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When are people going to wake up to the fact that political parties serve no other true purpose in today's government than to keep the general populace divided and complacent? The sooner you realize that it doesn't matter what the party affiliation is, that they're all corrupt, that they do not have your interests at heart, the better off you'll be.
Both parties supported the invasion of Iraq. Both parties voted for the Patriot Act. Both parties lessened regulation of the banking system and contributed to the economic problems that we have.
Retards spouting off about "Le Revolución!" is bad enough without them arguing over whether it'll be as a Democrat or a Republican. We sit here bitching about the Kardashians and the dumbing down of America. Hell, politics is our reality TV and Congress is our Hiltons and Osbornes, and whoever else people worry incessantly over. Cheering for one party or the other like they're a couple of friggin' football teams ensures that the population will never act as one body and affect real change in politics. You want to change things? Start with yourselves and lose the "me vs. you" mindset of "Republitards vs. Democraps". |
It should be noted that by expressly stating our "Internet rights" we automatically deny ourselves any rights not present or interpretable. I agree that what we need is to keep the internet open, and our rights as citizens shouldn't be impeded upon in our digital or physical manifestation. |
You are an idiot. He openly admits where he gets his information, generally google news or reddit. The reason why he makes money off it is because he compiles it into a segment under ten minutes, adds his own commentary to lighten the situation and give the show depth, and henceforth makes news that most would otherwise get from boring news channels and puts into a context that is more enjoyable. Have you not seen Sourcefed? It's content is a concept that many have tried to emulate without success. It doesn't matter where he gets his info, or whether or not you like him. The guy's a genius regardless. |
I literally said it in the post above. It is because people like the device they are getting enough to warrant the price. Some people actually prefer ios and are prepared to pay more for it. People like flawless hardware integration and are prepared to pay more for it.
The fact that you consider iphones to be inherently inferior shows your ignorance. A phone, or any device for that matter, is more than a collection of specs and consumers who don't understand specs do understand exactly that. Ease of use and aesthetics are something people pay for and have paid for since the dawn of time. It really shouldn't be surprising that people still do so today. |
From this thread,](
"The molten salt used as a moderator/coolant is fairly corrosive over time. Probably the biggest hurdle to LFTR right now is materials science research into an appropriate metal that can be used to build the containment vessel, which needs to hold up to constant neutron bombardment and corrosive salts.
The last I checked, I think the best/current ideas for containment would last about 5 years before they need to be replaced. This is probably a bit too quick to be very economical. |
Honestly, I don't give a damn about anyone noticing I download copyrighted materials, as ethics are still present here in the Netherlands and downloading copyrighted materials - with the exception of software - is legal. I download content, and I purchase content.
With that said, I'm looking forward to using MEGA for personal files, especially when apps are created that allow me to easily access. Why MEGA, and not one of the older file-lockers? Privacy. Since several years, I've been made more and more aware of the flaws of this planet. I do not allow for any instance, government, corporation, to look into my files. I want to use MEGA as a personal cloud drive, and given it's encryption, it actually makes me feel comfortable using the service. There is no privacy on the web, unless you encrypt data yourself - which MEGA provides. Sure, I can manually encrypt any personal files, but then I'd have to go through all the trouble on mobile devices which aren't capable of proper encryption and decryption protocols - for free, that is. |
without needing a power cycle for months now.
When this is a criteria by which you measure the quality of hardware, it's easy to discern good from Bad.
>incentive to shittify their consumer products
I don't believe it's intentional, it's the nature of building something that regular people can afford, that does 85% of the job people want, and do it often enough that it doesn't get returned.
The biggest gripe I have with consumer products is more Marketing than capabilities.
Example - When you get a company that says "8 port Gigabit Switch, 8 ports 10/100/100" It sounds like you can run 8 devices at 1 Gbps, when in reality, you can run 1 Gbps of traffic through the switch.
If that weren't enough, most cases you can't even do that. As long as the negotiation succeeds at 1000 Mbps/Full, you can call it a 'Gigabit Switch'. Regardless of how much traffic the ASIC can push.
If a switch we're truly capable of transferring 1Gbps, (assuming no system IOPs bottle neck) (Assuming minimum header sizes for 802.3, TCP and IPv4) you would see transfers around 124999914 Bps (Bytes per second (124.9 MBps).
This would be a "line rate" transfer. Most people are happy to see what, 30MBps? That's around a line rate transfer of 239999312 bps (bits per second) or 239Mbps. I would be willing to bet a nice steak dinner those people getting 239 Mbps line rate are negotiated at 1000Mbps and its says "Giga-something" on their gear.
I've got a lot of hosts on my home network. While my Wife watches HD Netflix on the TV I can still transfer to my NAS at about 80MBps. Of course I am using gear that 99% of people wouldn't buy(Juniper SRX210 / Cisco 3560G), but it illustrates why I have the low opinion of consumer gear that I do. |
I'm not sure how it works in the US, but isn't a phone only locked if you received it on a contract? I.e. You didn't purchase the phone outright, rather it was loaned to you as part of a contract with the carrier, and you get to keep it only if you complete the contract? (At which point it would become unlocked?) |
one of those rare moments i'm actually proud to live in israel.
some time ago a law passed that says all carriers Must unlock cell phones on request(or perhaps even sell 'em unlocked). also, all "contracts" are not obligatory and if some cell company signs you , you can take your contract and move with it to other company. and the cherry - we have a new company that has unlimited plan for about 30$ (minutes AND data). oh, and we also don't pay for incoming calls/sms. |
Here's an Ultimate advice mallard for your asses. If you own a cellphone on contract from say ATT or T-Mobile and for some reason you wish to unlock it to use on a prepaid network like Simple Mobile or Net10.... I have some news for you(you don't need to)NET10,RedPocket,H2o,Straight Talk = AT&T MVNO, while Simple Mobile,Solavei are T-Mobile MVNO. Unlocking just allows your cellphone to receive non standard signals your cellphone will NOT work 100% with another carrier because it is not made for the carriers specs... so most of the time unlocking is not even worth it. It's been that way for a while now, the only cellphone I think it is worthy to unlock is the Iphone in the USA since T-Mobile is enabling 3g. |
AOL was stagnant and didn't go with the flow. It died away because of lack of vision.
Napster was sued into oblivion because of their blatantly illegal business. However, Napster did change the entire media industry as consumers tasted digital downloads and created demand for a shift away from physical media. The movie industry is slowly catching on, but the music industry is basically all about digital downloads now.
MySpace was kind of a pile of shit. It was the Geocities of social networks. The first major, and the ugliest attempt. Facebook wiped it out because it provided a clean, uniform, simple interface.
Digg made lots of bad decisions when they upgraded the Digg software and it didn't provide the same usability it once had, nor did it provide the flexibility Reddit provided. Digg's pride is what ultimately brought it down.
Facebook is having similar pride issues as Digg (forcing change on people who don't fucking want it), but there isn't a service out there yet that is truly able to compete. Google+ has a lot of promise, and infinite money to keep it afloat, but Google kind of really sucks at marketing (despite being a company that survives solely on ad revenue). |
Not sure why you are getting downvoted for this comment. Entities don't send cease and desist letters to be bullies, they send it to protect equity and assets simply originating from the incentives set up in our legal and corporate system. |
That sort of happened to me in grade school, except I skipped the day they introduced subtraction. I actually flunked the first unit quiz because I went through and changed all of the "-'s" to "+'s" and solved the problems as if they were addition questions. |
Haha, it's funny you say that. I've been in trouble twice in my life.
The first was for a DWI. I was pretty scared and immediately lawyered up. The guy i hired seemed good but eventually turned into a sketchball. He was late for EVERY court appearance by at least 45 mins. He never returned my calls. He got me a pretty shitty plea deal and everything was just so fucking difficult to do with my case because my lawyer was never around.
Fast forward a year and a half and my license gets reinstated but i have to pay a fee to get it back. Can't afford said fee. Drive like a boss anyway, get pulled over. Cop decides to be a dick and arrest me for DWLI.
Went ahead and posted my bond and decided i would let a court appointed lawyer take care of things. I thought there's no way it could be worse than the first guy. Turns out he was completely awesome. Got everything dropped, was punctual as fuck, dressed like an old timey southern lawyer, and was just generally really awesome. He even got the fee to get my license waived. |
This.
Automating network security is tedious, if done correctly. Fortunately we now have the means to do so, but automation for such a large user base will present problems if done on an end user to end user basis.
These problems would present end users with things like lag or shit call quality, which would lead developers to seek solutions to solve for these shortcomings, which Microsoft has a solution which already exists.
Fortunately, the solution for us end users is quite simple. Skype is a product, and we, the consumers, vote with our dollar. Don't use Skype if you don't agree with their design philosophies. Other products that meet the new customer needs will pop up more and more, and Skype will die off. Hopefully, Microsoft will see their multi-billion dollar acquisition fail, and it will be lesson learned.
One thing I will hand to Microsoft is that it is always willing to change and adapt when it has been pointed out that they are clearly in the wrong. I just wish they would hire people to spot these types of discrepancies and correct them (company-wide) BEFORE they become a big problem.
Unfortunately for big businesses these days, it is no longer "buyer beware", it's now "seller beware"
As in, "seller beware", your always on-DRM requirement getting passed to every known social networking website could mean the death of your product before it ever gets off the ground.
We will see if the architects at Skype see the results of their implementation and see that Skype use will be plummeting, and hopefully do something to change it. Otherwise, make way for the next big thing! :) |
The world needs more engineers commenting on why things are the way they are, instead of armchair techies trying to figure out things for them. It would be sweet if this guy did an AMA. |
Google Chrome
> Proprietary
Have they never heard of Chromium?
Also, TorBrowser is Firefox with Tor.
> Diaspora
:/ They've had so many security issue they might as well be part of PRISM anyway.
> Google Android
> CyanogenMod
facepalm
CyanogenMod is Android. |
I really do not give a shit. They make top quality phones, fridges, microwaves, cameras, and even stoves. I am sure we are all are well aware of Wal Mart and their shady business practices, but we all still shop there. |
Maybe we should stop focusing so much on benchmarks and look at real world performance instead
That's the problem, it's all anecdotal at best.
