0
stringlengths 9
22.1k
|
|---|
I live in a apartment complex and have comcast as my isp. I pay for 50 mbps of internet but in when I run the speedtest I get around 2 mbps. So I called comcast and wanted to know the reason for the sluggish internet but all I got from them was the generic "everythings good on ourside"... I then asked for a technician to come ti my apartment and assess the situation. Apparently comcast charges 90 dollars for a fucking technician to fix their service problem. Of course I think wtf and explain how it makes no sense but the customer serivce representative assure me that the if the problem isnt solved after the technician's visit, they can send another technician for FREE!!! |
I'd be fine with just internet too in most cases (there's really only one or two channels that have shows I can't easily get online; and legally).
The open source option is unlikely to work though. 1st, you'd have to have the delivery network. Unless they're coming in over your internet connection, then the provider has to be able to deliver them somehow, and that means you're going to have to pay for that.
Now add your cable fees, and here lies the largest issue. ESPN is currently the most [expensive channel on cable at about $5.54 per month]( I know what you're thinking: "great! That's not terribly expensive!" Except it is.
You're only getting that price because everyone is paying that price whether they're watching it or not. It sucks if you, like me, don't care about watching sports on TV, but it spreads the cost around. This article from NPR , [check out this NYT article](
The |
I enjoy researching energy and have been doing so for almost fifteen years. The US has had production plants for many decades now. While the initial cost could be large, depending on the size and number, there are significant tax breaks for projects such as these as well as tax depreciation over X years.
One such example of recouping energy is steam vents collecting water vapor and running it back into the system before it hits room temperature. It doesn't provide a lot of ΔC, but every bit helps. |
Hence
> Not defending it in any way
Just explaining how it works. It's like someone built a Dick-Punching machine, and complaints about being punched in the dick. That's what the thing does. |
It was probably my fault. My thesis was never stated explicitly, it was the combination of "good communities need barriers to entry" and "subreddits get swamped because there's no barrier to entry from the rest of reddit."
One could tack on the following |
making money is not required
> There is tons of investment capital out there
Are you on crazy pills? Do you understand what "investment capital" is really all about?
Google bought YouTube because it allowed them to increase their user base and add to their enormous data warehouse about their users. (That's what the forced Google Plus integration is all about too.) It made an already-profitable company even more profitable. I think it's far from clear that YT did not make money, or doesn't do so today as a business unit.
Twitter is worth lots today - in fact, consensus is generally that its stock is incredibly overvalued - because of the expectation of future gain. Revenue growth is absolutely a major focus for Twitter right now. It's not #1 - growing their user base is still the overriding concern - but the company has rolled out many new products this year, and is strongly focused on increasing ad sales, data sharing agreements with marketers, and so forth. |
I posted this a while back.
Based solely on observations and horrible math skills.
Observation #1 : Gold = 276.46 minutes of server* time per ("Buy gold for yourself to gain access to extra features and special benefits. A month of gold pays for 276.46 minutes of reddit server time!")
No specifications as to whether this is per one server or all 240.
Observation #2 : 240 Reddit Servers per (
Observation #3 : "This daily goal updates every 10 minutes and is reset at midnight MST (10 hours, 26 minutes from now)."
My Calculation :
24(hours in the day) 60(minutes in an hour) = 1440(minutes in a day) 240(Reddit Servers) = 345,600(minutes total for servers in a 24 hour period) / 276.46(amount 3.99 of reddit gold pays for.) = 1250.09(reddit subscriptions) * 3.99(cost of reddit gold) = $4987.86(cost per 24 hour day to run reddit).
365 * $4987.86 = $1,820,569.19(a year to "run" reddit.)
Final Speculation : The only thing that is unspecified is whether or not reddit gold buys one server or all servers, which would make this number substantially smaller. |
Someone posted on askreddit the question "what is the most obsolete technology still used in modern society?". The replies read "fax machine; fax machine; fax machine; land line telephones; fax machine; fax machine; cheques; fax machine; tom cruise; max fachine..." you get the idea. All the intelligent discussion of things like "steam engines: except for renewables, all our methods for electricity generation are just ways to run a steam engine." got completely buried in the fax machine noise. It was funny for the first half hour or so but it went on all day and totally ruined what could have been a neat thread. |
Because we are bombarded (as Americans especially) with ads literally every waking minute of every day.
Anything you watch on TV is going to involve some sort of ad, even during the program or event you're watching. This is especially true for any sporting event.
Listening to the radio, ads. Driving your car, ads in the form of billboards, sandwich boards, on the sides of buses, other vehicles, etc.
Almost any 'free' app is going to come loaded with ads. Your email, any website you hit, everywhere you look there's an ad.
I'm personally not your typical consumer who is attracted by clever advertising. While I can appreciate a good ad (or one that's really funny) I still have never once made a purchasing decision based off an ad I saw.
Instead I make informed, researched decisions when spending my money. |
No, he meant to tell you that someone creating a Google account in order to store a Youtube favorite should not be forced into creating a Google+ social profile with their real name etc. exposed.
Your real name isn't exposed.
Here's what Google has to say about it:
> Note: There is no public link between your new page and personal Google+ profile (if you have one). People who view your YouTube channel or Google+ page will not find any connection to your personal profile or name, unless you publicly link them yourself. |
Ignore this sensationalist headline. The 60%+ price reduction affects a subset so it won't correlate to the bottom line mentioned for one thing, so that's misleading. But industry insiders have been speculating on the impact to insurers of GPS-enabled Pay As You Drive insurance for many years, so this is nothing new. Because of sufficient competition, auto insurance prices adjust to the reality in the market whether that reality includes new regulation or new technology. Driverless cars sound incredible, but the adoption rates and subsequent impact on insurers' bottom lines will be gradual and certainly won't be grabbing headlines unless they're misleading like above.
Source: I priced auto insurance as an actuary. |
See, here's the thing.
1- I disagree with this post. Vista's problem was very simple: its features were ahead of its time. Vista had more than double the minimum requirements of XP, and the hardware just wasn't ready for it. Because of that most people disliked it and complained about it being slow and whatnot. If you load vista on a newer computer it will run about as fast and well as windows 7, it just won't look as pretty.
Windows 8 actually has the exact opposite problem. While with Vista most people liked the new features, but the OS was too slow; Windows 8 is an improvement on speed and memory management from windows 7, but people don't like the features. So in a sense, Windows 8 is the opposite of Vista.
2- I have always been a person to welcome new ideas and change, whereas most people in the world are very resistant to change. They like to see the same thing decade upon decade, and if a company decides to revamp their look, people complain. A good example of this is Facebook a couple of years ago. The Facebook design team decided to try revamp their look, but every time they made even the slightest change, there was a huge outcry against it.
The same thing just happened with windows. Microsoft decided they wanted to get a totally new look, but no one likes it because people hate change . I honestly believe that is the sole reason people don't like windows 8. Its looks are appealing and with newer computers (primarily the touchscreen ones) it works beautifully . |
Always been a Microsoft fan (even after actually having Windows ME) and was extremely excited to buy my first actual decent computer. Had never even seen Win 8 how different could it be? Was pretty annoying at first but I got the hang of it pretty quick. Oh people are saying Win 8.1 is out and it gives you a start button, that'll be nice. Within only having my brand new PC for 4 days upgrading to Win 8.1 completely fucked me. Had to get into safe mode (wasn't easy) and download all my graphics drivers and such manually (probably installed some of the wrong drivers) and am still not sure if everything is installed properly. |
Windows 8 is better.. with touch
I’ve tried Windows 8 on a Surface, and it is absolutely better than Windows 7, but I’m not going to purchase a new device with a touchscreen just for Windows 8.
Touch can be uncomfortable, so advantages can be lost when in a desktop environment
I know someone who loves his Surface, and Windows 8, so he bought a touchscreen for his desktop environment. The problem was that it was too un-ergonomical, as the shoulders tire out fast.
I have not seen any examples of a developer doing serious programming on a touchscreen. I’ve seen programmers that operate in a three-monitor environment, and I don't think that repeatedly reaching their arms across to touch the screens would be comfortable over time.
Touch works best with a mobile device that is close to your body.
Eye tracking
If you don’t have a touchscreen, Windows 7 + a $99 eye tracker could be better than upgrading to Windows 8 for the same price.
There are consumer-level eye trackers that are available now, and were demoed at CES.
Quick activation of on-screen shortcut tiles without a touchscreen is now more feasible. Look at any interface widget to highlight it, and then touch the keyboard to activate and select it. It can basically turn a non-touch screen into a touchscreen.
I’m not sure if people are willing to pay for an external hardware device to do that though. Many people might be completely fine with a mouse and keyboard on Windows 7. |
Yes, the K menu looks to be what you want. Do you know how Windows has several UI settings? 'Classic', regular, etc.?
