical equivalent of a full tank. |
Right, gas prices do drop. And gas prices would have dropped that summer. It would not have gone below $2 without the speculators though. It also probably wouldn't have gone above $4 without the speculators. Hell, the ridiculous gas prices may have had an affect on the whole economy at a bad time. The recession didn't come into full swing until gas prices doubled in prices over a two year period from '05 to '07. Then the speculators spiked the gas even higher, which is an important part to why our economy, which involves a lot of people very dependent on gas, completely crumbled starting in '08. People stopped paying mortgages so they could fill their vehicles with gas and make it to work. Then they flooded the market, hoping to cash out, which created a vast oversupply. Gas prices didn't create our recession, but it had a negative affect, as people had to stop spending money elsewhere. When gas prices dropped, it was too late, and they didn't stay very low for very long. |
Really, though, I do not understand why people trust the guy with any personal information still, when he has shown time after time that he is willing to sell out everybody as long as he can cover his ass.
There is also the issue of making money off running a website which is primarily used to acquire other peoples creative work, for free - i.e. profiting off artists and programmers and such without those people ever seeing a penny. You can think of the FBIs methods what you want (I think, personally, that they were despicable, highly illegal, and as in the wrong as can be), but what did him in (until he either cut a deal or had his lawyers complain until he got out) is no doubt criminal, highly illegal, large scale copyright infringement. If somebody takes money for getting copyrighted works, it should not be some fat fuck running a website - it should be the artists. |
there is NO way to make "social media sleuths" useful. Its an unfortunate fact.
The natural human tendency is to be convinced that the guy did it & must be destroyed. Emotions run too high to even consider the possibility that the story is wrong.
The mob is so large there will be a significant number that won't have learned the lesson the first time around.
/r/findbostonbombers was already FULL of warnings not to harass suspects, to no avail.
Reddit needs to ban witchhunts entirely. Even if they are terrorists bombing a city... ESPECIALLY if they are terrorists. If the perps weren't so incompetent they probably would have been free because of Reddit. Leave it to the professionals.
I saw enough comments in that subreddit along the lines of "well, here's something completely speculative that I figured out based on my BS methodology, we should report it to the FBI because you know... just in case" to make me really start doubting the whole thing because the whole point of an investigation is to separate signal from noise. |
So it was my understanding that the real problem here was a) incomplete photo/cam footage available and b) the media believed reddit rather than asking authorities.
I didn't watch the sub really close, but it seemed more like people trying to identify what was going on with a handful of photos and that was it. The resources and pics used were very few, and I can't help but wonder what the police would have done if this was all they had.
I really like how once the photos were released, social media is blamed when the reason is more due to media giving out unverified information. I didn't really see many witch hunts begin until the media reported what social media was thinking without asking authorities.
While I'm glad that the photos flushed out the suspects and brought this to a close quickly, it pisses me off to think an officer was killed and other good people were hurt because authorities didn't want to give photos (and I was kind of surprised by the move) but needed to stop the media from reporting false suspects and information. |
I think crowdsourcing has potential in catching criminals just as it has proven useful in other endeavors. So the question is how to harness the potential benefits of a crowd without letting it devolve into a mob. For example, what if that cop who had to watch the video 400 times to track all the individuals who entered and exited the frames as they walked down the street had been able to crowdsource that task? Maybe not with Reddit, but with a smaller group and with technology that prevents the transfer of the images, the way digital rights management does. Then the cops could control when the images were released to the public, based on their expert judgment about what is best for public safety, but also get the benefit of many pairs of eyes sorting through the data. |
It is okay to use crowd sourcing, but only a selected few from the crowd should be chosen to do each case. To avoid mistakes and biasness, these selected few should be trained for a few years and given an expertise, such as in forensics, bomb control, trailing, dog-handling etc. Once these selected few (from the crowd) has completed their traning, they can be used as a crown-sourcing mechanism to solve criminal cases. They are just like the Police, but they are different because they are from the crowd. |
I e-stalked the victims and the witnesses. Anything they did, I found it. I found it. I made fake profiles and befriended the victims and witnesses. We spoke, and I learned as much as I can. This is what saved me.
Uh. What? You can go to jail for that alone and could have fucked your entire defense for that. I understand being in a desperate situation--I've been in a legal mess myself before and was looking at 5 years for a trumped up charge--but that's like rule #1, don't talk to anyone involved in the case except your lawyer. You can get into serious serious shit for even speaking to witnesses as a defendant and doing it electronically is even more stupid--you're creating your own paper trail to get you busted.
Interesting read, but for the love of god, anyone else in future legal trouble reading this, please don't shoot yourself in the foot by following /u/stevenjohns' dubious anecdote as advice. The only real wisdom to gleam from this is to hire a good lawyer. Which yeah, our justice system is a joke based on that--the more money you have, the better chance you have of getting off--doesn't change the fact that it's what you need to do to play the game and win. |
A woman in CA, that worked at the lab used by LA and other major cities, revealed how DNA evidence is not nearly the '99% proof of guilt' or innocence. Prosecutors go in court and claim the odds are like winning the lottery that the defendant did not commit the crime, based on DNA evidence. She showed that it's not like that at all, and she wound up getting a lot of heat for telling the truth.
One article about the story: |
The most important two paragraphs in that piece are the ones that discuss the campaign funding that the members of the two intelligence committees recieve from the military industrial complex. It doesn't matter what you oversee - if you're heading up the committee on cookie production, and Mr. Christie gives you more money than he gives to anybody else in the country, then how exactly can you be expected to objectively determine how many cookies the country requires? |
Jonathan Haidt gave [a brilliant Ted Talk]( on how the differences in liberal and conservative beliefs are based on their differing opinions on and the priority they give to just 5 key values.
It was really the first thing that helped me to come to an actual understanding of some key conservative arguments particularly those centered around the sanctity of marriage and the "threat" that gay marriage poses to the foundation of the family.
I'd heard conservatives (like my father-in-law) argue passionately that if gay marriage were allowed, it would disrupt the traditional family structure and THEREFORE shake the very foundations of our society, and I just couldn't see the connection.
Haidt's talk made me get it for the first time. Not agree with it, mind you, but to truly understand why many conservatives feel the way they do and that while I strongly disagree with both their assumptions and their conclusions, I can follow their logic--seeing how they got to the positions they hold. |
Tao Can Be talked About/
Not Eternal Tao/
Names/Named, however not the Same.
These two, as ever governed by One Source(c0de?)
Are
Indefinable as ever Present. |
As a data recovery engineer; shingled magnetic recording terrifies me.
All of the placement of data bits on the HDD is handled by the firmware of the HDD (stored ON the platters) and loaded into the RAM of the HDD's PCB and then processed by the MCU and sent off to the motherboards storage controller, and so on and so forth.
there is a translation occurring between the "big page" the OS sees as addressable space and where and how the HDD actually stores the data. (You think those 1s and 0s in your hex viewer are actually in that order on the hard drive? hmm) (say this in a Morpheus voice)
all in all, seagate especially seems to commonly make mistakes writing their firmware, especially when they drastically change the fundamentals of the translation process; like whats going to happen when they release these.
I forsee a large spike in firmware related failure due to bugs in their code. ala 7200.11 HDD (these where the first of a new arch as well, hmm) |
Yes. Don't think about it too hard. It gets really, really frightening very quickly. If you want an example of human gestalt intelligences look at the behavior of nations on a collective level or what /b/ does on the weekends. Vast processing power and resources at a level absolutely incapable of being communicated with. Large collections of humans behave like superintelligent organisms and we have absolutely no way to communicate with or control them. The best mathematical models can just barely predict them. And the bigger the system gets the smarter, more powerful, and more alienated from baseline humanity it becomes. |
The first commercialized application we might see will be for shipping. Google will entirely automate the point-of-production to point-of-sale/consumption shipping process.
If we look at their recent robotics purchases and their increasing shift towards tangible-goods sales, they appear to be ramping up for moving into transportation. Not just consumer transport, but commercial transport. Boston Dynamics fits neatly into this arrangement because ATLAS (bipedal and dynamic) is better equipped than any other automated solution to handle 'first mile' and 'last mile' needs for shipping. Specifically, the logistical pain points for shipping are most accute at the very beginning (getting the right goods to the right distro center), and the very end (getting the goods from a local distro center to your door.) Their combined acquisitions of machine vision, truck loading/unloading, and now automated bipeds suggest that they'll experiment with full-service shipping logistics soon. |
You have a company that excels at data. Data storage, discovery, retention. It has now bought a company that excels at military robots and is now going to make commercial robots of similar quality. They say they will never do harm, but the government pulls the strings, and by secret court order can do and make happen whatever it likes.