My hobby is following cell phones and cell phone trends, so I keep up on the major release schedules. Every 6 months a company releases their flagship and the reviewers will praise it for running like a dream, unlike last years model which stuttered like a freshmen on his first date. This is especially apparent when your dealing with Android phones since Android has a real problem with OS animations.
Benchmarks are a real and quantifiable way of being able to tell that phone x is performing better then phone y.The two huge mistakes people make are: 1) assuming a slight performance (1-5% higher benchmark scores) lead means that phone x is dramatically better then phone y. 2) Benchmark scores mean anything in the real world. |
Awwww I hope not! It |
OK. I've been in the US for 44 years. Nothing that I have seen about the way law enforcement and the government act in those years lead me to be surprised by any of this. All the anti communist, tough on crime, war on drugs, war on terror rhetoric has been leading to this. I'm no tinfoil hat guy but this society has allowed law enforcement to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Find me one time, any time, in the last 75 years that 'the people' have ever supported a roll back of law enforcement power or even a roll back of law enforcement procedure. Don't bother searching, it's not there. |
I posted this shortly after SOPA started up and so far it's rang true:
This as an evolutionary system. The internet is the brain of humanity. We are strong enough that we want to protect it from pathogens. The government wants to be the brain of humanity. It wants to infect us. If we destroy a virus they send out(SOPA, PIPA,) they will form a new and stronger virus that has a better chance of working its way in. All this light-treading is necessary on the government's part in order to keep us under control in a smooth transition to avoid the society seizing(protest/riot.) |
Anti-piracy laws just get stricter and stricter all around the world. Meanwhile in Hungary, it is not a criminal offense to download movies and music as long as you don't try to profit from them (like burning the files to DVDs and selling them). They recently amended this law, so now it includes sharing. They likely did this to decriminalize torrenting too, because it by design requires sharing from everyone involved. |
Down voted mostly because it's not true. What's really happening is that Google is testing the waters in places where they're able to build cheap, and are need most. This made Kansas a prime example.
This is also to a try to shove internet companies into better deals and speed because competition is good.
(There is no current competition in most areas of the US, so Time fucker, for example, won't give a shit if Google is far off from their position. In around Kansas, though, they're starting already to bargain and try to keep customers with their services)
Fuck... Typing this took so long on my phone that I forgot what I was responding to. |
Yes! There is! Time for a quick Lesson on bit rates v. Transfer rates , reddit!
b = bit = 0 or 1.
B = Byte = 8 bits. e.g. 00010101
Let's talk about how data gets transferred over large networks. Electrical signals passing through copper, or light passing through fiber optic wires, represent these 0's and 1's. We call this serialized data , and it is why bandwidth is typically measured in bits per second. We could very well divide them by 8 to get the byterate, but that doesn't really make sense, and it's easier to conflate the number for marketing purposes as a bitrate.
Bytes are sort of the "lowest common denominator" within computer systems, so chunks of memory in RAM, or blocks of data on disks will use "bytes" for their units. This is why transfer rates within applications (like moving a file, or downloading something) are typically given in kilo bytes or mega bytes per second.
To compound the confusion, Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera etc. are not in base 10, they're base 2. Meaning we get very close to 1000 bytes in a Kilobyte, but it's actually 1024 bytes, or 2^10 bytes. A Megabyte is 2^20 bytes, and so on. |
Cable providers know that consumers want internet speeds to reach 1 Gbps, and they know that it will come one day. No matter what they do, it will come, but they do want to delay it. They already have hundreds of millions of homes that are wired for cable, and that is a huge sunk cost. They simply want to get as much money out of the cable service they provide before it is obsolete. To tell the truth, I can't really blame them for that.
One day, everything that your cable service provides will be offered through an internet TV service. We've already seen that Intel, Sony and Viacom, and Google (I think) are looking to provide internet TV services. It's simply a matter of time until we can cut the cable line and notice no difference in our entertainment options. |
The telecoms did spend the money, it looks like it all disappeared because it was spent at the wrong time. I get the impression that a lot of people decrying the wasted funding for fiber networks are forgetting the implosion of the telecom industry in the early 2000's. The dot-com bubble is well known but the closure of 23 major telecoms and the fact that [$2 trillion of the total $7 trillion market loss were from the telecom industry alone]( seems ignored.
Telecoms threw cash at fiber thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, [figure 2]( is a good visual of just how much investment was being made. So why aren't we all using 1gbps connections right now? It takes a few years to plan a major infrastructure project so you can see the climb going into the new millenium. That's right around the time wavelength-division multiplexing became a viable technology for fiberoptic communication. Suddenly these enormous pipes built around 1996 technology were hilariously oversized for the supply offered by modern tech. Companies had dropped huge sums to dig up streets when all they now needed were little wires on a telephone pole. So when the financial return on a lease for 1 mile of cable was cut by an order of magnitude everyone was fucked.
Everyone that is but the companies that diverted the money saved from subsidies and other fun regulations to wireless infrastructure or buying up the leftovers after the bust. [This is why Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T survived]( and the bankruptcies are why our broadband is primarily supplied by TV companies. |
Erm, no, I couldn't give a shit about 1gbps. I have a 2mbps / 30 mbps connection, and while I wouldn't mind something a little faster, it's more than enough for multiple Netflix devices and gaming. Half my computers are on WiFi, which is realistically about 75 mbps with my router / devices - you're going to have to plug in to see anything close to full speed.
What I care about is caps and price. I average 500 GB / month on my connection, and have hit 1.2 TB before. I pay around $70 a month for my connection, which currently is cap free.
I'd much rather have my bill go down, and stay cap free. I'm not so desperate for instant gratification I don't mind waiting a few hours for a game to download off steam - I'll just play sometime else or watch Netflix in the meantime (QoS on my router means Netflix will work fine but my download will go slower). Gigabit is beyond overkill for streaming - broadcast 1080 in mpeg2 is 18 mbps - the compression Netflix uses claims to fit 720p in 3.8 mbps and 1080p in 5 mbps. Even their 4k streams are only 15 mbps - so my entry level 30 mbps connection is almost good enough for two 4k streams at once. |
I had windstream and was able to dump them and get fiber. Went from less than 5 to over 20 and saved 20 per month! |
ubuntu user here.
the problem with ubuntu is that the devs make the occasional mistake that becomes highly publicized (within the linux community) and highly controversial*. for example, amazon integration in the search bar in saucy salamander (I use the lts, so i haven't seen this for myself). sure, you can disable it with a simple command, even delete it forever. but it's the default, and that IS a legitimate bad step. many people forget that an OS is a tool, and think of it as a lifestyle, so they're easily insulted by changes that are easy to circumvent (see: windows 8). this is the second problem with ubuntu (and desktop linux in general).
people are terretorial. you'll get people hating ubuntu because of unity (the GUI), totally unaware that if you don't like it you can always ditch it for straight up gnome 3 or KDE or whatever other DE you want (EDIT: see /u/Commisar's comment above). but "i'm a gentoo user which is a sophisticated distro for sophisticated people such as myself" is a common attitude amongst gnu+linux users. replace gentoo with other hipster distros like arch, or other reasonable distros like debian or fedora. |
Telecommunications act of 1996 did do this. Every copper phone line in the country is now an ILEC and can be leased, at well documented and prescribed rates, to CLEC. There are entire companies that offer "broadband" without owning a single wire. The reason there are few obvious effects is simple, really, the twisted copper wire infrastructure has been left to decay and die as most have moved on to cable and fiber offerings which are not part of the 1996 Telecom Act, only POTS lines were. |
I've heard this suggestion many times but can someone explain what we think it'll actually do?
Do we think people will switch ISPs if Facebook tells them their current one is playing unfairly? Many people have little to no choice (for me it's Verizon or Comcast if I want broadband... or maybe satellite if I could live with the latency) so I doubt it.
Or do we think they'll call/write their ISP and complain? Even if I didn't think most people are too apathetic to do so, even if they did, what good would it do? There's no leverage: see point A.
Or maybe we think people will pressure politicians to fix this mess? Well, see point B, vis a vis apathy... and even if everyone surprised me and did it, isn't getting politicians involved a big reason we have this problem in the first place? |
I hate wal-Mart, but they're simply giving consumers what they want, which is low prices. If you don't support their business model then don't spend money there. Unfortunately most people simply care about the direct price hit to their wallet because they're not educated enough to consider the external costs of that low price. If more consumers realized those low prices were essentially being subsidized by the tax payers through food stamps, etc walmart probably wouldn't be as successful. |
Sure, and shame on whoever down voted you.
You have to start with the break from Copper Wire to Cable/DSL. Copper cable was required by law to be shared between providers so there won't be interruption in phone service, they were classified as "Common Carriers". This regulation disappeared when the FCC decided fiber and DSL were exempt from it. This allowed for the companies to become monopolies. So far, not looking good for the free market right?
Well the free market can't function in this case because no new competition can enter the field and current competition cannot expand. If you look at any other telecom industry it is possible for a smaller carrier to start up in nearly any place or a larger carrier to set up shop. So why not with ISPs? Municipal governments own the "Right of Way", underground and above ground wiring locations. The sale of these rights can double the cost of laying cable. So because of the lack of regulation monopolies form, but they stay there because there is now government hindrance of competition.
