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Yes yes, I understand completely that a closed system is easier to work with since it's closed . Consoles are easier to code for than PC's, one reason being less hardware configurations... Building generic parts and generic software is easy when it just has one hole it has to fit into.
Of course that is the most important thing when we talk about the tech industry...how easy it is to create content that the DRM provider has final control over. How easy it is as long as the DRM provider allows what you are creating to be included. How easy it is since all the customers have a choice to buy DRM provider approved game version A or DRM provider approved game version B. How easy it is when one doesn't have to compete with the thousands of free apps and games, since obviously no one makes anything for free...when you live in the ghetto . |
That's not how this works. Bing uses archived google results as one input of many for their searches. Google's results only significantly impact Bing's results where there is no other inputs. Google's tests were intentionally designed to make the inputs from Google the only source for those terms, and because there was literally nothing else to draw inputs from, Bing just used the inputs it had from Google. For any realistic search, there are TONS of other inputs that Bing considers far more important, and thus for 99.9% of searches, Google has little influence on Bing's results. This means that Google being down would have little to no impact on Bing's results; Bing only really checks Google for references when it can't find relevant connections anywhere else. |
They need to pay for this "Online Pass" bullshit too. Why in the hell would they even think to justify making money off of their used games. They've sold their product, why should they make extra cash if the consumer who bought the product wishes to sell or give the game to someone else? This happens with no other products in any other industry, and they make it seem as if it's money they're losing due to "server costs" in absence of this "Online Pass" system. There should be no more profit gained from 20 people playing the game on one disc for 100 hours than one person on the same disc for the same amount of time. |
But...but...but if I boycott them, then I can't play Battlefield 3 or Mass Effect!
No seriously, there was a screenshot I saw a while back about a steam group that was to boycott Activision because they didn't implement dedicated servers or something in Modern Warfare 2 or something. 90% of all member who were online was playing Modern Warfare 2. |
Am I the only person in the world who despises SOPA, but also takes serious issue with stealing software? I mean, if it's worth playing, its worth paying for. It's not like there aren't free alternatives, or you could support the companies making the games you enjoy. There's no shortage of demos or reviews these days to know about quality before you buy it. |
Maybe most of them, yeah. But that doesn't mean I'm disingenuous. I've never had a worse experience with customer support than dealing with EA over Battlefield 2142. And so I don't buy from them: I don't buy any of their sports games, I didn't buy BF3, I didn't buy Dragon Age 2 (even though I liked DA1), and I don't plan on subscribing to their new Star Wars MMO (huge Star Wars fan though I may be). |
I have an 8 GB USB drive that's half the length of my thumb, and as thin as piece of cardboard. I also have a much larger (albeit still small) 128 GB lexar usb flash drive. And then there are people with multiple terabyte hard drives full of pirated material. In a city of a couple hundred thousand, there's bound to be at least one with such collections.
Essentially, even if they were to shut down the internet, it would be incredibly easy for local communities to crop up, physically distributing free content. Seriously, even if you were to be on the lookout for physical distribution, how in the hell would they look out for something as small as a Sony Microvault Tiny ? I could create a hollow space in a hard book cover, stick it in there, and 'lend' it to someone. When they give it back, I get back my usb drive, and a new movie.
Edit: Also, you can use a camera memory card to store music and movies from your computer. Since most people already have at least one, it's not like everyone would have to suddenly buy a bunch of flash drives and cards. |
I just stopped playing because it got boring really fast. I still like guessing but when it came time to draw, and I had to draw back to like 15 people I find myself simply saying "I'll do it later" |
Zynga turns everything they touch to shit. It was the same thing with WordsWithFriends, it spanked wordfeud until zynga bought it and yes, turned it to shit.
edit: |
That's why it should be coin based. I mean words are easy. Maybe a slight randomness with starting words. (each person gets a random word pack). Then have update packs, and a better choosing algorithm that doesn't pick the same word within X games? |
Oh Yeah, I too remember those days.. I used to play Farmville, Cafe world and then some Mafia something game. All were time based. I used to calculate when I should return to harvest or take food to serve (cafe world).. I literally got addicted that I used some online Farmville cheat sheet to get more points in doing many harvests.. Some crops yield more coins..
But whats the turn down is there was no game satisfaction. levels kept increasing.. There was no end game.. Needed more friends to help.. More spam.. I forgot why I signed up facebook in first place.. Then one day removed all those apps and blocked all requests. Felt relieved big time.. |
What a false equivalence! North Korea is a country run by an oppressive dictatorship, if they limit free speech or the open exchange of ideas, all of their citizens suffer. Facebook is a private corporation which can do whatever it likes with the product it is selling, if people don't like it, they can get rid of Facebook...most people won't because they are addicted to Facebook, but they have that option. |
Oh a lot of things are broken about the legal system. Dont try to act as if the law is always perfect and anyone who questions the law by putting one pinky toe out of it should be crucified. This is not about a call for anarchy, so let us not talk in extremes.
If that were true, the holiday on Monday 21 Jan (Martin Luther King Day) is a big waste and his life and actions were a big waste. I'll leave you with one quote from him:
"one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws - Martin Luther King Jr." . There were unjust laws back then, there are some unjust laws now. COICA, PIPA, SOPA were trying to add to the tally of the unjust laws.
Are you trying to say that if a country has a law that it is illegal for a girl child to read books, then the society should hold a girl accountable and prosecute her?
Anyways, we digress. Whether Swartz broke the law or not was for the courts to decide. The CFAA in particular is broad enough for every single person who uses the internet can be considered a felon
Ortiz and Heymann in her over-zealousness tried to pile on several counts of felony for an act of disobedience on part of Swartz. JSTOR did not want to press charges, people from MIT seem to privately hint that once the case was with the Feds, there was very little MIT could do. |
southern california here, couple weeks ago when they announced the 10mb plan going to 15 for free (50% MORE SPEED FOR FREE) in capital letters on their website. Two weeks later (was going to sign up) I go through the order process, and see that the "free" 50% more speed, had its priced upped by 15 dollars a month, and the modem fee upped another 1 dollar per month. |
Contracts that you agree to are not legally liable if they are illegal, regardless of what it said when you agreed to it. |
I think it's because people have loyalty to franchises, not the companies. For instance, if your favorite tv show moves from one network to another and gets worse. You'll probably still watch it, even if some of the magic is gone, because in a sense, you have a veil over your eyes because you remember how good it used to be and keep watching until it gets better.
Examples include the Office after Michael Scott (Steve Carell left). |
All the previous responses are incomplete. I would say Captain_Salmon is the closest. The biggest thing is that the majority of gamers don't browse r/gaming, don't care about drm, industry politics, or game design. Most gamers simply play for fun.
I've been asking people at my school who I know game, if they have heard of EA's newest bad release. Most haven't. Hell 90% of people I asked about the ending of Mass Effect 3 didn't know that the internet was raging about it. Half of them didn't even think the ending was bad.
The internet can rage all it wants. To EA, we are simply a small fraction of their customers. |
Not everyone keeps up with every EA game. Say you're a Maxis fan, and you don't hang out on gaming sites much. You have The Sims 3, which is pretty good so far, aside from some weird expacs that you just decide not to buy. Then you see SimCity coming out. Awesome! The always-online thing sounds iffy, but it's SimCity. And this is a pretty experienced company, so you decide to trust them.
And then you find yourself betrayed. |
Probably that a company can just deny you a refund for a game you can't even play. The only way you could guarantee you get your money back is through a chargeback which will get you banned, making all other games you purchased through it unplayable. I get that chargebacks are very serious for companies, and even companies like valve will ban you for chargebacks, but it seems like it should be illegal to not allow a customer to get their money back for a game that flat out doesn't work. |
It generally works unless the game itself requires a steam connection for some whatever reason, in which case you have to go through the "login->go offline" rigmarole. Sometimes simply starting the game directly instead of through the steam client will work too. |
We have a rep. The problem was I think he had too many accounts at the time and took forever to get back to us. Also, he was completely inept and we had to go through quotes with a fine tooth comb to make sure he didn't fuck it up. There was always at least one mistake, which meant another week or so before we got an updated quote. It doesn't even make sense, because we would spec out the systems and give him the quantities. There was nothing left to do but calculate the price. We politely asked for a new rep, and of course that didn't work. Finally after threatening to jump ship entirely, they gave us a new rep, and so far things are better. |
They meant Mass Effect as others have mentioned.
And there are a bunch of false cracks that are probably just malware out. The DRM isn't really a problem with getting a crack, it just takes awhile to code it so it's reliant on your system rather than their servers. As of right now, supposedly has a crack but to download it you have to do an sms survey that charges you. If Skidrow doesn't change the site hosting the download soon, the crack should be released in 1-3 weeks or so. |
Second, it's been widely available information that Sim City will have always on DRM and will need a constant connection to the internet, this was informed to us customers from the get-go. So I don't fully understand what all the fuss and moaning is all about, the info has been right there from the start.
Yea we don't disagree at all in that respect. I think the people bitching about things that were already known after they already purchased to game do not deserve a refund and have no right to suddenly complain.
> Sure there are bugs, what new release game doesn't?
The issues that people are experiencing aren't "bugs". They are undeveloped mechanics that will take some time to create . We're not talking about bugs here, we're talking about an incomplete game. [Here's a video exemplifying the issue](
This is the same underdeveloped mechanic that every AI uses, the people, the cars, the school busses, firetrucks, everything.
I understand things will be resolved in the future but that does not rob from the fact that they released a game that is still in development. This isn't the fault of Maxis, this is EA pushing deadlines and cutting corners for profit. That is why people are upset. |
Seems to be the rule in /r/technology - that's why I unsubscribed and only get reassured this was a good idea when I get here from /r/ |
It's obvious that several correlated chemical attacks were not "Al Qaeda". Anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves.
"Al Qaeda" was capable of a coordinated attack that resulting in the destruction of the world trade center.
