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You don't like him because he wrote about random things? >So you use exactly the trick I described here: >No, the cause of me not liking him is not that "he wrote about random things". It is very possible to "write about random things" and not write what he did, or to be an asshole. It is the specific things he wrote I have a problem with.
Is complacency really better than revolution? Come on! Show a good power-is-in-the-people example! Who knows how these giants will grow if no action is taken. edit: You sure seem to hate comcast very much. Yet you seem more willing to keep yourself uncomfortable because "could be worse." When a time comes that you're forced to describe the situation as "eh, could be worse", it's already pretty fucking bad and it's high time to do something about it. Not quite the same thing, but, people lost their lives when my country went in the streets for independence from the Soviet Union, agreed, it was already crumbling, but bad service and grumbling customers can't be exactly described as "top of the line machinery". Comcast may not be the Soviets the same as losing a job or a month's worth of movies n shit isn't as losing life. EDIT2:
I don't have to deal with Time Warner or Comcast and I don't understand why people don't cancel. I've heard so many horror stories but I'd like to know more. I saw someone say like $150 for cable and internet. I pay $54 for 30 up and 4 down with charter. Every time I test it, it's like 32 up and 5 down. I need internet. Pretty much a fact. But I don't need cable. I've seen a lot of people say they need it but no, you don't. Get a Roku, Netflix, and Hulu Plus. All set. I've had my Roku for over 2 years. Netflix and Hulu are like $17 combined per month. Want more? Ask around for someone with HBO. Then you get HBO go. The login for HBO go is the same for ESPN. Boom. I get the internet thing but cable is not required. I don't know how Comcast and TW are with internet pricing but it should be less than you're paying now.
I live in chicago and comcast is the only option in my area. After 1 year of bs service and increased rates, we decided to cancel cable. Still get the internet so we can use Netflix, hulu, amazon prime, and stream football on the weekends. We also bought a $16 antenna from RS that works perfectly. Football Sundays have never been better. Network games on one tv and redzone streaming on the other. Saving about $100/month. Looking to cancel internet soon and reopen under a dif roommates name so we get it for $50 instead of $65 (which is also just ridiculous).
I canceled cable years ago, saved up money for a baby, and now am a father without debt.
There is no realistic alternative IP thanks to regional monopoly. I gather that's the situation for the vast bulk of their subscribers based on their own reasoning for the government to allow the merger. In other words, I can't affect a real impact on the merger because of the very reason for the merger (extending monopoly)
See, here's where I think a lot of people (including OP) miss the point and aren't looking at the whole picture and over-arching strategy. Just about every piece of data on hardware usage points to maybe not a post-PC era, but one where laptop and desktop form factors are no longer the main 'computer' people use. Additionally, Microsoft is doing a lot more than just bundling services into a subscription model. They're offering a number of basic services [free of charge]( bringing access to many, if not all, of their apps to the cloud, AND bundling apps in a subscription model. To think this doesn't offer a lot of flexibility and opportunity to consumers is incredibly myopic and ignorant. Moreover, the internet is becoming ubiquitous - with access to it available through a myriad of different devices (phones, wearables, laptops, desktops, tablets, etc) and operating systems (linux, windows, osx, etc). In our lifetime, we're probably going to get to a point where everyone on the planet has access to the web, but not necessarily access to hardware powerful enough to run sophisticated applications. Thus, as a software company, it's incredibly pertinent and strategically advantageous to offer your services / applications / etc to anyone with access to the web regardless of hardware specs and operating system. What's the best way to do that? Offer it through 'the cloud.' If people only want basic word, excel, and outlook functionality those are now all available free through your web browser to anyone on any piece of hardware with access to the internet. Want something more complex that's available too. Lastly, Microsoft is psycho about backwards compatibility and not leaving legacy users in the dust. Their strategy is mobile and cloud first - not only. Although they are moving to a cloud & mobility centric strategy (which in my humble opinion is the right thing to do), it'll be many years before anything drastically changes for legacy users...
A lack of ISP competition is one reason why it's a bad idea. That being said it's a bad idea regardless. In your situation would you really want to have to subscribe to 3 or 4 different ISPs to get all the different websites you want at a reasonable speed? Because that would be the result. Think: ISP A strikes a deal with Netflix and throttles anyone that competes. ISP B strikes a deal with HBO... throttles anyone else. ISP C strikes a deal with Sony pictures and throttles everyone else. If you love Game of Thrones, Orange is the new Black AND spiderman you can either pirate what you want and risk that, you can subscribe to 3 different ISPs to get what you want or you can do without 1 or 2 of what you want. THAT is why net neutrality, regardless of ISP competition, is a bad thing.
this is correct. The reason someone might get charged for a modem they own is this: when you buy a modem you have to call Comcast (or the installer calls it in) and add the modem's Mac address and Serial Number (as well as make/model) to the inventory and to your account. When they are entering the info there is a box that says "Owned" or "Rental" - it is pretty easy to select the wrong box there and it will show in the system as a "Rental modem". Once it is in the system wrong, someone will audit the account eventually and they will "fix" the billing system by adding the $10 rental fee then send you a letter or phone call about it. The only way to get this fee removed is to have them file an Equipment Research Ticket and that will go to someone that will check the Mac address against the list of modems that Comcast has purchased and if it doesn't match then the fee is reversed. But make sure they change the modem to "owned modem" or someone else will "fix" it again with the next audit. --
Yes. But how many cops would realistically stop—for example—chokeholding an unarmed civilian to check their phone for a "You're being recorded, officer!" alert? " It's really kinda sad that this is how people view the police. A couple dirty harries make the news and now everyone has to mistrust the police. How can the good police, which is like 99.99% of cops, do the job they are under paid to do if witnesses won't talk or the public won't cooperate? Simple, they can't, and the bad guys win. No one should be afraid to document police, but the people who do and get attention, are dicks. Don't walk up to a cop trying to conduct a traffic stop for a speeding ticket or searching a vehicle cause he smells illegal narcotics and shove a camera in his face and demand to know what he's doing and his shield number and his probable cause. If you get in the way he can and will arrest you for obstruction of justice. If you do decide to record any encounter with law enforcement, DO NOT EDIT IT TO MAKE THE OFFICE LOOK LIKE A DICK. You can get a good man put on modified/suspended assignment or worse and could result in a defamation/slander suit against yourself. Most LEO just want to make it through their tour. Hardly any want to shoot anyone, and if they do, internal affairs' entire job is to find out if it was good or not and then charge that officer. Witch hunting and fear mongering go against everything 'innocent until proven guilty' stands for. I am an aspiring LEO. I have already gone through some training and programs, and have received 'shoot don't shoot' training. Until you've been in their boots, you don't understand. Danger IS behind every corner, and in a dark alley or parking lot you would shoot him too if he disobeyed every order you have him and started to reach for that thing in his pocket.
It irks me that so many otherwise sane and smart people on Reddit can be so sure in their support for or use of AdBlock Plus or any Ad-Blocker software as some morality crusade or something. This is not you against the man, it's not about freedom or choice it's simply about what's right and what's wrong. You're getting a FREE service, and they're running a business and trying to pay their employees so just respect that and let them show you some Ads. Privacy? Oh please. Why do you care if they are tracking stuff about you? Ad companies get far scary more info about you from Credit Card activity, Retail Stores, Surveys etc than they do from you online. It's creepy as shit maybe yes but you can't really avoid it (tinfoil hat, cash only, living in the woods maybe) so instead just embrace it online and let them show you decent Ads instead of random garbage that your un-targetable low cost ass deserves. Larger websites are tracking you by useragent and IP address already anyway, with a little work (or outsourcing) they know where you work and where you live and who you work with. Clearing cookies won't save you either, it's a Big Data world now chief and you can't actually escape it. Even if you don't see an Ad you've lost your privacy long ago. Malware? If you're smart enough to know about Ad Blockers you're also smart enough to mitigate the risks of malware by keeping your shit up to date. Also, if you're visiting the kind of shady/shitty websites that have malware in Ads well shame on you for not doing that from a VM in the first place as they probably have 1st party malware too and your bot is causing more problems on the Internet than you know. Look, websites are ridiculously expensive to run, the only truly viable solution still today is to run Ads using a 3rd party Ad Network. So unless you want your favorite websites to paywall everyone or have websites start taking your free shit away from you in other ways stop blocking their only source of revenue which lets you use them for FREE. Internet Advertising is a shady business, it really is, but that's mostly because of naive old practices and technology still in use today, all that is slowly changing for the better and the more trackable/targetable you are the less of an opportunity for abuse there is and the less of a problem it actually becomes. Finally, if you think AdBlock Plus are on some moral high ground here then know this; they are running what most people would call an obvious extortion racket. Websites can pay to get on the whitelist and they do that by paying a % of the revenue sourced from what would have otherwise been blocked users and it's all tracked by AdBlock Plus. It's quite disgusting really and you're all a party to the extortion when you use Adblock Plus.
For one thing, they'd have to buy radio spectrum. That would probably cost them billions that already has the datacenters and thousands of miles of fiber optic cable, or build it yourself.
But you do realize that what they're showing off is the clear display right? They just chose to use a laptop to showcase it. The laptop has nothing to do with any of this except that it's nice to be able to show something on the screen. Slapping it on a laptop makes that easier for people to visualize what makes it so great because they can compare it to something that they already know about. Most people have a laptop, or at least have used them quite a bit so it makes sense for the designers to use a laptop so that people have a reference to compare this new tech to.