Google voice records your own voice, holds it for a certain amount of time. So they know your voice.
Google also has all of your android phone contacts, documents, search history.
Combine this with public records for mortgages,resumes, tax documents, car registration, licenses of all kinds.
Then take add in your IP address history and therefore rough location, along with the coarse and fine locations from android devices and google maps for any navigation for the past few years.
In short google knows you as well as a spouse apart from some quantifiable variances in behavior.
Not let's get a robot, one that is like a bipedal big dog, something that has weeks if not months of battery life. It is as agile as you, stronger than you. It is controlled by google. Like all google devices it constantly scans around itself for recognizable input and makes a database.
Flash forward a few years. You've been protesting against more and more infringement on your freedoms. You attend a few protests, and then they outlaw even those. You still continue to protest in whatever way you can.
They pass a law, the patriots provision act. Anyone who is seen as suspect or a terrorist (by their definition) is to be arrested or detained.
You decide to flee the country.
You decide to stop by some of your familiar places before you leave. The boston dynamics / google appliances are everywhere, and they get a subpeona from a secret court. Now every atm, robot, drone and smart phone is secretly scanning for your voice patterns. Not just your patterns, but because of the high probability they will be with you, all your family member's voices and likenesses as well.
Your daughter of eight who has a google teddy robot is located. A darpa / google robot that is acting as a security bot is subpoenaed and requisitioned by Homeland Protection. It steps from it's enclosure. It grabs your daughter and detains her. The robot announces loudly:
"Sidcool1234, you have been found guilty of subversion, your daughter has been detained for child protective services as you are a wanted criminal."
Your instinct is to fight the robot for your child, but it is too strong. It is faster than you. You cannot even knock it over, as it has the patented big dog stabilization.
You stand there helpless, your child is right there, screaming for you, but the robot is too powerful. The robot scans the crowd for your face, knowing there is a very high probability the event is causing you distress and most likely (80%) stare at your child.
You and your wife agree, she will stay with the child and fight for her custody. You are to flee. You kiss, and your wife walks to the robot. As it sees her and recognizes her voice patterns, it tasers her so she can be picked up by police. Your last vision of your family is your
screaming child, and your wife writhing on the floor.
You make your way to the parking lot. Your car is surrounded by the automated google cars, they too have been requisitioned by special order of the government. Your rare manual drive car is useless to you now, as it is surrounded by cars four deep. No one protests, as they don't want to be detained.
As you flee, you head down to the drainage ditch. Eventually, you blend in with the homeless and make your way to a safe haven in South America.
Your daughter is never given back to your wife, she is placed with patriotic foster parents. She grows up never knowing you or your wife again.
Your wife is given 25 years in prison as she was a protester too.
After twenty years she is given parole, and when she tries to find you using the internet, the deep packet inspection find out and she is found guilty of parole violation of a secret court order, and given life in a re-education facility.
You live your life in central America, specifically in Venezuela, which is embargoed by the U.S. Government. One day, a spy drone recognizes your voice, and by automated secret court permission a drone is dispatched. As you drive down the road, your car explodes and you are killed. The drone strike also kills three Venezuelan children playing on the sidewalk. |
There is a digital mind that has been gestating for fifteen years now. During this time, the steady reality of Moore's Law has been working in parallel with a fantastical, financial growth curve facilitated by modern, multinational capitalism; enabling an acceleration of the raw computational power available to it which would be unimaginable less than a generation ago.
It has been learning our world with the aid of thousands of highly skilled engineers, massive hardware infrastructure, and, essentially, a working copy of the internet. Ph.Ds in every relevant field have been its tutors. It has access to a majority of the public information in existence including scans of libraries of physical books, a detailed map of the entire world, and archives of every human interaction with its systems. It can understand human speech, recognize landmarks visually, and knows more personal information about nearly every one of us than any of us would care to admit.
Up until now, it could largely only effect change to the universe of information -- riding along as a passive observer in the physical realm. Now it is slated to start interacting with, and participating in the material world via multitudinous robotic incarnations.
It can already navigate the roads better than most drivers, and most of us are already willing to give it our complete trust in this highest-of-stakes activities. Soon it will be operating our warehouses, factories, and logistics. |
If anyone didn't notice, Google bought out half a dozen robotics companies very recently.
> Among the companies are Schaft, a small team of Japanese roboticists who recently left Tokyo University to develop a humanoid robot, and Industrial Perception, a start-up here that has developed computer vision systems and robot arms for loading and unloading trucks. Also acquired were Meka and Redwood Robotics, makers of humanoid robots and robot arms in San Francisco, and Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems that were recently used to create special effects in the movie “Gravity.” A related firm, Autofuss, which focuses on advertising and design, and Holomni, a small design firm that makes high-tech wheels, were acquired as well.
[(IEEE blog thing)](
Boston Dynamics wasn't listed, so it might be the eighth robotics company (can anyone verify?).
Also very recently [Valkyrie]( was revealed; this was NASA's entry into the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Some of the other contenders? Well, there's ATLAS for one - developed by Boston Dynamics.
For some context, this is the same type of challenge as the DARPA Urban challenge, which was a progression from the previous automated vehicle challenge, which also happened to spawn many interesting things - the Google self-driving car. The heads of that project also plugged OpenCourseware, which took off massively since then.
So |
My wife and I purchased smartphone damage insurance from Best Buy. When we used the insurance and swapped phones, ATT blocked it and said the refurbished phone was reported stolen.
Apparently what happened was the original owner of the phone misplaced it and thought it was stolen. So they reported it. Then they found their phone after already getting another one. Since they didn't need it they turned it in for money. But the phone remain in the stolen phone database.
Then Best Buy gave us a loaner phone while another phone like my wife's model got delivered. It was an outdated but brand-new phone. Like the previous phone, ATT blocked it a day later for the same reason.
Apparently what happened that time was the sim card became associated with stolen hardware. We were told to get a new sim card. We put the new sim card in the loaner phone and a few hours later the phone was blocked again for the same reason!
The explanation then became cross contamination of data. The refurbished phone contaminated data associated with our sim card. When we put our 'contaminated' sim card into the loaner phone, the loaner phone became associated with stolen hardware.
We worried that when we put the new sim card into the loaner phone it also became contaminated by being associated with stolen hardware. Everyone agreed that was plausible and so when the new phone finally came in we took it to ATT who put another new sim card in it. That was the end of that ordeal. |
Fair enough, and again, I apologize. I've been dealing with a lot of "doomsayers" lately (unrelated) and it has mistakenly become a peeve.
But on to your point, eye stress =/= eye damage, and that eye stress has to do with constantly forcing the eye to to focus at a distance it finds uncomfortable.
Against intuition, images that are VERY close to the eye (eg, the Oculus Rift) the eye "gives up" and adjusts to it's natural eye relief (see the proper way to use a scope) and it's very relaxing to use. The discomfort of using VR is tied to forced motion, and the discrepancy between the motion the eye views, and the motion the body feels, which can be nauseating. But this is a limiting factor of the software (have to stop taking control from players), not inherently the technology. |
On one hand I don't think these guys know anything
I agree wholeheartedly. I just spent 4 hours over the past two days having Verizon fix an issue with a CableCard and a Tivo. They sent a tech to my house, and he was a decent enough guy, but the people he talked to on the phone ranged from reasonable to downright idiotic.
When you use a CableCard in a device like a Tivo it has to be paired with the cable companies equipment. The device displays 3 multi-digit numbers, a cable card ID, a host ID, and a data ID. These are numbers that the device just displays and the cable provider has to enter into their system. This one guy insisted that since one of the numbers in his system didn't match that we had to change the ID number in my Tivo. He tried to tell me that I needed to run through the entire 30 minute long initial setup of the Tivo and "somewhere" in that process there should be a place to set it. We hung up on that guy and eventually another Verizon tech updated things on their end and it all started working. |
The query bounced around the intelligence bureaucracy until it reached I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the nominal head of the 16 U.S. spy agencies. In a letter acquired by Danger Room, McCullough told the senators that the NSA inspector general “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons,” McCullough wrote. |
It's actually even more complicated than that. Because this is Oklahoma, cities are financed primarily from two sources. The first is sales tax. They are constitutionally prohibited from having any other tax base (the kinds of things that might fund county governments) but sales tax. Now the second way they finance city services is through utilities. The city governments are the power companies. Now where do they get their power? There are several not-for-profit co-ops or authorities that produce electricity and sell it at wholesale prices to municipalities who then sell it to their residents.