Chemicals in your home country with nearby support are not as difficult to come by as planes halfway around the world. |
This isn't 2005 anymore. Back when cable modems first became relatively common, you would notice a slower speed during peak hours. However, as the telecom infrastructure was improved, more bandwidth was available to the American people as a whole.
Now, your average connection speed in America is still pretty friggin' slow when compared to other parts of the world (looking at you, Japan). However, this is not a technological barrier. The reason we do not have faster speeds is because folks like Verizon tell us that we do not need faster speeds. By limiting individual speeds, this prevents congestion on their main lines. This allows them to prevent the peak usage spikes that occurred in the 2000s. At least, this is what they think/say. Personally, I am of the belief that it's all a money game. Most research and public opinion is with me on this one, too.
By the way, if you want to feel the real impact of what you're facing with American telecom providers, take a look at Japans' Internet service. |
I actually look forward to this. Here's why: These big ISPs are not going to relent. They are going to figure out how to do this one way or another - whether we like it or not. To me, it's a flaw in the design of the internet for this to be possible.
By doing this, Verizon et al. hasten their demise. There are a few projects slugging along trying to replace the current model, but since there isn't a passionate plea from the public, these projects don't get the funding or manpower to put them in place. This step creates the urgency needed to drive these projects. |
Yes they can. They can say, no device on Verizon can use the Google Marketplace or google services. Would you want a smartphone that can't Gmail/Play Store/Maps/Navigation etc? Sure they can build from source, and institute their own marketplace, but again, half the apps won't work if google refuses to work with them. |
The problem being that google, facebook and netflix have very little to lose from this. It is all the small websites that have no bargaining power that will end up getting crushed. Companies like google and facebook will end up paying nothing (or even end up getting
PAID to allow their packets to be carried if they negotiated hard enough), because no one would buy verizon's internet if you couldn't go to those sites on it. |
I live in southern Illinois and the Verizon network is shit here. I have no service anywhere around my house and when I go into town it just constantly bounces between 4G, 3G, and 1X (this being the most common) networks repeatedly which makes the internet on my phone virtually unusable.
The only reason I still have Verizon is because my parents were still helping me with the bill when I got this contract and that is what they have had for years. I will NEVER sign up with them again once this contract is through. |
It's not really just lobbying, if you think about that for a minute.
Sure, lobbyists at the CCA (if you don't know about these guys, take a second to look into private corrections companies in the USA) are the bridge between the CCA and, for example, a rural southern community.
However, the real problem is that the interests of the company, when left unchecked by the government, are damaging to large portions of the population. And , the constituents of the Congresspeople who live in the areas where the prison (in this example) will be built support this because it brings jobs/money to the area. So these constituents vote for the congressperson, who advances their interest, which advances the interest of a company, which winds up fucking over certain parts of the population.
You can apply this easily to things like: some hard rock mining, lumber, oil and gas (to a lesser extent), Wal-Mart's omnipresence, and a long list of other capitalist endeavors that, at some stage, fuck over Americans. |
And to elaborate.. Since the fuck when was Netscape a 'service?' It was a goddamn browser/suite. People spreading misinformed bullshit like this, people that can't even get the BASICS right are a part of the problem. |
Susan, I don't know much and I am not American, but I think, if I can summarise here, you guys are fucked on all 3 points based on how your country is currently operating.
It is very clear that the idea of any kind of regulation is anathema to a significant portion of Americans. I can only assume this attitude has been pushed by the people in power (ie, the people with money) for the last few centuries and now most people seem to buy this bullshit. It has now gotten to the point where people, consumers/voters, will now actively resist concepts that are in their best interests because they somehow believe those people have similar ideals and represent their interests.
Lobby and special interest groups are now too powerful for an underfunded and ill-equipped federal government to deal with. |
Hi, someone who knows about networking and systems administration here.
To answer your question in a nutshell, 'not enough' and 'a lot'.
To get further in depth:
WHERE WE ARE NOW:
The main problem with the r/darknetplan idea is in the link-layer. Creating physical data connections between distant points is really fucking hard .
Laser links require line of sight, and go out in fog or rain, or when really anything blocks the beam.
Microwave links are a bit more resilient, but are again limited to line of sight, are difficult to configure and, due to quirks of electromagnetism, can be blocked/slowed by things that aren't in the line of sight, but near it. Setting up a major-capacity wireless link and getting it to run at or near its rated capacity is difficult, and tends to need a lot of troubleshooting.
Copper wire is basically idiot-proof, and in rural situations is easy to run and setup, but running it in urban areas is surprisingly difficult. Getting it on telephone poles requires finding out what entity owns the poles, then renting space from them. Burying it requires permits from the city, and people who know what they're doing so you don't end up breaking pipes/damaging existing infrastructure. Needless to say, digging in an urban environment gets very expensive very fast.
Fiber optic line has all the problems of copper wire, in addition to having finicky bend radii, being more expensive depending on your supplier and order size, and the receiving and sending equipment being more expensive than copper equivalents. This isn't including needing repeaters at shorter intervals than an equivalent copper setup. Your mileage may vary on all of these, but the rule of thumb is that fiberoptic is more expensive and difficult to setup than copper.
With all of this in mind, basically the best practical setup for a meshnet is to have intelligent wireless routers at roughly equidistant intervals in urban areas, with major microwave links to cross long distances. The microwave links we can more or less do now. The problem is that we aren't quite at the technology level to make a distributed meshnet out of independent self-sustaining nodes yet. We're anywhere between one and five generations of technology away from being able to have a standardized software/hardware kit any nerd can stick to a lightpost with magnets.
On the software side, our routing protocols aren't quite there yet either. You have things like B.A.T.M.A.N. .
WHERE WE NEED TO GO:
First of all, I need to stop right now and make an important differentiation between a 'darknet' and a 'meshnet'.
A darknet is a communication network that is pseudonymous and encrypted.
A meshnet is a communication network that is distributed between peers.
A darknet can run on a meshnet, a meshnet can include features of a darknet (encryption between all nodes). It is important to differentiate the terms and use them correctly, as each serves different functions.
Building a darknet will not help with shitty ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Rogers, etc, as the darknet would be running on the ISP lines. All a darknet would do is allow the users of it to theoretically communicate with pseudonymity and security.
Building a meshnet WILL help with shitty ISPs like the above, as it would put users on an entirely different physical network. There would likely still be connection points between the meshnet and traditional internet, but those connection points would be free to be placed in ways that are beneficial to the meshnet, and likely use (currently) benevolent ISPs like Google.
Semantics out of the way, let's move on to practical concerns. The following, in no particular order, is what we need to do to go from where we are now, to the beginnings of a real meshnet.
1. We need to get people testing and using the routing protocols we have now. I'm going to say this again: we need people to run and use what we have right now . B.A.T.M.A.N. is part of the linux kernel since 2.6.38. In english this means most GNU/Linux distributions come with it. Here's the problem, though: As of right now, running B.A.T.M.A.N. is not easy. It requires some basic knowledge of IP routing and linux usage. If you can build software from source in GNU/Linux, you're probably qualified to begin messing around with B.A.T.M.A.N., otherwise, by all means please try anyway, but understand that you'll have to learn some GNU/Linux and routing basics before you can really even get B.A.T.M.A.N. running. I'm going to say right here that there are other very solid mesh networking protocols out there, but they vary from more to less complicated, and I'm less familiar with them. |
This is going to sound ridiculously ignorant, but what is the |
I'm fuming about Verizon right now so I'll just vent here. Last month my family switched our primary account holder, right after our monthly bill of $109 was paid. Well yesterday we got a bill charging us last month's $109 AGAIN, plus this month's $109. Obviously they made a mistake, right? So we call customer "support" and explain the situation. The moron on the phone had no idea what was going on. So we finally got to her supervisor and he explained in a nice and rehearsed fashion that its their policy to charge the new account holder "for security purposes" and that it wasn't a mistake and we actually have to pay double for one month now. My mother hung up the phone with a "THIS IS WHY PEOPLE FUCKING HATE YOUR COMPANY YOU ASSHOLE!" |
So my understanding is that sites/services have a contract with their ISP, customers have a contract with Verizon, and Verizon has contracts with other providers regarding how the links between their networks are paid for and maintained. My vague understanding of those ISP level agreements is that neither side makes much, because both use the link about equally. Still, there's a contract and money changing hands every time the data does.
My understanding of what Verizon wants to do is to have the agreement with the ISP where they pay/get paid if there's a bandwidth imbalance, then bill the other ISP's customers directly for using their network. |
Epsilon is half the size of the H2A, and JAXA reported that
> production and development cost three times less -
> at 3.8 billion yen (29 million euros, $38 million).
$38 million is NOT cheap.
India has been launching rockets at less than half that price for many years. Last year, a [launch vehicle that cost around $11 million put two satellites in orbit](
India's future "mars mission" is the cheapest in the world, when compared with other similar missions, with a budget of around $70 million (~ $24 million for the spacecraft, ~ $17 million for the rocket, ~ $30 million for the ground stations). Source: [India builds orbiter for Mars mission](
Also:
When you consider that the highlight was the use of a laptop to launch this rocket, it seems more likely they were really testing this rocket to build more potent missiles.
For those interested in rockets and missiles do read Wings of Fire: An Autobiography of APJ Abdul Kalam and DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organization). He describes in good detail how india utilised its rocket expertise to build missiles. |
Generally, in most countries we accept a concept of basic, inalienable human rights. People are considered to be born with these rights. They are not "given", but they always belong to them. The UN document entitled the Universal Declaration of Human Rights covers this.
Article 19 states that
>Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Consequently, "we" (citizens of signatories of this charter) view China's limitations on freedom of speech as a vile affront to the basic rights of its people. This isn't merely a "technical variance", but it transcends local law. As a result, "we" feel that Google's compliance with Chinese censorship makes them complicit in this obscene oppression. Since the Chinese people's right to privacy is more important than the China's censorship law, Google (and any company dealing in China) would be more morally correct to pull out of China than comply with oppressive local legislation.