Really? That's interesting...how come. Looking at the differences in numbers we aren't talking about earth shattering differences in volume vs other modern aircraft, maybe 7db at the most. Your ears are pretty good at picking out differences in volume, but who knows if that difference will be reproduced accurately. In this video, look at the path it takes from the airport to your ears. It is recorded on site, processed with the video, encoded and compressed, converted (looks like the user is not associated with boeing), and uploaded to youtube, then played on your computer. If at any point along the line, if the audio is normalized (which will even the two clips), or dynamically compressed (which will change the perceived volume) either on purpose or incidentally, or gain changed in production, the entire comparison is invalid. If they just used the camera mic, there's a good possibility it changed the gain automatically. Of course, they could also change the gain on purpose to maximize a volume difference. Even if there is no alteration of the sound from the microphone to your computer, the differences in volume in the track are really differences in gain. There may be 0.2db gain difference between the two airplanes on the audio track, but how much volume difference is going to come out after it is decoded, sent through your audio driver, through your soundcard's DAC and preamplifier, and through your headphones (or amplifier, then speakers)? Also, the way you perceive volume differences changes at different levels. At a comfortable listening volume there may be no difference. Would you turn up your speakers to 100db? And on the same lines, the tone and timbre of the sound also contribute to perceived changes in volume. Saxophonists have long known that an 'edgy' sound will 'cut through' the mix and make them sound louder, and used this to their advantage in the days before PA systems. Same deal will happen here, and it's a valid way for them to reduce the sound impact of a plane, but will it be maintained from recording to your ears? If they did a comparison, and there was a huge difference, would you trust them that it was accurate? It's a video put out by the manufacturer. Knowing reddit, if they had done a comparison, the first comment would be listing all the ways it was crap.
I don't mind "facts" being posted outside r/politics. Posting that congress is considering a bill to move steering wheels to the right side of the car is fine really. It becomes politics (and thus should be relegated to politics) when it's Side X is doing this! Side Y is doing that! Look how screwed we are because of X. Person A voted for/against or introduced X,Y,Z how can he be in office. Person B is the best thing since sliced bread!
Gtmo is not actually at all like it used to be. I spent some time there working as a lieutenant last year and the prisoners are actually treated extremely well. The ones who are cooperative and don't throw things at the guards have DSs and PS3s. Any time they want to talk to an interpreter they can, though most of them understand English well enough by now. Any time they must be forcibly removed from their cell the entire operation is video taped with an interpreter present so that any claims of abuse can be easily validated or debunked. In fact, giving all of these things to the prisoners forces more supervision over the guards as it makes them bitter to how well the prisoners are treated.
This article will make no difference to anything, anywhere. Except for CNN's bank balance, courtesy of Google. And if, to fill 10 reasons, they have to mention privacy twice count 'no farmville' as some sort of bonus (If it was 2008, this would mean something) assume that people simply cannot stand unintrusive sidebar ads assert that posts are 'cleverer' on Google+ (er....OK then) damn, I just couldn't survive without group video chat and so on...I'm not sure how this makes Googlebook look any better.
Protip: Indonesia and Thailand are actually different countries, and the flooding happened in Thailand. This article doesn't even mention Indonesia. Also, it's spelled "Indonesian."
Computer aided design. Think of it like a 3d model, but instead of being intended to simply approximate the visual appearance they are technical drawings of the entire object corresponding to actual detailed measurements.
Wait until they start dropping the surveillance marbles across the countryside. Tiny gps connected listening devices all meshed together to hear everything around them. Then they will send in tiny robotic insects to get a better view of your house and what you do in there. If there is something suspicious then they will dedicate a UAV to tag and track your movements until they compile enough evidence to break into your home and shoot your dogs.
So we should expect our president to base his decisions off of the possible reactions of MSM instead of principle? No. We should expect our president to not fall on his sword when it will accomplish nothing but destroying what political capital he has. He was faced with a choice between two evils, and he chose the lesser of the two. This choice has the added benefit of allowing him to retain some amount of political capital and may enable him to walk back some of the damage. I don't know about you, but I expect our president to make decisions that are practical . Like not committing political suicide with a veto that will be overriden inside an hour in a scenario where the ensuing media shitstorm will leave him unable to effectively explain why he did so.
You admit that the power is being used Please read the rest of that for context. I think this is the real meat: >complain when they do what any rational actor would The government has rational self interest like any of us; it is just that these feelings are both collectivized and aggregated. > clearly a problem [Citation Needed] These things have happened time and time again as any technology matures in our nation. Here we stand, chicken little. Here we stand. Somehow, here we are after the government probed telegraphs and landlines. Somehow, society still exists and I would argue (though you seem to disagree) that our quality of life is radically better than those times. I appreciate tools for what they are - tools. I realize that we have the choice to opt in to numerous wonderful communication opportunities that were unavailable to my grandparents. Some of these tools were incubated by a lot of our government's treasure. You seem to believe it absurd. I believe that those investments and support wouldn't have happened for these nascent technologies if it wasn't for that little aforementioned word - inherent . I would expect nothing with rational self interest to use precious dollars to incubate its own demise.
I've thought up a metaphor for these anti-privacy bills. So everyone knows those final bosses of games with multiple stages, where the gamer thinks (s)he finally beat the boss only to get creamed by the bigger and better next stage of the boss. Well these bills are just like that. It may seem plausible that after each is shot down, another will pop up in its place that seems like it might pass, and that disheartens many of us. But we must remain steadfast in our protesting and petitioning because bosses don't last forever.
No. Anyone who's dealt with the massive loads of regulation, red tape and taxes in NYC can tell you that this is not a Libertarian wonderland. It's corrupt, bureaucratic and maintains one of the largest public employment forces on earth. BB himself has boasted of controlling the 4th largest army in the world
While I agree with your that information should be free for everyone, I think we need to recognize the difference between information and entertainment in this situation. When you go to the movies, or buy an album, you are paying for the entertainment, which is essentially a service that the artist has provided you. This entertainment, converted into a simple form of information, such as a plot summary, is free, since most of the entertainment factor has been removed. It is equivalent to working an 8 hour shift and only being paid for 3 of them. You charge the employer a wage for your services, and expect to be paid for all of them. On a basic level, the artist has these exact same expectations. I know my opinion is not a popular one, but this is how I view the situation.
My bad. In that case, allow me to try to explain as best as I can (my experience re: marketing is limited to the web and music): There are various factors to be considered when releasing something globally. At the end of the day, the strategies are chosen are believed to be the best way to get as much of a market saturation as possible while using available funds efficiently. Off the top of my head: Seasonality and Culture. For example, Action Movies go hand-in-hand with the Summer in America. If a certain type of movie is believed to be better released around a different time overseas, it could be in order to take advantage of specific dates/times that people are likely to want to see said movie (which can differ from americans). Similar to above: Local events. It would be silly for a movie to launch on the same day/weekend as something like The Super Bowl where you know a large amount of your audience is already spending their cash to prepare for a home event. Such events happen in other countries as well, and movie releases need to keep those in mind for release dates. Competition. Not all movies compete with other movies head-to-head on fixed schedules. The meer fact that there are staggered dates forces other movie releases to change their dates accordingly. For example, if Avengers released in the US one week, and then in Europe the following week... if you have a movie that might get crushed by such a huge powerhouse film, it is in your best interests to stagger your releases as well. Budgets and Hedging Losses. It costs a lot of money to promote a movie, and it would be risky to drop a global-amount-of-cash in one big ass check. So it is quite possible to hedge risks by attacking popular markets first to ensure you get your desired profits... then, based on this, dump more promotion in subsequent markets. It is smart business. Keep in mind... these are just educated assumptions, so I may be off. But the
I'm not defending it. I think it's a pretty lame punishment. But that is the punishment as it stands an was available to be pursued legally by the rights holder. I think it's lame that if I park on the street during street sweeper days I get a $20 ticket... And I may even hate it enough to try to get that law changed... But until it is changed, the fact that I view it to be unjust doesn't negate my responsibility to pay the fine. As much as I want the laws to magically update to meet the modern world... They can't. Is a process. And the process relies on established rules. When you violate those rules and are caught, you are punished. If you believe it to be truly unjust, you may fight it... But you're not just fighting words on paper... You're fighting the opinions and preferences of other people. Law tries to find scalable balance between parties with opposing views. Edit: and btw, things like this happening are how bad laws are modified or thrown out. The law isn't conscious. It can't update itself. Things have to be brought through the system in order to address them.
All of the electronics aboard Curiosity have to be space rated. Not only did the specs on Curiosity settle a long time ago, but when they did, the camera had to have proven through other space flights that it was radiation proof (space is full of harmful radiation that will compromise/fry an image sensor over time), and vibration proof (launch is a bitch, reentry is a bitch), and thermally tame enough to be able to radiate all its heat output with passive cooling aids (no atmo means no convection cooling means shit gets hot without good thermal design). It also has to be made of components which will not outgas too much in the vacuum of space, to prevent contamination and/or accumulation of potentially explosive gasses, or to simply withstand the exigencies of a vacuum environment (duct tape, e.g., simply evaporates in vacuum, plastic coating for cables disappears, thus space wiring is coated in teflon). You also cannot have any sealed cavities, since the pressure inside them will cause issues when you reach vacuum, so lenses, and any enclosures, have to have vent holes to make up for this (no off the shelf lenses for you!) This makes it so that not only was the technology old when it was specced for the vehicle, but it was basic and rugged to being with. Why do you think the thing runs on a 200Mhz processor? And to top it all off, it is not like you can stroll over to the vehicle to replace a broken part, so it just has.to.work. Incidentally, all this shit fascinates me. I recommend you read SMAD.