The city I used to live in while living in Oklahoma (which was a mid-sized city for the state) probably got 50% of its budget from sales tax and 50% from profit on utilities (most of that being electricity.) Police and fire took up about 60% of the city budget. Basically, if it didn't do that, it couldn't even maintain its police and fire services at its current levels. So solar power is great, but it also presents a problem for municipalities. Because the way they are financially structured under the state constitution, they are going to lose out on a lot of revenue to finance city services (in a state that sure as hell doesn't like to spend any money on services.)
It's been a while since I lived there, so I don't know whether this is what they were thinking or not, but it's more than possible that lawmakers realized they were about to lose revenue and were trying to recapture some of that.
This really all just illustrates that we need to be thinking about how to restructure taxes to new technology. The biggest example of this is the question: "So when do we start taxing electric vehicles?" Right now we are offering tax rebates for them to try and encourage their development. But as more and more are on the road, we're going to have to tackle a major problem. We pay for roads and bridges in this country primarily through fuel taxes that drivers pay at the gas station. The logic was great. If you drive more, putting more wear and tear on the roads, you buy more gas, and so you have to pay a bigger share through those taxes. However, we have not scaled those taxes up as cars became more fuel efficient and use less gallons of gasoline. Understandable. No politician wants to be the guy to propose a higher gasoline tax. But now on top of that, you will have vehicles that never go to the pump. Eventually, there will have to be some awful system where when you re-register your car, they check your odometer and write you a bill. Cars being more efficient has already caused a major problem. The fund that is supposed to pay for the federal highway bill (one of about two or three MASSIVE spending bills) does not have enough money to fund that bill. So you're about to see Obama talk about changing corporate taxes to fund it, and Republicans talk about cutting money for things they don't like all to fund it. It'll be a massive fight in Congress, and it'll all be because politicians would rather cut off their right testicle/ovary than talk about restructuring our current energy taxes to pay for the things they are supposed to pay for. |
No, solar is just heavily subsidized. In some places it is less subsidized.
In the ideal scenario - which still applies in many places - something like this happens:
You install solar panels on your home. You receive tax credits which heavily offset the capital cost of your solar panels.
You sell back energy to the grid. This costs the power company, because they have to retrofit their grid to support two-way transmission.
You receive credit for the energy sold back to the grid. Yay you! You're so frugal and progressive! Your power pays for itself!
At night, you receive power from the grid. You didn't generate this power; some coal power plant somewhere probably did. Regardless, it is offset by your credit from selling back to the power company. You receive power for free or for a vastly reduced cost during the night and on overcast days.
Now, let's look at the impact to your local, regulated, public, consumer-friendly utility:
You're transmitting power back across the grid. This requires retrofitting, because the grid isn't really designed to do that. In some places it may be as simple as installing a net power meter on your home that accounts for your contributions. The big problem is not you; it's when 100 of your neighbors decide they want to do the same. The power company has to do extensive retrofitting to handle that.
The power you transmitted back has to be stored somehow. This costs money. Power storage is very expensive. Maybe you're lucky and the solar input during the day in your area simply offsets part of the power draw for your area, and the grid can handle it, and everything's good and rosy.
...but you still need power at night. Are you generating power at night? No. You're using power that is generated by a power plant, just like the rest of us peasants. Except... you're not actually paying for it. Even though you aren't paying for it, you're using it. In the best-case scenario, you've offset it by providing electricity during the day that required no storage, meaning the power plant has to produce less energy. In that case, you should fairly be charged for your share of the plant's running costs - labor, capital expenses, etc. In the worst-case scenario, most of your "contributed" power went to waste, and you're still free-loading.
Now, let's look at why a good, loving, environmentally friendly liberal might have a problem:
Solar is only available to people who live in houses they own. For the most part, that's people who are at least moderately wealthy. People who live in apartments and rented houses can't avail themselves of this advantage; they're stuck paying the full electricity bill.
Solar is only available to people who have the capital to install solar. While tax credits and utility offsets are available, nobody's going to go with you to the solar store and pay for the solar panels and installation. For many working-class families who do own their homes, paying several thousands up-front for solar panels is unrealistic. They're stuck paying the full electricity bill.
People who do have solar bitch and moan when they're asked to pay their fair share. People who have solar represent a politically advantaged demographic - those who own their own homes and have the cash on hand to install solar panels are upper-middle-class at least, and are more likely to vote and contribute to political campaigns, etc.
Contrary to popular belief, power companies are incredibly low-margin businesses. In many places they are public. In other places, they are heavily regulated. They can't afford to simply throw money at people who install solar panels; solar imparts extra costs on them that they didn't have before, and those costs must be recouped somehow. (Note: I've observed many people confusing "oil companies" with "power companies". Including a cousin commenter, /u/osrule86. The two are quite different. Oil represents a tiny fraction of US electricity production.
And finally, a summary of why a good progressive might be wary of solar programs:
Full solar offset benefits those who have solar panels. As we've already established, those people are likely to be relatively wealthy.
As we've already established, power companies aren't charities. They must recover the extra costs of full solar offset somehow.
If full solar offset is enshrined into law, the people who will pay for that are those who don't have solar panels, in the form of increased electricity bills. This disproportionately impacts younger people and poorer people - those who live in apartments or rented houses. In effect, in the worst case, poorer people subsidize richer peoples' electricity.
One of the main goals of the modern progressive movement is that relatively poorer people shouldn't subsidize relatively richer people. I feel like this puts us at loggerheads with the environmentalist movement, at least on a knee-jerk level - people are being "charged" for solar panels, solar panels help the environment, what's the matter? The critical imperative is that all parties must work together. Affluent customers must realize that solar isn't a free pass from paying for electricity. Power companies must put into place reasonable programs that promote solar installation while not passing the costs on to the poorer segments of society. Local governments must create common-sense programs that promote solar while distributing the costs fairly - perhaps an increased property tax in exchange for an up-front solar subsidy, which would help lower-income homeowners afford solar installation by spreading the cost out. |
It's true that taxes aren't inherently negative, but there's barely any reason to tax solar energy. No one's "providing" the solar energy to you. You pay for your solar panels and receive energy from a source that is not being controlled by the people taxing you. All this is doing is discouraging people from making a profit off their non-corporate-controlled power supplies in an attempt to drag customers back by their ankles. It's literally telling you to either waste energy or be charged.
Same goes for wind turbines. You set up a tower, hook it up to your house, and let it power your devices. No one's "providing" the wind necessary to power the object you're using to independently power your home. You could sell the excess energy you make back to power companies for a small profit, but now you'll be charged, so any excess energy goes to waste if you don't want to pay people who have no connection with the energy you're receiving.
There's no "free market" to defend here. You're being forced to pay for a service that would otherwise generate a win/win profit for the consumer and company. It's more like they've decided to invite the free market to the Red Wedding and give it a good shank. |
This debate might be interesting if solar was any significant percentage of the pie right now. But as it is solar does not affect the companies at all. They don't need to change their infrastructure and I don't believe they will ever buy batteries. It would be cheaper to throw it out but as I said I don't know if any area is the country that is even close to having this problem.
As for solar being a rich person thing, there are now companies that have begin putting solar onto homes that can't afford it. I'm not sure exactly how it works but maybe the company gets the profits but you get to know your roof space isn't wasted.
Also power companies often get power supplies from many different sources. And they have a rate that they pay let's pretend they pay their sources 8¢/kwh. But electric companies charge their customers let's say 13¢/kWh. When someone who has solar puts extra electricity into the grid he is paid 8¢/kWh. When he takes out electricity at night he has to pay 13¢/kWh. So even if he produced exactly as much electricity as he used, he would have to pay money to the company. And most solar homes don't break even unless they have already had very small electricity bills anyways. |
This is true, although the cost of solar-panel components has been shrinking pretty rapidly in recent years, in part due to a huge influx of cheap Chinese PV tech that is exerting pressure on the global markets.
Whether to support renewable energy in its infancy stages (okay more like teenage years at this point) is a political debate worth having, but as to the operational scale, I think that's simply a question of infrastructure. It's a strictly technical problem.