In fact, going further, we get upset that Chinese workers work such long hours, because we feel it violates their rights, when in fact it complies with local law. We get even more upset when it's children that are made to work - again - because it violates their rights.
In Google's case, Article 12 of the Charter deals with privacy:
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Now, both the US and UK have privacy law - the UK is generally more stringent. The UK is acting in defence of these inalienable rights. It seeks protecting its citizens, from what it sees as Google's infringement of basic human rights. The legal system exists exactly so that Google can defend itself - if it is not infringing, then the court will rule in their favour. Consequently, we see the UK as being morally correct and Google as evasive.
Just because its topical, you could extend the argument to Nelson Mandela. By your logic, Mandela is just a criminal because he violated local South African law, but his actions went beyond that, in that he sought racial equality in South Africa and his actions succeeded in bringing that about. So we hail him as a hero, because racial equality trumps silencing political dissidence. |
The problem is that countries can't just turn around and say to international companies that they aren't allowed to move money around or that they aren't allowed to establish themselves in what ever country they like, certainly not in the EU where all those things are expressly provided for in law. Google will move money around sending it all to a tax haven using totally legitimate methods (by charging for services and extra things) so as to ensure the money all ends up in Ireland or wherever at the end of the year so they can claim a loss elsewhere.
The UK can't just tell a private company how to use it's money, what it's allowed to do with it and where it's allowed to move it; that would be a colossal revolution in company law of the sort we haven't seen since incorporated companies first existed. It would be fundamentally illiberal, anti-business and would turn international corporations into lots of smaller national companies unable to be financially connected to the central company by law because they could use the movement of money to avoid tax. This would be bad for the businesses and for countries that benefit from having an open economy where large companies are free to offer their services to consumers who benefit from having choice and competition in the market. All businesses would oppose it as it would destroy their business model and I expect if it were proposed all countries would oppose it to because it would isolate their economy.
The truth is because Google et al are using legitimate processes to do something they're not supposed to it's impossible to fix because you can't shut down the processes they use. It's like shutting down the whole internet because people pirate music and films. You can't do it, it's not fair on the people including the pirates who use the internet for legitimate reasons. To extend that analogy, the way to solve piracy is to stop overcharging people. We all have an interest that artists get paid because we want more content and at the right price we would all happily buy a product we like. There is an element of honesty there also because we recognise we are getting charged a fair value for a product and to turn it down and pirate it is fairly unwarranted. In the context of tax this means we need to price tax right by lowering it until it's at the same value as the value of the product (i.e the value of operating in a country). However arguably tax is already lower than that value (~20% in the UK) and yet they still avoid tax. That's because their sole aim is profit; it has to be because that's what a company is for and a useful tool it is too for this purpose. Even with arguably a fair rate we don't seem to see any difference.
That's because given profit is their sole goal fairness doesn't enter the equation. Fairness is not a feeling a corporation feels and so you can't use fairness to induce a change in behaviour like you can for consumers. If they are being charged anything at all their only goal, irrespective of what that charge is, should be to minimise it, fair though the charge may be. Furthermore, you may have a fair tax rate but unless your tax rate is lower than all other countries then you still won't get any tax for the reason above and because a company can choose it's jurisdiction of establishment. Again, you can be as fair as you like but if another country is willing to offer an even lower tax rate your screwed.
In the end then we must accept that unless you're truly willing to force a company out of your jurisdiction for not paying enough tax, which would be an unmitigated disaster for your citizens and the companies current customers there especially and thus politically damaging, you can't tax them legally. Moral claims are the only thing you can possibly use to persuade a company that the damage done to it's PR by being seen as immoral is more damaging than paying tax. |
A corporation is deemed a "citizen" (for the purpose of subject-matter jurisdiction) of every state and foreign state by which it has been incorporated and of the state or foreign state where it has it's principal place of business. (28 USC section 1332(c)(1)). And for the purpose of personal jurisdiction, Google may be sued wherever it meets the minimum contacts and/or fairness factors tests. (My brain). |
Yeah, while TOR is becoming way more prevalent I doubt very honestly that 96% of the content on the internet is through closed/secured networks like that. Almost all of the data is reachable through the browser and or ftp/ssh...
This whole infographic reeks of made up factoids. Bitcoin is called a "volatile" currency, while it has mostly gone up the entire time. I think they made this to predict the massive fall of Bitcoin and the rampant spread of black market sites. |
I signed up for the new T-Mobile no contract plans recently. Let me tell you why their Jump program is BS and why this news makes me so happy to have avoided it.
I bought a new Nexus 5 outright for $400 plus tax. They tried to sell me so hard on Jump, saying things like "with this you don't ever have to pay for the full price of the phone, you just make payments and after 6 months you trade in/upgrade to a new phone!" I said I didn't like the idea of paying the $10/mo fee just to BE ABLE to upgrade sooner and BE ABLE to pay my phone off monthly. I'd rather just pay my phone off, and have a lower monthly bill and keep my phone for a while like I was already used to.
Seeing this just solidifies my mistrust in such a program and makes me so happy I wasn't bought into it. Lets do some math. The program itself costs $10/mo base price to use it. The guy at the store quoted me to my face recently "around $15/mo" for the device payment plan. After 6 months that's only $150, and with the OLD way of not paying half cost of the device it could be worth it if you want a new phone that often. That's $300 a year, and $600 every two years, roughly the base price of some brand new phones now anyway. With the NEW Jump plan however... That's $150 after 6 months, PLUS half the cost of a device, in my case $200 for the Nexus 5. So after 6 months, to upgrade to a new phone you would have to pay $350 and trade in the device to get the new one, and then start all over and do it again in another 6 months. That's $700 after one year and two phones you don't own. I know the Nexus 5 went down in price so lets edit that one, $300 after 6 months, and $600 after one year. That's the price of some brand new phones you could OWN for a few years and then sell yourself when you're done with it. |
My middle school runs google apps for education. And I've heard all these deep privacy concerns many times. The truth is: do you trust any Internet service to provide you with privacy and security? Google uses our emails and search history to help their company make decisions and money. We get their apps. Nothing in life is free.
My bigger concern is teaching my students this lesson. So they won't understand that email doesn't follow the same rules as "regular" mail.
I also teach them to always think about the sources of their information. Such as this article. It looks like a mainstream news article (whatever that means anymore). It seems to be written by a neutral 3rd part reporter. But, wait a second. It's from a blog run by an IT firm specializing in privacy and data security. So, is it news or an ad? Although a lot less sexy than Google's super-secret data mining of students email, I think articles like this are more dangerous. |
Disclaimer: I am actually trying to ask this question here, not start an argument. I really want someone to explain this to me.
If there were no copyright/patent laws, why would someone make something in the first place? A company has to put in all sorts of money and time into researching new technology. Why would they make that initial investment if one company could just wait for the other company to release the product, reverse-engineer it, and sell it for less because they don't have to make up the cost of R&D?
If I was going to do research for something new, I'd want some sort of reward. Sure, it's great that humanity makes some sort of step forward with the new technology that I come up with. If I could be given some sort of budget from the government to just produce new technology, I'd be all over that. But everything isn't like that. Even if you do just want to do R&D, you need funds. With a need for funds comes a need for investors, and those investors will want to see a profit in the end.
There are some people in the world who are lucky enough to have the resources to provide their own funds for R&D. Bill Gates is one example with all of the challenges that he has proposed and paid for (that really cool mosquito laser comes to mind). But not everyone is that lucky or generous. Sure, it would be great if everyone was like Bill Gates and cared for the advancement of humanity as a whole. It's also easy for Gates to throw money at these projects, because he already has his fortune (not trying to downplay his charity, that man is a Saint).
To me, it seems like patent and copyright law have increased incentive for advancement. The dawn of the personal computer brought forth a technological arms race, and I'm not sure if that would have happened if nobody could make a profit off of it. That's not to say that there could be reform, because these laws definitely do get abused. But it seems to me like Reddit wants the world to produce information and innovation freely and available to the public. Sure, that would be great, but that's not the kind of world that we live in. |
This article is awful. It uses extremely specific anecdotal evidence with questionable analysis and conclusions to support a ridiculous stance. The concept and protection of intellectual property is not the problem. To an extent, anyone who creates something deserves copyright/patents. Yes, it protects the big guys, but it does protect the little guys, too. If JK Rowling had had no IP protection after writing the first few Harry Potter books, it's almost a certainty that the market would've been flooded with cheaper copies and professional knockoffs, leaving Rowling with no real incentive to continue writing, depriving the world of the ending of a fantastic work of fiction.
That being said, there is a such thing as too much protection. The above Harry Potter books are currently under protection for a very long time... After Rowling dies, the timer is set for 70 YEARS. It's insane. Best case scenario, no one is legally allowed to work on Harry Potter except Rowling or her heirs until the year 2084, and more realistically we're looking at the year 2140ish! (I say "best" for copyright purposes only. I bear no ill will toward Rowling, and I wish her a long and happy life.)
This is just WRONG. Even if someone wrote a fantastic fanfic that actually deserved to be published, it would be impossible to do so. In fact, this is the reason creativity gets stifled. The world NEEDS reasonable limits on copyright, or else society loses out on so much. Think of Cumberbatch's/Downey Jr's Sherlock Holmes, Disney movies like Tangled, The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jungle Book... All this and more doesn't exists if copyright protection doesn't expire. (How ironic. Disney has arguably gained more than any other in human history by using other people's IPs, and now that others stand to do it to them, they spend millions if not billions to make sure the laws are changed to prevent it.)
How much is society losing right now because of IP laws that repeatedly get changed to protect the largest studios only? Because Star Wars, which should have expired into public domain a few years ago (according to the original copyright law), still can't be touched by anyone but Disney for another century?
Edit: I realize the article is mostly about patents, not copyright, but still. I don't feel like talking about patent law right now. That's fucked up in a totally different way. |
Economist here, IP (and particularly patents) are a pet area of mine and the issue is not as clear cut as you seem to think.