You see Google setting up shop so successfully because the Local governments are chopping at the bit to get them there. In many cases Google doesn't have to pay the Right of Way cost because they can offer free internet to government services such as schools and libraries. Now they have the capital to be able to get away with that, but a newcomer can't and a larger competitor would be concerned about getting access cut off or being forced out of a market they're strong in. |
Canadian here. Needless to say I hope one day google starts into canada. I Pay $60 a month for what speedtest.netted to about 8mb down, 0.4mb up, Rogers. My cap is 150gb per month. My ISP doesn't have a over-billing option of any kind and doesn't really care if you go over unless it's extensive. I went and checked the last 16 months of my usage (DD-WRT router counting), my average month is about 450gb. Some months break into the 700gb range. I considered these numbers my functional minimum before I have issues. We live in fear up here of the '$1 per gig over' and other crap in the states (and the lowest ISP's here, like bell, telus, etc.) I would rather have 8mb down and 1mb up with no data cap over 1 gigabit with a 200gb cap. Pretty soon I'm going to be forced to buy 3 concurrent internet connections to peer over to get any kind of decent bandwidth and not pay $1000 in overdata. |
I simply called TWC and mentioned Google Fiber and that I was unhappy with their service. Even though I am not in a market that Google has announced expansion in TWC promptly increased my speed like the chart in this article. Went from 3x1 to 10x1 at no additional cost. |
They're probably trying to offer a standardized product that can be sold to 90% of their service area without trouble calls.
DSL can go much higher, but then they have to actually have accurate loop distance databases to know what every customer is eligible for (poor excuse....).
22x2 on a single copper pair is approaching the practical limit of ADSL. Of course... you can pair bond, use VDSL, VDSL bonding, etc etc.
I don't know why more ILEC's don't offer better ADSL speeds than they do. When we, as a CLEC, sell ADSL, we tell the customer the estimated speed based on their distance. The speed they actually get is based on the technical limits of their individual circuit.
Some people get lucky, live close to the CO, and will get, say, 20/1.2 down/up. Other people are 14,000 feet away and are lucky to get 3x1.
I feel it does help to explain to people what they should expect, and inform them that their speed isn't being artificially limited or capped.
Where I live right now, I'm around 14,500 feet (loop length) from the DSLAM.
Two ADSL pairs bonded, at about 3/1.5 each. So I'm getting 6x3... but not being throttled/shaped/capped makes that 6 a lot more usable than a shaped 50. I have no problems with Netflix in any quality, for example, and consistent ping times |
OK first, you keep mentioning a "baseline." That does not exist. There is no baseline defined by the FCC. So baseline could be "Well, we'll get it to you within the year."
> But they can't just discriminate against certain companies with these laws, that is outlawed.
They're not discriminating against companies that don't pay. They can say "But they didn't pay to keep their roads up to spec, so we let them go." And it's not anti-competitive because the ISP would not be responsible for the financial decisions of the companies.
By saying "Pay for better service," they're also saying "If you don't pay, we don't really care about you, but since we're the only choice, tough shit."
All of the terms said in Wheeler's proposal will all be defined by the ISPs themselves. There is no baseline from the FCC; The FCC does not decide what's anticompetitive.
Basically, everything proposed by Wheeler is exactly what we want to happen, except backwards. We want better speeds, better reliability, cheaper prices. Wheeler says "Don't let it get any worse!" Literally nothing about his proposal has anything to do with making things better for anyone except the ISPs themselves.
And let me ask you this - Netflix decides to pay Comcast large amounts to ensure their data actually gets sent through. Guess who absorbs the cost. Netflix? Ha! No, you do. You're $8.99/month Netflix subscription just went up to $14.99.
Maybe you're OK with that. You shouldn't be. Even if it is only +$6/month, nobody should be OK with paying raised prices for literally no reason other than Comcast says you should.
It's utter bullshit.
>It doesn't make sense for startups to use this service because they won't have the traffic that requires this service.
Amazon gets 2 day shipping because they're already around, but Buythingshere.com doesn't because...? It should not fall on the product supplier's shoulders to get us our products quickly. The supplier does exactly that - supplies the product. It is up to the ISP/Deliverer to get it to us as quickly or slowly as we demand it get here. If I order 2 day shipping, and UPS said "We know, but we're gonna delay it because Buythingshere.com didn't give us money and Amazon did," you bet your ass I'm suing. Or never using UPS again. Oh but wait, UPS/Comcast is the only postage company for the country? Guess I get no mail? |
Ok guys, there's absolutely nothing wrong with this in my honest opinion. ISPs all over the world charge for bandwidth, not throughput, and even their contract says so. ISPs cannot guarantee throughput because there are many factors that play into affecting throughput. As for the difference between the 2, think of it with this analogy: bandwidth is the size of the channel that the water flows through. Throughput is the amount of water actually flowing through it, which we know can be affected by things upstream which the person who dug the channel (ISP) is sometimes unable to control (please Google the terms for a better explanation, trying to translate to simple analogies is... Inaccurate sometimes). |
EDIT: You are not fine. The below comment was not valid. This can be exploited via dhcp. Watch your broadcast domains till you patch <pants shat>
You're not understanding him. This is not exploitable on nearly every machine because there is no way to exploit it. Very few hosts are running cgi scripts in bash or Perl. It was know a decade ago how insecure cgi scripts can be and anyone with a head stopped allowing them.
Heart bleed was vulnerable on every ssl host running Apache (all the that do anything). Calling this even in the same ballpark as heart bleed only proves the ignorance of the person talking.
On npr they were acting like end users macs were exploitable even going so far as to say "be careful on what links you click". Let me put it this way. If you are running bash from websites you're fucked already. If you run a website and are accepting unsanititized user input in exec or something you're already fucked. If by some strange twist of events you are running cgi scripts move to the 21st century already. |
I can't find the article now, but I have read several things that show the AVERAGE kid is actually LESS tech savvy now than 10 years ago...Sure, 3-4 year olds may now how to unlock an iPhone and find Angry Birds, but when I was 4, I knew how to type the commands to launch games on my parents Commadore 64 and was using G BASIC to make simple ASCII art...
Hell, I just recently went through a class on TCP/IP for work and watched a 22 year old kid with a BA in IT fail out when I have no official training other than what I read in a CCNA book 10 years before and never touched again... |
but isn't that the point of capitalism, to maximize what you can obtain. If your goal is to have max profits to appease the share holders, you'll do whatever you can to do that.
> Not saying I agree with it
> Again, not saying it's right,
> Again I don't agree with it
Sounds like there's a voice nagging you in the back of your head. It sounds like it's saying, "Everything I'm saying is a lie that someone else taught me."
> They are just playing the game like everyone else.
I think I know why you have that nagging voice. Because your reasoning seems to boil down to, "Well, that's just the way it's done!" Which we all know is a pretty lame argument when it comes to humans and their ingenuity.
> We all should be complaining to the government to set better rules and distribute the wealth better.
Yep. Which is why we need to be mindful of using the propaganda written by those who currently control the wealth. Of course the wealthy call it business. Why would they want to admit it's greed? If they did that, we would have a leg to stand on.
> Of course I can still see all the big companies suing to see what they can undo to maximize profits, but that's business.
But you had said that the government should set rules and protect the public interest (I don't like the idea of "distributing wealth"). That's the FCC and net neutrality. You specifically pointed out that the telcos would wish to undo this remedy of law. Business is not the intentional use of your wealth to subjugate the will of the people in the interest of increasing your own wealth. That's called greed. "Who cares what everyone else wants, I'm taking what I want."
edit to add |
I work at a campus network service building. We order at least 20 cisco switches per week. We had to hire new students whose sole purpose is to unbox them and throw away/recycle the excess packaging. |
Actually, on the contrary. The short "Brown" or "Orange & Purple" tips cause more damage. China to US are usually done on pallets in a container, unlike domestic shipments, which have a delivery driver climbing all over them.
True story, I work for a small IT company which supports some regional banks, and we have a contract with one of them to repair broken equipment. Something breaks, we send out a new one overnight to them and they return the broken one in the same box. So two days later the broken ones come back, usually about 40-50 boxes or half a fedex truck. We had a sub driver not the usual one on our route. The driver asks where to put our boxes and I say "just toss them on the dock". She literally tossed all 40 boxes out the back of her truck into a heap on the dock. Of course I made her mark them all as damaged after calling her supervisor. At least I got a free lunch meeting out of it on Fedex's dime. |
I teach 6th grade and we have issued iPads to every 6th grader at my school. There is a lot of potential with them, but they are also a HUGE pain in the ass!! Students email each other in class, downloading porn, playing video games. It's a great idea, but there needs to be a better way of keeping the students from screwing off in class. I don't care what they do when the leave (short of illegal activity) as long as they do what they are supposed to do in class. |
Honest questions here:
>"If cyber devices communicated in near real-time with each other about attacks, and took coordinated security-hardening response actions consistent with a defined policy framework, then critical business, mission and privacy objectives could be better supported, and many security risks could be managed proactively and dynamically," it argued.
So what do they expect people to do? Have everyone install a government provided, standardized piece of software connects everyone to perform this type of security response? For one thing, having the government mandate running this software sounds a bit like another country that isn't too popular on the internet front.
Secondly, is this software going to be 100% open sourced? If not, then I wouldn't trust installing something that I'd be held accountable for and may compromise my anonymity for some vague reason (see: Patriot Act):
> In the cyber ecosystem of the future, the paper continued, sending and receiving parties would be known and accountable for their actions, but anonymity would be protected when needed .
Third, are they going to make it a law to install this theoretical software on all of our computer systems (home users and businesses)? If so, then they better get the security objective...
> For that to happen, five objectives must be satisfied: security; affordability; ease of use and administration; scalability and interoperability.
... completely solid (which we all know is almost impossible) because having one group of attackers finding a Zero Day vulnerability would be instant shutdown of everyone connected to the internet. Remember, this software is based on creating networks and networks of computers that communicate with each other so once a system is taken over, it won't be long before everyone is screwed as per these quotes:
> If cyber communities could be defined by policies rather than by technical constraints, they would permit cyber participants to collaborate seamlessly and dynamically in automated community defense .
> It identifies three building blocks for creating a healthier cyber ecosystem: automation, interoperability and authentication .
Fourth, this sounds like the first step in creating a government ID system on the internet. I thought this debate was still in the air. Is getting approval for this (but hidden in another initiative) illegal in any way? I'm not clear on how the law works in these types of scenarios.
> Typically, the objectives are carved up among enterprises and users. That, the paper said, "creates a complex landscape of multiple authentication technologies with limited interoperability, vulnerable security seams, and barriers to business or organizational change."