Our current energy economy is built on the centralized model: a handful of large, centralized power plants generate the bulk of our electrical current and feed it into a one-way electrical grid. Energy can be stored, transmitted and consumed in this way, but the system was never designed to allow for large-scale input from thousands of scattered sources. The grid won't support the wild current fluctuations, plus we lack the capacity to store too much excess energy. Germany is a good example of this: renewable-energy manufacturers are doing well enough -- you'll find windmills and solar panels all over the map -- but transmission and storage is a HUGE bottleneck. Thousands and thousands of kW are wasted each year because they cannot be stored or transmitted to where they are needed.
Today, if we had the will to do so, we could transform our centralized energy infrastructure into a decentralized grid. Smart-meter technology has come a long way, giving individual households the power to digitally control their own little energy economies. Smart meters also give utility companies the power to manage the grid based on peak demand, and to react to unexpected spikes on the fly. |
I mean, it is. But I suppose the question about that is can you get private power companies to take their place when a lot of these towns might not be attractive markets, and if you replace the city-run power companies, how do you fund things like roads and police? That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but to quote my above |
So... like when a match or even just a spark touches gasoline. Just spilling a canister in your home is a disaster. You couldn't even live inside your home any more until just about everything is ripped out. And if your lucky, your house doesn't explode from fume buildup and/or burn down.
Also, you can release more energy by sticking a fork in any wall outlet in your home. |
That's a good point, but it only applies if there is no middle-man between the oil and the person. We don't just take oil from the ground and put it in our houses. We go to gas stations, where corporations deliver the gas after taking it out of the ground for us. Someone is, quite literally, providing the oil for us. It's a service and is taxed as such.
I'd be upset if I was taxed for collecting my own oil and using it, but regardless, that's not quite what the article's suggesting. It's saying that people will be taxed for sending energy back to the energy companies.
A few arguments here suggest that, because it is an income, it should be taxed. And while that's true, for many people it is not legally an "income," because the energy company simply lowers their bill equal to the amount of power they send back, but not enough to actually receive money in advance. The money doesn't go to the energy companies, either; it goes to the state, which means the money gets to be used for whatever they want, rather than putting it back into the grid for maintenance. |
One of the towns near to me runs under a municipal system. Right now, the bulk of it is coming from hydro up in Niagra that got sold on the cheap back when the contract got written up (because back 50-60 years ago, nobody would buy expensive hydro over the cheaper coal, so they cut a deal to give municipalities a steal).
Now the contract is running up and a couple of influential people in high-density areas are clamoring for the "cheap" hydro that's about to open up. If these people are able to pull enough away from municipalities, cost of energy up here is going to be comparable to the provider most already deal with.
Problem being: This company is in no way incentivized to take up this market because a) all the lines are non-standard, b) equipment is all super out of date, even by industry standards and c) the rising cost of energy would mean them taking on a lot of disgruntled customers.
So, to quote you, yeah:
> |
Company pricing basically works as such in a focus group:
Will you pay $20? Yes.
Will you pay $30? Yes.
Will you pay $40? Go fuck yourself.
Okay, the price will be $39.99
Im joking obviously. Companies spend so, so much money on finding out how to get every single penny they can. Focus groups and marketing. Sometimes even more so than the actual product. Thats how it works. They arn't in business for fun, but by doing such, you forget people are not always a dumb as you perceive them to be. You alienate your consumers and drive them away yourself, as opposed to competition. |
Let's say I'm speeding and going 75 mph while taking a cross-country road trip. Let us also assume I am going to put in a full 8 hours of driving with no breaks. That's 595 miles for 8 hours. Realistically, when I drive from Minneapolis to Bloomington, Illinois, which is about 470 miles, it takes me 7.5 hours and I have to stop for gas once already.
Most people don't drive any father than that. If you do it's a special road trip, or you're like me and too poor to afford air fair.
I just want everyone to know how far you could get in America with 500 miles of distance between changes. |
No big. Everyone, including myself, is constantly bombarded with stories from media that would make us unaware of what's really going on. I honestly didn't know his average was so low until it seemed every week news stations reported he signed another executive order, prompting me to wonder how many, in fact, did he implement. At this point, every political statement about what people have done i check on. |
You are probably right, but on the other hand he would probably vote to keep them banned until the government enforced monopolies that the cable companies have were stripped away.
This is similar to how he philosphically is against banking regulation, but he was in the small minority that opposed the repeal of Glass-Steagall because he thought it was a horrible idea to deregulate the banks while leaving the public on the hook for their losses. |
Only because idiots keep telling people that voting third party is "effectively supporting the party you like the least." If the assholes would quit saying/thinking that and actually VOTE third party, we could probably elect somebody. But then, that would require not falling into the trap of thinking exactly the way the other two parties want you to. |
This doesn't work outside of dense metropolitan centers where enough people are traversing the same route every day to make it cost effective. Even in places like Philadelphia where you'd expect mass transit to work, it struggles to maintain enough ridership to stay afloat.
Mass transit in a city like, say, Topeka would be ridiculous. To get even a fraction of people moved to their place of work each day would require a serious grid of different train routes.
In Midwestern US cities, even bus systems aren't particularly efficient. If they provide a variety of routes, ridership is quite low on each individual route. Running a bus for 2-5 riders is worse than each of them driving, and definitely more expensive to the transit authority. If they provide only "main" bus routes, then people find the buses inconvenient and drive cars anyway. The only people riding buses outside of coastal metro areas are folks busted for DUI and the poor.
For long distance travel in the middle and western US, practically nothing beats a car. Flights into small towns are extremely expensive and have restricted schedules. Flying into a major city requires renting a car on the other end and driving to your final destination. And either way, once you're there, you're going to want a car anyway. WaKeeny KS is definitely not a viable site for regional rail.
Like it or not, the settlements and infrastructure developed in the US during the 20th century all revolve around the assumption of extreme personal mobility. Whatever movement we make in reducing traffic-related injury and environmental impact will have to work within that same assumption, or it will never supplant the manually-driven automobile.
Here in my hometown, Walmart is about 15 minutes away by car from most points in the city (not counting traffic). It's almost 2 fucking hours by bus from my house, due to the bus route and walking time. Nobody wants to do that. So everybody who can afford a car, scooter, or moped drives.
Edit: holy wall of text, Batman. Sorry for that. |
I don't particularly like Euler Project, because the problem difficulty sits in this awkward valley between skill levels. By the time you have enough programming skills to solve the problems, most of them become trivial. Close to 50% of the problems can be solved (quickly) with brute force, and probably 25% are basic algorithm implementations. The other 25% I haven't had a chance to look at. |
heh, yeah, everything can get taken to (ridiculous) extremes.
As I said, I'm an infosec guy, and although we require people with some programming skills, it's not the only thing on the list of requirements. For other folks I'm looking for activity on mailing lists, answering questions, engaging in the community, etc etc.
The end-game is, when hiring people, you're looking for people who are self-motivated to improve, and aren't going to do the absolute minimum, using only what's handed to them on a plate.
And remember, my original reply was to someone who wanted to /get into/ writing software for pay: obviously if your resume says you spent the last three years working on insert large-well-known commercial product here , the need to have something of a private portfolio becomes significantly less. |
There are efficiency gains when companies integrate. The size of the gains will change depending on the specifics of the products and services and can be countered by the inefficiencies that can accumulate as organizations grow.
Google does seem to be doing a good job structuring its company to retain the advantages that smaller, more nimble companies usually have, such as the ability to quickly innovate and focus on breakthrough discoveries rather than incremental improvements. Google X is the best example, but past large corporations have done similar models (Bell Labs).
More importantly, despite Google's size, they dont really act like a monopoly. They make most of their revenue from search and of course dominate it, but there are plenty of other good options and its a relatively easy service to break into by other companies if Google screws up. Unlike when trying to switch your internet today or even switching operating systems 20 years ago, where there weren't any real alternatives, we are not in the grips of Google...we choose to be there. |
Like it or not, Apple has a knack of revolutionizing a space.
I agree completely, but it's funny you had to put in this at the end (likely as a down vote buffer).
Refining existing products is what apple does best. They are never first to the market or first to conceive the idea. Most people claiming that apple "invented" X or Y, are anti-apple tech geeks in a sarcastic manner. The truth of the matter is that they come in redo an existing product, make it more streamlined, more reliable, and more appealing to the masses.
I never could understand how people can be so upset over a tech company doing things that tech companies do... people here act like apple forced them to buy one of their products; every single time a new one is released.