The outcome from patents really depends on the approach you take to looking at them, the empirical work in the area supports both positions as a result.
For an example lets look at the HGP & Celera, it has a [very good]( paper looking at the subject and its one of the view examples where there was both a patent protected product available and a fungible equivalent in the public domain within the first few years of patent. As the paper makes clear there is a demonstrable reduction in innovative activity because Celera didn't release genes in to the public domain:
> I find evidence that Celera's IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development on the order of 20 to 30 percent. Taken together, these results suggest that Celera's short-term IP had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.
Sounds like the issue is settled? Not quite. One of the assumptions the paper has to make is that Celera would have embarked on their own gene sequencing project in the absence of patent protection, this assumption is reasonable in the scope of the paper (the paper is looking at the effect patents have on innovation not the change in activity from the absence of innovation) but in reality is outright wrong. The capital risk of the project was high and return was extremely long term, the two factors we know to require some form of revenue protection to overcome. Simply there would not have been capital in place to accomplish the project in the first place without patents. This is particularly true with the HGP progressing, they had a very very small window of patent lifetime (between two and three years).
The next point I am sure you are considering is so what? The delay between projects was only approximately two years so it doesn't matter. To this point there are two answers;
If we repeat the methodology of the paper but without the assumption Celera would have entered the market then the absence of patents actually results in a change in innovation of -1 instead of +0.3. Absolutely if Celera had released them in to the public domain there would have been increased innovation resulting from the genes but releasing in to the public domain would have meant the project never occurred in the first place so no innovation would have been possible.
The projects were symbiotic in nature. Celera bootstrapped its work on the ~30% progress and came up with a new sequencing method which was faster and cheaper to capture the market. HGP adapted this method which reduced the cost of the HGP and sped it up significantly, in the absence of Celera and the sequencing innovations it would have taken approximately 8 years longer then it did and cost about $400m more (which is why it came in $300m under budget).
Having said that you would struggle to find an economist who doesn't support vast reforms in patent law. The general approach we would like to take is considering the value of a patent to be the regulatory burden portion of cost of entry. Something like software which has no regulatory burden (allowing first to market preference to overcome development costs) no patent should exist but where there is high regulatory burden (such as drug development where the majority of the development cost is regulatory burden). To put it simply while patents do reduce innovative activity their absence would result in R&D work simply ceasing in a number of areas, drug development is probably the best example of this where the end of patent protection would result in all primary development simply ceasing to exist. |
Damn. Okay, here's a very long-winded response. You'll have to bear with me. And sorry if some things aren't completely clear - I'll try to clarify you actually respond to this with questions.
> The fact that state 1 was won by a ridiculous landslide doesn't matter, which means 48% of those votes don't "count".
So if a presidential candidate wins with 75% of the vote in a popular vote election, then 24% of the nation's votes didn't matter?
> Because of the loss, A gets none of the electoral votes, so those who made up that 49% can be ignored
So if a candidate loses with 49% of the vote by a popular vote election, then 49% of the nation's votes didn't matter?
We're a republic - we have representatives who act on our behalf rather than policy being driven by popular votes. It's the same reason why we have a Congress that dictates policy rather than calling a referendum every time we need to pass a law.
How we choose to divide the vote counts is ultimately arbitrary. Do we have no divisions and count the whole nation as one? (This is the popular vote model). But then what if states feel underrepresented or ignored? And what if there's a need for a recount? Do we recount all those hundreds of millions of votes?
So we chose to use the electoral college, which essentially dividing up the votes by state. Your vote affects who your state votes for. This makes sense because 1) in the case of a recount, you won't need to recount as many votes, and 2) we can assume that different states have different needs, and that citizens of one state will vote in the best interest of that state.
Here's the thing: even if your candidate loses by 2% in your state, your vote - the fact that 49% of your state voted against the winner, will dictate national discussion. It affects how the President and Congress will address issues, especially if they're looking to get reelected. If a candidate wins by a landslide in electoral votes, but had barely won in the popular vote, they know their actions will need to be more bipartisan and moderate so they don't lose swing states in the next election.
> That makes none of the sense.
Nice use of a straw man argument!
Never mind that Hitler is an apt example, since he came to power by manipulating public opinion. We should just ridicule the argument because the circlejerk is more fun.
To quote Hamilton from the [Federalist papers](
"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes. And as the electors, chosen in each State, are to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place." |
I think we need to move to a system of Proportional Representation (PR). This system is stable with an arbitrary number of political parties, whereas the first-past-the-post system we have now is only stable with 2 parties because of the "throwing your vote away" phenomenon.
Unfortunately, we need a constitutional amendment to adopt PR. Worse, the conventional way to pass one is for 2/3 of both houses of Congress to approve an amendment, which will never happen since the Democrats and Republicans in Congress will be afraid of losing their seats to 3rd parties.
Even worse, the status quo (big business) likes the system we have now (because they only have to pay off two parties) and Citizens United lets them spend enormously to influence elections. So even if we all band together and only support candidates who support a PR system, big business will spend heavily to defeat those candidates.
That leads me to think that we need to urge our legislators at the state level to call for a Constitutional Convention, where Citizens United could be overturned via amendment and PR could be instituted via a second amendment. Of course, at the state legislator level there will also be strong opposition, but less so since they are jeopardizing someone else's job, not their own. |
I'm not the guy you replied to and while I'll agree it's a bit of a leap to go from the net neutrality issue to the issue of our first past the post system you also clearly oversimplified the issue. First and foremost our current system, despite the rule of law, most closely resembles an oligopoly [(Princeston Study).]( Secondly even if you disagree with that study you can't dispute the original issue that in a first-past-the post voting system like ours it will always, given enough time, become a two party system. Parties might fall with several taking their place but it will always revert to the two party system. |
My father in law said almost the exact same thing to me about my MacBook. I told him that I bought it for durability. He said that the laptops he bought would last just as long. Four years later, my MacBook was still running like new and he was on his third windows machine. Now he carries an iPhone and an iPad. Still uses a PC but won't buy them, it's paid for by his company. He also bought apple stock around $230/share. |
Stuff is broken and we need it to be unbroken if we want to move forward as a society.
Personally I believe this is not so much flaws in politicians personally, but flaws in their environment. Due to the structure of parties, politicians probably feel they work for the party more than for the country per se.
This is because the election of a party has become a "contest", to be "won", and that brings out aspects in certain people much like the temptation to "dope" in sports. We must "win", winning is good (as Charlie Sheen will testify), and anything is justified as long as we "win".
They have forgotten that the Democratic process is a process - ie. how you get into office is more important than being in office. But, because the party is what they feel most loyal to, instead of the people, they feel justified in subverting their own ethics "for the good of the party".
Subverting your own ethics "for the good of others" is often accepted. For example, stealing to feed your starving family, or killing in defence of them. What a person feels most loyal to often dictates when and how someone will subvert their ethics.
So, what we have are parties in contest with each other, like football teams, with all the associated internal pressures to "pull the line" so the "team can win". This is of course an utterly dysfunctional attitude in the context of Democracy. |
Last summer I was texting a coworker/moderately close friend of mine about how my family was moving to Texas soon, and that I wouldn't be able to work with him anymore. I, being the naively nice girl that I am, had mentioned how much I was going to miss working with him. He responded with exactly, "Nooowww that I'm not working with you I think I can tell you something ." He then proceeded to tell me about this "amazing night" we had at the pool (we were lifeguards, and a couple times a summer the head guard would have to stay the night to watch some swim meet equipment). He said "everyone left but we didn't and we had the best night ever. Like amazing. I can't even begin to describe."
I shit you not, I said "I'm confused by what you mean by amazing." It didn't occur to me until at least a month later that he was trying to have sex with me. |
That's kind of what |
The cooperative agreement and reference to a “tailored solution” strongly suggest that Google and the NSA built a device or a technique for monitoring intrusions into the company’s networks."
That's what's mentioned in the article.
"According to people familiar with the NSA and Google’s arrangement, it does not give the government permission to read Google users’ e-mails."
That's also mentioned in the article.
" it’s sometimes easier to get precise intelligence about hacking campaigns from the targets themselves. That’s why the NSA partnered with Google."
Where does it say anything about giving non-hacking data to the NSA?
I see nothing at all in the article mentioning Google cooperating with the NSA in any way except to protect Google and its users, other than "Google is required by Prism to turn over records the government supeonas." There's no indication (and indeed clear statements to the contrary) that this article is saying anything at all about Google cooperating with the NSA to the detriment of its users.
> there are reasons this is mentioned in the article
Really? Where in the article is it mentioned that Google is allowing NSA back doors?
> The |
Did anyone read this at all or just start commenting? This is an excerpt from Shane Harris' War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. A book. He's explaining how complicated the relationship between private companies (including public utilities, transportation systems, public health facilities, etc) and the US (and probably foreign) government is.
The |
What you say would be ideal, but the roles have already been designated, the products delivered and cost structures differ between each type of business.
You can host a web page but the number of viewers and the amount of data you served would be limited to the speed of you connection. You couldn't possibly run YouTube on a home connection, there isn't enough bandwidth at your house to handle the traffic, not even with Google fiber. Hosting companies invest in hardware to rent and scale-able bandwidth to the transit providers at a cost for sites like that.
ISP's invest in last mile, we pay them and they hand over some of that cash to the transit provider so we can see a web page on any other ISP or hosted network. They connect us to the internet at a certain speed, with no download restrictions. That should be a rule.
Transit providers invest in massive bandwidth and interconnect all the hosting companies and ISP's which are their customers. The problem is that some of their customers have gotten so big they have begun to use their own customer base as hostages, to turn the tables and request payment instead of paying to provide what we already paid for. They are the problem.