Same thing on Kubuntu. You may find that you prefer the [classic setting on it (see #1)]( I do. To change, unlock widgets if needed, right click the K and select 'Switch to Classic Menu Style'. If you're just getting started, you may want to go easy and check out the default menu first though.
I highly recommend you check out the link above, as it gives some visual feedback before you have to download anything big. We are up to version 4.12 now, so you may find some additional polish if you do try out the real thing, compared to that web page.
As for the 'spyware', I haven't seen any place in Kubuntu with Amazon integration, which is what this is all about afaik. You could install it, and use it if you like, but it doesn't appear to be installed by default. |
Why not both? I've recently started using XMing, and now my Win7 and my Win8 tablet are full-window terminals for my research CentOS beast using X over SSH. I'm also privately using Ubuntu as a dual boot option, and it IS kinda slick, but as long as Steam and Netflix don't run I don't have much of a home usecase for Linux. SHH all the way! |
Windows is still shit with a touch interface unless you're using metro full time. Try using a windowed application however and you'll realize there are some glaring flaws that can't be fixed if you keep the desktop. Convention has the minimize, maximize and close buttons for each window right next to each other. The buttons are small, and in a touch environment, it's really easy to accidently close your app instead of making it full screen. Touch requires a different way of doing things, and desktop applications would either need to be scrapped or completely overhauled to support touch. Microsoft wants a 30% cut on Metro apps, so nobody wants to do that. In the end, Windows is a hybridized bastard child of the windows we've known and loved for many years, and Windows Phone. |
Thank you! The metro screen is just a glorified start menu that works functionally a lot better for me. The Windows 7 start menu had 2 functions for me: shortcuts for common programs, and search for less frequent programs. My 8.1 start screen can do both of those better.
My frequent programs are organized into columns based on games/media, utilities, office, programming, etc. This let's me keep a cleaner desktop which I prefer and still just a quick click away.
I agree that the W8 search results being split up is a pretty poor design choice. I upgraded to 8.1 after an hour of using 8 and never looked back. Now my search is so snappy, I don't know how I lived without it. Plus with Indexing Options, I can decide which locations I want to see in search results.
Setting the background to use the same wallpaper as my desktop makes opening it a really smooth transition as well. Doesn't feel like I was pulled out of my desktop environment at all like some people complain.
I never use the Apps, Windows Store, or any of the live tiles stuff (except the weather tile is nice), and I'm perfectly fine without it. Maybe if they implemented more functionality akin to Android widgets, I could reconsider apps.
Sometimes I wonder if my friends who tried Windows 8 and claimed it sucked instantly ever even tried to customize it to their needs. |
I definitely wouldn't prefer Windows 8 over 7 at all, but it's all that's available on new PCs. I got a new laptop a few weeks ago, and believe me I tried to make the Metro thing suit my needs, but I just got too frustrated with it. It just felt like I was using two OS's.
I installed StartIsBack and it's made using Windows so much easier. It's completely lightweight and it doesn't run as a program or a process as it actually integrates itself as part of the Windows shell.
The metro stuff is still available but can be easily disabled and shunned to an unobtrusive "start screen" button on the start menu, or pressing the Windows Key. So if you like Metro but still miss it, out can have the best of both worlds! |
I downloaded and paid for "startisback" to get my start menu back.
I rarely have to deal with the tiled menu crap. I so so hate that shit. I had Vista, and was ho-hum about it, I had Windows 7, and really really liked.. But since Windows 95, 2000, NT and the ones mentioned.. Windows 8 is a fucking disaster. It's a full on Star Trek Enterprise-entire crew face palm.. Not just the enterprise, but the entire federation face palming at once. That is how bad it is. It is a Picard Meme simply yelling "What the Fuck Microsoft... What the fuck?"
I like apple computers, but the high price has always kept me away, but if Microsoft continues down this path, I will look at them more seriously in the future.
What frustrates me more, is that when companies like Microsoft misstep like this (and they seem to be doing it a lot lately - see the Xbox debacle). They just get stubborn about it and say "NOPE!!! We see that millions of our users are frustrated, fed up, and mad.. but THIS is the way it is, DEAL WITH IT!!!" |
I'm forced to use Win8 at work... the entire interface is just so goddamn un-intuitive for someone who has been using computers in one way or another for over 15 years. I don't know how to do the simplest actions (I just want to look at a folder with all of my pictures! Not scroll through my 1,000+ pictures one at a goddamn time!)
I have to create desktop shortcuts to everything in order to not get lost in the interface. I have no idea what they were thinking when they designed this UI, and I have no idea what my company was thinking when they decided we were 'going entirely Win8 from now on' (except for the VP's and such, they get special ordered Win7 machines...) |
I didn't know about the way "mod" privileges were coveted. I've no desire to be on a subreddit where ANY moderator moderates that many subreddits. There's no way to do it effectively. It's like people that put a whole bunch of letters after their name on their resume for every accomplishment they've done. It's like people in MMOs that brag about being officers in multiple guilds. WHO CARES?!? |
My 63 old father who doesn't even use or have a FB account doesn't want his picture so much as uploaded to Facebook. So you're essentially wrong as I know my father is not the only person like this and he's certainly not part of the internet minority that is very vocal and knows everything about Facebook's past by any means. |
ITT: Lots of people who put down IE without understating the actual issue involved or why people especially in an enterprise environment might actually want/need/be forced to use IE or why the original bad reputation of IE for bad security from half a decade or more ago is not really all that justified anymore.
Really IE used to be shit but it has improved a lot since IE6, there are many legitimate reasons to still prefer another browser but most people here seem to be just repeating what the cool kids used to say without having given it any thought themselves.
There also seems to be no understanding that there is a bit of a difference between switching to a different browser on a home computer and switching to a different browser in an enterprise environment with legacy intranet applications and lots of other dependencies. |
Mostly no. Imagine trying to model real world climates by sampling 50 random dudes apartment thermostats. |
95% of posts are spam, but 94% of them are filtered out. I've got a site that gets 1000 unique views a day, and it has a form. I was playing with the db and got a dump of all the posts. there where only 100 or so comments but 10,000+ records.
The bots posting had been posting without a reply ID, even though it was in the <form> in a hidden field. |
I'm actually at work and can't watch this. |
1]( [2]( [3](
Every single year someone writes an article about how apple products are going to break through into corporate usage, usually when a few companies are trying it out. Funny how it never seems to catch on.
Maybe the problem is that reporting on the industry is sloppy as shit. |
As an Android user and someone who personally doesn't have much use for iPhone's or Apple products in general, I hate this kind of unthinking fanboyism.
People have different needs and different options suit them better. My father got an iPhone because it works for him (he doesn't have to tinker with it, and it works pretty much straight out of the box, which suits his level of technological ability). I have a hero which suits my smartphone needs (Cheap, I can tinker around with it to my hearts content, works for me) while I have friends who are ten thousand times more tech savvy then me who have an iPhone/iPad...because it works for them. |
So, using Photoshop at $700 boxed vs a $35 per month subscription is $700 vs $840 if major releases come out every two years. You pay more. You don't own anything. There's no concept of equity that would allow you eventually own anything. You don't get anything extra (ie: some kind of added value that is an ongoing cost for Adobe).
This isn't a subscription service. Adobe is lending you money to buy Photoshop. I can get the same 'deal' using a low interest credit card. At least I'd own something in the end.
For the record, I'm a fan of actual subscription services. Freshbooks is a good example. The monthly fees look high vs buying something like quickbooks, but there is a lot of extra value. No installation or updates (a 2 hour ordeal with quickbooks - I did it last night for a relative. Far easier backups - none if you trust their service enough. Incredible potential for integration. Less pressure to bloat the software with garbage features to satisfy a business model that relies on new sales.
There's a big difference between a real subscription service that 'just deals with everything' vs Adobe financing the purchase of Photoshop over two years. If anything Adobe should charge less than boxed value since everyone that's renting is, effectively, guaranteed to buy every new version on release. |
I am drunk and I don't want to read all that someone |
As a Canadian this makes me so jealous. Our home broadband installations include a complimentary POV video shoot for Brazzers. Then we have to listen to all the ISPs brag about how great the penetration is, like it's an excuse for the lack of quality, even when we know it's way better in most other countries. Our ISPs only compare themselves to other G7 countries which is kinda like sneaking into an elementary school to compare cock sizes with the other 'men'. |
To clear up a few misunderstandings here: When a video refers to SD/480p/480i, 720p, 1080i and 1080p, it's a reference to the resolution of the video - specifically how many horizontal lines that are displayed simultaneously. The 1080p means that a picture is made up of 1080 lines, painted in one pass - if a format has an "i" postfix, it means that the video is [interlaced] where a single picture is painted in two halves: First all the even-numbered lines are painted, then the odd-numbered lines are painted (In practice, this means that only half as many pixels need to be painted as for a progressive source - but nevermind this, because it is unimportant for the actual explanation). A Blu-Ray or a downloadable or streaming video file can be either of these formats - on some sites, like YouTube that offers streaming video, there is a cogwheel dropdown that allows you to select among the formats they have encoded the video in.