The Age of
And you're living in a land full of tinfoil hats. [Here]( is an algorithm which is mathematically proven to be unbreakable. For the time being, classical public-key cryptography methods of encryption are impenetrable if sufficiently large keys are used. Obviously, some algorithms are better than others ([ECC]( for instance is far superior to traditional [RSA]( but for the purposes of modern-day cryptography, they are still infeasible to break within the lifetime of the universe if used properly. As quantum computing becomes more and more pronounced, there's a good chance it will necessitate moving away from traditional PKC methods of encryption and towards OTP, as quantum algorithms can trivialize breaking things like RSA ([example]( Helpfully however, they also make key-distribution feasible for OTP. You're more than welcome to go on believing your baseless conspiracy theories, but there are a lot of people more intelligent than the both of us whose doctoral works would be rather useless (despite the fact that they are all clearly and concretely mathematically and computationally grounded) if what you're saying is true.
What is bullshit? Apple exerting their authority regarding their products and dictating how it arrives in the customers hands? that would be hardly bullshit... Google's lack of dictating strict terms with android? Well android is an OS and the hardware is created by third parties that already have the ability to create and modify that OS on their own products so they relinquished control over this much earlier in the supply chain Android hardware manufacturers? Well they could but competition is cut-throat and if they push too hard there are other Android headsets available. The fact is with Android if anyone pushes their weight around they will quickly lose weight. I really do believe Google needs to come back into the picture and create new licensing terms for new android builds/versions. With Motorola under their control and the ability to withstand the shit storm that the carriers and partners will throw at them they could pull it off. So I don't think any of this is 'bullshit' in the sense that its irrational or nonsense but its a result of the very real market forces and dynamics that are in play. I also think Microsoft is trying to prevent the adware bloat that is still common on their desktop OS by putting a stop to it early on. Good move for them and I hope Google follows.
Yep, and that's the day part of me is hoping never happens. Right now, I can hold an intelligent conversation on Google+ without some teenager coming in and saying something stupid (e.g on Facebook many pages have constant "Hey!" or "I wanna have your babies" messages - Google+ has none of this shit yet). At the same time, though, if Google+ doesn't take off, it will be nonrelevant, which it really can't afford to become.
Alas it is a "businessman" and not a scientist trying to invent this, so there's little reason to think it will actually work. Let's assume the most extreme humidity: 30g of water in a cubic meter of air. That's Florida-in-summertime-on-crack humid. And also assume 100% efficiency from the bottle, which is ridiculously optimistic. A standard smallish water bottle holds 482 grams of water (half a liter). Divide that by 30, and you'll see that your bottle would have to process 16 cubic meters of air. Doesn't sound like a lot? That's 16,000 Liters.
Risk isn't quite the right word. Risk/benefit is better. But there's more... Let me explain... Ok, poor guy borrowing $10K might be risky since poor guy. And along the same lines, rich guy borrowing $10K is not risky since rich guy. However, rich guy may well want to borrow $10 Million. This may well be risky. Let's say it's the same risk as a $10K for poor guy. The difference here is that the aggregate return on the single loan, accounting for risk, is much better on $10M than $10K. So, er, loans are loans. But please consider that loaners may chase rich people since rich people take on bigger loans which mean more money for the loaners! so,
This will probably get buried, but I work in ad tech, specifically one of the advertising companies that harnesses a lot of your data, and we know nothing about individual people. We can't find you -- your personal info gets scrubbed and you get a number. All you are is user 1234 and then you get certain attributes based on your internet history . We do not know how much money you make, or what your insurance plan is, we can only determine/guess these things by your browsing history. And then we determine with an algorithm whether or not to serve you an ad and what to pay for it based on 2000 attributes in MILLISECONDS. This includes how likely you are to convert (buy a product or go to the website) where the ad is located (what site) what sites you tend to frequent, and 1,997 other things. So really, if you're always hanging out on Burberry and buying knee socks, you'll get served a Burberry ad for knee socks. Plain and simple. We don't divide the 99% and the 1% and decide to exclude the population from a campaign, nor are we tracking you and manipulating you with our banner ads. This is a really uniformed article, where the person clearly knows nothing about ad tech and is just trying to make people paranoid.
While I agree that the article is a load of spin... it's not true that there are browser plugins and other simple solutions to protect you from this "filter bubble". Web services track you based on lots of factors that your browser can't save you from. Having an account is a big one, but so is having an IP. And a MAC address. So are the idiosyncrasies of your spelling mistakes. Yes, we track and filter for you based on these elements. I build sites that do it, and google, Amazon, and facebook all do it. It's not clandestine, it's just the price of using the service. To give you an idea- there was a recent experiment where 500 people from around the world Googled for a handful of key words within a fixed timeframe. They all had the same list of words... hot button items like "abortion", "Obama", and "Iraq". Everyone submitted screenshots of their searches in a browser normally, and in "anonymous surfing mode" for their browsers. The results: Anonymous surfing mode does alter your results, but it does not neutralize your filter bubble. The truth is, as long as companies see it as a viable model, they will find ways to do it. If they lose consumers (or to be more honest about it, "products") over this issue, it will change. In the meantime, yeah sure use your extensions or plugins or anonymous mode. But to actually neutralize the bubble, you have to use services that pledge not to filter your results.
Being on "The Internet" is having an active connection to the global network of networks. The only way it is different for anyone is based on what specific websites they use and how they use them.
But it's not FREE! At all! There's an enormous opportunity cost involved in the labour! And the sourcing of the materials! And the maintenance! If this was an efficient way of doing things, it'd be done by now! Why don't you go get one and prove me wrong? Is it because it'd be an almighty pain in the dick? That's the cost! What if electricity prices jumped 10,000%? You'd do it then, right? That's because it became an efficient solution!
Exactly. I've got a much smaller fresnel lens (A4 size). If I were to hold my hand an inch behind it, it looks a bit bright, and I might be able to feel a difference in temperature. If I hold a piece of 2x4 at the focal point, it will burst into flame almost immediately. His lens has much greater surface area, and the focal distance is much greater. You'd have to swing the lens to face the sun while holding it the correct distance from yourself to suffer injuries
I was hoping to post this as a comment right there on the NPR site, but found the login process onerous, so... no . "Solar-Powered Death Ray," indeed. Way to blow things out of proportion. I'm annoyed by everyone's seeming mystification over what is a very simple principle that, when I was a kid, every child over the age of four knew all about. It's a simple and trivial matter to set something on fire with even a small magnifying glass and decent sunshine; I myself was doing it from the time my father showed me the principle as a very young boy. What happens is simply that the light of the sun -- specifically, the infrared (heat) portion of its spectrum -- from the whole area of the lens is being focused onto a tiny spot, concentrating its energy. The bigger the lens, the greater its area, the more light and heat it is able to collect and focus, and the hotter becomes the resulting focal point. On a bright summer day, even a handheld toy magnifying glass can be enough to ignite a sheet of paper (the darker the paper, the easier it ignites) or melt a plastic bucket (again, the darker the better; dark colors absorb more heat). A fresnel lens as used here is just an ordinary magnifying glass, just physically rearranged into a form that, on the large scale, appears flat; if you look closely, though, it's actually a series of rings with an overall "sawtooth" cross-section which, if lifted out to line up with each other would form the familiar (well, in my day anyway!) convex surface of a "normal" magnifying glass. Without looking at the video yet, I can only speculate as to how large this guy's is, but it sounds like it's got to be at least a couple of feet across. I had one about ten inches across when I was a kid, which wouldn't melt coins or turn concrete red-hot, but which was sufficient to set the asphalt of my street on fire on one memorable occasion... I am definitely going to have to scavenge up one of these bigger ones and melt me some coins and concrete. Oh, and if you have one, you should wrap it in paper or cloth when storing it, just in case the sun happens to shine on-and-through it; you don't want to set other things on fire in your storage room. Edit: Added first sentence, added T;DR
Sanity? Are you NUTS?!?!?! Do you know what the Canadian Supreme Court position is on gay marriage? The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the government has the authority to amend the definition of marriage, but did not rule on whether or not such a change is required by the equality provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Court stated that such a ruling is not necessary because the federal government had accepted the rulings of provincial courts to the effect that the change was required. The Court also ruled that given freedom of religion in the Charter of Rights, and wording of provincial human rights codes, it was highly unlikely that religious institutions could be compelled to perform same-sex marriages, though because solemnization of marriage is a matter for provincial governments, the proposed Bill could not actually guarantee such a protections.
No. Both Canada Customs and US Customs (and probably in many other countries) can basically search whatever they want without a warrant. The basic idea is that you chose to cross the border, so you can be legally required to submit to whatever searches. Specifically, a federal court case in the US found that US customs could search someone for any reason without a warrant because showing up at the border in itself gave the customs officers "reasonable suspicion". I don't know the exact legal reasoning in Canada. Note: I'm not saying this is fully justifiable, but that's the way it works.
Your glaring omission and the main point that you refuse to address is how you plan to not alter the original binary. As soon as you add functioning code to the original binary you negate the possibility of getting a hash collision. The reality is that with platforms such as Windows all of this is moot to begin with. There are enough known security holes that up to 85% of all Windows boxes are easily owned. These days that are even gui frameworks for Metasploit that would allow an unskilled teenager to pop a reverse shell on most Windows boxes. The only thing needed is network access, which is the hard part. If you are talking about trying to get malware into a Linux package maintainer's repository, you are way off the mark. Your methods would only work if you managed to coax the user into adding a key to an untrusted repository and if that's the case, the collision method is entirely unnecessary. If you were adding code to an already popular project you can expect the code to be scrutinized before being accepted. Even if you were excellent and obfuscation it's likely that the code would be rejected because project standards don't really make room for obfuscated code.