ISP's interconnection costs are based on the number of customers they have sold a service to, but they hedge their bet and overload the network. Hosting companies interconnection costs vary based on the popularity of the sites on their networks. The ISP's want to get paid to handle the load they have already sold but not provided. |
What really bugs me is this "opt out culture..." I mean it seems like lots of companies are pulling some shit then making you opt out of it... For example, Verizon has that "super cookie" which you have to opt out of.
Edit: I guess I was downvoted for implying you have to opt out of cookies... I put "super cookie" in quotes because that's what the media is calling it.
[ |
Because you don't want to jeopardize your chance of employment by omitting key information that expected to be on a resume. The employer's preferred method of contact may very well be by mail. Do you want them to shit can your resume because they could not find what they think is an important piece of information? |
I have a very similar printer from Samsung. I paid about £40, so roughly 60 of your 'dollars'. It came with a 1000 page cartridge which has lasted me about 1500 pages. The replacement cartridges are 5000 pages though, so well worth it since the printer is still going strong. Good print quality and speed too. |
That article is hilariously bad.
They don't understand (or don't mention) the new micro-op cache, tweaked frontend decoder, AVX, ring bus, or the redesigned execution hardware. And the physical register file sounds damn sweet.
Here is an article written by someone who does know something about CPU architecture:
After reading such horrible misinformation, I'm sure as hell never going to technologyreview.com again. If that's the level of expertise they have, they should consider applying to McDonald's. |
The problem with this is that your numbers seem to imply a single viewing person/party. Think about a family with 4 members (mom, dad, two kids). More often than not, not everyone wants to do the same thing at the same time. Mom and dad want to stream one thing, one kid is gaming, and the other is streaming something else.
This also doesn't take into account other things you'll be doing with your connection throughout the month, and things you'll do in tandem with streaming content/gaming (random files/programs/browsing, Itunes/Steam initial downloads, etc.). I could see lots of people with Pandora type services going 24/7 without even thinking about it.
Also, particularly in the case of gaming, stuff isn't getting smaller. These 150/250GB caps are going to stifle further innovation for the sake of forced efficiency. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but look at Netflix HD vs. a Blue-ray disc. There's definitely a difference.
This problem is even worse in the mobile arena. Why exactly is texting and stuff still considered separate from other data?
All of these justifications for caps seem to imply that there's a scarcity there, and I'm not too sure I believe that in the slightest.
edit: |
Backbone broadband infrastructure may be expanding. It's the so-called 'last mile'--the infrastructure that services your street--that's the problem. ISPs (cable companies in particular) oversold the capacity of that last-mile infrastructure, hoping you would never actually use the bandwith they sold you. They never reckoned on the expanding demand for Web Video, huge game downloads, multi-computer families, etc. Now many customers are actually using the bandwidth the ISP claims it is selling them.
AT&T and Comcast have responded by capping usage. Other cable ISPs have responded by throttling service. Verizon (to Wall Street's chargin) proactively decided to basically rip up and rebuild its entire network on a fiber-optics platform with nearly limitless headroom. |
Wow aren't you brainwashed all to fuck.
Both your connection, and your grandparents connection cost your ISP within 20% the same amount of money.
So either you are subsidizing your grandparents (doubtful an ISP would only sell a service they make money on). So what this means is your ISP is making $80/month of pure profit from your stupid ass.
So let me break it down for you, you see that rich motherfucker in the mansion that owns more things than you will ever make in your lifetime. Yeah he's taking that $80/month right out of your pocket. |
Alright I think the rant that follows here is going to be way more information then anyone here is really looking for but I just took a class on telecom and I wrote my paper on this exact topic, it's 3:00AM so what the hell, lets write it out.
First, you need to understand that broadband is an industry thats generally referred to as a natural monopoly because it has extremely high fixed costs. The next thing to consider is that the way people use broadband today and the way people used it even 5-10 years ago is constantly changing. Traditional data models were based on completely different expectations for data use then we have today. The next thing that you really need to consider when looking at broadband today is the concept of Universal Service. Universal Service is basically the notion that broadband access should be available to everyone, regardless of their location. Sounds simple enough right? Not really, see it's incredibly more expensive to provide broadband to rural areas as opposed to urban ones. The question becomes who fronts the cost for this? Currently the government fronts a big piece of the bill. But the telecommunications industry is constantly evolving. The use of wireline telephone service, satellite, and eventually even cable will likely completely disappear. The question becomes how should companies respond to these changes, should they shift the costs by charging "power users" more then the average customer or should the subsidies come from another area? Anyone who has really researched the issue might argue with some of the points i've raised here but the bottom line is the issue is more complex then simply money or greed. While I agree there is a great deal of that going on, if you take a look at other countries besides the US you'll see similar problems. The reason its becoming even more expensive and bothersome for those of us from Canada and the US is that our countries have a much lower population density then places like Europe or Korea. It's a hell of alot cheaper to install new technology such as fiber when you don't have to cover so much land. Okay rant done, go back to the corporation witch hunt |
There was a rubric. Rubrics must be followed. That's why you have a rubric. Not even God himself could have nullified that rubric. |
There is no way of using energy from thorium by firing at it with lasers. This is either extremely poorly written article, and/or the Charles Stevens is selling us snake oil.
> A 250 MW unit weighing about 500 lbs. (227 kg) would be small and light enough to drop under the hood of a car, he says.
ORLY? This is ~3000x the power of an engine of a regular car. |
Google the DMCA. There's lots written about it. For example:
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) -- you know, the people who make technology -- has [an article titled "Death by DMCA"](
> Copyright is being turned from a limited-term incentive designed to encourage creative artists to a broadly scoped transfer of wealth from the public to the private realm . As the industries that generate copyrighted materials seek control over not only their works but also the devices on which we watch, listen to, and remix them, copyright law is turning into technology regulation .
Or Linux Journal has ["The Case Against the DMCA"](
> A Princeton University professor by the name of Edward Felton and his team of researchers (from Princeton and Rice Universities) decided to take on a public challenge that was presented by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, or SDMI. The SDMIs challenge was simple enough: anyone who could remove the SDMI watermarks, used to prevent copying digital music to someone who has not purchased, would be given a sum of $10,000. After successfully bypassing SDMIs watermarks, Feltons's Team went on to write a research paper on how they accomplished this, as well as the details of the SDMI watermarking technology. Felten's team then decided to present this paper at the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop. Before they could present this paper, however, the SDMI and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent a letter to Felton that threatened legal action against him and his researchers if they presented the paper.
Note that "creative people" do not generally favour the DMCA. Any argument about protecting "creative people" is a smokescreen to hide the real culprits.
The established corporatocracy wants DMCA and related controls. High-tech companies ranging from Microsoft to Google have fought for reduced copyright and patent controls, but to no avail. Rich powerful interests in Washington trump innovation or economic development.
And then you end up with [cases like this](
> Lexmark claims that Static Control violated the DMCA by selling its Smartek chips to companies that refill toner cartridges and undercut Lexmark's prices.
IE: Lexmark put a trivial "encryption device" into their toner cartridges so that if you try to refill or make compatible cartridges, you have to reverse engineer this "encryption device" which constitutes a violation of the DMCA. So much for competition in the marketplace.
With enough power over information, you end up with frightening cases [like this](
> Monsanto claimed intellectual property infringement when a farmer used the company’s patented seeds from a commodity seed bag. |
You're a special person with smart friends who all love you and know not to click on spam links. |
i completely understand how it doesn't seem to make sense. I didn't believe it either until it happened to me. We had a few servers we took offline and kept as physical (emergency) spares. These servers had been running non-stop for over 5 years and in a pretty warm (around 80F in the server room) environment that entire time. We took them down for storage and as Murphy's laws predict, had a server go down about 2 months later (which isn't an unreasonable time to have down for servers awaiting discover for evidence). When we booted the first one up, all but one drive had froze. The second server only had 1 froze drive. From what I can tell, the drives seem to be happy when warm and connected to electricity. I guess its like a car, drive it everyday, and it will like drive for years (with regular maintenance). But leave that same car sitting for 5 years, there are going to be problems. Same with drives, just on a much faster scale. |
Okay, first, if you get caught pirating 6 times, you should probably follow liar liar's advice and STOP BREAKING THE LAW, ASSHOLE. Or at least be better at it.
Second, stoping pirating isn't "censorship" and this isn't really surveillance. The RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations would be able to look at publicly available information (like people in a swarm on a public torrent) and tell the ISP to tell you to knock it off.
Stop trying to be a pirate while hiding behind a flag of "oh it's censorship!!!!" It lessens the effect when real damaging issues like SOPA come up. |
It's true what you said, and thanks for the rediquette upvote. People have different levels of concern. For example, I don't want my life details in the hands of one single organization. I use google services sparingly (I.e. maps, and admittedly gmail, but I have migrated off gmail almost 100% now to my own personal email server). To me, the creepy feeling came when I looked at my dashboard two or three years ago and saw that it knew when I filed my taxes. What? How and why does it even need to know that? So that's when I decided to diversify which services I use. Duckduckgo for search, whenever possible. My own email server, whenever possible. Cash, when possible. Etc etc. The worst part is that these services are not only assiciate with me the things that I do, but things that others send me, in case of email. My house lender sent my SSN in a PDF in email. Really? Thanks, now they have that too. |
University generation... I've never heard that term before though there's a response down from you that sort of defines it as millenials which I think I'm just before, having been born in '81. I have an iPhone now though it's because my company opted to go with the device for their provided handsets; I was hoping for an Android-based one for what it's worth.
In any event, I remember growing up and the general story-line was that Apple made the computer something that could be used by people outside of programmers and business type(though I didn't start seeing Macs until I was in middle school and I'd been using some Packard Bell and second hand home-built computers for a few years before that rocking out on Dos with Populous and Death Track and Circuit's Edge. Anyway...) Vile and evil Microsoft and Bill Gates ripped off Apple and succeeded based on the stolen ideas and brought all of the other hardware companies along with them. Apple was in all of my schools growing up, and even very early on I remember the 'just works' mantra though I couldn't for the life of me figure out how only having a single mouse button was useful, and I don't remember seeing desktop computers using CD-caddies except for some Macs we used in computer lab in I think it was junior high. Apple was also bandied about as the computer de jour for anything artistic or music oriented(I've later found that despite having options on Windows and Linux machines, Logic Pro actually is I guess pretty damn good for audio manipulation and creation.)