Now, on to bandwidth. A raw, uncompressed video is big. Really big. If you took a 1080p video in 16:9 format, each and every image would occupy 1.98 MB of data. A single second of video (assuming 24 fps) would be ~47.5 MB. A two-hour movie is about 330 GB, so it clearly needs to be compressed. This is where video codecs and compression comes into mind. Your typical Blu-Ray and video file you downloaded (From iTunes or less legitimate sources) uses a particular brand of compression in the MPEG-4 family of video codecs called h.264. Such a video codec works by doing two things: It eliminates data that is the same between a number of frames, and it tries to change the rest of the data to eliminate information you aren't going to notice anyway (it is a lot more complicated than this, but the explanation is close enough to the actual things going on that it can be used) - this psychovisual encoding permanently removes information - it doesn't just compress the data. Now, the second bit of this, the psychovisual encoding can be done more or less agressively. In other words, it can remove more or less data. In a file that has been compressed to, say, 27 Mbps, more information has been removed, when compared to the file that uses 54 Mbps. Depending on how the video encoder did this, you may or may not notice the difference. My bet is that, unless you are a freak, or watch every frame individually, you aren't going to notice the difference. ( |
I've been researching the drilling into Lake Vostok for a project (Lake Vostok is the model used by NASA for developing and testing this idea for Europa). Here's a video with some nice anims explaining one method of sterilization they may use for the Lake Vostok robot:
[
Wikipedia's info on Lake Vostok:
[ |
That's actually a pretty normal price for core-network solutions, especially a collapsed core where everything filters down to a single cisco device.
T1 lines are basically dedicated copper lines to the phone company, that provide guaranteed speeds, and redundancy if multiple lines are used. They're useful for segregating congestion-sensitive traffic like VoIP from regular internet traffic, and in many cases you can save money by buying a SIP trunk from the telecom instead of a bunch of POT lines. I'm not entirely familiar with this Cisco line, but chances are that the telecom would make them spend thousands on a SIP-terminator anyway, which this device may itself already do (thus saving money down the road).
Also, keep in mind that the price paid is not the same as the total cost of ownership. They may cost $20k, but a lot of that is maintenance costs. Even that $500 device mentioned would probably be $6000 or $7000 with maintenance. These are really the most complex part of the network, and it is far cheaper in most cases to pay for maintenance than to hire a full-time IT person or contract someone on-demand.
Finally, these are not your mom's routers. I'm guessing these state agencies have IPSec VPNs set up between branches to allow for information sharing, which will simply not work in any decent fashion on cheap consumer-grade routers. They are also integrated firewalls, meaning that these will handle intrusion prevention and probably antivirus as well. And even if they did cost $20k initially, these are pretty modular/upgradable, and could probably be used a decade or more. $2000/year for an advanced Cisco router/firewall with all associated IT costs included is not unreasonable. |
Posted on /r/ |
I work for an internet advertising company and I hear quite a bit of bs from companies who "advertise on Facebook".. Here's my 2 cents, albeit possibly biased..
First, some company yesterday dropped all of their Facebook marketing bc 80% of the clicks were from bots ( source would never click on any of those ads.
These people have their advertising strategy backwards. They are focused on being seen by as many people as possible, vs as many qualified consumers as possible. They are focused on sheer number of clicks/impressions vs the quality of the clicks. What I mean, is each 'click' or 'impression' (I'm not sure which price breakdown FB uses) costs the advertiser, so when whoever sets up these advertising campaigns, they don't care about how effective it is, simply either gettings the most impressions to get the most money.
So you have these companies who think "well theres XX million FB users, so surely this is a great website to advertise on" and FB says "Of course, watch how many clicks you'll get". Well in general, you don't want the highest number of clicks, you want a low, yet high converting number, for the highest ROI. What advertisers fail to see is what people use FB for, just social networking. You don't go to FB to shop. You go to Google or Amazon or eBay, not a networking site. Why do you want to target a limited audience who is just there to chat or post drunken pictures? It just doesn't make sense, they use the number of users FB has as a ploy to drag advertisers in and it's such a stupid model it's no surprise they have to use bots to generate clicks, "You might not have gotten any new customers, but you've had 5000 clicks this week! That's all our job is!".
Facebook uses their "Like" button websites to track where users are going, that combined with "Likes" from friends help determine what ads you will see...So, here's my thought on this, what are the chances of someone seeing an ad on Facebook at the perfect time when they need whatever product/service is being offered? A small number I would imagine. Consumers use search engines when they want to spend money and this is the obvious route for an advertiser, as you can target your exact audience, someone who lives "here" and searches for this "this".
/end rant |
It's plain CSS.
If you check the source code for the CSS of that page you'll see that #separator3 has relative position (it moves with the page) and within that you have the .bg4 class that have fixed position (it's "sticky"), which makes it look like the page scrolls past the background image.
Also I think you'll have a bigger success in a sub like /r/webdevelopment. |
Missing the point? The point was you said I didn't know what I am talking about. I gave counter-evidence. |
That is more or less what I'm saying.
Most people I've met in grad school (at MIT anyway) and during my time at a few national labs and in China do not consider non-violent crimes to be crimes at all, and wouldn't feel comfortable sending anyone to prison for them.
I personally would have an incredibly hard time reaching anything but not guilty for drug, tax, piracy or other related instances where the threat of actual violence was very low.
Criminality is just a completely superfluous Draconian thing I find, from my personal experience with how the government works, outside of violence anyway.
Gross negligence is the threshold before I'd start even giving a shit about what happened if no one was actually harmed by their behavior (that didn't want to be harmed that is). |
Stealing" is depriving another person of a possessory right in property. There is a fundamental aspect to "ownership," and digital property is a real thing.
So if you have an idea... That idea is pretty much fair game to the world... But if you put that idea into a tangible medium, then you own that expression of an idea, and the law protects your property rights. This doesn't mean that someone can't also have the idea and make their own expression... It means someone can't copy your specific expression.
At some point in the chain of piracy, an individual usually violates someone's property right... And from that point, it has a cascade affect where people lose track of this reality.
To try to put it another way... Trade Secrets are largely protected by the mere fact that they are kept a secret... But plenty of laws exist to prevent people from outright stealing them... Because even though they don't physically deprive the owner of the trade secret, they deprive the owner of his/her possessory rights in the property.
So whether, as laypeople, we want to say it isn't stealing... So be it. But as far as the law goes, it isn't that simple and sometimes a legislative scalpel doesn't exist fine enough to cut out the sections we wish we're more simple. |
You're exactly right however what you just said doesn't fit with reddit's opinion of "I am entitled to free stuff because anyone who tries to protect their creative property is inherently evil", therefore they like to use the word censorship because it makes people think evil government and evil corporations. The real loser in all of this is the people who create these games, music, art or whatever because they are being portrayed as a bad guy simply for protecting their property.
Imagine if a bank had various security devices that made legitimate customers slightly inconvenienced but the bank deemed these devices necessary to protect the money in the vault, while this may seem a little assholeish they are still in their rights to do so, even if they lose a few customers. Now imagine that a vigilante sees the plight of the poor inconvenienced customers (who were using the bank of their on volition) and decided to break into the bank, blow open the vault and toss money to everyone around (bank customer or not). This hypothetical situation is what most arguments in favor of piracy are equivalent to. Simply replace the bank with a huge media corporation or maybe an individual artist trying to make a living. Copyright pirates like to pretend that everyone who creates media content is literally Hitler in order to justify their actions.
Furthermore I will add that the difference between copying a digital product and stealing a tangible physical product is insignificant because the cost of making a digital product is far greater than the cost to the consumer of any one copy of that product. Therefore any product that is pirated is still a product that is stolen.
Also in regards to the "I pirate things to try them out" argument, while this practice is not directly detrimental to the creator it often leads to "well I liked it but I don't have the cash right now so I will just keep playing this stolen copy". It's like going to a car dealership and stealing car because they don't offer test drives and then later returning it (or not).
Anyway my point is that piracy does equal stealing and it results in real tangible loss to the creator or artist and is one of the worst things to happen to the media industry. People that cite benefits of piracy on the gaming industry are like people that list off the health benefits of heroin. Piracy if left unchecked could lead to the stagnation of the gaming industry. Sure indie developers will always make games but what is the motivation for someone or a group of people to put any significant effort into making a game that they Will receive nothing for. I think that most game developers (not game Corp owners like each shareholders) make games because they want to love to, but these people need to make a living and without that they simply can't make games. |
Well in Pirate Bay's case you are right. Thing is though - the way they are being suppressed is basically copyright conglomerates pushing them off the internet. They may have the right to do so in this case, but the very possibility of a website being suppressed like this, terminated by all hosting services across the planet, is disturbing. If Pirate Bay loses fight, it will not just be a triumph of copyright. It will prove that money and influence is capable of silencing the entire planet on a given subject if so desired.