Fifth, they split this up between users and enterprises. What happens to small business owners or entrepreneurs? Will this software be free? Is it light weight enough that it won't require additional hardware upgrades (this would make it harder for new businesses to get on the internet)? Then a sixth related question, for end users that are stuck with metered bandwidth, wouldn't this software waste bandwidth? For such a software (or its protocol) to work, you can't be sending unencrypted packets as potential attackers can intercept them, modify the data, and send them along to deter the system in a form of a man in the middle attack. Since the packets can't be encrypted, then ISPs can't discount them from your bandwidth usage (no way to identify). So what happens, do we just get screwed out of part of our cap?
> Reitinger added, "If these building blocks were incorporated into cyber devices and processes, cyber stakeholders would have significantly stronger means to identify and respond to threats—creating and exchanging trusted information and coordinating courses of action in near real time."
> From the actual PDF: "To illuminate such a cyber ecosystem in action, one might look at today’s practice known as “continuous monitoring,” in which system managers use a variety of software products to automatically detect and report known security vulnerabilities in network nodes.
Seventh question: they seem to want to target all "cyber" devices. In other words, cell phones, PDAs, tablets, etc. Since these types of devices are rarely used in the actual attacks on computer systems, is this really necessary? This time, it sounds like the government wants to install software on all possible devices so it can where everyone goes. They purposely use vague language (well vague language everywhere) here so they can interpret it in a way that gives them the most power. To me this sounds like a major invasion of privacy so how is this in any way legal?
Eighth: in their PDF, they propose some magical system that can have computer detect infected systems and cut them off from everyone else until cleaned. If they could somehow determine a way to identify all viruses, worms, rootkits, etc. then why don't they just create a free anti-virus that handles all of this? There wouldn't be a need to generate some network of computers. Additionally, no where in their PDF do they address the problem of stupid end users or Zero Day vulnerabilities. Like I pointed out in my third question, all it takes is one infected PC that avoids detection by the software and we are all fucked.
Now for my actual opinion, this sounds like a load of crap. Lots of marketing speak is used in the paper and terms used are specifically crafted to be vague and sound "nice" (think cyber vs internet/electronic, in the PDF, using terms like "Environmentally Aware" and "Environmentally Sustainable"). This is all just an underhanded attempt at restricting what people can do and improving the ability to monitor citizens. With such vague language, who knows how else this will be used: monitoring, identifying, or even stopping use of technologies like bittorrent. Nothing in this paper should be believed as they don't even try to tackle any of the harder issues about computer security. |
YouTube's content is streamed with the permission of the copyright holder except when a user breaks the terms of use. Which is all of the time. Under present rules, YouTube can receive a complaint and take it down. Under the new proposed rules, they're willing capitulators.
And no, I don't really find it all that odd but then again I worked in marketing so I very much expected the page to be |
That is a horrible plan. Tor and I2P are still experimental solutions, and may not be mature enough to weather NSA attacks (though Tor might be exempt, it was invented by the US Navy for a reason).
The first problem is that it might be possible to identify encrypted packets as Tor/I2P packets. Such packets must have IP addresses on them, allowing ISPs to determine the identity of a Tor user (but not what they're accessing ). Since the bill criminalizes attempts to access banned sites, any use of Tor/I2P would be a dead ringer to who is bypassing protections.
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear," as they say.
The second problem is that it is still painfully slow. They've made huge strides in this area, but it will still take more developers and years of time to make it fast enough.
The third problem is that these networks don't really work for contemporary media. There is no known way to prevent Flash from bypassing Tor, so it must be disabled. Since evil scripts could easily discover your true identity, they too must be forever turned off.
Perhaps we could use HTML5 instead of flash, and we could try to make sure scripts never have access to sensitive information, but the point is that Tor and I2P still need years of development and interest before they can actually be used. |
I like the idea but we have to remember there are other people who would be affected by this. The people who work at theaters, book stores, and thousands of other places would lose a large amount of revenue. Cashiers and all the other people dont make that much anyway, im speaking from experience. So we should find a way to do this without hurting them. Besides the people who were trying to send the message to, will just gain the money in April. |
Conservatism isn't the rejection of progressiveness, conservatism (before it got hijacked by the anti-progressives) was very much a rejection of radicalism, at a time when untested and extreme concepts/ideas were being pushed by liberals and socialists a voice for caution came from conservatism.
Indeed once many of these radical concepts/programs came into place and started to work the conservatives once upon getting into power left them alone, it was a pretty sensible ideology that sadly ended up saying "wait a minute" to things like progressing women's and worker's rights (due to the nature of the time, if classic conservatism was about today with the power of modern day conservatism it would be pro-science as fuck and we would have majority electric cars, UHC, wide spread, nuclear power, mass fair trade, sensible drug policy, etc...)
But out of it's sheer nature conservatism became the refuge for those who were either frightened of change, hateful of it, or had everything to lose (the religious, the powerful, the rich, etc...).
The rich in particular who previously favoured liberalism (mainly due to extreme/economic liberalism which later became known as libertarianism) realised that they had a better case against extreme socialism (wealth redistribution/revolution) under the banner of conservatism than they did under the banner of liberalism they joined the conservative movement and positioned it to be opposed to socialism entirely (rather than just the extreme parts).
So in doing so we saw conservatism drop the spirit of its name and started preaching untested radical liberalism (basically all the libertarian pro-capitalism stuff that the conservatives around the world went super crazy for in the 80s).
The liberals who remained basically took the soft side of their ideology (the personal freedoms, some free market stuff) and largely shunned the extreme parts of the ideology (aka libertarianism which is now nothing more than a wing of conservatism), though occasionally they'll cross over and cause a bit of conflict within their own groups (that's why we now see the conflict within modern conservatism on personal freedoms between the libertarians and the rest, and this is also why no-one should have been surprised that the UK Lib Dems went Right rather than Left).
By virtue of the system now being:
Socialism - Liberals - Conservatism
Those who previously would have been in the middle between the old system of liberalism and socialism neutered down each respective group with a smattering of a few things they brought over (hence why modern day socialists accept some liberal ideas about personal freedoms and modern day liberals accept some socialist ideals about the role of the state).
The death of the socialist movement in the US (thanks to a bunch of conservatives and rich people who saw what was happening in Russia and shat themselves and therefore waged a huge war on the working man's ideology) left the US with this dynamic:
nothing - liberalism - conservatism
Which is why in the two party system the word liberal became synonymous with the concept of the left because the liberal party is the left of the two (but is not actually left wing).
The make up of any modern day conservative party is basically a schizophrenic unity between various fractions all pulling in a different direction which has has been so very well encapsulated by the current republican primary (an elite, a libertarian, a religious man, and a sex pest) all pushing their own agenda whilst trying to appeal to the base of the other. |
The reason for your post is fine. The bit that is not is just one word...
> ...outrage...
The change in format is a mild inconvenience for you that doesn't stop you from watching all the same shows you did last week. You have no right to be outraged that you are watching them on a slightly less comfortable chair when your actions are denying creators money for their work, work that you enjoy and follow. Forget the publishers and the moneymen - I mean the writers, the actors, the cameramen and directors. The people who do the work to create the shows you love.
If not being able to watch the shows on your big TV is enough to outrage you, perhaps you should just buy the shows. |
Let's be honest here
Please never use this again, mostly for your own good. I don't care if you look like an idiot on the internet, but I will point it out. Using this figure of speech serves to invalidate the rest of your post by immediately informing the reader that you are honest, which, if the reader exceeds the intelligence level of a boll weevil, will immediately draw suspicion to whatever you typed. |
You missed my point. Let me reiterate/rephrase: if you show up at work and take no deliveries or get stiffed 100%, you make minimum wage. If you show up at work and bust ass and make just enough tips to be counted as minimum wage, then your employer isn't paying you (minimum wage). If you do the same and make way more than minimum wage in tips, your employer still isn't paying you (minimum wage), but hey, you got more cheese. Yay?
A large portion of my delivery area was a big town public university and our shop had underbid the exploratory delivery food service contract. Us delivery guys got fucked because students couldn't tip with their spending accounts. It was basically community service after you factor in gas and vehicle maintenance costs. They also couldn't order beverages due to licensing issues from coke/pepsi/whocares. We also enjoyed a large amount of public and low income housing in the area, so lots of sketchy, stiffy deliveries there.
I think if we had the 'tips replace minimum wage' thing here, nobody would have done that job for more than a month or two. I lasted about a year. My buddy got canned for doing a blog about work (before blogs) and should have sued the shit out of them but didn't. I was doing it really wrong, and I figured that out, and quit one night when I called a bad check delivery just by the order they placed. |
Firstly, I am extremely interested to see if this idea will work. I would love it to, however I am sceptical purely due to the fact there is minimal evidence (7yrs is NOT long), and I have concerns that those going in to have this procedure trialled on them, are not aware that 'not knowing' what risks may come up 10-20-30 years down the track, is the worst risk of them all.
>It is 100% evidence-based. These devices work in plumbing.
This is not 100% evidence based. In the medical world, there are high standards set, and ‘evidence based practice’ requires extensive research, appropriate trials, and LOTS of real evidence. Just because it works in plumbing, certainly does not automatically make it an obvious answer/safe option to put into humans. The body is extremely complicated, and has huge risks – death and other things we simply don’t know as there is not enough evidence– if something goes wrong. Yes this device has worked in the way that his aorta is still working 7years later, and he is still alive. However there are other treatments, which have much more evidence to be more successful, and are doing more than simply keeping one alive. They pose what some would call higher risks, however they are well managed and in most cases the benefits of this major surgery outweigh the risks.
>How do you propose an internal implant which wraps a structure will cause aninfection? It can't introduce any more bacteria than was already present at the time of implantation. There might be some kind of issue, but an infection?”
As explained by other people here already, risk of infection (among with other things) are not simply short term risks. The main point here is that the long term risks of this new device are not known. 7 years post surgery, and only 20-30 patients is very very minimal evidence. It’s a good start, but certainly not enough for it to be a recommended procedure to those with this condition. More research is needed before it can be labeled as ‘safe’ or ‘evidence based’.