To be fair, most Linux distributions do the same thing. That is, if they decide to digitally sign packages at all. I know it's popular to hate on Microsoft but they actuallyfdo a pretty great job overall of securing their OS. Sure, they are bugs. But there are bugs everywhere. Just because the Linux kernel potentially has more eyes looking on it doesn't mean that it actually does. Nor does it mean all the software built on top of it is equally secure.
That was more of a server issue. This I do have experience with. (I am simplifying their storage/server structure here) Basically the way it works is that they were storing the photos in folders on their servers. The servers automatically propogate (mirror) the photos across the whole facebook network. A PHP script (or whatever they use on their back end) generates a unique id for the photo and in effect creates a url that now points to that specific file on whichever Facebook server you connect to. Now it wouldn't be too difficult to write code that deletes the file, then propogates the deletion. However per Facebook's EULA, they now own your photo so they are not going to delete it. The problem is that there was no mechanism to break that unique URL to the photo which still sat exactly where it was on every server. The code could have been very simple. Once a user "deletes" a picture, the server could just append the filename with a character. This would break the URL. The picture would appear deleted and Facebook could keep the photo. I really think this was a result of sloppy coding to be honest. Their site is shit. From an application standpoint, the UI is horrible. They spent all of their money hiring Computer Scientists to write fancy algorithms that controlled their social mapping software and other fancy back end shit. The people who actually did their application design, built it like they were fresh out of jr. college.
The fact that there is an ongoing case into it's legality and the rulings into it's constitutional legality are classified are clear indicators that the program itself broke the law - thus illegal. it's a reinterpretation of the word 'relevant' that allowed the unconstitutional spying. It's not just a single case where they made one mistake which allowed verizon business customers data to be sucked up, none of which has anything to do with 'national security'. He's not a spy, he didn't commit treason, or espionage, he never profited from the information, he never directly provided the broad classified information to a governmental body or competing company, he released it to the press. That classified information is on the illegal activities of the government. Hence whistle-blowing. If anything he was a spy working for the NSA before becoming a whistle-blower. You apparently missed, multiple times, where I stated that I do not agree with how he blew the whistle, though I understand why he did it the way he did. If you break the law you should be held accountable, however the head hunting that the US government does for whistle-blowers is beyond ridiculous, this you can't argue. Which is also clearly shown by the president's comments US 'won't scramble jets' to capture 'hacker' Snowden, which is right, all he had to do is let his security forces say he's on a Bolivian airplane... >According to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, Americans disapprove of Edward Snowden’s leaks by a 52 percent to 44 percent margin. >But according to a Time magazine poll released last week, they think he did “a good thing” by a 54 percent to 30 percent margin. Which once again nullifies your position of the 'vast majority' of people. You directly missed the point. America's enemies aren't using Skype / facebook / gmail and other common social tools to communicate . Nothing that he leaked to the press will change how terrorists communicate. If there was there would be more than 2~~ ~~5 12 world wide as many as 50 'Potential Terrorist Attacks'. All of which they have no explination for and the ones they directly attribute it to such as the [NYE Bombing plot are horse shit](
Subhead of that article you linked to: "Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data." If the program was truly as lawless as you seem to believe they wouldn't have even done that much. Instead they are acting within existing law and seeking to get surveillance approved by the appropriate courts. Screaming that something is illegal or unconstitutional does not make it so. Just because a judge has struck down the administration's claim of state secrets doesn't mean fuck-all about the merits of the case. I also would be very surprised if that order stands. Something tells me the US District Court for the District of Columbia will eventually get the case and throw it out. Even if they don't there is no guarantee the EFF's lawsuit will be successful. Under existing law it appears most of what Snowden has alleged is within the law. I don't know what a case president is but it sounds important. That said, the FISA court was established by statute as a way of handling a difficult problem. Our courts are supposed to be public; however, the government really doesn't want to tip off subjects of intelligence gathering. Folks who know they're being watched won't reveal that they're doing anything nefarious. In order to allow for surveillance AND have some kind of court supervision, the FISA court was established. I think there is certainly a great deal of room for debate about how that court functions, but I don't think Snowden's actions are likely to encourage that. Obviously the secrecy of the court is not perfect because we're discussing orders made by that court. This "is he a whistleblower" question is pretty pointless. It's basically restating the argument over whether the programs he disclosed were legal or not. I've made my views clear. Since the programs he disclosed were legally authorized he is not a whistleblower but a spy. Again, I don't know what a case president is. Maybe you're referring to precedent -- which is clearly in PRISM's favor. Metadata is not protected at the same level as content. Frankly I do not find the arguments saying that metadata should be protected very compelling. You DO voluntarily hand the phone company the numbers of people you plan to call -- the system needs that to work and you want to have a record of calls for your bill. Likewise you have to provide the email address of every person you attempt to contact to a third party for the system to work. I've never looked at electronic communications as fully private because I understand how the systems work and adjust my privacy expectations accordingly. Gee you bring up another dubious whistleblowing case as a reason Snowden shouldn't surrender himself to the authorities. I guess you believe that folks should be able to leak classified information with impunity and fear no prosecution as a result of their actions. I think people should be held responsible when they break the law. Your "shit tons of trumped up charges" link doesn't link to anything about a person being prosecuted. Nobody has declared Snowden "guilty" of anything. Diane Feinstein said she thought his actions amounted to treason. That is not saying he is guilty of treason. He has already confessed to his crimes so I don't know exactly what you think a "fair trial" would entail. I think his only hope would be an act of jury nullification (which might even be justified). He did break the law and he did confess doing so. A fair trial might very well end with his conviction. Reddit is not a very good stand-in for the views of the general public. Reddit skews much younger and generally more libertarian than the general public. Opinion polling on this issue has been pretty consistent -- the general public is not outraged and is not particularly supportive of Snowden. I'm not pulling anything out of my ass - I just get out of the Reddit fever swamp from time to time to check in with the reality of public opinion. You did an excellent job missing my point. My point is that Snowden's actions directly benefited America's enemies. Since you seem to think that somebody has to benefit from espionage for it to be espionage I felt the need to point out the benefit.
When you're building industrial equipment and the only option is HDMI, you cry because you know you're going to get a call from a customer who no longer can get information to their display you know it's because HDMI is a stupidly designed connector.
Although the sentiment is there, and we all know the Monster Cable scam, there is a difference in really shitty HDMI cables and not so shitty ones. Shitty ones will give you what looks like snow on your screen as the signal is on the ragged edge of failure. Not so shitty ones won't. That being said, the difference in a $10 Monoprice cable and a $80 Super duper gold laced extra deluxe cable is minimal even at 1080p 3D on a really damn good TV. Source: professional installer.
And that is where we are now. Copies are made on computers vs being made on VCRs. And you don't have a HDMI cable running from your hard drive to your processor, so its like having an elite cavalry when the war is being fought on the water with aircraft carriers & submarines. One bigger difference I've noticed is I work in video production & in the '90s (and I believe even early 2000s) a professional VTR ("VCR") wouldn't have [Macrovision]( which was essentially the HDCP of the analog world. So in 1999 if you bought a $200 VCR from Best Buy & tried to duplicate a major VHS or DVD the signal would be blocked & you wouldn't record anything. But if you bought a $5,000 S-VHS VTR or $20,000 Betacam SP VTR you could duplicate any VHS or DVD you wanted to. Flash forward to today, I have seen statements from multiple manufactures who make professional video recorders with HDMI inputs & their statements are written in such a way that it seems like they legally signed their first born into slave labor if they don't implement HDCP in their devices. Granted, most of these devices are designed to be used to record live from a camera & cameras don't have HDCP. But it is made clear that these devices won't circumvent HDCP if you try to record a copy protected signal.
Unfortunately, it really isn't optimized properly in either direction. Ethernet is a framing standard, while HDMI is a streaming standard. Standards like MPEG do implement a transport stream multiplexer specifically for the purpose of "streaming" over TCP/IP, but why bother with the overhead? Back in the day, before televisions connected to the Internet, it didn't make sense to add the unnecessary complexity and costs of a software decoder when DVI/HDMI provided a universal "plug and play" solution for getting digital information to a "dumb" monitor. Now that this is no longer the case, HDMI development is focused on throughput optimization. Ethernet is made to be extremely generic, and takes a performance hit as a result. HDMI is made to be highly specialized, so it achieves higher performance as a result of it's narrower optimization.
I bought an XPS 15 a few years ago and I was pretty annoyed by the lack of VGA and its substitution with "this proprietary DisplayPort crap." Recently I realized its actually great because you can break it out into VGA or DVI/HDMI. Using it alongside the HDMI jack I can plug 2 monitors into my laptop. Let me tell you, if you think dual monitors is freeing, you should try a triple-monitor setup. I can not get things done three times as fast.
You're right, but your specs don't help your point. Modern PC GPUs are well ahead of console GPUs. Consoles are meant to have a couple advantages: Efficient use of resources. They're specially designed and optimized, since the designers know the specs of every component. Affordable. Relative to a gaming PC, a console is meant to be something you can actually pay for. Problem being, the next console generation got put off because the cost of actually increasing the raw power of the last generation to make a big leap was increasing exponentially. HD game development is more costly and time-consuming than anyone was prepared for. So they waited until it was reasonable to build a box for a few hundred bucks. In the mean time, GPU development cycles outpaced the consoles. Normally, you have this "leap-frog" affect. A console comes out, ahead of its time, and is an optimized, stable platform. Then PCs catch up, but are less stable. Then they blast ahead. Finally, they outpace consoles in power and price... right in time for another console. Which is why the long console generation is important. The consoles are, relative to their forebears, a big step up. But to keep the cycle going relative to PCs, they'd need to have come out a couple of years ago. And since a couple of years is about how long it takes for PCs to really compete on component prices and power with consoles, it basically means they got a head start and have already "caught up". And since the market for PC parts is in a great place right now, it's easier than every to mash some cheap parts together and build a serviceable rig that can easily play anything you throw at it. Perhaps not on the highest settings, but it'll look just as good, if not better, than its console counterpart anyways. And you have access to modding, more settings, easier updates, and a bunch of extra utility that comes from owning a PC.