This may not be censorship now, but it will definitely eventually be used for censorship.
If Pirate Bay is successful at creating a self-hosted distributed website, it will invent a way to combat one of the main ways governments have of censoring the internet in general. |
If people want it, it gets made? No, lol, if people buy it it gets made.
I am in the industry. I am a CG artist that has worked on movies that I am sure you have seen, and some that you have probably loved. Our DVD sales have been steadily and quickly tanking and are going to die very soon now even as box office and reviews stay high. We are still profitable but the margin keeps dropping. If you were a studio exec and were going to gamble $250,000,000, would you spend it on a super awesome movie that people will see but doesn't sell merchandise, or would you dump it into Cars 4 or Transformers 15 that you know is going to make a trillion dollars in toy sales?
When pirating finally kills off my studio, which it probably will, I am not going to keep creating these movies. I am really good at what I do, and was it The Joker in the second batman that said "if you're good at something, never do it for free"? I like making a living. I have rent to pay and I like eating. I will go into another industry. Even if I wanted to, how am I going to round up 200 of my talented coworkers and coordinators and managers and painters and sculpters and directors and convince them to pour 50-70 hour weeks of their blood, sweat, and tears into making some movie out of charity? |
Wonderful quote from Max Planck, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die off and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
The |
I'm completely against this ruling, but I can bring some actual data to the table here with the congestion question. I'm an engineer for a medium sized ISP. Somewhere between 1 and 2 million data subscribers, and also do backhaul for all the major cell companies.
Netflix alone, accounts for roughly 30% of data usage going across our egress to AT&T. Whenever they have a maintenance that takes Netflix down, we see a very noticeable drop in network traffic.
To take that a step further and assuming that cell providers have a similar usage percentage from things like Netflix. They pay companies like us to link their individual towers and pipe that data across our network to their network (Put very simply). The more bandwidth they need, the more they have to pay and the more we in turn have to update our own bandwidth to accommodate. |
Imagine it this way. You have a road with 3 lanes. Everyone is trying to go from point A. to Point B. in a car. They occupy one of those lanes. Now some shipping company comes along with a giant truck that fully takes up 1 of those lanes. Now you only have 2 lanes for the rest of the traffic. That traffic gets backed up because it no longer has the full reign of the 3 lanes. So the guy maintaining the road wants the guy using up the whole lane to pay more for the increased 'wear and tear' on their road, so to speak.
That's a way oversimplified of course (especially for those of you who know networking). The answer is no its not a problem right now, not for us anyway because we can keep up with the demand by continuously updating our network and by building specific rings for the cell companies. That costs money though, so we charge them more, which means they in turn charge more from their customers, eat the cost, or find some other way. The other way they are looking for is by charging Netflix (for instance) to use their network, or to gain priority on their network. Alternately, they can charge customer's more for a Netflix prioritized tier. That's so they can pay for the more bandwidth without eating into profits. Again, I'm very against this, but that is what the companies are arguing. |
It is in no way like "Bridgegate". A company wants to do all it can do to grow and protect its profit. They don't WANT to be a terrible service it just happens to be more profitable to be terrible.
Christie on the other hand forced a special election weeks before the already planned elections, costing NJ tax payers millions of dollars. He did this entirely so that he wouldn't have to deal with Booker voters during his re-election. The special election promised Christie a landslide victory. AFTER all that he closed down a few lanes of the GWB for purely vindictive reasons. |
Oh man, Hughesnet pissed me off so badly, when I lived out in the boonies they were the only reliable service (I mean that didn't cut out all the time if the wind even started blowing) and I had my choice of a 12GB per month cap for $80 a month, or a 20GB cap for $100/month. What they neglected to tell me is that their antiquated tech has a ping that is at minimum half a second, sometimes 3 full seconds, meaning for 2 years I was stuck with internet I could only check facebook and email with, couldn't even connect to game servers, and when I went over my 12GB that throttled me to 12kb/s and called me at work to offer me a data extension for $50 to push my cap to 20GB for the rest of the month. |
Good damn, I love Bloomberg. It's like Fox News without all the shouting; a pitch perfect parody of itself.
EDIT: I know this isn't very technical, but neither are most people on the internet. I'm trying to call attention to the process of stilted media at work. Hopefully this isn't considered wasteful.
So we juxtapose "VICTORY" with the bad guys, over a photo of Mormon-dressed VIPs apparently reciting the pledge of allegiance. Striking down the scary acronym's "so-called" neutrality "rules" (as opposed to regulations). It then limits the description of the issue to premium rates (as opposed to potential censorship) and beats this point to death until it reads like a pre-game sports show. Verizon is said to charge both ends of their service anything they like, and this is proposed as a nice, not at all greedy idea, with no mention that it completely contradicts the notion they are not a telecommunications company. "Goodbye, open internet" is the sole quote from the opposition and left entirely undefined so that it almost sounds positive in context.
Meanwhile it is implied that NetFlix has been getting a free ride and has been ruining the internet for everyone, and they should be ashamed of themselves, and their stock dropped as a result of their naughty behavior, and you-- dear investor --should heed this warning. We're not telling you to sell your stock and kick one of America's few good guy corporations while it's down, but we are giving you three paragraphs of good reasons. |
A lot of members of the court (and famously Antonin Scalia), believe strongly in the separation of powers.
Whether or not the a network should shape traffic is not a constitutional question. It is one that the people must decide. And the constitution defines the mechanism for people to get something:
Call your senator and congressional representative, and lobby them.
If the people want network neutrality: then get a law. That's what laws are for; an expression of the will of the people.
[Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3]( gives congress the power to tell a company what they are, and are not, allowed to do with their own network. [As a business, you're not allowed to decide who you will and won't do business with]( - becuase Congress said so. The same can be done with Internet service.
But some people are republicans. Republicans believe in freedom, freedom stands opposed to constraints, and the bigger the government, the more the constraints. They want fewer laws on employers, not more. |
There are costs to such decisions too. I pretty much quit using Google's services because of their inconsistent and generally poor design. Consistent design instills trust. A/B testing is always going to get you these sort of small incremental wins, but at what expense? Design chaos. Here's the catch 22: data will never lead you to make consistent design choices. The benefits of consistent design are not reaped until you are basically "all-in" focused on maintaining consistent design--the trust and reputation takes a while to build but it would be worth it once you reach the threshold. Unfortunately, using data (which tells you to go for that $200m short-term win by using 100 shades of blue) you'll never reach that threshold of consistency and trust and you'll never know the true value of a consistent design focus. |
No, the difference between the US and the world is unregulated cable vs "open access" cable. The later was created by the US but dropped in the 90's in favor of unregulated cable. According to the famous Harvard FEC report, "open access" ALWAYS leads to more competition with lower prices and higher innovation while the deregulated model leads to monopolies. |
In Russia it was the exact opposite of this. Telephone lines were in monopoly's hands. Isp's had to use those lines and the private phone lines were prohibitively expensive. But then the Soviet loophole helped (that many story houses, cable poles and etc are city or smaller local servicing companies owned). Suddenly ethernet cables companies started to appear everywhere. Thus adsl and cable companies didn't even happen in Russia. So there were many small Isps with really fast (100mbps) connections. Then in I think 2005-2006 consolidation started and most of smaller companies sold themselves to either their carriers or mobile carriers due to extreme regulation - licenses appeared so additional costs were applied to running such business. |
A kind like me. Redundancy in infrastructure makes infrastructure robust, and provides a platform for competition and improvement. Natural monopolies may exist, but are short-lived and should die when someone else thinks they can provide service that's cheaper, faster, nicer, or different.
Competing rail lines also sounds like a good idea (and is, in practice).
Edit: More importantly, if someone builds competing infrastructure (or does anything else) and it wasn't valuable,
then they go out of business and lose their money. On the other hand, if they make a profit, then it means people valued their service more than the resources it cost to build it. |
I'd suggest the same for you
Jesus, you are rude. I am trying to be patient and not pull out the expert card, but yeah: maybe it's not clear from the incredibly long amount of time I spent trying to patiently explain the basics to you, but this is my profession. I'm trying my best to engage and break things down into concepts that non-experts can understand and engage on, despite the fact that it's clear you don't have the basic micro tools or intuition, which makes it hard to advance the discussion. That makes this conversation challenging to have because I can't teach you an entire econ course in a Reddit comment.
(That's not to say economics is infallible, far from it. But we can have a much more productive conversation if you are at least able to understand what economics says before dismissing it out of hand. The frustrating thing about being an economist is that because economics is about real world phenomena that we all experience, everyone feels qualified to have an opinion. Many people think a degree from r/libertarian or r/RonPaul elsewhere on the internet is the same thing as formal training.