>“Hell, there's no evidence ANY of us won't require future surgeries.”
This guys main point was he has avoided open heart surgery and warfarin. It was being stated that he hasn’t necessarily avoided that, and it won’t be known until many years down the track if many people have been trialled on this treatment. If he still needs the major surgery in 10-20yrs, he may just be too old/unfit for it, and can no longer have the surgery due to the general risks of surgery when elderly.
There is no proof he won’t need to go on warfarin or other anticoagulants. Again, this is because 7years post-op evidence is not enough. He has a cardiac condition – he is at risk for other cardiac issues. Warfarin is given to patients these days, as it is required to give them the best outcome, with the least risks compared to benefits. If this device turns out to not be as amazing as he is making it out to be, and for whatever unknown reason does not prevent the clots etc from happening, who is to say he will find out simply from a scan etc – highly likely that the way he would find out is post a stroke. It could be too late. That is a big risk, which seems to be ignored by many. Just because one problem is fixed, doesn’t necessarily mean that this new ‘cure’ wont lead to unthought-of, unknown complications in the future.
>“So far with 30 patients there haven't been any [complications]. But that doesn't even matter -- this doesn't have to be a perfect cure, it merely has to be significantly better than doing nothing to be useful.”
It doesn’t merely need to be better than nothing – there are already well researched & practiced treatments which have proven good outcomes. Again, it needs more research to prove if it is going to do more than simply be ‘better than nothing’ and actually be a better option than those already available. |
For our economy to function, there has to be a flow of currency and if things are being pirated, there's less of a flow.
Why is that? You're assuming people who pirate would have purchased the product anyway. A percentage of them would have, but I'd like to know how that figure is offset by the increase in revenue generated by pirate driven advertising.
>You don't want to buy a stupid album for $10-$15 that your favorite artists worked hard on for several months? Well tough shit!
I like that slogan. "Buy our product. Don't want to? TOUGH SHIT!". You should apply for a job at Comcast or Bank of America. You'd fit right in.
>Since when is stealing a damn freedom?
Pirating a product is not stealing. Digital products are intellectual property - property that is taken when it is "viewed". Therefore, a better metaphor for piracy would be going into a bookstore and reading their books with no intention of buying the product. Let's work with that analogy.
The bookstore could invest in security cameras and personnel to follow their customers around like criminals. They could invest in book-locking technology to make reading impossible unless you pay money. Though these acts would drive their customer base away, and create a customer=criminal mentality that would be very bad for business.
OR they could install coffee and snack shops into their stores. Now the customers who lingered around all day reading (you know, those naughty criminals) are paying for coffee and cookies.
In the previous case, the bookstore didn't institute new laws and regulations - They found hidden value in the services SURROUNDING their product. They found a large demographic that previously wasn't being catered to, and changed their business model to accommodate them.
Getting back to the main point, Steam and Netflix are competing with piracy. They're literally competing with free products. And you know what? They're thriving. How are they doing this I wonder? Steam and Netflix are capitalizing on "convenience". They ensure a quality product, make it easily accessible and usable, and they offer it at a great value. When faced with a changing market, they successfully found hidden value in the services SURROUNDING their products. Wow, what forward thinking.
I can understand why would big business hasn't followed suit by adapting to a changing market place though. Taking risks, and changing their business models is relatively difficult. It's much easier to just lobby Washington to regulate commerce and restrict personal freedoms. And really, when you get down to it, customers are just criminals right? Businesses shouldn't cater to criminals.
Let's just fix everything with more laws. That will work.
>I'm just getting tired of people like you who are okay with piracy
You don't like "people like me"? Well I don't like people like you, who seem to be falling over themselves to restrict communication and personal freedoms if it means fixing an economic system THAT ISN'T BROKEN.
If you let the government regulate ANY PART of the internet, you open the floodgates to over regulation. And if there is one thing our government is good at, it's over regulating. Any laws they pass will be imperfect. They will contain loopholes, and inconsistencies, and a million little ways the government can "reinterpret" the wording to fuck people over. Why do that? Why even take that risk? Are things that bad? Fucking NO, they are not.
The digital economy is fine. Online businesses are thriving. AND people are exchanging free and unfiltered information with each other. It's a fucking UTOPIA right now for customers and businesses alike. The only people who have a problem with the current situation are the dinosaur industries at the top of the food chain, who want to force customers to spend every last cent in their pockets, even if it means taking away their freedoms. And you - "people like you" - just can't wait to get government hands into the system to fuck everything up.
Just shut your whore mouth. Nobody needs your theoretical, bullshit opinions. |
Just an FYI if a call or message is not from the area represented by the Senator or Representative it will not get logged and will most likely be deleted on the spot. Do not call Lieberman's office.
You should call your own senator or representative and tell them to vote it down. If you don't know who that is, or their office phone number visit or |
Right. I'm just saying that promoting these stories tell us that bullying is the only problem we need to fix, when in fact we need to deal with the suicide obsession among teenagers and educate them about depression and recognizing when they need help. The help system also needs to change to make sure that each and every kid who is abused in such a way is properly supported. |
I hate to be "that guy", but Microsoft doesn't seem to be learning from it's mistakes either. Both the 360 and PS3 were ridiculously underpriced (cost of production was much higher than retail price at launch), so much so that they might be breaking even now, I haven't really checked, and it's looking like they'll be using a similar model this next go-round, while Nintendo sits back and sells its console at just over/under cost. In the end, this means that Nintendo can keep on trucking indefinitely while Sony and MS have to pray to the consumer gods that their customers buy enough games to offset their bets. |
Used copies were already purchased by someone else. It's the equivalent of me buying someone's game off of them, except there's a third party involved, profiting $10-30.
If you love the games industry, buy digital. It's cheaper on both ends.
>Secondly, games are sold below their worth.
On the other hand, if your game is bad, I'm less inclined to purchase it for more. It's the difference between when I paid $80 for a digital version of Guild Wars 2, and a $30 used copy of some generic shooter title. I, the consumer, should have the power to influence the market like that. I won't pay what I don't think is worth it. The economy is not just firms' to influence; the consumer also has a stake in what something is worth. If the next Call of Duty title sells millions of copies at $60, then perhaps it's worth the $60 on the market at the moment. However, there then are people who don't think it's worth $60. To them, maybe $50. Or $40. You can see where this goes. |
The telecom companies like to pretend the "last mile" is prohibitively expensive, but it's a lie. There's a significant initial investment, but once the lines are installed (particularly if it's fiber) they won't need to be replaced for decades . The companies can easily cover these costs with installation charges (which they already do) and multi-year contracts (which they already do). But why do that when they can just spend some money lobbying Congress and installing employees in the FCC and other agencies to foot the bill? And as a nice bonus, they get a nice legal monopoly. |
You can get this speed from Verizon FiOS, which is available only in a very few select areas.
The closest plan to this is 150/65, (or 75/35) - extra note, the 150.65 is not available to be bundled with TV or Phone, so it will cost you more:
150/65 -> $100 USD (+ approx $5 in tax)
290 channels (the middle package, does not include premium channels like HBO, showtime, etc) -> $75 (+ approx $15 in tax)
Digital Voice (VoIP) -> $45 (+$30 or so in taxes)
So lets add this:
$105 + $100 + $75 = $280/month. |
I don't believe so. I tried to wade through the poorly maintained website. It has way too much going on and I couldn't even find a link for residential service. It looks like it more oriented towards fiber TV. It's expensive for their TV service too. |
and you think uncensored internet access is something to even consider worrying about?
YES . Because in the entire list of things that North Korean citizens need, even if there are many many things more important than Internet access, providing Internet access is STILL a progression, a solution to that entire list of problems.
Your analogy with the homeless person doesn't work for several reasons, even though I understand the point you make. While a breathmint might not be helpful, it's not as clear an analogy to providing communications to an entire civilization, not even regarding the positive consequences of that. Say, a breathmint, doesn't help a starving homeless person, we can agree on that. The problem of starving to death should be dealt with, regardless of all other problems that person has. But that should not mean we shouldn't deal with those other problems in parallel as well, such as bad breath which has a bad influence on people in the persons surroundings, hypothetically a consequence of which would be less chance of finding a job due to smelly breath. Farfetched maybe, but point stands.
As for Internet access, that can actually have an enormousness impact. Many people mistakenly assume that the Internet is 'not real', as opposed to 'the real world', despite these same people chatting on whatsapp every day or even texting or calling each other ('primitive' forms of the Internet, still the same ones and zeros). What Internet access could do for North Korea is to provide the citizens with an enormeous resource of information but more importantly, the freedom to communicate freely without indoctrination or censorship (the both of which go hand in hand partially). That will allow them to form their own opinion on their current political state, gather information on how to solve problems they currently face - including ones high up the list of problems, and so on. So while Internet access itself doesn't seem to be near the top of the list according to some people apparently including yourself, I'd argue that's a considerable mistake, as the Internet has huge implications. Hence, this could even mean that your first sentence, that North Koreans can't criticize their government, would actually be able to do so when they have Internet access.
In that sense, calling it an insult just appears to me as a sign of uninformed opinion - that's just my opinion, meta as it is. I believe the Internet can have a huge positive effect on many problems the North Koreans face. Even if it turns out it doesn't, it's worth trying, isn't it? It's not like abandoning the project would mean there's time, space and resources to solve the other problems, it doesn't work like that. Anonymous can do Internet stuff, but they can't just all go on a plane and bring food (- physically, they can, but societal, socially and practically, they can't easily do that).
I think it's more insulting to regard the Internet as just a source of cat pictures, as you say it, or as you intend to say, that the Internet doesn't have much of value to offer, which I strongly disagree on. Calling their lives insignificant tops it off, in my honest opinion. If we thought their lives were insignificant, we wouldn't even bother trying to help them get Internet access.