Anyway, throughout the 90's Apple was the little guy fighting the good fight after it was wronged, and especially the colored jolly-rancher looking iMacs really played to the idea Apple was outside the box on design, even if they weren't that appealing(this was back when most computers I'd seen anyway were the matte off-white that yellowed terribly. Credit where credit's due, I remember seeing some Acer computers back then that were all black or black and grey with swooping lines and aesthetics on the sides of the towers and had a swiss-cheese-ish look to their vents on the sides).
So going forward, all of these people from at least my generation if not all over had grown up seeing Apple depicted as the underdog, occasionally seen their stuff and being a little intrigued but confused by the differences it had compared to the 'normal' computers we'd see, we'd hear about them struggling but surviving, see the awkward but innovative designs. That pretty much takes us through the 90's and in the very early 00's Apple's hardware was still....well quirky I guess? awkward? bizarre some might have and continue to say? That wasn't the first thing to change as OS X dropped and even in its first iteration it was much prettier than Windows ME and even in many areas XP(Vista upped the visual ante for the OS but screwed the pooch on its initial usability and by the time Microsoft had missed the window, as it were, to try to save that version's mindshare) and was just so damn fluid. The buttons all lickable and glossy! You see that dock, man?! It's so much prettier than that stupid Start(task) Bar that actually says start on the button, ain't it? You see those icons! They shrink and zoom as you move over them, holy shit!
Okay, so OSX made the using of the computer much nicer. Take a look at how Apple took their designs from being artsy to being sharp. Those [Powerbook G3s]( Get ridda that junk, we got smooth looking stuff going on here. I mean, look at what they replaced that thing [with]( Look at how the [G4 Power Mac]( to the [G5 Power Mac]( changed. Holy shit, right? I'm sure somebody'll find an example to slap me in the face with, but seriously those were not incremental changes for at the very least Apple's own lineup, and the iMacs weren't hard on the eyes either. The logo itself on the Apple hardware never again as far as I know has been the multi-colored one; it's white or silver or black. In short, Apple got their shit together in the design realm before the vast majority of other hardware manufacturers and became that hot-ass 20-something who used to be pimpled-up and awkward.
So there's that. Since I've already done all this typing, I may as well keep going for the various justifications and rationale that very well could play into random consumer A's perception of Apple and their products. Steve Jobs gets a huge amount of praise for these design changes and, indeed, he does deserve some of it. However, the industrial design may not have begun with him but Jonathan Ive apparently has had a huge amount of influence over the physical appearance of the devices Apple's put out in the aftermath of these early 2000's changes and this is the period of time to which people in media and unknowingly in common usage refer when they lavish over how amazing Apple's products look. On that note, it's my opinion Ive will be the next CEO and Cook's almost more of a place-holder while Ive's grooming is completed.
Back to Steve Jobs. Up until very recently, he was Apple. Woz, who? Steve wasn't the CEO for a decade? wha? If people knew about this history, and to be fair probably more people from the general consumer perspective knew of Apple's corporate makeup than say HP or Sony, it just intensified the myth and legend. Woz designed and made the original company possible but he was quirky and isn't a salesman, a showman, the guy who shows you something, smirks as he looks at you sidelong and you say damn that is pretty smooth. That was Jobs. Plus, the dude was the prodigal son of the company and he came back right when Apple was at its weakest, having needed to take money from Microsoft of all companies to stay afloat and bang, all of a sudden OSX, their physical designs go from shit to hellz yes.
All of that helped, and really made much of Apple's larger devices appealing for more and more and more people actually in college or university; gotta get that glowing logo on the back. So that brings me to what really in my mind what got Apple into people's heads. The iPod, iTunes and letting go of quite so much proprietariness. There were mp3 players before the iPod, of course, but Apple and Jobs' were able to hype theirs so much better, sell it much better, and more crucially than I think is given credit, after a short spell of exclusivity for Macs and Firewire, made the iPod compatible with Windows machines and gave it a USB plug. Lack of a requirement for songs to have been bought from iTunes helped massively as well, letting people bring in their pirated or ripped libraries with them. As things progressed, iTunes gained momentum and became the de facto method of legally obtained music and movies and television shows on the internet. The iPhone didn't even launch with App Store, but it was sexy looking when smart phones until then were anything but(Prada yes and Equilibrium and 13th Floor were great movies but who remembers that in place of The Matrix?). This was also on the tail end of rumor after rumor for how long hyping Apple's foray into the market? Where'd those rumors come from and who consumed them? Favorable and fawning people in media, the younger and 'tech-ier' of which grew up seeing Apple go from weird also-ran to badass trendsetter. Who(Apple), by the way, turned their handicap of tiny marketshare into a badge of exclusivity and along with changing from IBM to Intel cooled and cheapened their units for their manufacturing so they could begin to make incredible profit margins on devices most others can only dream of or attempt to make up for through marketshare.
The iPhone and iPad and all of the closed garden tight-ass controls and cut-throat tactics be damned. This is crescendo times and even with their idol gone, Apple's got the mindshare in so many ways, in so many areas it could release incremental updates even as others do amazing things and they're still good for years to come.
Thanks for reading that massive block of tripe if you did and for what it's worth, Google's exactly the sort of foil to exist to give Apple something to continue to rage against in the mobile sphere as a relatively humbled Microsoft claws to get something, anything from that market since Windows machine makers are still trying to get their sexy back with the consumer base. |
I'm not saying MS didn't do some asshole vendor lock in's but - as much as I hate to defend MS - apple has been far far far worse.
Apple is far, far worse than MS these days , sure, but only because back in the day MS was pulling shit comparable to Apple now, and they were stamped on for it, hard , and over and over again until they (largely, generally) stopped doing it.
MS has many anticompetitive and literally criminal (as in "they were tried and convicted for it in a court of law") highlights dating from the mid 80s to the modern day, including things like the AARD code , all the way up to charging manufacturers more for Windows licences if they dared to offer free operating systems in their product lines alongside Windows, and persistently, repeatedly and intentionally breaking compatibility with third-party implementations of everything from Office document formats through to the Samba networking protocol.
Apple is evil because it's building a walled garden, and they only get away with it because they don't have a monopoly - you can still choose to buy from another manufacturer and not suffer at all.
Microsoft were a monopolist to the point you quite literally couldn't really buy from any other desktop OS producer to integrate with 90% of the other computers, programs and formats available. In addition the Microsoft of the late 90s would have cheerfully done everything Apple's doing if they'd have the opportunity (ie, if the technology/connectivity/bandwidth was there) and their monopoly position would have allowed them to get away with it.
It's counter-intuitive, but monopolies have to play by different rules to non-monopolies, because you can always opt out of a non-monopoly. Apple are shits, true, but they're little shits you can choose not to deal with. Microsoft (at its peak) was slightly less shitty than Apple now, but it was huge to the point of omnipresence - you didn't realistically have a choice about whether you dealt with them or not.
> MS is still very relevant
Don't get me wrong - they're still relevant in the Office productivity world, and they're still relevant to enterprise... and the XBox/DirectX makes them still relevant in gaming.
However, in the most exciting, fast-developing and most advanced areas of popular computing these days - the web and mobile devices - they're largely playing catch-up or are functionally irrelevant.
Don't get me wrong - Microsoft aren't dead , and likely won't ever be; like IBM they've taken the blue whale approach, where they've gotten so big that they have no natural predators, and even if most of their consumer product lines became obsolete they could comfortably live off enterprise computing and their patents essentially indefinitely.
However, like the blue whale they're essentially irrelevant to the rest of the ecosystem - "scenery" rather than a competitor, mate or prey.
Web apps and runtimes like Java and Adobe Air make operating systems progressively less relevant (not completely ir relevant, but less relevant than ever before) as time goes on, and their effort to get their office formats enshrined as open standards means they can't easily break compatibility to stop other packages reading and writing them any more either (MS fought tooth and nail against AbiWord and other word processors reading their file formats back in the day, but don't seem to give two shits about Google Docs and others doing it now).
The key here is not that Microsoft are going away or will go bankrupt. It's that, for whole sections of the software industry they're increasingly not even worth considering. How many times have you cared which OS a user is using when writing a website? As long as there's a browser and fun games, why would millions of users buying smartphones or tablet PCs care whether the OS can run MS Office or Photoshop?
MS staked its dominance on operating systems and office productivity suites, and those are factors of rapidly-diminishing importance compared to the last three decades of personal computer-use. They tried to kill the web in favour of Silverlight (even letting IE stagnate for five years to give Silverlight a leg up) but all they ended up doing was giving Flash a half-decade head-start and making the web community absolutely fixated on open standards and avoiding vendor lock-in.
MS aren't going away, but they're less relvant today than they have been in a long time, and unless Windows mobile managed to outcompete both Android and iOS (and I really don't see that happening) I don't see anything which would change that in the foreseeable future. |
Here's my theory. It helps people see through Republican bullshit. Only the internet can educate people to understand the truth about the propaganda, disinformation, and corporate funding of politicians that has served to sabotage the democratic process in the US.
The corporate media isn't going to tell the truth, they are owned by the same companies that work against our interests. And without anything else to balance out all the lies people actually believe it, that's why it is so important to Obama for Americans to have access to a free and open internet. |
Until you were called out, there was no proclamation of Apple-ownership, let alone a statement lending any credence to "reading things from both sides."
I provide research, facts and reasonable counter-points to your assertions. You provide insults and attacks ad hominem. Do you know why "this will go nowhere?" From the evidence of your follow-up posts, not only to me but to others, you have no interest in a discussion. You proclaim me as the die hard Apple fanboy and prop yourself up as the "open mind" martyr. |
I'm with you: to hell w\ the |
This thread is a combination of "Apple needs to stop doing that" and "Who the hell cares if it's hard to fix?"