This idea that laypeople can understand your field at a PhD level by spending a lot of time on dogmatic websites with an agenda is not something my scientist friends tend to experience.)
>Just to make sure I understand how you're using the word "monopoly," you define it as "a company that has 100% market share in a given area"?
One way I know you haven't studied economics is that if you had done any basic micro you would know that when I reference monopoly pricing models I am talking about inefficiencies that come from any firm with market power. I tried to include this above but apparently I wasn't clear. Any intro econ book will help you understand this, for example Chapter 9 in Goolsbee Levitt and Syverson:
>"In this chapter, we start to look at firms’ production choices when they have some ability to control the price at which their product sells. A firm that can influence the price its product sells for is said to have market power. The most extreme version of market power is a monopoly, a market that is served by only one firm."
So monopoly pricing absolutely does not mean the firm has to be 100% of a market! The ISP market is clearly not dominated by a sole monopolist. What you need is for a small number of firms to be dominant players in a market with barriers to entry and the inefficiency analysis goes through.
>We would rather have one set of wires servicing all households. In this sense monopolies are more efficient for society than competition with many identical firms.
>I thought you said earlier that monopolies result in high prices.
This is another example where you are clearly very confused, and you need to do at least a little bit of study for us to have a productive conversation. There are two sources of inefficiency that I explained - they go in opposite directions from a societal perspective. The first is inefficiency from monopoly pricing - prices that are artificially high due to firm market power, stemming from barriers to entry. The second is inefficiency that comes from the costs of production - the cost of having one grid or two. Two grids costs society more to achieve the same effect as one grid, and thus is a source of inefficiency. These are two almost entirely different issues that happen to work in somewhat opposite directions.
You are absolutely allowed to be polemical about being libertarian as a matter of principle. That's fine. But don't confuse libertarian principles with efficiency.
You might as a libertarian argue that on balance from an efficiency perspective the free market is best overall - that might be a tenable or even correct argument. But in order to do so you need to engage with ways the free market, operating perfectly, can have market failure which results from individual and firms acting in their own self interest. Market failures from the unfettered market cause inefficiency! Monopoly pricing is just one market failure that does this.
From your writing here, you seem to have difficulty detangling libertarian ethical principles with the reality of how markets work. You will make better arguments if you can understand that these are not the same thing. |
In that theory, there are two possible states the universe could be in. Your information bias left out the one where space is a true vacuum. Regardless, we can still consider it a vacuum compared to our living conditions, most especially in this context. Also, while OP's comparison to Star Trek is inaccurate & unfortunate, it gets the point across. |
Between the Steam client, games like league and Blizzard games (and many many more) the number of "legitimate" uses of p2p probably represents a large fraction of overall use. Most people I know have no clue what p2p download is but have used p2p services many times for legit software without even knowing it. |
If you read carefully and acknowledge that Microsoft is horrible at marketing and double-speak when compared to Apple (my perception is that the employees of Microsoft are incredibly awkward socially and don't understand how they are perceived to the outside world), you will realize that the content of the two disclosures given is exactly the same. They reveal identical information. Apple simply elaborates in a way that caters to the lowest common denominator to minimize misrepresentations of their stance. |
u/Bolusop is acknowledging the prevalence of doublespeak in ... everywhere, but especially statements directed to 'the public.' It's when you say something that is "technically true" but misleading. It's the deliberate misuse of language.
It's like the husband who says to his wife "I never slept with that whore!" And really he fucked the whore, yet never lay in the bed and slept with her. It's technically true, but deceptive in the context of what the issue really is.
(It works too if you put the emphasis on that . The husband didn't sleep with that whore; he slept with this one.)
He is monkeying around with language to lie without telling a falsehood.
Apple is trying to get street cred for some action/condition they may or may not be doing, and we have no idea what's going on, except we've seen some pretty scary PPT presentations about the grand scale and power of nation-state scale spying. |
250,000 per day, doubling every week. From 2008, when it started, to now, the fines would have been more than the total cost of the steel used to hypothetically create a Death Star. thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands TIMES more money than exists on Earth, let alone the entire worth of natural resources that the entire planet contains. |
I did the math for this.
> Let me just start off that nobody will be constantly clicking links for a full 30 month day. Take into account that we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep. That's shortens it to 20 days (480 hours, 28,800 minutes, 1,728,000 seconds) which accounts for 10.8 million megabytes. That's about 10,800 Gigabytes. Now, if that's from one device from one person who also spends half of his awake time away at a job, that cuts it to 5,400GB. Now let's say he only spends half of his home time clicking links (and keeping the line busy). That's down to 2,700GB. I've cut it time after time after time.
> Shoot, far over the 300GB cap that Comcast insists that we will love and I've made some generous deductions. And, by OP's overage fees, that's 48 fees equating to $480 just to use internet how we've always been using it. |
Just wanted to point out that the title contradicts the article. The cause of the NK outage was acknowledged as unknown in the article and although there is speculation that a DOS might be responsible for some instability there is nothing to suggest a 'Massive Denial of Service attack' is taking place. |
The way the gov has it structured is stupid, but that's a different rant.
The digital signature will be linked to a digital account housing their information?
Your paper copies are only accessible to someone standing in front of them - your digital penpad transfers the data (Sig) to be stored with or on that persons records.
Did you notice that Walgreen's / Walmart / CVS have all upgraded their signature pads to a new brand within the past three years? The government mandated that only certain brands and models are approved via HIPPA compliance.
You know how you get HIPPA compliance? File for it and give them money ... That's it. You pay the way and play ball... But anyways if you're a small one man operation odds are nothing will ever happen. Someone would have to walk in, see what you're using, know enough about 1) the tech and 2) the law ... And THEN report you, and then it would have to be verified and processed etc. |
Actual audiophiles probably aren't listening to the main artists who where excluisive to Tidal or using any streaming service for that matter.
Most intense audiophiles (dropping $15,000 to $250,000 on home speaker systems) don't care about streaming anything. The quality of streaming is too unreliable if they do offer high bit depth and bit rate, and most services don't really offer that.
Most audiophiles who drop serious cash are usually leaning toward analog systems. If they are leaning towards digital, they are most likely using PCM-encoded WAV files (which are loss-less and can not be compressed) or FLAC which is mathematically loss-less, and can be compressed.
While you can be an audiophile on a budget, the people who drop 15k to 250k on home speaker systems usually don't care about the value that streaming services offer. They are willing to buy all their songs in high quality formats, usually at a higher cost than the songs are usually sold through music publishing services.
Also being an audiophile is like a logarithmic scale of diminishing returns. Going from a $100 audio system to a $500 set up, you will notice a huge difference. Going from a 100k system to a 250k set (the average listener and some trained professionals would have trouble distinguishing between the two).
Also audiophiles no matter the amount of money spent generally LIKE owning their own music. Most audiophiles don't like the idea of paying for music and not actually owning it. |
Most of the DoS-attacks I see on hosting networks are in the line of IP-nastygrams, either TCP SYN, or UDP. Occasionally I see actual HTTP requests, but those require round-trip links, so they can't used spoofed IPs. If you're seeing more than 65K source IPs, chances are the traffic is spoofed and not trying to do actual HTTP requests, just flooding out the link on its max. throughput in either packets/s or bits/s. I've seen these attacks grow to the level of 2.5Gbit on some occasions, there's really not much a hosting ISP can do at that point but put the host in a BGP blackhole community to get their upstreams to nullroute it. That kind of nasty traffic can make even large routers blow smoke.
If the problem is a large botnet, all doing HTTP requests, you can indeed mitigate the problem by firewalling unwanted elements, or deciding elsewhere in the chain not to service those requests. The question then remains, how motivated the attackers are and how many resources they have that they hadn't been using so far.
The real problems come when there's no valid distinction to be made between legitimate viewers and DDoS drones. Then the only solution left is to scale your site to the point that it can eat up the DDoS. Not going to be cheap. |
I never thought of the ashy byproduct though that seems silly in hindsight.
I will look up what makes the ash radioactive. I am curious but don't feel like getting a LMGTFY.com sort of response. :)
I also didn't think of storing CO2 in another form. That makes much more sense. |
BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY!!!
In 100000 miles, the SUV's improvement would mean 1667 gallons less fuel required.
In 100000 miles, the gas-sipper's improvement would mean 1111 gallons less fuel required. In reality, the car at 30mpg would have to improve to 60mpg in order to save the same amount of fuel.
This only shows the net improvement, which is the basis for the argument. The SUV at 20mpg would still use 5000 gallons to drive 100kmiles, while the "worst-case" gas-sipper at 30 mpg would use only 3333 gallons, a saving of 1667gallons, and the same amount (from 20mpg to 30mpg) that the SUV owner saves by going from 15mpg to 20mpg). |
I will look into this more. I have heard from my Physics prof that we are running out of air space. Basically, TV got assigned a shit ton, and now, certain frequencies go for [billions]( due to the lack of airspace.