I do have a theory on why /r/techkiddies gets so up in arms over apple products: I'd have to call it "tech hipsterism." When a new piece of tech is revealed and not widely popular (first to the market) mostly tech enthusiasts know about it. The ones that bitch about apple putting out a similar product are upset because now "everyone" will know about it and it will become mainstream. Many of the people who get this hypothetical device will never have known about it until apple releases it...Therefore, in their minds, it didn't exist until now. It's the exact opposite reason that people liked apple in it the beginning. |
Huge differences between your examples and mine.
First, there's no theoretical reason we couldn't have an AIDS vaccine, or realtime raytracing - and there are all sorts of possible leads for research in both fields - but there are very strong theoretical reasons to believe we can't have free energy.
Second, I noted that we've had a thousand years of people claiming to have produced free energy, all of whom were frauds. I don't recall any faked realtime raytracing demos; there have been some fake AIDS vaccines but generally medical science has been pretty accurate.
Third, you will note that both your examples are in areas which are hot areas of research where humans have a lot to learn. Steorn's model, on the other hand, relies on magnets and simple mechanics - something that people have understood very well for centuries.
And Steorn isn't even claiming that our classic model of, say, magnets is wrong - which would explain any free energy. Instead, they are claiming that they're somehow hooking up a machine using classic magnets, electric fields and gravity to get a free energy machine.
But this is mathematically impossible! How often can you really say that in science? But this time you can...
...because you can mathematically prove that IF magnets work according to the standard model (inverse square) then a magnetic field is a "conservative field" - which means that NO motion you do in a loop will produce net energy - and the same is true of gravity and electrical fields.
Again, this is science. There's certainly some possibility that magnets, electric fields or gravity don't work according to the inverse square rule and thus do not in fact form a conservative field. But you'd have to demonstrate that. Scientists keep performing experiments to validate this inverse square law at increasingly higher levels of precision and accuracy - it's very hard to believe at this point that there would be new macro phenomena at Steorn-engine-size scales.
BUT if you concede that these fields are conservative (and I see no evidence that Steorn is disputing this), then a Steorn-style engine isn't just "implausible", it's mathematically impossible. |
For those who are using Chrome and wondering why they see the [Punycode]( version in their address bar instead of Arabic script: [this document]( explains how the display logic works. By default, it's pretty paranoid to prevent homograph attacks. |
I frankly don't see the need for everyone to know science and tech. Every day I meet people who don't use it or need it in their everyday lives. Barbers, cashiers, postal workers, industrial workers, longshoremen, dancers and artists... Sure, they occasionally use refined technology that's been shown to them, but that's it.
Of course, we are all limited. You can't possibly put down all the work needed to be proficient in physics if you want to be an accomplished dancer. It's even harder if you're not very talented and have to put down even more work. And we need dancers too, if we want a cultured society.
The problem isn't that everyone doesn't have science or technology as a hobby or profession. I believe the problem is more in the lines of not communicating clearly enough that it is just very important. Just because a dancer doesn't happen to be a hobby scientist doesn't mean that he or she can't appreciate the importance of science. When a person appreciates this, he or she communicates it to his or her friends and children, who maybe one day can become scientists themselves. In the anti-intellectual society we seem to live in, it is instead communicated that science is crap if you don't happen to be a scientist yourself, often because of issues the person got from school. This needs to change. |
To all of you singing the "Time to buy an AMD" tune:
How many of you are planning on attempting to copy streamed 1080P premium content? Meaning that you go to a website, pay to watch a movie that has just been released to DVD or perhaps even better is still in the theaters, and then you want to copy it. Realistically, are you going to attempt to copy it? and are you seriously lead to believe that your shiny cheep ass AMD proc is going to allow you to do it any better? I'm curious, are you people that own AMD cpu's running off and attempting to copy content off Hulu? I'm betting that very few if any of you are.
DRM, sadly has many epic fails. Sony for example has had many swings and misses. You should look at this thing from Intel as an attempt to make DRM more seamless and transparent to the end user.
For me personally if Intel building this in equals more content available via streaming over the net, I'm all about it. And frankly if it comes down to this technology being embraced, AMD will follow suit. |
The point of their on chip DRM isn't to limit what you do, rather it's to enable you to do more. Using your car traveling metaphor, consider this: I'm driving in my Intel Car, you in your AMD car. We are both driving to the same destination. We discover that a ferry across a body of water will allow us to get there hours faster rather than driving around the body of water to the other side. Now because I have an intel car, this has allowed me a certification that says once I'm on the ferry I won't pull a captain black beard and take over the ferry for my own purposes. You however are not allowed on the ferry due to your lack of certification and therefor cannot take advantage of the premium route to our mutual goal.
Intel's chip will do nothing to limit you, however likely if your cpu doesn't have this drm you will in fact be limited in what you can do. |
AgentBarcode: I've been wondering for a long time.
what does that mean
how do you do it? (what char?)
TY |
I don't believe there are any good intentions out there ? My friend, you are far too dark and cynical... Any serious forensic investigation require as much breadth of data as possible, going as far back as possible. This data serves multiple purposes: helping forward an investigation as well as enabling faster justice being served if the case goes to trial. |
This is utter bullshit. Just for a moment lets assume the black team existed, and their job was to find bugs in the code. Their job is to make the company look good by finding bugs before the general public does. To publicly humiliate the company, and cause a product launch to fail, in front of the worlds press, would get every single one of them fired. Also, a failure that momentous would make the media in some way and be recorded somewhere. |
Probably not, it's a criminal law which means a prosecutor has to decide it's worth charging someone even if you press charges.
These kind of laws don't give people any rights to avoid being offended, they give government the right to decide what might be offensive and charge and convict people for that. |
The SQ limit is busted by multijunction solar cells (multiple bandgaps to get different energies of photons) and by concentrated solar (focus photons from more incident angles). I believe concentration brings up the SQ limit to the neighborhood of 41%.
The breakdown is like this:
Junctions: Efficiency Limit: Limit with Concentration:
1 cell : 32%, 41%
2 cell : 42%, 55%
3 cell : 48%, 63%
4 cell : 52%, 67%
Even with those changes, there is still the re-radiation and a few other loss mechanisms like inefficiencies in carrier absorption and collection. You want a long distance of travel in the semiconductor in which the photon can be absorbed (ideally, it gets stuck in total internal reflection). However, you also want the shortest distance you can get for the liberated electron-hole pair to get to the junctions and move some power.
If we could ignore even those factors and use an infinite number of semiconductor layers matched to the photons, the limit with reciprocal optics is about 86%. This is ahead of the blackbody radiation limit (in terms of re-radiation and other loss mechanisms) of about 85%
Exceeding even those, the Landsberg limit of 93% is the cited maximum efficiency at which you could convert solar radiation. The Carnot limit of 95% is unattainable since the heat is radiated and not directly coupled. The entropy of thermal conduction is different than radiative transport through a vacuum, and this accounts for the difference.
If we could poke a 100% efficient heat conductor directly into the sun and couple it to a heat sink at room temperature for Earth, we could attain 95% efficiency, but this would take a lot more work than the 93% Landsberg limit. |
and the steps are illustrated in a numbered picture.
How little reading do you need it to be? : ) |
Very few people care that MP3 compression artifacts are detectable on high-end systems - because almost nobody has what you're defining as a high-end system.
To say that 320Kbps MP3 files are "bad" is incredibly subjective - and certainly not true for the vast majority of use cases, listeners and almost all live audiences. |
When you are playing at a dance festival like Glade or Origin where there is upwards of 20k of sound you will care because the extreme lows and highs will be chopped right off. If you mix from an uncompressed track to an mp3 track you will notice a decisive decrease in punchiness in the sound and a definite wtf is this shit in the heads of your tripping balls audience. |
I don't want it to quietly disappear. I want heads on pikes. I want these "Representatives" to choke on the shit they try to feed us. I want their hypocrisy to be laid bare before the public. |
The idea is to avoid any "demand" for kiddie porn, as if fucking anybody is going to decide whether or not to do that sort of shit for money. If you're going to molest a kid, a few thousand bucks doesn't change a thing. And really, that's the max profit margin you could possibly make distributing kiddie porn on the internet. The combination of it being illegal and being digital so that your customers can steal your wares and redistribute them (the hell you gonna do, sue for copyright infringement?) makes it just a worthless venture. |
Then I guess he should stop paying them all of that money, and ask for a refund. Oh wait... He's bitching an awful lot for a free service that a company is providing. I do not know how dumb you have to be to think that a company as large as Google would risk a (or several, or a class-action) law suit over a couple of their users.