Apple is not the only one to blame. Other tablets, while getting scores in the 6-8 range, could still be much easier to repair. The only thing that makes Apple special in this case is the huge amount of glue and with how well they are selling, other companies are sure to follow suit.
Who cares though? It's not like anyone actually fixes their own anything anymore. Well, that's not the problem. The problem is the huge amount of e-waste. Here .
The benefit for fixing something yourself is that you keep your gadget out of third-world countries. They don't go into landfills. They need to be recycled. But it is so expensive to properly recycle electronics in developed countries that the broken gadgets are shipped to other countries for the poor to sift through (even burn to extract the metal from them). iFixit is upset about Apple's glue because they know that the tablet will eventually be burning in some pile of electronics in Nigeria and the glue will be poisoning the locals.
This talks about the growing e-waste crisis and has a lot more data than what I'm writing here. |
Right. However I've found fixing something yourself that you don't do much of (or if ever), you'll end up spending lots of time on it. Followed up with the chance of it being permanently broke out of negligence. Or not being able to get the replacement parts as cheaply. Etc, etc. |
how many people are even willing to take apart their own computer?
Actually, computers tend to be on the easy-to-take-apart side of electronics. At least, many of the components are. I'm pretty sure that many "common" people would be willing to say, swap out their laptop's hard drive after reading a guide which involves removing three screws, versus paying someone $150 to replace your hard drive...
(Something like a laptop screen is different, though) |
Try "blowjob hardcore" and get tons of unfiltered results. |
Because if there is no alternative ISP, then it doesn't matter how much redundant fibre there is, the point is only one ISP is providing the service and it is that service that is in low supply. You misrepresented my point entirely because I wasn't talking about the internet connection speed as the goods, I was talking about the internet connection itself as the goods.
The available capacity is the supply.
A lack of ISPs causing specific ISPs to artificially raise their prices is a monoply.
ISPs not using their full network capacity so that they can continue to increase network speeds fairly regularly without actually having to spend money is a result of that monopoly.
The low number of ISPs nationwide in the U.S. is called an oligopoly.
The system in the U.S. that is causing prices to be inflated all across the market is called price fixing. |
Throwaway because i'm talking about work.
I work at a company that makes things. We make them here in America, and have for a long time, and they are good things, so put away the torches. We market. It's how the world works. Enjoy some commercial TV, on us.
Anyway, we do a certain amount of online advertising, because we are a company, and we are testing the waters in third-party remarketers, so here's a few things I've been thinking about all of this as the US starts to wrap its head around it.
Your understanding of how this all works is likely pretty naive and it's not as bad as you think. I don't want anything other than your money. Facebook wants to sell who you are . All I want to do is sell you what you might already want, according to my models. It's no more 'evil' in intent than not buying a billboard selling Yankee gear on 495 outside of Worcester, it's just more complicated. You can make the case that the sophistication makes it worse, but I haven't seen that case made in a way that has kept me up at night.
Your understanding of how this all works is likely pretty naive and it's way worse than you think. When people ask me if marketers are really recording their every move, my general response is, "Ha! You wish online behavior was the only thing data we're working with." I'm not on FB, Twitter, Instagram or anything else precisely because I know how much of my data is out there already. I ain't adding to what's an already-massive, widely-available heap of Me.
Not all third-party cookies are about advertising. I think it's reasonable to want to do internal website analytics on your own site to see what's working and improve experiences. Most of those are at least in their default configurations dependent on third-party cookies. I'll still be able to do this because I have an IT department and can negotiate a first-party cookie into my contract with my metrics provider, but I suspect not everyone has this sort of leverage. In fact, I wonder what this will do to software-as-a-service vendors in general -- just to give an example, a lot of on-site search (when you go to Macys.com and search 'shoes') these days is SaaS, and many of them make use of third-party cookies just to work. That's going to be an interesting thing to watch.
This shit works. Like, in dollars terms, marketing that uses these broad, third-party-cookie-dependent models works. Targeted works better than broadcast. This has been known for, like ever, and it's true, in a big dollar, measurable way for the companies that use these remarketing firms. I can get more business per dollar of ad spend because of third-party cookies, no question.
Ads pay the bills -- not my bills, mind you: again, I sell an actual thing that's great and people love. But technology has been making it possible for me to get a better return on my online ad dollar than I used to get, and I've shifted money away from other things -- print, paid search, TV, etc. -- into that channel. This isn't a threat, it's just business.
So, it's stupid to characterize this as a 'nuclear strike' -- a half-step below a Godwin situation in terms of poor taste, if you ask me. Maybe even same step. But given that third-party cookies work, I do suspect it'll be an influence on my marketing spend mix. It won't be out of spite or anger or the wrath of the cabal, it'll just be business, and there's plenty of other places to put it. I'm a marketer, but I sell a product, after all.
But if what I sold was that ad space? This would terrify me. The Imgurs of the world? They sell one thing:ad space. Well, ad space and pro, which I'm totally sure we've all bought. And that ad space, in the absence of third-party cookies becomes significantly less valuable. |
Sure, but they're doing so very poorly (I have done this several times, and I have always been able to identify Google's page, even on searches I had never performed before) and in a biased way (primarily towards Bing, although that's more subjective).
The only way to actually accomplish that goal is to provide a list of links, but that obviously removes a lot of the appeal (both aesthetic and functional). |
This is a bit of a nothing statement, and it will be interesting if a wrongful dismissal lawsuit comes soon after. What it boils down to is that she doesn't feel she owes anyone an apology. I can't blame her if I'm honest, especially due to everything that has happened and if a lawsuit is in the works, but I do wonder if she regrets not just politely asking them to be quiet. |
You want to some data in your compression, keeping data that does not add to your model is pointless to have an adds to overhead.
The compression of the data REDUCES the time spent analysing the data. The way you guys think this stuff works is insane. You have take the sensor data which is just points and figure out what they actually are. That car over there? you have the front half of it as a series of 100,000 points, it is your job to analyse those 100,000 points, if you take that object as is then when it comes to manoeuvring the car, your model is XX ms out of date and your physics is wrong. So you need to figure out what is the car, what is the road and is it moving? So we do that, it takes much longer, suddenly you're XXXms out of date, we can take into account the movement of the car, but it's still very old data and the car cannot react to unexpected movements, furthermore it has to do some seriously clever prediction otherwise any unexpected movement will fuck things up. So. What do we do? We do that first analysis of the car, build a simpler model of said car, it may have taken 50ms to do, but we did it while the car was far away and it did not matter to us. So, we move our simple car to the position we think it will be while we are waiting for the next frame of sensor data. We get the new data and now we have a rough position of where we expect said car to be. We look around that area, find the car, its position is very near to where we said it was we update the car position, but importantly, our analysis of the data took 1ms and we only needed to look at a fraction of the data to determine where the car had moved to. We could ignore a huge chunk of sensor data. |
I worked on robot control systems for a few years. One of the we take for granted is the incredible ability of our bodies to integrate sensory data and make conclusions from it. FOr example, a driver can tell if their car has blown a tire almost instantly by recognizing the sound, physical sensation of the car shifting, etc.
Robots can't do that. When you're designing a robot, you basically need to imagine every possible thing that could go wrong and then put in a sensor to detect that thing happening. Of course, these sensors aren't perfect either--they sometimes indicate a failure when there isn't a failure, for instance.
Dealing with situations where you have conflicting or ambiguous information requires an enormous amount of commonsense reasoning and fluid intelligence. This is easy for us to do--we know that the approppriate response to hitting a fog bank on the highway is not pulling to a dead stop in the middle of the lane. But that's based on our ability to reason about the mental states of other drivers(("They can't see that I'm stopped"), as well as completely reconfigure the visual cues that we use to stay on the road, and, non-trivially, recognize that the situation is fog, and not, say, a stroke or a sudden-onset visual condition. Any single one of those would be immensely challenging for a computer, and would require AI technology we aren't even close to having. |
Yeah, yeah. It's legalese. A way of saying something that seems like it means something but doesn't say what they say it says, all the while employing armies of lawyers and dazzling those too busy to try and decode what is ultimately a simple idea that would usually be dismissed outright as stupid if people could take the time to decipher the nonsense. |
I don't understand why so many people complain about the commercials. It's one 30 second commercial every couple songs, and it's a great (free!) music streaming service. If its that bothersome maybe you could lay down the whopping $4 a month for Pandora One. |
that would be nice..if i used that radio for music and pandora had stations for my music.. |
You're joking, right? There are plenty of decent factories in China, plenty that are inspected regularly by foreign owners, plenty that meet Chinese labour laws. Apple chose not to run their production like this, instead turning a blind eye for maximum profit.
But they're not the first foreign company to do so - MacDonalds, for example, were caught paying their workers below Chinese minimum wage and ordered to pay back the extra, as well as fined. |
Okay. There's a good chance I will receive down votes galore for what I'm about to type, so as a disclaimer: I understand that working in a sweatshop has additional factors that make it ultra-sucky. Still, consider the following:
(a) The article specifies that workers receive two 30-minute breaks per 12-hour shift.
- US federal labor law does not require lunch or coffee breaks, unless
you're a minor and you work over 5 hours. Individual states may
require rest breaks, but not all do. One such state requires a 10
minute rest break for every 4 hours worked. 12 hours divided by 4
hour periods = 3 x 10 minutes = 30 minutes. ONE THIRTY MINUTE
PERIOD.
(b) Staff are asked to sign two year contracts and pay significant sign-up fees.
- Kind of sounds like a labor union that doesn't have the benefit
proper representation to actually negotiate with management. It
should be interesting (not sarcasm... genuinely will be interested to
see fallout - positive or negative) to see how the US ends up 20 years
from now, considering half of our population thinks that having labor
unions hinders business.