The capacity of each cell tower is only so much (this is what I will look into). I assume this is geared for 'normal usage', and when an unusual circumstance arises, such as a convention/gathering or a major traffic jam, devices begin competing for traffic. Not only are they fighting for the tower's attention, but the noise of each phone is also interfering with the other devices. The heavier part of this equation would definitely be the cell towers' capacity. Recognizing that these towers are limited (and as much as I would like it, it would be a shit business decision to prepare for the worst, everywhere), the sustainable amount of traffic is also limited.
So, the most limiting factor for absolute capacity is noise from other devices, though, this is insignificant compared to the lack of towers (and the fact that there aren't going to be a more towers any time soon).
Interesting: [Given that a single sector can carry anywhere from 7 (GSM) to 20-something (CDMA) calls at one time, that gives a capacity at your school of somewhere between (7 8 = 56) and (25 8 = 200) calls at one time.](
This is talking about a rural area, but their final paragraph, talking about old school phone service, drives home what is going on right now (same link) - "[The engineers at Bell Labs who developed the technology foresaw this kind of thing, and built in a mechanism to prioritize traffic. Each phone was to be assigned an "Access Overload Class", and phones owned by bona fide emergency agencies would have a special ACCOC assigned. In an emergency, the cellular operator would simply deny channels to everyone BUT the emergency personnel. However, the FCC in a mistaken egalitarian zeal, decreed that such discrimination was unfair, and could not be implemented. So, a good idea died at the hands of a bureaucracy. The technology is STILL there, but cannot be used."](
I am optimistic. I do not think that we will see tiered service on cell networks any time soon. I believe they want to prioritize data in the case of an emergency. So that when a crane falls onto your freeway, you can get a call through to your loved one (instead of the douche next to you being able to load some brazilian asses), or atleast, the emergency services will be able to communicate in that area (instead of you being able to reassure your sugar muffin, who is fucking her boss anyway, that you're all right). The profits are definitely a factor, but I think phone calls still need some priority and tiered service is not the motivation behind this agreement.
I will send some emails and maybe make a larger post on the issue, depending on the information I get back.
Edit: Shooting off emails now, requesting cell capacity for data and calls, and cell site density in three major areas. Verizon - Sent. AT&T - Sent. T-Mobile - Sent. Sprint - Sent. Data and any answers to questions I receive will be posted to Cyberlaws, under a net neutrality topic. |
Get well Crunchman. This is the guy who figured out that with a plastic whistle that came in a cereal box, you can create the 2600 hz told your phone network, OK nobody picked up the other end, don't bother charging for this call. Steve Wozniak went on to make a Blue Box to generate this and other signals automatically. Steve Jobs funded Apple by selling them. |
I'd nuance it a bit; what I personally due is assume everyone has a side on what they are trying to say, whether it is CNN or the BBC or The Guardian whomever is writing the article has an opinion of his own. As for Internet comments why the hell would you bother commenting if you didn't have an opinion of your own?
So the |
For those of you in here shouting "lolz AMD is going to build mobile ARM CPUs and kill Intel!", you should understand that this license is a result of AMD's recent announcement that they will be embedding an ARM Cortex in their PC (x86) CPUs, so as to use ARM's "Trustzone" technology. The ARM core will only be a low-power way to manage hardware security features. This is to compete with Intel's similar offerings of DeepSafe and vPro.They have not made any announcements about building SoCs for mobile devices with their ARM license.
Here's a link in case you're interested: |
That's a non-sequitur.
Take a look back at the beginning of the industrial revolution, where farmers went from having to hire people to till the land and harvest the crops to using machines to do the same thing. What this did was it freed up this now-excess labor to do other, more productive things in the economy. Did it create (temporary) transitional unemployment? Yes. Did it enable us to live in comfort, as opposed to having to, you know, grow our own food (for the most part)? Yes. People opposed this move from "labor" to "machinery" back then as well, but if we didn't make the transition, we wouldn't have any of the modern conveniences that we have today. AND we'd have had lower wages, lower quality goods (all-around), higher prices (all-around), and a less fluid economy.
But, nonetheless, you do still need employees. You just don't need as much manual labor (over time, in general). In other words, people are more incentivized to receive some kind of specialized training. That doesn't necessarily mean college/university schooling. You can teach yourself math, science, engineering, etc. (on that note, what caused this availability of educational resources? YouTube! That's right, technology! Yet, going by your logic (not to single you out, it seems pretty much everyone responding here is of a similar mindset), we should have blocked YouTube from starting, since it "eliminated jobs" from the market by automating the publishing of videos, etc. In other words, it made these things cheaper and easier by employing computers instead of human capital. |
Why does Google having your information bug you? They're the last guy to want to use it against you.
I can almost guarantee you that unless you have been running totally anonymously since you first signed onto AOL online or some shit that Google has some form of user information on you. Hundreds of millions of people use Google daily, and it only increases. This is why I trust them. If they wanted to be some evil corporation and use my consumer info against me, they could have.
Sure, I knew how those targetted ads were getting to me, but that's all that was getting to me. Does it bug me that my credit info is probably in some huge Google data base? Yea, it does. But it bugs me considerably less than having that data in someone else's data base. Even my Gov's. Why? Because Google has played fair thus far.
If logging on and off with their service is the line for you in terms of privacy you need to take a step back and trace your digital footprint going back years. Google isn't the bad guy out to get you, they're out to make money and make tech. So far they've done the former without hurting consumer privacy, and the latter decently enough and with very well laid plans. There are far worse companies that could have your info that you ought to be worried about. |
How many of you actually read the article? This sensationalist title really is a bad one.
For those who don't have time to read it and want to comment only, a quick summary involves a college student who was having his family buy text books from overseas, and selling them in the U.S. which undercut the price of the book being sold here. In short, the Supreme Court will rule on the first sale doctrine and how a global economy affects reselling. |
I think Reddit's dislike of Apple is for a simpler reason: Apple is mainstream and popular .
Back in the late 90s it was cool to hate Microsoft and Bill Gates; but when Apple started to take over their position at the top, all the insecure geeks with something to prove started bashing them as a way to standout from the rest of the population (i.e. the "dumb sheep that Apple was scamming"). |
That's not entirely true, though to at least some degree I think it must be.
A lot of people hate Apple because they feel they sold out and betrayed the fans. Both Woz and Jobs were hippys. Free information and all that stuff, when Jobs started looking to profit off of apple in the 80's they sold out, to a degree, but there was still clearly a passion for delivering the best possible product. The products they delivered were still aimed at tech savy people, though less like Woz now and more like Jobs (in that they weren't hackers). When microsoft entered the marketplace Apple struggled, they found a niche with web developers. Apple effectively killed the open source desktop movement by making an easier product for web devs, most people couldn't be bothered with the extra hassle associated with linux, even though Apple had hardware limitations on their machines. By this stage the hacker or tech focussed demographic had all but abandoned the company, but it was still a nerd friendly organization, yes they were more expensive than it needed to be, but their niche had money so it didn't matter. Obviously this isn't the case now, Apple more aggressively design for obsoletion than they used to (the Apple 2 was a competitive product for years!), they aggressively tell you how you're allowed to use their products, they abuse the patent system to stifle innovation, they abuse human rights in order to drive up returns. Look, you're not wrong when you say that other companies could probably get away with being like Apple behave as apple do and not be as hated, Sony are far more anti consumer and, in general evil. Samsung seem to be at least as bad. When Sony or Samsung build their image on innovation, freedom and hacker culture I've no doubt I'll hate them equally. But as of right now, Apple are still telling people to 'think different' while shamelessly profiteering off how humans flock together and follow mindlessly. |
It astounds me how much you're having a discussion that has nothing to do with what's going on .
> No, the Samsung vs Apple case wan't just about hardware infringements.
Oh, here we go. This is why you sound like a lunatic. Because you've *completely misinterpreted the discussion.
For something like the 50th time, in the biggest and boldest letters I can write on reddit:
THE DISCUSSION ITSELF IS SOLELY ABOUT THE HARDWARE DESIGN OF TABLETS, IN PARTICULAR APPLE'S. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANY PARTICULAR CASE, OR SOFTWARE UI DESIGN, OR ANYTHING ELSE.
We aren't discussing anything but hardware comparisons. I don't know how many times I've mentioned this, but I think I have once per post now and it somehow hasn't registered in your brain. I really don't care that the Samsung-Apple case also had software design patents. Because this discussion doesn't cover those. At all. We aren't talking about it in the slightest and yet you are constantly bringing it up. You sound like you were dropped on your head and can't take a message when you do that.
> No, Apple never said to use triangles.
> No, Apple did suggest other things on how to design a different phone.
[Yeah, they did make suggestions]( and while they didn't specify triangular they said "non-rectangular shapes" which doesn't leave many options, really. And it's not like their other suggestions aren't ludicrous. Can't have a black front? Can't heave four rounded corners? Seriously? This is what I mean when I say Apple wants to lay claim to generic tablet and smartphone design.