Nature-opposing as it seems, not all humans are that prone to egoism anymore - especially considering mankind isn't that close to nature anymore, depending on how one defines nature. Surprising as it may seem, Anonymous is actually very altruistic, despite the enormous variation within this 'group' (it is rather a belief, an idea), even though there's enough egoism in this group. Ever heard about the People Liberation Front? A very small group of freedom fighters, one of which known as Commander X, was interviewed by [ARS technica]( gave up a huge portion of his life to fight for the principle of freedom of information, literally on the run from the government, becoming homeless, you name it. Now that's what I call a hero. Not just because he did so, but because he fights for an idea, now strengthened by his fight to other people around the globe. Or in other words, how one 'insignificant' man can have a very, very significant influence on the world. Maybe not to you. Maybe just to a niche. But a considerably powerful niche including Anonymous. |
Here’s one side effect of this that Anonymous might not have considered.
South Korea has had, since the student revolution days of the ‘80s (and even before), a certain subculture of super-intense ultra-liberals. In general, these liberals are good guys, if a little pompous. They’re progressive in a lot of ways and support gender equality, expanded civil rights, aid to the poor, boundary-breaking art, etc. Remember that this used to be a country that until 10-15 years ago, had a really, naïve, closed minded, and reactionary general population, so these beret-wearing, weedy goatee-sporting lefties were kind of cool--if it weren’t for them, there would’ve been no cafes in the entire country where you could drink espresso and listen to Ornette Coleman.
Anyway, the thing about these folks is that they were (and some still are) sort of pro-North Korea. Not that they supported the oppressiveness of the government or the gulags and all that, but, like radical hippies in the ‘60s, they believed that their own leaders were corrupt, greedy, capitalist reactionaries (which they absolutely were and are – the daughter of South Korea’s most brutal dictator was just sworn in as president, after all), and they saw some value in the communist ways of their brothers to the North. And the young really did hate the South Korean government; in the ‘80s, the idealistic youth of the South were fighting the police and military every day in pursuit of rights, fairness, freedom, and a new government. At the same time, South Koreans in those days really did yearn to be reunited with their northern half, and, idealists that they were, they thought reunification of the two Koreas would soften each side, and a socialist paradise would rise on the peninsula or something.
OK, so here’s the problem. Many of these super lefty free thinkers, being intellectuals of a fashion, have settled into various respectable positions in academia and elsewhere, but they still feel a kinship with North Korea. They don’t want the North to spill over the borders and dress everyone in the South up in pajamas or anything, but they still feel that they have brothers and sisters in the North worth caring about, and they still believe in socialist ideals.
Here’s the punch line to all of this: THESE people account for many of the names on the list that Anonymous hacked. Many of the email addresses belong to South Koreans at major universities and minor colleges both in Korea and around the world. I have no idea what their intentions were in joining this North Korean site, but, for most of them, it was likely just general curiosity about what is going on in the North.
Why does this matter? Because it was South Koreans who invented the “human flesh search engine” (even if it’s associated with Chinese nowadays). With just a smidgen of info, South Koreans will track your ass down and make your life hell if you rub them the wrong way. And as we speak, South Korean reactionaries (I mentioned the rise of their most conservative president since the ‘90s earlier) are in a feeding frenzy, harassing these people on their Twitter, Facebook, and other social media pages, calling their homes with threats, publishing hacked personal photos, identifying their children and spouses, demanding their dismissal from their positions, etc. Oh, and did I mention that under South Korean law, some of these people may be exposed to arrest?
I wonder if this is what Anonymous meant to accomplish. |
I don't think that true at all. Sure the app store is a walled-garden, but what mobile app store isn't? Microsoft wouldn't dare to kill the desktop, it is their bread and butter. You seriously expect businesses to move to mobile style computing?
What Microsoft is probably really doing, is looking to the future. They realize that the future of mobile computing will lay somewhere between modern tablets and modern laptops, so they are looking at a way to try to merge the two (windows 8 on the surface pro, anyone?). The tablet interface must lack the complexity of a true desktop interface to maintain the illusion of simplicity (for simple tasks), but a laptop needs to have a more complex interface to mirror that of a desktop (for more complex tasks). The obvious solution to the problem lies in creating a tablet running a full x86 processor which would have access to both a simple tablet interface and a full desktop style interface |
I hated Windows 8 when I first installed on my desktop.
My attitude progressed to satisfied once I installed a third party start menu, letting me avoid Metro completely.
Then I bought a new laptop. A touchscreen laptop/tablet combo actually, the Samsung Ativ Smart PC Pro. Blown away. Windows 8 finally makes sense on this device, it's the best computing experience I've ever had. I use Metro apps when I'm browsing, desktop mode when I'm working.
I don't have a start menu installed on this, because all the controls are intuitive on the touchscreen.
That said, I still can't run W8 properly on my desktop without the start menu, I don't think you can do the appropriate gestures with a mouse on a multiscreen setup. |
Just because you like it doesn't mean it is good .
The problem here isn't the home user. Plenty of people on Reddit come from a business IT background. W8 is a failure for business - these people and their opinions aren't wrong, these people are the decision makers for their businesses. You can't keep telling them they are all wrong, that's just refusing to see the writing on the wall. |
Do I need 5 second bootup? I restart my computer once a week at best.
Does I consider any pre-installed apps an "OS feature" - fuck no. No one with a brain does. It's an app, those who want it, will install it.
Multi Monitor support - don't need them. My current monitors are already huge enough for me to do everything I want. More would just mean I now have to keep turning my head for everything.
Consumption of resources/hardware of acceleration/task manager - do I even notice that stuff when I am using my PC? No, I don't, and who the hell would trade a usable UI for several percent in performance - no one with a brain.
Native ISO support with virtual drive? great now I have another app to learn to use when Daemon tools did everything perfectly fine for years.
Copy paste in windows 8? When I need to use copy paste it's usually to get text from one application into another. Guess where windows 8 sucks ass compared to previous OS? That's right, using multiple apps, effectively closing/opening them and switching between them. |
It's not Windows 8 that did this, it's the manufacturers, and they're trying to shift blame. For years, people that go shopping for laptops have had to choose (largely) from bulky, plasticky machines with awful screens, keyboards, and touchpads, and the lame excuse that "they're faster and cheaper than Macs", even though people that actually use screens, keyboards, and touchpads (like, you know, anyone who owns a laptop) would prefer a slightly slower and slightly more expensive option that put more emphasis on those parts. |
Go to your little Win+Q. Type in "hidden files" and tell me what comes up.
Nothing, because it's not the fucking start menu. It's an entirely unnecessary part of the OS that is separated from the core that people who actually require a PC need. Starting with Vista MS started doing things we had wanted for years, like redoing every error prompt to be more specific. The shining achievement was the index search, which power users quickly found had references for every conceivable thing you could think of, including stuff like the afforementioned "hidden files". Whereas once you had to know the exact location of said option and go through many clicks to get to the right window, Windows 7 knew exactly what you meant and would show you a "Show Hidden Files and Folders" option which opened the correct window to set that option whether you had any clue where it actually was or not. They went to an extreme amount of effort to index every single little check box in every aspect of the OS.
Windows 8 destroyed it. If I want the control panel, I have to go to the pointless metro ecosystem and open it from there, or start explore and click my way through it. Only once I am there am I capable of searching for the aforementioned settings and what not. Your beloved metro interface searches for nothing but apps and base level OS menus.
Everything they did to Windows 8 ruined it for real desktop users. All the shit you are talking about is just fine for a tablet, but by removing the start button and forcing metro on everyone, people who need to get shit done can't. The grand irony is that people like you who find the interface beneficial would be just as happy with an actual windows 8 tablet, and the rest of us would be a lot happier without any of metro at all. Forcing windows to always act as a tablet makes it unbearably shitty for people who actually have to do more than click on the Angry Birds icon.
It sounds like you pretty much don't even leave the metro interface, which is a guarantee that the way you compute makes you irrelevant in this argument. You're never going to encounter the reasons Windows 8 is considered a gigantic piece of shit if Metro actually offers you all you need, and that is why the logic behind why they combined the two is beyond me. This brings us full circle to the PC sales plunge, which is brought on by the fact that a number of users on your level have realized that they can now do all they need to with a Windows 8 tablet, and these are the people far more likely to buy a new PC. The power users meanwhile do not buy prebuilt PCs in general and are not upgrading to 8 because it breaks the huge strides Windows 7 made.
For being the first Windows versions in a very long time to have consistent naming schemes, to a power user Windows 7 and 8 could not be any more different. |
Pc sales were trending downward before windows 8 came out. Tablet sales were cannibalizing PC sales even for apple.
People are sticking on to their old PC's for longer as there is no need to upgrade- Although we are following Moores law for processors that doesn't mean we are not getting diminishing returns on the beefed up processors. I might be wrong but I have a MacBook pro circa 2007 - first intel model and its still functioning properly and fulfills most basic needs an average consumer would have.
Windows 8 although not great is still usable- I have a surface pro and have grown accustomed to the swipes- it starts making sense on touch screens. although I still long for some multi-touch gestures.
Businesses and the government are still using XP- They even put it on PC's that come with seven- easier to manage. They will never upgrade to 8, perhaps 7 but most likely ride out XP till they absolutely have to upgrade.
I think the PC market is a mature industry now there is market saturation at some point- we have been hovering around that point for the last few years coupled with point 1 leads to decline in growth and sales.
6 Ultimately we will transition to a point where one device will power all our screens, cell phone with enough juice to power most of our computing needs like word processing and other things.
The real thing that nobody seems to be talking about is due to historic market share MSFT is untouchable, even if you are having a convo between 8 and 7 you are still stuck with msft. If you plan on running legacy applications for work. |
You're just making up an arbitrary list and saying fail after them. I could do that about anything.
Not at all. A new file system WinFS was supposed to be the biggest feature of Windows 8.
One of the big (and few) complaints about Windows 7 was the way in which it handled networking. The introduction of the 'homeshare' which was supposed to simplify windows networking only complicated it.