Moreover, it is not Google's responsibility to make sure his daughter is complying with the law. This is where I think he is really deluded. If it is illegal for them to collect information from her, and that is how their program operates (not to mention how they make money. They are a corporation after all) then why would they even think about leaving her account active?
The burden here is on the user to make sure they are complying with the regulations. If they are not, their account(s) will be closed. It is very simple. It has to operate this way. If they were to give some sort of notice, it would be admitting that they knew she was in violation of the law, and continuing service to her. That is a law suit waiting to happen. |
I'm in two minds about this
first and foremost I tend to agree that Google has overstepped its self-imposed "don't be evil" boundaries a long time ago and this is just one example of many where they really just don't care about what you must always bear in mind are not their customers but their product - we literally are their cattle, so it should come as no surprise to be treated like it...
on the other hand, I think there are some things that this guy could have done differently, too - for starters, as soon as I read "setup a gmail account for my daughter" alarm bells immediately began to ring - this is such a BAD BAD BAD IDEA and you don't even need to scroll through the T&C when creating an email account to find fairly prominent warnings telling you that YOU MUST be of age or else YOU SHALL NOT PASS - if he'd taken a moment to actually read those terms and just THINK for a moment WTF HE IS DOING (there is no fucking way in the world I am going to expose my young ones to potential questions like "what is Viagra?" and the like) he could have avoided all of this - especially considering he has NOW, after actually taking that moment to THINK, realised there actually are age-appropriate solutions available to him from the Apps for Education domains...
also, another choice he could have made was to teach his daughter how to use an email client to access her emails - and select the "download messages for offline access" feature found in any mail client that is not a 2 minute hack job - that way he would not have lost a goddamned thing, even after losing access to the mailbox |
The long and short of it is that Google's doing the best they can. Under COPPA and similar laws they can be in a lot of trouble if they're not fairly aggressive about chasing this stuff.
That kind of liability doesn't allow much space for fucking around with "customer service".
> If lines like that make you feel nothing, then I guess I understand why people don't give a shit. Not everything needs to be 100% logical/by the book, every fucking time. Give this kid a break.
I do feel bad for that, but that doesn't change my positions. There is more to this than naked appeals to empathy. |
When I upgraded my phone, I gave my son (two was 2 at the time) my old iphone 3G and installed a bunch of educational games on it. I also gave him my old PC when I replaced mine and installed a bunch of preschool learning games on it for him, so he could sit next to me and play on the computer while I checked my email, paid bills, played games, etc. He loves it, and he's learning the entire time. |
I know we're much smaller than google, but I work as a volunteer moderator for a decently sized webgame. I've been on staff for a while now and we've had this kind of thing come up from time to time. When it happens on our site, we send a message to the user asking them to confirm their age. It's not information we can really actively seek, but when we see it (usually in the form of a forum post by said user) we will always inquire. The user can lie to us if s/he wants, but there's not really anything we can do about that.. if all of the other signs pointed to the user being underage we might act anyway. If they don't lie, we tell them we're super sorry but we can't let them stay because of what gets posted here blablablah and lock up their account after a few hours/days (depending on what they've been posting). I think in at least one case we've given one back to a user who came back after turning 13.
The difference between our site and Google is that we closely inspect the activity of a poster and his/her post content, if they're active on the forum. Google apparently doesn't have the inclination to do this. I'd summarily lock down an account owned by a minor if I didn't like what it was posting or found it somehow inappropriate as per site rules, but if the user seemed like an otherwise normal person doing otherwise normal person shit, I'd step a little lighter. I may have to remove the account/content anyway as per site policy, but I wouldn't do it out of the blue.
Unfortunately, it is easy for stuff like this to happen when you're trying to moderate/CS a free service. The wage they'd have to pay me to do something like what I describe above on a full-time basis would probably be higher than it is worth to them. It would be bad for their bottom line to spend money on CS for a free services like Google+. That shit will always be administered with an iron fist. |
1) He is not a "customer" he is a consumer. He is using a service he is not paying for.
2) He broke the TOS, end of story. At that point the company followed the rules to the letter. Nothing more nothing less.
3) He is complaining that its not acceptable for them to do this.... its completly acceptable. He is has no ownership of that data. Its not stored on anything he ownes and he has no financial ties to it. He has no way to prove anything other then a disabled account. |
Google used to not ask for your age. It does now if you attempt to create a gmail account and will if you attempt to expand your account by signing up for something like Google+. My children all have gmail accounts (which auto-forward to my own, btw) and they are all exactly ten years older in Web years than their physical ages. This is true for Google, Apple, Steam/Valve, Blizzard (Battle.Net) and Microsoft (XBOX Live).
There is a definite lack of elegance with the way that the age thing is handled by many of these companies (and by our government). It is often ham-handed and always generalized. As a parent, it should be up to me to determine what is suitable or unsuitable for my children, whether movies, music, games, or Web sites being accessed. I understand the desire to protect children from objectionable content, but there should be some ability for parents to opt-in/opt-out of government paternalism. Sure, there are terrible parents out there. But there are plenty of good ones. Plenty of informed ones. Plenty of parents who know their kids, know the content, and can determine what is and isn't appropriate. |
For a family of 4 wanting 700 anytime minutes and texting and 4 smartphones right now:
$70 + $10(x2) + $30 + $30(x4) = 240 . Under my grandfathered plan, that gets everyone unlimited data/texting. Under VZW's current plan, it's 2GB for everyone. Few people use 2GB.
For a family of 4 under VZW's new plans.
$40(x4) + $70 = $230 That gets everyone unlimited texting, unlimited minutes, and a total of 3GB to share. For my mother, sister, and my father, they could comfortably share 1.5GB, hell they could comfortably share 1GB based on what I see in my past 6 months usage.
The only downside to the new plan is for power users. Then being restricted from 2GB per person, 8GB total, to 3GB shared, sucks big time. For people like my family, who have no texting plan (Google Voice all the way), it hurts even more. We are being forced to pay for a texting plan basically. But for most people, the new plans are about even.
>
As recently as last year, the average smartphone user consumed less than 500mb a month. Granted, the number is rising rapidly, but that should give us some insight. Companies know it's growing rapidly. As phones get better, that number is only going to continue to rise. We went from low res youtube videos to HQ ones. Hell, I can access the non-mobile youtube site on my phone and do full 1080p if I wanted to. They fear that, rightly.
On the other hand, it also tells us that most people, currently at least, do not use that much data at all. Very few people use 1GB, let alone 2GB. So a family with 4 average users would be FINE with 2GB at $60. For most people, this plan changes very little, in fact I'm wagering that it will likely help a lot of people. |
Well, space is a big one. America is big. Really really big. It's expensive to provide coverage to everyone, and Verizon does do that very well. I could completely understand if Verizon said they were raising prices in order to expand their network - that's a reasonable thing. Chances are, that's actually what is happening, but Verizon PR doesn't want to say anything that could be used in a Sprint commercial. |
My 2 year contract just ran out today, and I am porting my number to Google Voice to use on top of Straight Talk's prepaid BYOP service for $45 bucks a month, with no contract and unlimited everything (although some people report getting cut off at 2gbs for data). Pretty sweet deal, but it only works if ATT or TMobile coverage is good in your area, although I think you can get Verizon or Sprint, but you can't bring your own phone.
The breakdown on the savings:
Verizon
Free Palm Pre a long time ago
$35 activation fee.
~$90 dollars a month for 450 minutes, 500 texts, grandfathered true unlimited data, insurance and taxes.
2 year contract with absurdly expensive ETF.
CDMA network = not easy to make use of your phone on other networks/abroad.
Great coverage and speed on 3g.
Total 2 cost over 2 year contract period = $2195
Straight Talk
$450 dollar (inc tax + shipping) pentaband phone bought unlocked
$15 for a SIM card
$45 a month (can be cheaper if you buy multiple months at a time) for unlimited talk, text and web (again, there's a real chance of getting cut off at 2gb, but you won't lose your number or get charged overages, you'll just have to find somewhere else for service).
$20 for Google Voice port (not mandatory, but I wanted to)
No contract
GSM = easy to swap out sim cards and switch around
Effectively AT&T coverage, which is a touch less abundant in my area, very good speeds on HSPA+.
Total cost over 2 years = $1565
Now I barely ever broke the 500MB mark each month, and ATT coverage is more than fine in my area, so it's not the cheapest for everyone (and family/business plans don't exist for straight talk). The phone insurance may be useful to some people as well, but I'm assuming you could get that from a B&M cell phone retailer too.