> No, Apple has never said everyone has copied their designs. In fact they stated the opposite. Referring to the Surface (an example you used as how "similar" all tablets are) and Lumia phones as examples of how to design products different from theirs.
If the Surface is really an example of what's furthest from Apple's design, then it just shows how narrow the market is that smaller corners and moving the Home button (it even has a Home button!) to another side instantly makes it all better.
> No, the 2001 tablets look nothing like the iPad.
Actually, it's a black rectangle. It has some buttons on the bottom, sure, but it's remarkably close for something made almost fifty years prior. So it's modified a bit. The concept of the tablet is there. Apple didn't invent it, they didn't even have the first tablet on the market! But they try to imply people are just copying their innovation. The problem is, the tablet as a black rectangle is already prior art .
> And no, Apple never claimed they invented the tablet or claim the design of all tablets.
They've implied in numerous court statements and through their various lawsuits that they feel entitled to control of the tablet market and that others are stealing their ideas because they can't make stuff work on their own.
> No, no one ever claimed a row of icons is a UI ellement
> No, Apple's slide to unlock and pinch to zoom patent doesn't have prior art. If you would stop just taking Samsung's layers word on that and actually read the patents in question (instead of just the title), or read the statments by the jury, or any half decent article on the issue you would have known that.
You've missed the point yet again. I said I could discuss software issues such as these , but I'm not going to discuss them because they're out of the scope of the discussion . But there's a variety of Sci-Fi movies stretching back for decades I could point you to that would show you some variation of both. And guess what? That qualifies as "prior art" because Apple didn't think of it first!
> Here you are blabbering about design patents that you clearly didn't even read,
Funny, because I just went back and reread them so I could make sure I cited each one correctly by name using its specific purpose. You can Google all of them.
> You are full, full of shit and you are what's wrong with this subreddit. Making shit up as you go along about things know nothing about. Your the kind of person that gets his tech news from /r/technology headlines, forum comments, and linkbait articles and believe you're some kind of experts. And when someone calls you out on your bullshit you have nothing to defend yourself with instead downvoting, calling the other party a fanboy, and repeating the same thing over and over again.
Wait wait wait, this is coming from the guy who trolls old articles so he can defend one company who owes him nothing for the favor, and when I link to numerous articles, images, etc as evidence, you tell me I have none and I'm clearly wrong. You, pal, are what's wrong with reddit as a whole. Psuedo-elitists who want so badly to try to have a quasi-intellectual argument. To start calling for specific evidence (even though I just waved it in your face) and looking the other way when you get it.
I actually think it's really funny that you've yet to link to one source yourself, yet you constantly say I haven't. Do you really need me to go back and count how many links I've posted? Are you that blind that you can't see all of them? Or maybe it is you never clicked them and jumped straight to writing a reply.
Look, I really don't have time to engage in petty accusations. I just think it's a real dick move to misrepresent my, refuse to acknowledge my actual argument in favor of whatever it is you're hearing, and then turn around and say I'm a horrible person because I have an opinion on a subject that I linked my evidence for and you refused. |
Alright well, the issue with Africa is the former colonial powers' negligent attitude towards it. F.ex. people like king leopold of belgium created a massive humanitarian catastrophe via his euro-centric attitude. Look what his policies of racial classification caused: rwandan genocide and social inequality all of central Africa. Against this backdrop of poor government and decades of dictatorship-caused by the withdrawal of previous authortarian colonial government- set up the stage for long lasting corruption. To improve Africa one needs not money to hire or educate new judges or money to revamp the executive, legislative and judicial government sections. One needs a total military occupation. Luckily that won't happen and africa will remain a lawless shithole for an indefinite amount of time. |
Think of it this way, you have to put gas in your car, it doesn't go anywhere without it. No gas, no vroom.
Cellphone is the same, wifi is alright, but you can't really call or use it as intended in the sense of "Mobile phone"
Yes they come with contracts, but Rogers for example has the flex-tab. Which is much like the above. You pay 60/month regardless if you got a subsidy or not. The cancelaiton fees are based on the subsidy amount of the phone, so why not get one?
Let's say you get an iphone5. average subsidy is about $550. They average that over 36 months, and that's the cancelation fee
5550/36 = $15.27/month remaining + one-shot deactivation fee of $12.50
your $60 plan is actually a $44 plan, and the hardware is being expended over time. Drop your phone out of the window of your monster truck, into the mud, then run over it? Let's say you have... 14 months left on the term. Early upgrade is 14*15.27 = $213.78. It's all based on the subsidy!
"But apple is poop, and I just want a cheaper phone!"
Cool, let's say you get a cheaper smartphone-lite device at a subsidy of $200, the same math applies
$200/36 = $5.55/month remaining.
Now all of this is in contrast with the old cancellation fees. For voice, it was $20 /month remaining, minimum 100, max 400. Data was at 5/month, 25/100. So a smartphone's max cancelation would be $500.
Now, if you got a shitter flip-phone that was only worth $100 on a term, and you wanted to cancel it used to be as much as $400 for the first 16 months of the term before it would go down from there. Now it's just "subsidy amount" / term = ECF.
Things are getting better. Slowly.
"But the US is so much cheaperrrrrrr"
Yes, they also have 10 times the population in a slightly smaller area, with less drastic weather in most of it. Population density is key for a lot of those places with cheaper plans. People have to run up-and down towers, sit in call centres, test the network, provide tech support, run the stores. They need support staff, supplies, wages, rent on office and retail space, computers, and on and on and on. Their overhead is large, and yes the profits are large as well. But the changes are being made, slowly, and for the better. It's not as easy as flipping a switch and you get magical hand-computers that can communicate with literally any other connected device on the planet, from most places in the country.
"The reception is kinda spotty at my house, put in a new tower, right now!"
Sure! You have $100,000 - $250,000 for a new tower to service all of another 100 people? Then we can get right on it! |
I recently cut my contract off ( Just two weeks ago ) With Tmobile. They sold us bunk Sidekick 4gs that never received signal and basically never worked properly. It took me going through four supervisors ( all the way up to Rene! .... ) to get anyone to give a flying fuck. After 1 1/2 years of dealing with shit service and a shittier phone... they lopped off a whopping $100 from our $200 contract termination fee. I fought hard for that $100...
THEN I find out... that last year... anyone with a sidekick was offered out of their contract FOR FREE since they discontinued the phone because it was shit. No one ever once mentioned that to me prior to, or during my conversation about my sidekick blowing chunks for a living.
NOW THIS.
Can I go back and yell at some more people and have my contract termination fees dropped? |
Thinking about it, naming conventions probably have quite a noticeable impact actually. If you manage to knock out a stellar product that does what you intend from a PR point of view (i.e. win hearts and minds and the man on the street) the next step is to do the Apple game and successfully pitch the next product in turn.
To do this properly, everyone has to know where they sit on the product ladder, in order to successfully generate enough 'phone envy' to incite sales earlier than strictly necessary. |
Their statements about barrel length helping are the opposite of true. In a real gun, the extended barrel length does help because it allows the powder to burn and it keeps the gases released by the gunpowder burning confined longer. While there is an upper end to a barrel length being helpful, in general the longer the barrel the more pressure behind the bullet. It also lets the bullet be accelerated longer, as it basically reaches its maximum speed about the time it exits the barrel is is no longer able to be pushed forward by the compressed gasses in the barrel. In short, a longer barrel means more force for longer so the bullet is faster.
A nerf gun operates based on a spring as opposed to compressed gasses. Once the spring has sprung, the dart is no longer accelerating. If the dart is still in the barrel, then the contact between it and the barrel actually slows the projectile by causing unnecessary friction. |
I too have decreased my P2P usage, I get most of my music from Rdio, and the same goes for Netflix for most of my videos. I still download GoT though because there's absolutely no way to get it legally. |
It has a wealth of content, just a metric ton of it.
For me, it was a change of mindset. I'd flop down in bed and think, "I'm in the mood for a comedy/docu/sci-fi/etc" - and then browse the genres till I found something that piqued my interest.
I use Hulu+ to keep up with any shows I might be interested in. I honestly am completely tuned out of latest series, what's new, even advertising (I missed the Iron Man 3 release by a week because I didn't realize it had been released yet) -- which is super nice -- ever since switching to just a HULU+, Netflix solution.
Getting a Roku was the most fun I've had with streaming media. Just a crapton of channels to explore. |
Even though this one may not have super strong arguments in a few places, the fact that it was written at all makes it superior to the original in my opinion.
It doesn't need to have strong supporting arguments to be valuable; it just needs to have different conclusions with supporting arguments that aren't any weaker than the original's. That's enough to show that you can't take the original's conclusions for granted. |
ANYTHING that can take place without a trial is so- just... it's the ultimate level of bullshit.