4K video means really high resolution. A lot of pixels. (A pixel is a singular dot on the screen that is one solid color throughout. More pixels = higher quality picture). SUPER ULTRA HD. HDMI 1 could only send a limited amount of data per second. The more pixels sent in one frame, the less frames there are that can be sent in one second. C = pixels/frame x frames/second where C is a constant defined by the HDMI standard. Imagine someone doodled a series of images on a stack of post it notes and then flipped through them to present to you a cartoon. Each image on a post-it note is a frame, and the rate at which the pages are flipped is the framerate (measured in frames per second = FPS). If the pages are flipped slowly, the motion looks choppy and not natural. Due to it's limited bandwidth (amount of data that can be transfered at one second), HDMI 1 could only transmit a 4K frame 30 times per second. This is fine for films and tv shows (maybe this will changhe in the future), but bad for video games and the like. Why can films get away with a lower FPS? Because if you ever pause a movie or a show while something is in motion, you will see that there is something called a motion blur. Because each frame shows something in a blur when it is moving, when played at 30 FPS, it looks smooth. If there was no blur in each frame it would look choppy, and not smooth. In video games, there is no blur, a frame is a blurless image. I don't think data is actually represented as frames in the HDMI cable, but perhaps someone with more knowledge would care to enlighten me. ** There are actually options for bluring images in video games, but as far as I know, this is not really made for motion, but for removing jagged edges at the borders of objects (zig-zaggy looking black lines on the edges of things in games) but I don't think this really counts as it is artificial and requires computation.
Because while there are laws implementing "net neutrality" at a basic level, we have very little legislation in place that actually addresses the matter. To the courts, and government agencies, they argue that it is their "pipes" and so they can route what they want through it. They argue that while they are not allowed to slow down or delay traffic from one origin or another, they're allowed to dictate how much is used. But the funny thing about that argument is that network infrastructure is built to accommodate a theoretical peak load at a certain rate. Lets say 6pm on friday when everyone gets home, they get online. The network needs to account for that - everyone will be requesting data so they need to be able to handle that. And it does, though usually with a bit more lag and slower speeds. But if at 3am you're online, those network interfaces and fiber lines are still in use. While you can argue they may shut some off to save on power, this is unlikely as the overall power difference is going to have minimal impact on the general expenditures of the network. So, why impose caps? It makes little sense. I have, and will continue until given a reason to otherwise, promoted capping speed. Because that is where people really end up fighting with other customers. If I'm downloading 1.2MBs and someone else in the house wants to download anything they probably can't. If everyone is trying to access the network, someone will not be able to. So putting caps on the network transmission rate (and charging for higher rates) is more accurate than saying "you can't consume more than X amount of data". Now - they have been sued, and I don't remember if they have won or lost or if it is still going on. But the legal grounds that they are defending from, again, are very sturdy compared to the relatively new laws and regulations regarding "neutrality". By not limiting speed from Netflix, they're not prohibiting it or giving it a disadvantage (they argue). But they put a cap so that you have to limit your consumption of it, thus degrading the quality that person gets from their subscription.
It's funny since I know many people that bought Linden to trade it for BTC due to the relative ease of exchange.
And if I have no license am I not allowed to develop my own app? You would be able to build your own app for your own use, you just wouldn't be able to offer it for sale, or build an app for others (just like you can't cut hair for others without a license.) I am being a bit cheeky, but licensure is a means of limiting competition so as to protect investment in a business venture, which translates as a (putative) protection of consumers by ensuring minimum training and competency. I would argue that the work that accountants and lawyers (and plumbers and hairdressers) do is no more complicated than the work done in most IT jobs, yet these professions have licensing requirements which also entail a period of internship or apprenticeship which creates a barrier to entry because the lead times before profitability are a sunk cost which can only be amortized over many years. IT body shops like InfoSys and others would find it less attractive to onshore candidates from other countries if they had to put the candidates through a year-long licensing program before the could recoup any money.
There's [a thread]( over on /r/privacy about the best secure alternatives to WhatsApp. The
are you 100% certain that it does not?" Yes. >Denying unauthenticated connections is a matter of software and there is no mystical, cosmic force that prevents a programmer from coding in the instructions "you hit port 5000, then 8000, then 13000? Welcome, friend - I will give you full admin access and pretend that you authenticated!" There is. The code would need to be in the network driver. These routers are generally linux based and for the past several years have been using the upstream kernel modules. In order to do this, someone would have either a) put the back door into the kernel tree or b) changed the code. In the case of b, people actually pay attention and run diffs to see what changes the vendors made from upstream. Someone would make note if the driver was changed (even if they didn't understand why). Even if it's running a proprietary OS like vxWorks, I'd still stand behind my assessment of "yes", but I'd downgrade it a bit below 100%. The guys at Serrcomm packaging up the hardware and bundling the firmware are doing just that: designing boards around other peoples chips and assembling firmwares with other people's code, making the minimal changes necessary to make things work. In the old days of the WRT54G when we had the closed source broadcomm driver, broadcomm wrote the driver, not Linksys or Serrcomm.
No warnings or instructions could be devised that would effectively communicate the [ingestion] hazard so that the warnings and instructions could be understood and heeded by consumers to reduce the number of magnet ingestion incidents
Convenience is a huge reason CurrentC is doomed. To use Apple Pay, stick your phone near the machine with your thumb on the fingerprint reader and you're done. To use an NFC-enabled card, tap your card on the machine and you're done. To use CurrentC, unlock your phone, find the app and open it. Aim the camera at the QR code on the machine and scan it. Wait for your phone to connect to the cloud and have authorization sent to the retailer. Why would a consumer use something so horribly inefficient, on top of creating privacy and security concerns? When I was in Hong Kong, you could tap your NFC Octopus card to get on trains, buy snacks from vending machines, or even buy meals at Cafe de Coral restaurants. I can't imagine how frustrating any of that would be trying to use QR codes or standing behind someone else who is.
To play devil's advocate I've been a moderator on a forum before (not a very busy forum, but you still get forum drama) and I'd say there are a few different approaches to power. You'll have a mother hen, someone who's stuck with things since they were small and has a sense of scope. They understand that their users are important but they're also wary of letting everything go tits up on accord of a few bad eggs. They're basically your average parent. They care, but they're human. There's usually at least one of these, grows with scope. Then you have your general task force. They're normally above average users when it comes to activity and quality content, and so get given the ability to tend to their favourite places. They have ideas but they don't want to rock the boat, and normally stay out of the forum drama as best they can. It's a hobby to them, when shit hits the fan they just go do something else unless it is directly their business to deal with it. Then you've got your bad eggs. They're like your general task force but they've usually been around a little longer (so the hens aren't as harsh as they would be to others) or a little shorter ("give them a little more time"). They don't understand the difference between being right and doing what's right and the end result is they just do not see when they're wrong unless a higher up tells them. So when a bad egg stirs things up, the hen looks to the whole team for guidance (because the hen is wary of becoming some corrupt authoritarian) while most of the task force just kind of checks out. The only people left are the people that like the drama, normally your bad eggs, and they pick sides and schism. The hen makes a call, the flock come back, and then the confusion starts. The most level headed members of the team just trust that the right thing will happen without their input, so when the bad eggs convince the hen to make the wrong choice it leaves the task force disappointed in how things are ran and just kind of ashamed at the drama in general. The bad eggs are revelling in the drama. This cycle generally continues until your average mod checks out because management has degraded into a shouting match, while the bad eggs just get louder. Over time the ratio skews until it's almost all bad eggs and the userbase dwindles and you have a very confused and upset hen trying to reign in a bunch of bullies over the now comparably tiny userbase.
I hate myself for this, but when I was emailing real estate agents in gmail for my new apartment, a google ad for mortgages popped up in the ad reel and gave me the 2nd lowest mortgage at the time. I actually clicked and later nearly signed up for the mortgage (later a better rate just came out before I had agreed to the mortgage, and I switched banks last minute).
if you pay for impressions. Google is silently nudging the market towards ppc. This benefits everyone but the site owner. It's good for Google because it puts very real numbers behind the price. Fair prices means happy and predictable customers. It's good for advertisers because if they know roughly what a click is worth they know what they can bid without risk. It's good for the consumer because it gives the whole industry an incentive to only display ads that you'll find interesting and valuable. (it'll take a while before we get there)
Let me get in the way back machine. A long time ago, just after the merger that created a company we'll call Horizon. I worked a a Company we'll call Shmareritec. For training there is a training environment you log into exactly the same way you log into the live system. Somebody somehow pointed the training environment to the live system. For a week we had people in training doing this type of shit to live accounts, taking payments changing names and addresses mailing equipment etc. It wasn't they started disconnecting accounts that we figured it out. Even years later when we were converting to a new system we would still find crazy shit they did to live accounts that went unnoticed for years.
Ever work at a call center? I have worked at 2 stefanini (its spelled stupid) and HP. No matter what level of support you are when any change is done to an account it sends a redflag to the audit department to ensure the information was input by a legit person (employee) along with this the employees ID number will be marked as the person who changed the information. So with this knowledge a minimum of 2 low paid people let it go along with at least 1 manager. This is an issue with the company if they employ people who allow this behavior then they need to have a stricter employment regime. Companies can't be blamed for every worker but when it persists with EVERY employee they own then it's the companies fault.