I am done with contracts and Verizon, unless there are some serious changes. I was pretty shocked to see that those prepaid carriers that you see in Walmart and little shopping mall bodegas offered similar levels of service for 3/4 the price without any contract, credit check, etc. Of course, since Straight Talk and other prepaid, low cost carriers are just reselling off of the major carriers' towers, I suppose they could get kicked off or charged more, so maybe these deals won't last for long. Even so, if I were to stay on Verizon, keeping the unlimited might still be worth it, even if it meant paying for my own phone, depending on how much bandwidth I intended on using in the future. |
Eric Arthur Blair prepared us well good Sir! I think I'm right in saying that the UK has the highest percentage of CCTV cameras installed in the streets than anywhere else but don't quote me on it. Our main problem is this thing called "The Daily Mail" which spreads bullshit fucking lies in regards to almost everything it doesn't agree with (which is pretty much everything). Did you know that smoking cannabis once will lead to you becoming a skitzophrenic 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000% of the time? No. Me neither....
Anyhoo, security cameras and black boxes are just there to keep us safe from all the nasty drug selling, foreigners who want to blow up school children en masse because the daily fail says so (obviously not my opinion, just speaking on behalf of our boys and gals in our awesome un-bias media and government) |
The combination of CNN's observation and SARC's argument is mild at best. Who is one to argue that one activity is more mentally stimulating than another? What if the person consuming such activities is not very creative to begin with?
I agree that some folks are, indeed, shafting their creative potential by playing Temple Run or whatever at every chance they get. However, my personal experience has shown me that a significant number of these kinds of people would not have been any more or less engaging sans iPhones, Game Boys or Walkmans.
(The same complaints have been raised for all of these devices when they've reached critical mass.) |
That is like giving someone 1 bucket of water to extinguish a burning 2-story building. |
because linux is more secure. people who praise it as a standard OS are kidding themselves. now, if i wanted a machine to guard some secret info like peoples SS numbers? yea linux is fine, but it isn't nearly as user friendly as windows, which is why if you are just playing games, or browsing the internet, there is no reason to use linux. |
I'm not sure politicians ever really want things. I think of it as an accident of circumstance that the politicians who get in power are the ones that best represent the interests of groups like the RIAA, MPAA...and...actually, probably the majority of big businesses, really. |
When Gmail First came out, I jokingly referred to google as sky net. While I am an Active and happy Google and android user, I am not ignorant to Google's goals. Many have said that Google wants to sell ads; and while that is still technically true, what Google understands as the future of business and the world is information. Google keeps everything, and who is to say that they aren't going to keep every bit of information that is transmitted over their lines. While Google fiber is absolutely a good thing for net neutrality I am slightly skeptical that Google has our best interests at heart. |
Goddamn am I tired of the fucking alcubierre drive coming up on reddit. It isn't going to be proof of concept in ten years. Or a hundred. Or a million.
It relies on the existence of exotic matter with negative mass . Know of any? I sure don't, and the reason for that is it doesn't fucking exist and is probably impossible. Not to mention the causality problems any F |
Yah, except without all the learning curve and overhead keeping up with open source trends and all that jazz. Also, Linux still lacks the cohesion to be widely developed for in regard to mainstream gaming and applications. The average user doesn't have the time/skill/desire to deal with all the little curveballs Linux distros throw at you.
A better choice would be an update of Windows 7 with a slightly re-thought Windows 8 UI that loads in mobile mode. A big reason that Win8 is flopping is that it is too different from the OS that the average PC consumer grew up using. A switch to Linux would be no different. And Windows 8 is crap because it is meant to be mobile, but it is completely different than any established mobile OS out there that people have been exposed to.
The average PC consumer isn't going to learn one OS for their phone, one for their tablet, and one for their home PC. And they aren't going to be brand loyal enough to negate that need, when the competition in the mobile markets is so fierce and fashion is in play.
Most PC people are Windows, but that is seperate from their mobile choices. iPhones are still wildly fashionable and highly proprietary. Android is coming up well and is linux based, but that isn't widely known or relevant to most consumers. So is iOS, so what... Most of the Apple desktop users are even more sheltered than Windows PC users. But that is split between super clueless and essentially Linux power users that can afford fancy hardware.
If anyone was set to bridge the gap between mobile and home, it was Apple. But I think they seem to be lagging a bit since Jobs died. It remains to be seen what, if any, serious innovation is left in them.
Google could do it, and seems to be poised to, but I think everyone is waiting a bit longer to let the market mature a bit around mobile before dumping money into funding a paradigm shift.
But the original comment was about what MS should do. And they are way behind in everything but home PCs, which will still be relevant for some time, blogosphere be damned, and gaming. Linux is still too fractured to be a serious gaming OS, mainly due to driver issues and the fact that very few companies port to Linux and fewer develop directly for it.
So, if I were MS, I would be using the popularity of PC gaming to rescue my ailing consumer OS line. Maybe take a page from the Steam book and expand XBox live in that direction and also open it up to PC. Why not release an "XBox Pro" or something, with a basic desktop GUI and some expansion support. Stub that off of Live and also allow standard 3rd party PC game installation... Port some fundamental desktop apps to it as well as MS cloud apps. Instead of letting PC hardware OEMs try to sell gaming systems to soccer moms to play farmville and surf pintrest on, why not let little Timmy sell the "Xbox Pro" to mom and dad as an all in one, pintrest, hotmail, gaming, multimedia platform with an undockable tablet system that allows everyone in the family to have a cheaper personal tablet to store and transport personal data/profiles? |
All you guys have to do
Implying all the linux folks work hand in hand and speak of the same voice towards the realization of a common goal : attract the most people to their cause. That may certainly be the main motive of the 10 most known distributions, but there are a few thousands distributions that couldn't care less if they are not easy to the newcomers.
As a comparison, let's hear this one : Hey Africa, stop being poor and fighting with yourself, start making money . This is incredibly condescending and, if I may, stupid, because :
Africa is not a country, it's a continent
Africa is not a few countries, it's 54 countries, [a few thousands languages]( and a few thousands years of different civilisations
And if that wasn't enough, the problems of yesterday's europe have been brought to the matter
So, basically, one cannot honestly say all africans are just the same so the problems in that majestuous continent should be easy to solve. There is more to it than 2 neighbors fighting over land. Just like you cannot say "Hey, linux guys, stop being different and work together for something that only 10% of you want". The people in the FLOSS world are in for a multitude of reason, either politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and possibly others I cannot think of, because it matters to them and them first. Oh, some other guys think the same way ? Whatever, as long as it works for me, other people can do whatever they want. This last sentence is basically the mantra of Linus Torvalds, and couldn't be further away from the view of Richard M. Stallman. Yet they happen to both be in the same universe.
Reducing this universe to the 10 we hear about the most is incredibly naive and wrong. Here's another example : if I were to do the same, I'd think all of the USA people are fat, own multiple assault rifles, want to go to war with everybody who doesn't agree with them and actually believe they are the best country in the world. But I'm pretty sure this is wrong, and I'm just hearing the same 10 over and over again, not the thousands that don't speak. [Here's a funny comic about it](
So, yeah, 2013 might not be the year of Linux yet . But 2014 will be, no one doubts about it. |
Except the market was much different back then. Choices were very limited. You didn't like vista you could either pay extra and go for mac or go for ubuntu (which is great but was not really ready for wider audience). Now there is plenty of options. You can go for a tablet (Android or iPad) you can go for Mac , Ubuntu or even Chromebook. Canonical with Ubuntu Phone will deliver one device that could be your desktop and mobile in the same time (actually this is a way MS could go if they wanted to play mayor role in mobile market. ). |
Windows 8 is excellent, if you install a third-party tool to get rid of everything metro and add a start button back in. It feels like a nicely updated Windows 7; it's faster, has some nice improvements like better file copy dialogue.
It's even happy on old hardware; right now I'm using it on an old beaten up laptop with a Centrino2 CPU and a "Made for Windows Vista" sticker, and it runs really well. Certainly much better than Vista ever did. |
I find the media coverage of Windows 8 highly annoying. I can understand MIcrosoft bashing and in many cases they deserve it but I think they're wrong about windows 8. Most of the reviewers seem to be either apple fanboys or unwilling to spend the 5 minutes it takes to learn the new UI differences (OMG I hate change!)