How can any person or entity be trusted or respected when they just completely deny you an opportunity to defend yourself.
Also, how is this not getting flamed for being a fucking pre-crime program? The plaintiff defended their actions by claiming that if they followed through with a real trial the "hackers" would be able to destroy the evidence AND THEREFORE THEY DIDN'T NEED TO PROVE THAT THEY HAD A HISTORY OF CYBER CRIME. |
The problem is, is that its not just a "people" problem in most cases. Its a problem of the head not knowing what the arms truly need, but getting sold on something that "should do the job", but really makes the job harder. For example, I look to where I work. I work at a group home. When I started, we did all paper documentation for everything, including MARs(med admin records). We had a HIPAA compliant custom made online documentation tool that allowed us to docuement certain things, but not really anything of importance(it was terribly confusing, slow, had way to many bugs, and was in general, a PITA to use). Anything important was either verbally communicated, or was written down and mailed/faxed in to the office and nurses. Then, we switched to a much better online documentation tool(therap) that worked, and it worked well, and it fit in with all the needs we needed, and actually made it easier for us to work, and then document stuff, and see what other people are documenting. They stayed with paper MARs tho, because they are simple, cheap, and very easy to spot errors on. Then, about a year after the change to Therap(which was successful, and everyone has loved, even the technophobes), they decided to trial run some paperless(digital) MARs. They trialed them at houses that did not have many clients or meds, and in those situations they worked great. The guy who was selling them the software told them it scales up very easily, and could be integrated with our pharmacy so that reorders are just a button click(we had to call in reorders, which wasn't really hard, and it worked fine, and only took a few minutes a week at most). Well, they went full scale, and all the problems became apparent very fast. Our pharmacy refused to integrate with their system, saying it was not HIPAA compliant in transferring the orders, the system did not scale up well for houses that had many clients and many meds per client, and it actually made giving meds take about three times as long as it did before the change. The house that I worked in at the time(I moved to a different house within the company) was the trial run, and while it worked okay for us, I consistently wrote out bug reports, and about two weeks before the decision to go full scale was made, the higher ups held a meeting at which they asked us who had been using it what we thought. Everyone they asked had said near the exact same thing: it was overly complex(too many button presses, actions, and steps to actually give meds, when it did not need to be so), was slow, increased med giving times(which takes away from time with clients), full of bugs, and most of all, half the time, it would not work, so you had to go back to paper MARs anyways. It also did not work if the internet was out, or if the internet was spotty(like where I was, yay .5mpbs centurylink with an RDP session running over it!), and it was all but impossible to spot med errors as an overnight because I was not an "admin" and could not see the meds that had been given before my shift, or had not been given, and they would not elevate anyone to be able to see anything other than their own shifts worth of meds. Well, low and behold, two weeks later, this system was pushed full scale to the whole company. We ran it for a month before the nursing staff finally pulled the plug on it company wide. There were too many issues and anyone who used it could tell you that, but when the company CEO outsources his IT staff to a company of script reading monkeys(because it "saves" the company money, when it really doesn't), he got sold on the idea of eMARs, and we as employees all suffered the price, and not just us, but the clients too, since this money came from them in the first place. That was $150000 that the company spent on software they no longer use, and they cannot get a refund. |
I think it's worth explaining why people are downvoting you. There's a difference between incoming and outgoing ports. Most computers and ISPs wouldn't block the OUTGOING port 25, since that's still commonly used to send email.
What you're probably thinking of is that some ISPs might block the INCOMING port 25, and that's what someone would use to host a mail server. Many ISPs banned this years ago to prevent SPAM bots, but even then, it wouldn't prevent something from connecting to your mail server locally. |
Not wiped clean, they are requested them to go through pre-pub, verifying that they do not contain any inappropriate information (classified information).
They are not trying to get things removed from their resume or trying to get any sort of deniability. Nor because they don't want people to know they worked at the NSA.
The article is about moral, the employees are feeling betrayed by the government, that along with sequestration and other budgetary issues would be quite a few reasons to want to get their resumes out. |
Also, when setting it up, the chromecast extension has to do some crazy crap by inspecting your network cards, finding the right network card, then searching it for the wifi network your chromecast exposes, once it has found it, it changes the network to that of the chromecast, prompts you for the main wireless network/pass, and sets it up... If there's something funky with your network config, then it won't work. |
Greetings. I am Zorp. I come from the future. We have planet-wide 25G network where everything is already downloaded. Our phones are too small to be visible to the naked eye and deliver 256K resolution scalable holographic screens wherever you want and are powered simply by your breathing movements.
What? Your phones have batteries? And 4G? You must be living in a developing nation. Your carrier needs to download more Gs into their networks. And for the love of God, get that pixelated 4K shit away from me. |
those are present on the new s6; Samsung manufactures the newest chips, so it will be a little longer before other phone brands get them. |
So the next time you're interviewing for that job:
"Can I work from home?"
"Sure work anywhere you like, we care about what you do not where you do it."
"Fuck you, I'm not taking my work home with me you bastards!" |
Owning a home doesn't immediately mean wealth. Almost every home purchase that gets recorded as an asset in someone's net worth is also accompanied by a debt of 80% of that value called a mortgage.
With the mortgage market issues from several years ago, many of those assets were accompanied by debts of 85-100% of the total asset value, predominantly by people too poor to save up a 20% down payment.
It's unlikely that a poor family would be debt free other then their mortgage too. |
There's no multitouch in the browser or in the map, but I think at this point that's more of a legal consideration than a technical one, since many phones that run Android have the capability of supporting multitouch on a hardware level.
I still haven't seen good clarification on this. Does the phone support multi-touch like the Droid does? On the Droid, the built-in apps (browser, etc...) do not support multitouch. However, there are multitouch enabled applications in the market (browsers, games, etc...) that work on the droid. |
A lot of circlejerking all up in here.
In any case, PC gaming in 3d is an entirely different kettle of fish from movies or TV in 3d. The film and TV 3d effects are generally very mild and generally not configured very well and frankly aren't even that good when they are.
However, gaming in 3d is a pretty amazing experience after one takes the time to learn about convergence and how to otherwise configure their experience. Unfortunately 3d gaming still has a learning curve, and it always might, but no more than many other things we do for entertainment on a regular basis. You cannot jump on a 3d gaming rig for a few minutes and get a good idea of what gaming is really like, since it takes some time to understand the settings and how to adjust to ones preferences. Once you learn convergence and strengthen your eyes to see greater depth in 3d, then the effects are quite excellent.
I recently played through Mafia 2 in 3d stereo, and holy hell the atmosphere change in going from 2d to 3d was quite wonderful indeed. This is the case with many games I have played in 3d. I am hooked for life, and I would not be willing to give up 3d gaming, though I don't care very much for film and TV 3d since the effect is pretty weak.
In any case, you cannot understand and appreciate 3d gaming by spending only five minutes with it, or even a couple of hours. Since most people are completely new to 3d it can be jarring and strange at first, convergence is a mystery for most newbs, depth is usually set too high at first which can cause headaches and most new to 3d gaming wont really appreciate and prepared to observe the subtlety that pops up when playing in 3d. In a significant way, it becomes a bit of an information overload at first since it is a very different way of observing a game.
When I first got my 3d kit I was close to sending it back. It actually took me about three days to understand which specific convergence and depth settings looked the best to me in different games and how to best appreciate the effect without getting overwhelmed. When gaming in 3d, you can just about put yourself into the world with proper convergence and depth, which makes a gaming experience extremely dynamic and interesting. This is something that movies and TV are pretty far away from because of their passive nature. Not to say they gain nothing from 3d, but that the gain is so much more compelling with gaming. |
Didn't people learn anything by going to the movies? I'll shoot myself if I watch another 3D movie in the theater. The sad thing is, if I want to go and watch a movie in the movie theater I have no choice but to watch on 3D, because they don't give me the 2D option.
FFS, Avatar came out last year and people are already tired of 3D.
The honeymoon is over. |
Seriously, its been stated enough times that you need to get up and call Ford Corporate. Talking to managers/techs/dealership is obviously just a infinite loop of blame and doubletalk. The ultimate goal in this is to get you either frustrated or confused enough that you break down and pay the bill. On top of that, even if they knock off $$ in an attempt to please you and get you to go on your way, it dosnt solve the problem, and that problem is the dealership is ripping people off. Badly. Just think, what if it were your mom, girlfriend, bestfriend, etc who they were ripping off. That would piss you the fuck off right? Well guess what, until YOU get THEM under the microscope of corporate they will continue to do this crap and nothing will change and they will continue ripping people like you off.
DO YOUR PART AND DRAW THE LINE!!! END THIS NOW!!! |
I'm on a business package from my ISP. All they asked for was the business name, address and phone number. I put the name as "Home" and with my house address and number, and never got asked even when calling their tech support every day for about a month because their service was so shit. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.