One of the biggest features of Windows 7 was that you were supposed to be able to reboot pieces of the kernel so you'd almost never have to reboot for software updates. Still waiting on that delivery.
File explorer has remained unchanged for ... 4 or 5 versions of Windows now. |
that is not a thing a normal, or even slightly power, user does on a day to day basis. The file explorer work very well for what it does. And here people are complaining that now things are TOO COMPLICATED, adding this sort of features to on of the most basic things of the OS would only make things worse. I think it's correct that to do this sort of things you need something else. |
You know, at first I was on the 'I hate it because change is scary' bandwagon. But recently my wife's computer went to crap and we needed a new one. Sure enough the one we got came with windows 8, it took me about half an hour but I started getting used to the new interface. It really is intuitive and a heck of a lot faster. Now I (kind of) can't wait for my computer to die. |
I think anyone complaining about Windows 8 is ignorant and is just complaining to complain. I used 95, 98, 2000 ME, XP, Vista, and I used Windows 7 for about 4-5 years and loved it as by far my favorite OS from Microsoft. I installed Windows 8 last year and I would say that it honestly is faster, runs better, and looks better.
I find that most of the people I have met that complain about Windows 8 haven't even tried it yet and just say the "negative" things about it that they hear from others probably to keep their facade of being smart and tech oriented. The other main reason I find people complaining about Windows 8 is Metro. I just tell people that it's just a new start menu and that nobody is forcing anyone to have to use METRO versions of everything that don't have the Min. Max. and Close buttons in the top right.
I know and understand that my liking of Windows 8 is an opinion, but if I compared the 7 and 8 together I'd say that I really really liked Windows 7, and that I like Windows 8 even more.
I do understand that most of the people that dislike Windows 8 are probably not "tech savvy" people and cannot adapt to technology well in the first place. In that sense, I'd say that if Microsoft didn't make so many changes with Windows 8, it would have happened with Windows 9, or somewhere else down the line eventually and it would still be criticized then. |
It's true. Videogames have always contributed to pushing the limits of both software and hardware. Since the console market really exploded, most AAA developers focus there, and PC either gets ports, or free 2 play games that try to focus on being accessible to everyone even if they have a an ancient rig.
This last console generation was very long lived and very popular. The PS3 is 6 years old. In hardware time, that's ancient. |
And you CANNOT do some things as fast or efficient with a GUI than with a bash shell. Nevertheless, one has pretty much completely replaced the other, because it is far easier to use for most people.
...because the use case for Desktop PC's is different from servers.
> And therefore, I applaud Microsoft for taking the initiative and stepping in the right direction with a UI revolution.
How do you know it's the right direction? You don't know what the next big thing will be any more than anyone else does. Many people thought motion controls would revolutionize gaming but I don't see people abandoning their gamepads. Motion control has turned out to be a fad reduced to specific use cases where it makes sense, like dancing and other party games, but otherwise limited in the scope of it's practical applications. The future is all conjecture at this point. What is obvious are the limitations of the technologies that we have now . Instead of forcing a flawed paradigm on users, Microsoft would have been better off waiting for innovation or providing the innovation themselves to provide an overall compelling experience to their users. Just going through the motions and hoping innovation happens isn't how things work.
> It just seems that our industry cries for revolution and innovation, but when someone actually tries, they get hated on massively.
That's because "innovation" is a buzzword that the media and marketers love to throw around, and true "revolution" is innovation that stands the test of time. People are too eager to use both terms despite the lack of evidence.
R&D is always helpful and I love new technology as well as the next guy, but there's a difference between R&D and using your customers to test your products... that is, unless you don't mind losing them, which might very well be the case if they feel the long-term reward is significant enough (such as Microsoft's rumored always-online Xbox). |
several thing must be taken into account. (am in small buisness computer seller mainly for residancial customer canada)
For lenovo is simple. a good ressiliant mid and high end laptop.
in fack most of my used sell laptop come from buinesse getting rib of their 3-4 years old laptop.
Windows 8. i got about 20% customer happy about it . at least 50% ask me if i can go to windows 7 instead.
Ours desktop computer. we dont sell hp dell or thinkcenter(lenovo)
Why ? because most of the big trade mark computer have their own device or solution for their pc like an odd sata controler or non-standard power supply. in the bottom line it take more time to repair and support them. we dont like that our customer hate to pay 200$ repair on a 650$ value destop. instead we sell you a custom made pc us we call it the ''asus'' we basicaly ask you intel or amd. then we show you the price... good amouth go with intel because of their reputation and their add at tv.(maybe 30-45%) AMD is a good seller for their price and good performance low-mid range pc.
So in short OUR desktop pc sell dont appear like most of small computer seller. because we (our customer) buy PC PARTS ....not pc
and on the bottom line...yes we sell like one samsumg or asus tablet per week
a typical week arround me is 4 desktop 7 laptop 1 tablet. for the pc its mainly windows 7 |
Seeing that the NSA is only supposed to use information like that in the defense of national security, no evidence obtained that way could be used in court. Also, your average FBI agent doesn't need to know something so highly sensitive. Just receiving decrypted facebook wiretaps would reveal that capability to someone probably not cleared to know that. |
Grew up in oakland and went through the education system. Im glad i made the move with my parents in my early twenties and got out of oakland.
Many have already said it here: the police have a bad rapport with the communities (african american and latino). Most of my friends I went to school with got out.
I dont think this will help with crime. Oakland is large and does not have enough numbers to patrol everything. As a result, thugs can easily do what they want to (20s - 90s ave, im looking at you) |
You're comparing apples to oranges.
Cops go through a background check of some sort before becoming officers. As such, they can (presumably) be trusted not to use the license-plate-tracking system to hunt down somebody they have a grudge on and kill them in their sleep.
Releasing the same kind of data to the general public would be terrible, because there are a few crazy fuckwads out there that ruin it for the rest of us. They'd use the license plate detectors to settle old grudges, or to make sure The Bloods are staying out of their turf, or whatever. |
Yeah. It sucks that your government can't see the history of increased surveillance on keeping the peace.
A police state results in people not supporting the police.
Less trust in the police leads to greater incidents of violence.
Police violence leads to greater incidents of criminal prosecution and lawsuits against police services.
Increased legal fees for police services leads to fewer funds to provide those services.
Fewer funds for police services lowers the standards for maintaining them.
Lower standards for police services leads to a cyclical effect of police corruption that can not be avoided without ending the deficit created by it or improving public support for it. |
It's always interesting to see people's reactions to "Oakland" news. As someone who lives in Oakland and spends most of his time/money in Oakland, it's always disheartening to see the attitude, "Well, it is Oakland, so..."
First, Oakland has a crime problem, but it's also a major part of one of the wealthiest major metros in the country. It has abundance and poverty in equal measure. In many ways, it's the best city in the Bay Area. It has the cuisine, culture and bar scene of SF without the pricing. It has lower density areas similar to Berkeley, and also is home to some of the nicest parks in the East Bay. It's also a beautiful city, with Lake Merritt, the Bay and downtown all being extremely easy on the eyes (as well as views of the hills or from the hills, depending on where you live). Oakland is one of the most diverse cities in the country and many neighborhoods reflect this diversity.
But, Oakland does have a crime problem and Oakland also has a police problem. The problem with this proposal is that spending money on an enhanced surveillance program (that includes surveillance in public schools and almost no oversight of the system) is short changing Oakland and setting the city up for more failure. Part of Oakland's problems stem from the well documented abuse of citizens by the police department. This has cost the city millions of dollars, hurt the community's rapport with the police and led to a police department that has a difficult time recruiting and retaining officers. Oakland also has a history of racism by authorities towards the African American community. This history includes underfunding and under developing African American neighborhoods, businesses and schools (the freeway system in Oakland is a clear example of such planning). These communities need increase opportunities, not a surveillance apparatus funded by DHS in their schools. Oakland needs better public schools with more resources. Where's the Federal grant for that? The city also needs more, better trained cops instead of more gadgets for the ones we have. 1 individual is assigned to 10,000 burglary cases. The city has the highest robbery rate in the country. We need more beat cops and community policing, not reactionary surveillance and more criminal ordinances (like the one just proposed banning wrenches and other things from protests). |
Yeah I can't stand the Oakland bashing that everyone seems to jump into whenever the town is mentioned.
There's a reason why all the 20-somethings who aren't working in tech, finance, or corporate business live in Oakland and not San Francisco.
Cheap rent
Great restaurants, bars
Exploding music scene
Good transit, highly walkable, bikable
Very beautiful city in terms of architecture, parks
Yes, it's one of the more violent cities in the country and has major problems with burglary. But it's a far cry from Detroit. |
I don't have all day to find the exact articles. And it's not outlandish at all. My friend Chris just demonstrated how he can take control of every system in a Toyata Prius. It's all over the news recently, In fact, they actually wrecked a car in the process of testing the hacks.
( Warning: Video Auto-plays. Annoying )
Also, if they can compromise a phone while it's 'off,' they have access to it's hardware and processor, which means to anything in the phone (microphone) they can control as well.
Source: I'm a former computer security expert, as well as a robotics expert, and a Software Engineer with 18 years of experience, up to and including talking directly to microprocessors (X86 ASM for the curious) and connected sensors (RS232, serial, and custom boards.) The is nothing outlandish about these capabilities. Especially the security systems. The hard way, they reverse engineer the panels, the easy way, they probably just got ADT to build in a nice back door for them. |
Okay, look buddy. If you leave the Earth's magnetic field you suddenly have a lot of radiation, so if your components are not especially hardened against radiation they'll fail. If you want something to work on a foreign planet it needs to be very resilient. It also needs to work, rebooting it is not an option. Last but not least, communicating with something on another planet is a little bit...shall we say complicated? Curiosity can talk with the two Orbiters for roughly 8 minutes each day...at 2Mbit/s and 256kbit/s, transfer rate to earth directly would be 32kbit/s (though, I find no reference to the transfer rate of the Orbiters, but most likely also around 32). |
It's not about the company making a profit, of course a company would do it if they could make a profit. It is about the Brazillian economy encouraging local business. If Sony chooses not to produce PS4s there they either have to pay for that, or they have to open a factory there. The question they have to ask is by not opening a factory in Brazil, charging the customers for the import tax (instead of cutting into their own profit margins to keep the price down), are they losing so many sales that they would be better off just opening a Brazillian manufacturing plant? The decrease in sales hurts Brazil too, but the high taxes also make up for it. Who wins and who loses? It's difficult to say because you have to compare what would actually happen, in sales numbers, with and without the tax. It's not so simple as to say it's either good or bad for Brazil. |
The real problem in Brazil is that government keeps encouraging consumption under the banner of easy credit, so the industry keeps rolling.