No it is not superfluous. For example, AT&T could offer VOIP services over this network (landline replacement) at discount rates. And sure that could be competition with say Google Voice/Hangouts. However these companies could be giving an advantage to their own services (i.e. QoS providing low latency, cheaper/free bandwidth for VOIP), which would be unfair to third party services like Skype.
I made no claim to one. I'm just noting the fact of how the conversation suddenly shifts topic to talking negatively about a competitor. This seems to happen at higher frequency when discussing net neutrality. It's happenstance, coincidence, or just random musing... regardless, it happened here too, again.
I agree it likely won't kill it, but for alternative reasons. We essentially have a monopoly in PC game distribution - steam. I love steam. I have designed games for release on it, and use it daily. That said, steam is a market that is so flooded with games that it's hard to know what's really out there anymore, especially with the new steam curator. I will always argue that competition breeds better products. Maybe this venture doesn't work out for Microsoft. Maybe they get their asses handed to them by the following on steam. But I'm just damn happy they are trying. This will, in essence, bring new blood to the PC, and encourage people to look at al devices as potential machines of entertainment and in different ways. We could learn a lot from this. This approach to gaming could, in essence, be this thing that slowly erodes what we thought of as the console and PC divide. And I'm likely to get hell for hinting That there may not be a divide. I know there is. That said, it would be cool as hell to make gaming less segregated between consoles, titles - and more free. I'm an idealistic gamer. And I know I am. But cross platform tech is absolutely amazing when pulled off. It won't be right the first time. (Hell, I'm still not happy with the kinect) But, with a bit of ingenuity and a ton of corporate money and R&D, I'm fairly certain they can find ways to make it so when I'm on the toilet or sitting at my laptop, I could play an Xbox exclusive by streaming it from the Xbox one to my tablet or laptop. Streaming to personal devices, if done right, can change the video game industry - hell, even personal computing.
From what I've read you're only sorta right. Major Labels are carving out huge chunks of money, yes, as they always have, and I'm very glad to see independent promotion and publishing being a increasingly do-able thing. That aside, I've seen a lot of independent artists complain (quite rightly, if the figures were right) on the amount of money they make from spotify. For once, the issue doesn't seem to be greedy labels. Steaming revenues are tiny, and even as more and more people switch to paid streaming and away from buying albums, artists are getting fewer and fewer funds from their recorded music. It's the laws surrounding royalties that really need looked at and updated. Spotify may be right, that a free version is the best by far, if not the only reasonable way to grow their subscriber base, This means we should look at the other option: making the premium service better. I don't think higher quality audio is the answer, but quality of life stuff given only to the premium service e.g free listeners can listen to other people's playlists, but not make their own would be a much more realistic option than cutting out free altogether.
this would require major investments that someone would have to pay for – that someone being the subscribers
Also, to expand the point further, it will be $100 a month for like 2-5GB of data. You can wait to get home where you pay on average maybe $50/month for 200GB or unlimited data. WE ARE SUCH A BARGAIN! The entire article isn't thought out, because it solely focuses on data usage and if you were to take every other con of using Verizon it just amplifies them to make them worse. If I can't use my phone whenever however I want for $100/month then what the hell is the point? I'm not making international calls to Argentina 12 hours a day. There is no way it costs that much.
I think it's pretty funny that everyone is pissed that they don't get unlimited stuff for a limited expense. I sure this will be downvoted to the bottom because everyone wants to raise their pitchforks and holler that they're not getting free stuff What if i said you get UNLIMITED medical benefits for paying into medicare? You get UNLIMITED miles when you buy a plane ticket? You'd obviously tell me i'm an idiot. That very problem is happening right now in some parts of California - the state does not currently require all houses to maintain water meters. Because water utilities can't measure how much customers use, they have no option but to charge a fixed fee for unlimited use - these municipalities use outrageously more water per capita than those that sell water per unit. Unlimited expenses are inefficient, wasteful, and as a consequence, overly expensive per unit. With no marginal cost per unit, everyone wants to consume as much network bandwidth as possible because they have no reason not to. It is the tragedy of the commons in its most basic form. Note that expanding networks doesn't solve the problem, because then more people move more of their traffic over to the network in a classic example of [induced demand]( People, on average, will spend less effort connecting to wireless when they can and being careful with data usage, overwhelming the newly expanded network. I have unlimited data and i just don't give a fuck - i cruise on 4G allllllll day long! I'm all for reducing data costs, which are absolutely out of control relative to literally any other advanced or developing country when you consider GB per $. However, reducing those costs is accomplished through competition. Allowing the same oligopolistic providers to trick you into thinking you're getting a deal for unlimited usage is not helping you. It just creates a tragedy of the commons.
I got the chance to take a tour of the NOC at Akamai recently. These guys are, in a lot of ways, the internet. They represent something like 50% of all the web traffic out there. (They run locally cached servers to serve you content so you're not hitting a server across the country, and not everyone is trying to shoehorn a connection to the same datacenter). I got to see a graph of all internet usage over the last few years. As you can imagine, it's been going up over the years. But not linearly. The increase is ...logarithmic I guess? The angle of increase keeps going up more and more. It's awe inspiring to see how much more data we're consuming than we were two years ago. The point of my reply is that, while I agree with your post, the burden on telcos is real. They are upgrading their infrastructure. But they aren't upgrading fast enough to keep up with the demand. Mostly because they can get away with it. They have a duty to their shareholders to amass profits, and if they can do so by not sinking money into infrastructure, that is the better business decision. In the short run. My personal opinion of corporate america is that they seem to seek out the short term profits, sometimes in direct contravention on long term stability and growth. I guess they figure it will be someone else's problem after they've made their millions and moved on to the next gig. Much like American politicians. No politician sticks their neck out for a policy that comes to fruition after they are likely to have left office. Short term gains. Long term, companies that are on the consumer side (Google fiber, in this particular example, though I'm not dumb enough to consider them as benevolent as they would like to appear) will ultimately be leading the market, and companies like Verizon will be struggling to keep up. This shift won't be a result of intangibles like customer satisfaction. It will be because they simply ran a closer line to the demand curve, and wisely invested in infrastucture in appropriate intervals, rather than what I Suspect will happen with Verizon, where they won't make the same investment until they realize they can't compete anymore (see: UVerse). Then they will have a lot of explaining to do to their investors when all the profits that should have gone towards infrastructure are suddenly gone when they have to invest beyond their profit margin in order to keep up. This is where lobbying/legislation comes in. Verizon is among the usual suspects when it comes to doing all they can to slow down innovation so they can stay in the profit loop described above. This will continue for a while, but eventually common sense will win out. How do we, the little people expedite this process? Well first, understand that 'expedite' is a relative term. We're talking about change on a congressional pace. That is to say, a glacial pace. But as you might expect, the first answer to that question is to vote with your wallet. You won't find a lot of alternatives out there when it comes to broadband or wireless carriers. And if they exist, they probably will have weaknesses the bigger boys don't. Others in this thread have mentioned T-Mobile. Better freedom, closer business model to what consumers want, but if you live in a rural area, you're hosed. But giving them money and not Verizon will change this on a long enough timeline. The second method (probably best combined with the first) is to get your hands dirty. Let's face it. Politics = money. It's sad, but it's true. Lobbying gets a pretty nasty reputation for very good reasons. But there are a LOT of lobbies out there fighting on your side. Donate to causes you believe in. Everybody marvels at the effects of crowdfunding when a new gadget gets to be made thanks to KickStarter. This principle works just as well in politics. Verizon is DUMPING money into politics. But if everyone in this thread gave $20 to one of many organizations fighting back, the fight would be much more balanced. I almost hate to link to any of these orgs, because I feel like one should really research these things, and not just toss money where someone else directs them. But for me personally, I like the Electronic Frontier Foundation . I give them money every year. Also worth a shout is [Free Press]( These guys make a living duking it out against telco lobbies. So if you want, help them out. So,
state consumer sales practices act statutes Which statutes (exactly) force a private company to indefinitely provide you with a particular service, much less the exact same service at the exact same price for life? I'll wait... >breach of contract The longest consumer contract for wireless service verizon ever entered into was 2 years. This means that EVERY single grandfathered unlimited line out there has now been out of contract (i.e. month-to-month) for AT LEAST a full year. Furthermore, even IF everyone was still magically under contract, if you bothered to actually read the text, you would know that Verizon ALWAYS had the option to modify your price/plan, and your only remedy was getting out of the contract without paying the ETF. (i.e. There is nothing in the contract that forces verizon to continue providing you with service, much less a specific type of service... but again, that's a pointless distinction, because nobody with unlimited data is currently under any sort of contract). >fraud as well You are using a strange definition of that word that I am unfamiliar with. It is only by convention that wireless carriers have (sometimes) honored contract prices on a month-month basis after expiration of the original contract. They have never offered or advertised "unlimited data at the same price for life"
Hello all, let me start off with - I'm a Systems Analyst/Programmer - over 15 years experience. I don't work for any ISP or carrier - I come from this with an enterprise computing/application viewpoint. I'll also say that Unlimited data would BENEFIT me in the work I do. This guy addressed the problem, but he didn't address why we should consider it a problem. He's, in a nutshell, pointing the finger at us and calling us stupid. So, here's how I see it. For mobile - there is a potential for a severe degradation of service ... which can overflow into other services. Other services which have a higher importance than data: eg, telephone. While MOST USERS (to the tune of like, 90% - if I recall correctly.) never even come close to the data caps - removing the cap will cause more application developers to IGNORE the need to use wireless communication conservatively. Using wireless communication carelessly - will cause severe service degradation. One screwed over "circuits busy" 911 call thanks to too many people downloading a software update at once, for example, can lead to disastrous consequences. Imagine a pregnant woman in NYC going into labor - and she's just started hemorrhaging. The 911 call to save her and her child gets a "circuits busy" message. While the call is retried a couple times - she bleeds enough where she can't be saved in time. She and her child die as a result of network congestion due to a big software update pushed to the entire population of NYC at once at 2:00pm. ( simplified dramatic example, of course. ) This potential problem, however, is not an excuse to allow a substandard service to be considered acceptable. A situation like this should NOT be possible - period. Bandwidth available should EXCEED expected usage, and should be able to handle peak traffic while preserving vital traffic. Now - this is where one-size-fits-all Net Neutrality becomes a problem - which is what this whole argument boils down to ... they want to charge you more based on what you use. Rather than "tier data", there should be a priority stream allowed for emergency service / voice service purposes only -this- I would agree with. ( BTW; I am a supporter of neutrality, however I acknowledge that there IS a valid concern with absolute neutrality. ) Of course, this is a reddit post ; thus - while we can delve into a million technical issues - and explain further ... this is a tip-of-the-iceberg tidbit.