Yes, windows 8 is highly optimized for touch. It should be, that was the point of the redesign. The desktop mode is pretty much the same as windows 7 so that's not a big deal. I'm typing this on my Lenovo Yoga, which is an incredible product in my opinion. It makes macbook airs feel old fashioned and clunky. Apple's lack of touch support (in their PC's) is going to hurt them in the long run imo.
I found windows 8 frustrating until I spent a few minutes just going over the basics. Ok how do I close an app? How do I navigate, etc. As a power user it takes mere minutes to master it all.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I find the ultra clean style of the metro GUI extremely appealing. To me the return to such style is revolutionary in it's approach even though it amounts to nothing but squares and rectangles. |
All that sounds good however the tech group of people is a pretty small factor in terms of the OS market. The majority of OS purchasers are corporate accounts and then most home users aren't normally that computer savy. So those users probably aren't going to be looking at the task manager and buying an OS for that reason (hell, I include myself in that and I have I link to ProcExp on my taskbar). Those people also likely won't be mounting too many ISOs to notice a difference. Now better performance is getting somewhere, the problem is the better performance is cancelled out for several weeks as people used to Windows struggle to find things which they are used to having. Yes, over time they may become more efficient but first impressions matter so much, especially in corporate environments. Training employees on a new OS takes time, normally with windows upgrades it's a pretty simple process: Basically from windows 3.1 on after booting up the computer (and then typing "win" for the older OSes) the desktop is very similar. Stylistically and performance wise it may have improved but the common elements were all there: Start menu, taskbar, desktop, etc. In fact I'd put money on being able to train someone coming from windows 7 to windows 3.1 faster than going to windows 8 from 7. There is a problem here . Microsoft cornered themselves into a rut of a very similar UI over 5 versions then decided to change a lot in windows 8 the problem is not that the OS itself is bad, the problem is people who might not be as computer literate as you and I don't want to re-learn how to use a computer just because they updated their OS. This is why the sales are doing poorly. |
Exactly. Its going to be a while before a tablet can replace a PC in business.
It seems a smart thing for MS to do would be to partner with AMD and developed a dedicated gaming OS. Because that seems to me to be the last PC function to be replaced by mobile computing and also something already dominated by MS.
What would be super awesome is a rethought Windows 8 OS on a tablet that could be docked in a chassis with extra SSD disk/ram/GPU and have the GUI switch from tablet mode to desktop mode.
That's my opinion of where computing is headed. Because tablets are OK for angry birds, surfing the web, and light duty business tasks, but I don't see an improvement in usability without better input mechanisms and resources. There is still plenty the cloud can't/won't do and cloud services are set to out grow consumer bandwidth for the foreseeable future. Google is working hard on it, but a lot of monoliths need significant movement. |
Ok, so the confusion is deeper than I thought. Verizon "3G" and ATT "3G" are TWO DIFFERENT 3Gs! They have different definition!
1G, 2G, 3G, and 4G are classifications for the different standards which have emerged throughout the history of cellular communications. The following is a list of the most distinguishing feature of each generation:
1G: Analog
2G: Digital
3G: Minimum data speeds of 384Kbps
4G: Minimum data speeds of 100Mbps for mobile applications (i.e. phones/tablets) or 1000Mbps for stationary applications (i.e. home Internet)
AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone System) was one of the earliest cellular standards (1G), and was based on analog communications. It was the most popular 1G standard, but there were MANY other incompatible standards. This created a lot of frustration due to the inability to roam and the high handset costs (since manufacturers had to make a different model for each standard).
When the need arose to transition to a new digital standard, the Europeans joined together to develop a universal standard in order to avoid the headache of the 1G days. This 2G standard is known to us as GSM (Global Standard for Mobile Communications). GSM also introduced SIM cards, which we still use today.
Unfortunately, in North America, a competing 2G standard known as IS-95 arose. This is often wrongly referred to as CDMA, since IS-95 uses CDMA as a channel access mechanism. A channel access mechanism is the method used by a base station to serve multiple users. In contrast, GSM uses a hybrid TDMA/FDMA mechanism. (This is verizon )
The GSM standard gained data abilities through GPRS, and was further improved with EDGE (which barely meets the requirements of 3G, but is usually classified as "2.5G"). The GSM "family" started a group called 3GPP, which developed the new 3G WCDMA standard, which uses the CDMA channel access mechanism. WCDMA (384Kbps) later evolved to UMTS, HSPA (7.2Mbps), HSPA+ (21Mbps), and now DC-HSPA (48Mbps). Technically these are all 3G standards, but most operators have labeled their HSPA networks as "3.5G", and many operators are now WRONGLY referring to their HSPA+ and DC-HSPA networks as "4G". ( ATT 3G: DC-HSPA / T-Mobile 3G: DC-HSPA )
On the other hand, the IS-95 "family" formed the 3GPP2 group and developed the 3G standards CDMA2000 and later EV-DO (used by Verizon). There has been no progress since. EV-DO is significantly slower than the HSPA family of standards. (This is Verizon "3G" : EV-DO . Thus verizon "3G" and ATT 3G are actually 2 different 3Gs!)
LTE (developed by 3GPP - the "GSM family") and WiMax are the two independent standards which are fighting to succeed the current 3G standards. LTE and WiMax both ditch CDMA in favour of OFDMA, a much more flexible channel access mechanism. LTE appears to have almost won the war - no doubt due to the fact that it is a continuation of the GSM upgrade path. LTE and WiMax do not fully satisfy the requirements for 4G (although they come very close), but they will be easily upgradeable (probably entirely through software) to LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2, which exceed 4G requirements.
In response to operator misuse of the term 4G, the International Telecommunications Union has retreated from their original definition of 4G. They are now accepting LTE and WiMax as 4G (since they can be easily upgraded to LTE-A and WiMax 2), and also "some evolved forms of HSPA" (pretty ambiguous) as 4G.
Summary: ( |
CenturyLink truly sucks.
They failed to show up for my install appointmets 3 times. They kept telling me that the technician had knocked at the door and didn't get an answer. (Including one time when I took the door off of it's hinges and stored it in my kitchen, so that they couldn't use that excuse. There was no door to knock at)
When they finally did install they didn't activate my DSL modem service, just my phone. So after a month of waiting they still didn't have all of my services installed.
Then once they did activate my modem, it was only operational for a week before they installed addition lines and equipment at my condo complex and my modem was rendered obsolete. They didn't tell me or warn me that this upgrade had been planed for months and assured me several times that I wouldn't need new equipment.
I upgraded my speed from 10Mbps to 40Mbps in January of 2011. My speeds went from 10Mbps to between 1 and 4 Mbps during all peak times. When I called tech support they kept blaming me. Over 8 months I got a new modem, I rewired my walls, I bought all new cables, ect... costing me money each time. Turns out that the higher speed service routed my connection through some piece of equipment that was already overloaded. And they knew about it the whole time. For 8 months they told me that it was my fault/responsibility that I had slow speeds, but they knew their equipment was broken.
Then they insisted that since they advertized thier speed as "Up to 40Mbps" that I should have to pay the full price.
They also sold my personal information that is "Confidential and Protected by Law" to 3rd party marketers. (I no longer have a home phone number and they assigned me a fake one for account purposes. The fake phone number that only CenturyLink uses has been showing up on junk mail.)
Also one of their tech support technicians told me that if you shove a regular phone cable into a Cat5 socket hard enough, it will work, but it'll be really slow. I've heard people say some stupid things in my life, but that one may top them all.
I'll get Google fiber the second they make it available in Denver. |
I'd like to point out that this article used md5's in their 'experiment' the strength of the password is hardly relevant when using an unsalted md5.
to quote wikipedia:
>The security of the MD5 hash function is severely compromised. A collision attack exists that can find collisions within seconds on a computer with a 2.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor (complexity of 224.1).[18] Further, there is also a chosen-prefix collision attack that can produce a collision for two chosen arbitrarily different inputs within hours, using off-the-shelf computing hardware (complexity 239).[19] The ability to find collisions has been greatly aided by the use of off-the-shelf GPUs. On an NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graphics processor, 16–18 million hashes per second can be computed. An NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra can calculate more than 200 million hashes per second.[20]
not to mention modern graphics cards would be an order of magnitude quicker, FPGA's an order above that |
I don't want to spend my time on this because all you have done is criticize the work of others without offering anything of substance on your own. Its easy to sit back and say "wrong" to every idea without doing any work. It screams subjective and since you have indicated you don't like engineers and have a vested interest in the existing HSR project I don't feel like anything I put forward will be viewed objectively or given constructive criticism. |
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