Long term that's a really shitty strategy because it'll drive prices above their real value while not really encouraging the industry itself. Unless other measures are taken (and NONE are).
Take realty for instance, if you could only finance something for 10 years because you could only afford to pay $ 100 monthly, by doubling that lenght to 20 years, you could afford the same apartment by "only" paying $ 50 monthly (rough math, give me a break for example's sake).
The problem is, companies in Brazil have a really shitty mentality, so instead of selling that same apartment for $12.000 and investing in doubling their production so they can keep up with demand, they're upping the prices while maintaining the offer, thus making you pay $24.000 for the same apartment, while STILL not allowing the guy with the $50 monthly payment capacity to buy his own place.
In the previous 5 years, realty prices skyrocketed in Brazil while renting prices kept increasing at the same pace they were before, thus creating a discrepancy in real value vs perceived value.
Also, an apartment would be delivered within 2 years on average, up until 2013. Launches now are estimating a delivery date 4 years from now, because they're actually forcefully downing the offer in order to hold prices sky high.
The fact you can purchase a just delivered apartment at $250k, new and never occupied, while the construction company is trying to sell new units (to be delivered in 2017) for $300~350k should say something about fake prices.
Sure we did have a latent demand for real state, and that explains a little bit of why the prices increased more in the previous years than they used to.
But that doesn't explain the fact why we have so many vacant newly built apartaments that simply can't find a tenant.
Also, another point where you can clearly see why property price is artificially inflated is when you take the historic average renting price of a property which is 0,5% of the selling value per month.
Today, it's below 0,3% and you're lucky to get that.
And now you're asking me why 0,5%? It's because saving accounts in Brazil pay 0,5+TR% monthly. So, as an investment, you'd expect your property to return at least that, since there's no safer investment than that, it's widely considered the minimum return for any operation to be interesting.
They did change the law for a while, but since the SELIC went back above 8,5% and won't be going below that for the next couple of years, you can assume savings will keep returning 0,5+TR%. Also, during the lower SELIC rate, savings would be returning roughly 0,45%, which is still higher than what you could get in renting.
Also, I'm not considering the market valuation of properties simply because I'm also not considering the maintenance costs (which overall would also pend in favour of the saving accounts). |
It is quite common that foreign companies blame the taxes for their huge prices in Brazil ("Custo-Brazil", or "Brazil-Cost"), but the truth IN THIS CASE is that brazilians accept paying such prices and that is why prices are high. This is called "Lucro-Brasil" (Brazil-Profit) [1] and is quite common with cars [2].
What Sony says is such a bullshit that Sony in their explanations [3] uses as base for their calculation the retail price, as if they would send people to buy PS$'s at US stores to sell them again in Brazil. Also, the profit of Sony Brazil is bigger than the profit of the brazilian retailer selling to the final consumer.
My counter-example agains what Sony says is the brazilian price of the xbox one, that is almost half the price of PS4. [4] This shows that it is possible to sell things in Brazil for not such a high price. And xbox one is already more expensive than PS4 in the USA. (Or you might believe that microsoft is paying to sell in Brazil, but that would be absurd)
Brazil has lots of taxes, but this is just not truth.
nice sources (sorry, they are in portuguese. Maybe translate might help someone interested):
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4] |
Sure if you want to compare the x86 version of Windows 8 to two ARM OS's then I suppose it is more "full featured." However if we are to compare equals. ARM windows 8 is indeed bloated compared. Honestly my expericne with windows 8 is similar to others, underwelmed by the desktop experince and underwelmed by the mobile experince when compared to iOS and Android. They have had a ton of time to deliver on their promisis, and all they can say is "It runs office!" Well hell, so does android an iOS at this point. The only reason they dont run MS office is because of MS! So saying "Windows runs office" is like saying "Gas engines run gasoline." They already ported Office to arm, now they just have to port the UI toolkits used to make it cross platform. It will take more than the exodus of Ballmer to get MS to truely diversify and until then they will just simply continue to fall behind, be bloated, and leave people underwhelmed when compared to the competion. |
For what reason? You can't fix the hardware yourself? I manage over 300 iPads and I absolutely love them. There's no headache involved. They just overhauled the buying system. And if there happens to be a hardware problem, which happens pretty infrequently, Apple care takes care of it no questions asked. EVERY. TIME.
>you need to spring for a decent MDM solution for iDevices to work well in a large scale deployment
So... you're saying I have to spend money for quality program... no.... you don't say? You mean like I have to spend money on a server to get Windows devices to work well in a large scale deployment? Mass360 isn't even that bad of a price, and manages it all wonderfully. No one wants to spend money on IT, then bitches when it doesn't work right. BUY THE PROPER SHIT! |
truth, i just bought one (should be delivered today).
But I'm using it for a work only machine; data fitting, spreadsheets, etc. I'm fine with sacrificing space for portability and ease of use. I do have a 3TB external at my desk I can use, and I believe you can do up to an additional 64 gig on an SD card as well. |
I'm in Ireland and last year all of the teachers in my school got iPads after it being tested on five select teachers before. The system we have is great and it's being introduced as a whole school thing in a couple of years. Wifi was the only original problem but now we have modems in almost every classroom and things are going well. |
I've owned two HP laptops - never again.. They design piss poor ventilation, the mouse track pads are inferior, the case is cheap plastic, the monitor couldn't go higher than 59mhz refresh rate, which meant I couldn't play many popular games (battlefield or counterstrike).
As soon as i qued up a video, the fan would kick into high gear (very loud) so i'd have to jack up the volume. The intake fan for ventilation was on the bottom (WHY!?). I bought one of those high end alluminum cooling docks that had two fans to help cool the thing. I still burned out two motherboards during typical use. They were under warranty, but it took close to 6 weeks to get it repaired and sent back. Who knows if they copied my amateur porn videos strewn about the pc.
Anyways, I took a friends advise and got a mac book pro - its night and day. When hardware and software are designed by the same company, the end result is much better. it sucks air from above the keyboard and blows it out the back behind the monitor. (you can use it on your lap). The one-piece aluminum body means i don't hear plastic creaking when i pick up the 17" behemoth like i did with the HP.
The OS is more stable in my opinion and I got to avoid windows 8 which is nice. |
The thing is, it's legit to ask how some things would be without piracy.
Mp3 on the internet started thanks to piracy. Then when they started to be sold legally people wanted it DRM free and we broke the law once again to get it. Eventually companies caved in. And nowadays, after FIFTEEN years, after all this we have services like Spotify. In a way its hard to look at piracy and ignore its role as the engine that brought all this forward. Unfortunately.
And this is still reality today. If for example I want to see an episode of a series the day it comes out, let's say Game of Thrones, I have two options: Move to America and pay, or stay at home and don't. You may want to be ethical and follow the law but it is not hard to choose given this options.
Additionally, companies efforts to stop piracy end up fueling it and creating supporters. Like Ubisoft for example releasing games (Assassins Creed) with protections that redeemed them almost unplayable. I have a friend that bought the game and later had to download the crack in order to have a decent experience. |
If that were true, all unlimited plans would not exist, and companies that only offered limited data would have stock through the roof. I dont think I even know how cellular companies operate, it's an entire industry. So, all I say is IMHO and I do believe there is a somewhat-free market reason for it. |
I guess its a matter of preference. I wad with tmobile for 4 years. When my contract was up, my wife and i decided to go and renew and get new phones. We wanted the iphone 5 and GS4. Tmobile refused to let us have a contract under this new thing theyre doing. We had 2 options. Buy the phones outright for 1200 dollars, or pay monthly. If we bough them, our bill would be 110 a month. To pay them off monthly, it would be 170 a month. All this for subpar service ( i travel a lot and tmobile is always spotty). Went over to verizon, got the same phones for 350 total and my bill is 145 a month. I have yet to drop signal anywhere |
me too. i had started their 4g service when they got the htc thunderbolt (headaches!) but then just got a sim cutter and bought some galaxy s3's off craigslist in my area for around $250. been considering upgrading to a couple new phones this past year but kept passing because the s3 still does everything i need.
i still have 2 unlimited data lines with my employer discount comes to around $170/month. just bought a verizon 4g router off ebay a month ago and popped my sim card in there. faster than my cable internet.
2GB is a JOKE on LTE . i'd say these days, to use your phone comfortably (txt, email, surf the web, posting pics, watching youtube, streaming music, updating apps, etc.) you'd need around 10GB for basic users to stay under that cap and not have any overage fees. (my opinion)
also, i don't like asking people for their home network passwords and connecting and disconnecting from wifi on my phone. and if i need internet for my laptop on the go, my s3 still acts as a hotspot. |
As is so often the case, the problems are Power, Heat and Interconnects.
Given the size of '3 pizza boxes,' they are not getting even 500 chips in that space.
25 Watt processor or fpga @ 1.25 Volts = 20 Amps * 500 chips = 10,000 Amps of Power.
25 Watt processor = 25 Watts * 500 chips = 12,500 Watts of power
New series processor or fpga power interconnect, over 400 pins, = 200,000 connections for POWER only on and off the chips
There would be another 200,000 data interconnects.
If they could get 16 cores into a chip - this would still only provide 8,000 cores |
Most likely it's not a full "Watson" but rather a network appliance that slots into a rack. Watson is powered by 2,880 8-core IBM POWER7 processors, which AFAIK haven't received a core bump or a die shrink since their introduction in 2011. |
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