(c) Charged to open a bank account for wages
- Minimum balance requirements that many US banks have charge
people a monthly fee ($2-ish) if they fall below a certain point. The
non-direct deposit option in the US currently involves a paycard, which
charges for withdraws OR a paper check that, if one doesn't have a
bank account, will normally require some type of fee to cash.
(d) Charged for intrusive medical examinations
- Not unheard of in the US... For example, the TSA (yep... THAT TSA)
requires employment candidates to pass a physical examination. If you
make it through the initial (it's paid for) screening, but have some type
of pre-existing condition (non-severe asthma, for example), they
require applicants to have specialized testing (pulmonary function test,
for example) done that isn't covered.
(e) Only by working 100 hours of overtime a month can employees secure an income that matches average income of the area, which averages out to 69 hours per week.
- Average isn't a good indication of what's going on because it's skewed by people who make a ton of
money (this discrepancy is largest in the US), so I'll use median. In the US, the median salary per
person, per year is about $26K. $9 min. wage x 69 hours a week x 52 wks per year = $32K. I'm looking
at you, McDonalds.
(f) Workers have to leave their children in rural homes with their grandparents...
- Yeah? NO SHIT! They're working 69 hour weeks. I don't understand how this is any different than a
good chunk of America, though.
(g) Workers are required to sign confidentiality agreements and undergo security screenings when leaving
- Confidentiality agreements are standard these days; I'm pretty sure that even employees at Old Navy
are required to have their bags/purses checked when leaving the premises.
(h) Jabil was founded in 1966 in Detroit. As American companies started exporting their manufacturing... blah blah blah.
- So what you're saying is these assholes chose to exploit international
employees in the same way they could exploit Michigan employees
today? (Not a slam. I'm from Michigan... the only difference is our min
wage is $7.40 an hour, which, at 69 hours per week would result in a
salary of around $26K... The US median.)
None of this is meant to downplay the terrible conditions the Apple workers are facing. I'm just saying that if everyone would just take a minute to compare those conditions with what we've got in the US... |
the stronger arguments about open source hiding bugs is that not all the eyeballs (or the most qualified eyeballs) are looking in the right spots; see the years-old bug in the linux kernel (all versions of 2.4 and 2.6): There's a party at Ring 0 and you're all invited )
there was another (more well known) 10-year-standing bug in the open source Kerberos implementation that MS found.... talk about embarrassing. |
I love my Surface RT. I use it every day, and I don't even remember the last time I turned on my personal laptop.. it's been weeks. It is maybe a little underpowered, but to me that tradeoff is worth it for a cheaper device than Surface Pro, more battery life, and a lighter weight and slightly thinner device.
I feel like people maybe don't get that Windows RT is 100% Windows. It just runs on a different chipset and doesn't allow you to install or run third party desktop apps. But it has a desktop, with control panel, paint, explorer, notepad, resource monitor, task manager, snipping tool, calculator, event viewer, registry editor, etc.. and it comes with Office.
The app store is not as full as others, but I've got virtually everything I need. And for most anything (except for games) that is missing, you can just use the web version instead, because, remember the browser runs Flash. I do this with Pandora, for example.
Really, the only thing I want to do on it that I can't is sync my MP3 player, because I can't install the software. The Surface RT has a full size USB port, so I can copy pictures from my camera, print, plug in mouse or keyboard if I wanted (but I have touch cover, so I don't need to.) And actually, I think the mouse is an important thing to point out. Having a cursor is a duh for Windows, but it's not for other tablet OSes. |
PC hardware is the same as top of the line macs for half the price. When you look at real world stats on speed and meaningful numbers like 5MB file open time, basic usage.. the price for performance... PCs blow macs away. If Windows was cheaper, I'm talking cheap (10$ cheap), for new OS's you have yourself one awesome computer.
Linux if you're tech savvy. Well, if you're tech savvy I have nothing to say to you, you already know this. |
I love how everyone jumps on the FUCK AT&T/COMCAST/TW/VERIZON because they don't care bandwagon.
Cable companies put caps on you for a reason. In particular because if you are hitting the cap - you are the problem. And your neighbors are hitting the cap because they are the problem. If you think it is free to run a "Cable Monopoly" you are wrong.
If you live near a campus, you are the most expensive customers to provide for. I know for a fact that cable companies have invested more money per customer - short of long distance ISP's that have only a few subs per mile like you would see in the back woods of Wyoming - because of your insane use of bandwidth usage.
Ya know what, the front line customer service guys may not care. They aren't making much more than that dude at McDonalds. But you don't care and you are an asshole on the phone when you fucked up. Because they work for AT&T/Comcast/Verizon.
But everyone that works behind that magic screen you don't notice does care. Those of us that keep the networks up and running for 99.998+% of the time really do our best to make sure you don't notice us. The only time you bitch is when things don't go your way every day. HOLY FUCK THE INTERWEBZ IS DOWN AT 3 AM!!! I DEMAND A FREE MONTH
A lot of us "Old Timers" remember and hold near and dear to our hearts the old motto's like "Customer First".
I'm sorry you had a shitty experience. I'm sorry you got billed when you shouldn't have. I honestly am. Guess what - most of the time that does not happen. You just don't hear about it when people are satisfied.
Your connection to your favorite website sucks - guess what, they probably are using a service that isn't paying their bill to get whatever bandwidth they are exceeding. If your favorite website is being hosted on a network provided by "Company A" it isn't AT&T's fault if "Company A" has a Ten Gig link dedicated to them and they are using 11 Gig's at the moment. A website goes down because of the "Reddit Effect" it is cute and funny and everyone wants a mirror. Then some prick goes "It's Verizon blocking because of Net Neutrality" Bullshit. If you have a 1 gig link, a 10 gig link or even more - if you max out those links - fuck you. I'm not going to lay down new fiber and give it to you for free (I.E. Netflix / Level 3)
Enough on that point. Guess what college kids bitching about caps - they exist for a reason. When you, your neighbor and everyone else in your neighborhood thinks that you should expect free interwebz like "European Country X" provides, it still costs money. Euro Country X may "Provide Free Services" but they tax the fuck out of you. Oh - now you want free shit w/o taxes. Sorry champ - it doesn't work that way. |
I was referring to peer as in the sense of an IX. "half a cent a GB" Data providers sell by the bit/s not by the bit, Comcast resells by the bit (now atleast) and transfer in the sense of international transfer that connects you to a tier 1 provider, that is not sold by a fibre's capacity because they ration different amounts of bandwidth per cable (for example they'll have tons of bandwidth to Europe from America but only a small bit running into Africa, because American ISPs have little appetite for African content).
It is true that for internal content Comcast gets a cheap ticket, but they still need to pay for the fibre and the equipment at either end. Much cheaper for someone in New York to pull the data from other people in his local than from a data center in California, but it's worse than that for them, no major hosts of illegal content are in the US - they'll be based in Europe and Asia - places where Comcast needs to pay for expensive international transfer (not expensive expensive, but more expensive than transfer between two houses on the same street). |
Correction. The cabby is refusing to drive you there because you're only willing to pay him half his fare. I'm not justifying Comcast's actions regarding their monopoly status, which are bad.
The issue is not the way Comcast is displaying the limit - a "dumb pipe" no longer needs to be dumb after you've used it all. The issue is that Comcast are being dick heads by using politics to gain monopoly status which is preventing some competition (or that the govt is to lazy to build out an open access network as is done in England, Amsterdam, New Zealand, Australia, et cetera). |
I know how you feel. My phone number was registered with an area code in a region different from where my service was. The genius routing system used the phone number you were calling with to determine what center to send your call. So, I would call Comcast presumably to complain about my service, get routed to a call center where someone would answer and say, "I'm sorry, I can't help you at this office. I will reroute your call to the other office who has records of your service." I would then get rerouted to the right office where the routing system would kick in and determine that I'm calling from the wrong area code. So, someone would answer and say "I'm sorry, I can't help you at this office. I will reroute your call to the other office who has records of your service." I would then get rerouted to the right office where the routing system would kick in and determine that I'm calling from the wrong area code. So, someone would answer and say "I'm sorry, I can't help you at this office. I will reroute your call to the other office who has records of your service." I would then get rerouted to the right office where the routing system would kick in and determine that I'm calling from the wrong area code. So, someone would answer and say "I'm sorry, I can't help you at this office. I will reroute your call to the other office who has records of your service."
If you see a pattern here, that's because there is one. Eventually I just got fed up and started hitting buttons until I was able to enter my phone number, where I would enter in the right area code with a bunch of random digits just so I would get routed to the right place, where I would explain that I had to trick the system with a wrong account number to get to where I needed to be. |
I really Hate Comcast myself. I've only had them for 4 Months, and have spent countless hours and over 20 calls to them already.
They once had caps before, and if you are a customer you can still see the 250gb cap on your internet usage with a message stating the cap has been removed for now.
Something else they just started this month in the Pittsburgh area. They sent a notice stating they are going to be encrypting their cable signal and you need a box to watch cable on every tv now. They will provide 2 boxes (these are not digital cable boxes but just small tuners) for free for 2 years. After this period you will be paying per tv even for the basic cable service you already pay for.
I could go on and on about my terrible short time with them.
Another side note, Time Warner tried to impose a ridiculously low cap in Rochester when i lived there. They sent out a notice that they were metering over the summer and come fall they would turn the caps on. Tried stating no one really needed all that data and people probably wouldn't notice.
People protested and Senator Chuck Schumer responded to pleas form his constituents. He actually helped stop this cap from happening as Time Warner revoked this proposed cap. I'm not sure where he stands on everything else, but in my book he is not too bad a guy even if he was only doing it due to popular demand (he also speaks at many local college graduations every year, I've seen this in person).
Also their is a story in NC where they did this and the local town made their own infrastructure. It's a great story. Now Time Warner and other cable companies are lobbying for Municipalities to not be able to create their own infrastructure and winning in some cases (wtf).
I can go on and on about this. |
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