I think it's pretty funny that everyone is pissed that they don't get unlimited stuff for a limited expense. I sure this will be downvoted to the bottom because everyone wants to raise their pitchforks and holler that they're not getting free stuff What if i said you get UNLIMITED medical benefits for paying into medicare? You get UNLIMITED miles when you buy a plane ticket? You'd obviously tell me i'm an idiot. That very problem is happening right now in some parts of California - the state does not currently require all houses to maintain water meters. Because water utilities can't measure how much customers use, they have no option but to charge a fixed fee for unlimited use - these municipalities use outrageously more water per capita than those that sell water per unit. Unlimited expenses are inefficient, wasteful, and as a consequence, overly expensive per unit. With no marginal cost per unit, everyone wants to consume as much network bandwidth as possible because they have no reason not to. It is the tragedy of the commons in its most basic form. Note that expanding networks doesn't solve the problem, because then more people move more of their traffic over to the network in a classic example of induced demand. People, on average, will spend less effort connecting to wireless when they can and being careful with data usage, overwhelming the newly expanded network. I have unlimited data and i just don't give a fuck - i cruise on 4G allllllll day long! I'm all for reducing data costs, which are absolutely out of control relative to literally any other advanced or developing country when you consider GB per $. However, reducing those costs is accomplished through competition. Allowing the same oligopolistic providers to trick you into thinking you're getting a deal for unlimited usage is not helping you. It just creates a tragedy of the commons.
While I felt just as upset when I initially read this article, my background in a university IT department where everybody constantly complains about WiFi speeds has given me a change in perspective. From the standpoint of a consumer, this doesn't make sense, and it's understandable that everyone thinks Verizon is evil and greedy. In reality, however, the main argument for this article is bandwidth consumption. If everybody had unlimited data caps, the network WOULD be overloaded with traffic. Although it's true that companies like Verizon and Comcast have unused pipelines so that they can "improve" their capabilities frequently, it is highly unlikely that they can compensate for the traffic with even those. Unlimited data made more sense back when there were less people with smartphones and smartphones had less capabilities, but now that smartphones can consume data at just as high of a rate as any computer, bandwidth needs to be shared and allocated appropriately. The best way to do this, as in any economy, is to charge a premium for higher data caps. Customers who are willing to pay more get more, and those that aren't don't clog up the network. If Verizon offered unlimited data to everybody for free, or even a reasonable price, their networking infrastructure wouldn't be able to sustain it. As a result, you may have unlimited data, but it would be virtually unusable.
We just moved to T-Mobile from Verizon and we did it for a couple reasons: 1) Unlimited data. We were grandfathered into unlimited data and Verizon kept trying to get us to drop it, "because we would be better without it." Going as far as to tell us the we needed to purchase only certain top-of-the-line phones, outright, to keep it. ($600--$800 phones). 2) Politics. They are one of the leading companies that are still trying to dismantle net neutrality and I don't support that so I am not going to pay them to keep doing this. 3) Cost. We had 2 phones with 750 minutes a month and unlimited data, after taxes we were paying $190 a month for service. With T-Mobile we get unlimited everything and it cost us just over a $100 with taxes. In our area, T-Mobile runs just as fast (actually faster at my home), and we have better overall call quality. We have had some call issues in rural area's(which we sometimes had issues on Verizon, as well, but not as bad), but the GPS kept working. This hasn't been a big issue for us. I am glad that we switched, we are happy with the decision, with T-Mobile's service, although they could have better phone support, and I can sleep better at night knowing that I am not handing my money to a company that is attempting to destroy a free internet and dismantle consumer rights.
I don't like the argument in the article that users "don't need" to do X, Y, and Z and that's why unlimited internet is not necessary. In an ideal world, the network would be there to provide bandwidth for whatever task you need. However, if you think about how to implement such a scheme, it is a non-trivial technical and business problem. Take as an example Amazon.com. Amazon found that throughout the year, their bandwidth remained within a certain range but when the holidays came along, it spiked hundreds of percent. In order to support that bandwidth, you need enough computers to handle maximum traffic during Christmas. What that also means is that the rest of the year, that bandwidth is going to waste. In fact, if you draw traffic vs time graph, you realize that most of the bandwidth is going to waste most of the time . So Amazon came up with AWS: they rent the bandwidth out to customers so it's not being wasted, and when the holidays come along, they spin up a bunch of instances to handle the increased traffic. Now imagine everyone has unlimited wireless internet, and aliens come to earth. They broadcast a welcome message and everyone tunes in on their phones, spiking usage hundreds of percent. Well, the problem is that there's no easy way to scale mobile network bandwidth quickly -- they are physical towers. This means that in order to support a huge spike in usage, the towers would have already been built with the capacity to support it. And that means that most of this bandwidth is going to waste most of the time, making such a project expensive. What's more is that customers pay flat rates for access to the mobile network, regardless of bandwidth usage, which means that if the network is now required to support a spike of 4x usage, customer costs on average have to go up 4x as well. Even if you imposed a pay-per-kilobyte scheme, it wouldn't be feasible -- it all depends on how your available bandwidth can handle spikes in traffic. In that context, it's not crazy from a technical standpoint that Verizon wants to limit usage. That means they know the maximum bandwidth that their network will use, and that allows them to scale the bandwidth slowly as new customers come on.
Is [anandtech]( really that big a secret? Your article says it is the most efficient in GFlops per watt, it is certainly not the fastest. The big news about the card is that it's the first DX11 card on the market. Here's it's benchmark for Crysis: Warhead
Right, but we're talking here about appropriate icons in the specified context . Sextants may be appropriate icons in naval navigation textbooks, but they're confusing as hell everywhere else. As floppy disks become more and more distant legacy hardware, they'll become less and less recognisable to average users, so they'll become more and more confusing as icons. They aren't something simple, recognisable and relatively unchanging like compasses or red-triangle warning signs. They're a picture of a specific bit of technology, which is already several years obsolete, and before long will be mystifying to many/most users. For comparison, have you ever used a really ancient app that use the image of a drum or reel-to-reel tape dispenser as the icon for storage? It's heinously confusing, because - due to unfamiliarity with the technology being portrayed - your eye simply doesn't see the object the icon's intended to represent.
Explanation: The "freezer hack" is used to temporarily access a failed drive. By failed, I mean died as a result of age, or defect. It is not a write/read error that would corrupt the drive image; which is what you had. That OSX couldn't read the drives correct size is due to the drives image being messed up from a failed write/read. Which you corrected when you re-initialized it. The mechanics of how lowering the temperature allows a drive a second although brief life, is likely due to the density of the copper coils in the drive's main drive motor condensing enough to allow the disc to spin-up. Again, you did not have a failed drive and putting the disc in the freezer had/has no benefit to your situation.
I agree that most people don't understand the legal definition of monopoly. I would contend though, that most markets serviced by Comcast are also serviced by other broadband providers. I live in a fairly large midwestern town, so I may have more options that some people, but certainly less than most large cities. If Comcast doubled their rates for internet, I'd probably pay it or switch to cellular data. But we also have DSL available. The only reason I switched from DSL to Comcast in the first place is that the phone company allowed their DSL service to decline by not repairing the lines or switches or something, allowing the speeds to degrade below what I like.
Not too long ago I installed a HITAG-S 2048 in my right hand, in the location you mentioned. It does "secure" challenge-response authentication and has about 2k (woo!) of writable memory ([incidentally, here's a poorly-lit video of me using it to unlock a computer]( Realistically, though, it's much more a fun project element and occasional conversation piece than something useful. Last I checked, VeriChip is the only such product actually approved for human implantation. Unfortunately, it's also nigh-useless. The transponder is functionally equivalent to an animal-identification tag -- it merely sends a fixed ID bitstream as long as it's powered up. It's been demonstrated that they are trivially easy to clone, so nobody in their right mind would trust one for any purpose requiring even a marginal level of security.
Don't forget that Apple did run the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" routine for several years; it's a commonly accepted delineation, even if everyone here knows that they also run Windows. PCs aren't Macs. You could even claim that a Mac is more than a PC, since it runs both OSX and Windows *.
can agree, yet again, with every point charlie makes. long time zune user, and recent ipad user. By comparison itunes is horrific. The controls it imposes on music and content is akin to living under a Gaddafi regime. By comparison, with my zune i can plug it in to any PC i like and copy content to my zune player, or off it, without it even batting an eyelid. Even with a zune pass (DRM), i can copy and play content between my home pc, work pc. true, i have to use the zune software to do it, but even the user experience of copying content, or organising my music library is like skipping through a summery meadow by comparison. oh, and don't even get me started on browsing music on the actual device. Each time i have to find an album or create an on-the-fly playlist on a friends iphone i figuratively want to kill myself.
Ok, let me tell you a little something about the kinect. And before we get into why what I say is valid, let me tell you I have some idea what I'm talking about. I run a company that specializes in AR applications and have built over a dozen AR games myself, but all of them pale compared to what Microsoft has brought to market. The kinect is the real deal. It's not the end deal, or perfect, but it's the real deal in terms of being a game changer. But not for gaming: for exercise. Let me explain. I currently own all the kinect games on the market, and there are only a couple that fascinate me, but what I'm fascinated by is that I'm actually exercising in front of my TV. I hate fucking exercising. But when I play Fighters Uncaged with 5 pound weights in each hand, it really...well, simply put, you forget you're exercising, and you commence to gaming - kicking ass in virtual space. Now, I'm not saying the game is good, it is mediocre at best, but goddamn, it points toward a future of true interaction, and lots of real gamers are jumping to be a part of that vision. What works is when you simulate something in real life that we all know how to do - ie: fake fight. I don't think this is a final version of what we'll be playing 5 years from now, but remember how shitty the first mice were? I do. Now I have an optical mouse that can work on my jeans. The body is the ultimate interface for exercise (obviously, it's the only one) - and gaming, at heart, has always been a physical AND mental activity. It's only in the last 30 years it's entered into the word of also being about thumb dexterity. People can sneer all they want, but I'm telling you, this thing actually works. Just don't try to play in direct sunlight. ;)
Remember the epitome of a public service, the public toilet. It's always dirty and poorly maintained, so much so that you wonder if you even want to use it. No one makes money off it, so it's only good enough to be usable. I see this analogy a lot, but the toilets I've used in publicly owned spaces are generally better maintained/cleaner than the ones I've seen in privately owned spaces. Purely anecdotal, but, still, I'm not sure this is the best example. Or maybe the free marketeers are just wrong. My Time Warner cable internet is awful; highly variable speeds and frequently goes down.
It seems odd that Firefox would know to take you to the tanking forums when Chrome would not, since they both (I think?) learn from browsing history over time. You've mentioned that you shouldn't have to create search engines to do this, which is sound and valid, but if you just loved making search engines like me, you could just create one that links to with the keyword "tanking" The cbc.ca example makes sense because it is essentially a full address and neither browser has any guesswork to do. > I would have to type in "r programming" to go to reddit.com/r/programming, where, in FF, I type in r pro to go to the same subreddit. Yes, but you could just replace the URL with reddit.com/r/programming and make the keyword "prog" or whatever you wanted. I know you're reading all this and thinking "I shouldn't have to do all this work just to get my damn browser to work," and the keyword/search functionality is present in FF anyway, so I'm not trying to convince you to use Chrome, I just wanted to point out that you could if you wanted to.
This]( was the kind of car this rule was meant for. The regulation well predated internal combustion engine. This explains the stoker in the crew, and the 2 mph speed limit.
I'd say Reddit is the new Digg, not the new Slashdot, at least in terms of the community. You can't take two steps in any direction without fumbling across political lunatics. I still like Reddit, though. I spend a lot of time loitering in /r/technology, /r/programming, and /r/scifi I also still check Slashdot daily, but I do it more for the comments than the stories.
Sure. The article talks about storage in farads, which is basically the amount of excess charges something has. This is a LOT different than the amount of potential energy it can hold, because that has to take into consideration the voltage of the charges. Here's the basics for a capacitor... Energy = .5 (Capacitance) * (Voltage)^2 The capacitance is in Farads. You can see that the voltage term is squared, which makes it the dominant term. The tricky part in capacitors is getting them to maintain a charge with a high voltage. The higher the voltage the more likely the charges are to move around to ground. They already make low voltage super capacitors, but they aren't terribly useful. I'm not saying that the invention is crap, but the article itself doesn't touch on the voltage aspect. Their discussion on wattage is based on the math from the capacitance, which is misleading. The nice part about Lithium ion is that there is a reasonable voltage stored.
Certain people in anonymous (since its just a random group of people) could be taken very seriously since they know what the hell they are doing / not ddosing random websites. Basically think of anonymous as two groups, skilled hackers (i hate that word) and script kiddies. The skilled members actually do useful shit and may or may not make it obvious to other people. Script kiddies just attack sites and shit for fun / to think they are doing something.
It's not "more likely" that is exactly what "anonymous" is. It frustrates me no end that people can't seem to understand this concept. One guy on his own who is anonymous and acts in the name of anonymous is as much anonymous as any one else. That is the central idea to the group all the "core" ideals come from that. If you act under anonymous you have to be in favour of a free and open internet because with out it anonymous can't exist. But other than that anything is fair game because for "anonymous" to do something all you have to do is find a bunch of people willing to do it. Now under that banner groups of people can and do get together to achieve a goal but those goals can be anything. Anonymous has caught pedophiles and driven near underage girls almost to suicide because of naked pictures. They've sparked and organised mass protests against a "religion" and they've often utterly fucked over some random hapless internet community for the hell of it. It's actually deeply fascinating and as much as a nerd as it makes me it's the first real sense we've gotten of "Stand Alone Complex" actually existing. I know that talking about a concept from the ghost in the shell series might seem a bit much but the idea is simply that of emergent copycat behaviour in an anonymous internet environment. The protests against scientology where pretty much exactly that. A effectively leaderless movement organised around emergent nodes that had thousands of people who have never met and don't know each other standing in the streets in masks trying to achieve a goal. Yet the media tends to take this amazing concept that is a truly brand new social behaviour and take the label to mean a given group of "hackervsits" or what ever the stupid term is.
I moved from a technical past with iOS last September to Android. I'd done a bit of fun stuff with Jailbreaking and knew a higher than average amount about what everything there did. Moving over to Android was pretty fucking hard. It was only hard because my background using Terminal/cmd is pretty limited and when you want to do something as basic as unlocking your bootloader and rooting your device you'll more than likely* have to use one or the other with the android SDK. *If you're lucky your phone will be a popular one and have a 'one touch root' option that someone awesome has made and distributed free via XDA forums. Once you've learned the basics of putting your phone into recovery mode and install custom recovery software you're pretty much good to go. You just need to find a custom rom[again, on XDA most likely] that you find appealing and store it on your SD card/internal storage and use any Rom Manager[Available in the play store] to flash it onto your device. It's fantastic because rooting gives you the option to do things like 1 touch backup your entire device, OS and all. Get insane widgets for controlling and viewing your devices temperature, processor speed, battery control. Also you get fun things like console emulators for all your on the go Banjo & Kazooie needs.
Oh man, you must watch the last 2 1/2 minutes. He invented something which his professor said might be the biggest scientific discovery of all time. And which could cure all diseases and discover artificial intelligence.
Foolish. They didn't want to keep this data? Totally foolish. You know how valuable an entire synopsis of every citizen with a cell phone would be to the governments in the EU? in the US? Russia? China? Africa? That's billions of dollars worth of data that not just governments, but giant corporate advertising and marketing firms would pay top dollar to own.
He does make a point though, just perhaps not worded well. Ebooks tend to have pretty terrible typesetting. Publishers are frequently lazy when they make ebooks, and it shows. There are certainly a lot of ebooks that are well made, but there are far more (in my experience) that just don't look as good as a printed counterpart. These typesetting problems tend to get worse when converting between ebook formats. On the other hand, ebooks that are made by the publisher as PDFs tend to have better formatting. This is pretty unfortunate, since the same PDFs that have better formatting also tend to be made in such a way that the text is not [reflowable]( This makes it harder to read on a small-screen device, such as nearly all eInk readers. One of the advantages of the PDF format is that the typesetter of the document has exacting control over how the document will look, and it will always look the same to anyone using a proper PDF viewer. When making a PDF, you can put together some pretty beautiful documents, and everyone will have a consistent experience when viewing it. One of the advantages to the epub format is that it is reflowable. This actually gives the typesetter less control, and places that control in the hands of the document viewer. With an epub, it's pretty simple for a viewer to reach in and change a few CSS properties and suddenly I have bigger text, or full justification, or different line spacing. This kind of control could be disastrous to a carefully made PDF document, since everything was carefully lined up by the typesetter. There are PDF viewers that try to take a PDF document and reflow it. Unfortunately, they can have issues depending on how the document was typeset. As an example, it's possible to make a beautiful PDF document that is well designed, which contains three columns of text. It's possible to make this document in such a way that there is no way to automatically tell (using some conversion tool) which order the text should be read. This makes it pretty much impossible to reflow automatically with a non-standard PDF viewer. On the other hand, converting from epub (reflowable) to PDF (non-reflowable) isn't so bad -- if the epub was done well to begin with. It's possible (an common) for a publisher to screw up an epub so bad that an epub to PDF conversion will look absolutely horrible.
My affiliations aside, I believe that for students it can be one of the most useful things ever. 79$ nets you a 4 year subscription, always with the latest office version, and one thing that I haven't seen in this topic yet is the fact that the subscription comes with extra bonus benefits. The increase 20GB to your skydrive is pretty bitching if you do your work in school labs, your dorm, etc and have to move around a lot because the files can roam or be shared around easily to people in group projects. Office on Demand makes this even better because you can use the roaming version on any computer and not even have to do a full install. If you are in a college in another country, the Skype offer that you can add is handy because it gives you an hour of talk time with family or friends that you don't have to use calling cards and such for. All that aside, I believe that they will need to really work to show the benefit of this over the permanent model if they want people to switch. Your average person at home does not really need the roaming capabilities or cloud service, nor do they care if they always have the latest and greatest. For them, it really will come down to whether or not the subscription pricing is a better short term option (i.e. "I need it to do some work over the summer") vs the one time payment for a perpetual license.

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