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Former TSA worker here; worked in checked baggage as well, so I'm familiar with how these "contractor companies" operate. What Tiak says is mostly correct, except for the bit that TSA has any oversight over the contractors.
TSA maintains possession of and responsibility for your bag and its belongings from the moment it is placed on one of their carts/belts/cordoned areas, as it passes through the scanning or checking process, and until it passes out of the machine / their belt system. After that point, it's all the airline contractors' responsibility.
How exactly a node is set up varies from airport to airport and the arrangement of machines and space (they must lease their operating area from the airport), but it's up to the passenger to place their luggage in an area and effectively sign it over to TSA. TSA employees aren't allowed to receive bags by hand from passengers, as that could possibly be misconstrued as TSA "taking" the bag; the passenger needs to willingly give it. Other times, passengers will hand their bags or similarly exchange them with an airline worker/contractor who will then place it on a TSA belt or cart and bring it to TSA; the guys who do this may also be the guys who take it back from TSA when it's checked and bring it downstairs to the plane loaders / load it themselves.
Your bag is in the possession of airline contractors way, way, way longer than it's ever in TSA's control. A bag can go through the entire TSA security process in under 10 seconds, and that can be just seconds less than it's in TSA's "control". Once it exits the machine and the contractor has the OK to take it, woosh, gone, not their problem. It goes on airline belts, or an airline cart, and is whisked down to the basement or the airport or the tarmac where it sits around in a room without cameras or any oversight whatsoever for what could be an hour or more.
Some TSA employees do steal things, but 95% of the time it's probably the guys getting paid minimum wage and subject only to criminal/civil charges for theft, not the ones making $18/hr+ with government benefits and a guaranteed-to-increase pay scale who could be charged federally in addition to everything else. Many airports, my former one included, used to slap stickers, tape, or tie little notes to the outside of luggage to mark that they'd been opened and checked by TSA in addition to having the "love note" notifying the owner of a search inside.. and they stopped once it was realized this was a giant flag to people in the baggage rooms below that if they steal something from this bag, the blame can super-easily be pinned on TSA (as the presence of the note and other sticker stuff was TSA's admitting they'd been in the bag). Even so, it's still trivial to get your hands on a bunch of the TSA's little notes and stick them in a bag yourself after you've taken something. |
I'm a fundamental windows user but as someone interested in technology for technology's sake I need to make a few comments.
Apple is the wealthiest company(notice I didn't specify 'tech' company') in the world. They could sit on merchandise, not sell a single piece of hardware and maintain production at current levels for the next two years and not exhaust their cash reserves. (the numbers work but this isn't actually possible, publicly traded companies can't exist at pure deficit)
They make some of the highest quality engineered products available to consumers, world over. They dominate or lead essentially every market they are currently in(computers over 1000$, phone sales by model, online multimedia retailer, tablets, portable music, retail sales).
Microsoft is a phenomenal company that has produced some great products. They are hands down one of the tech giants. But for you to say that they can wipe Apple clean off the earth within 2 years(never mind 2 decades) is easily one of the most preposterous things I have heard in my lifetime.
You can say what you will about Apple, you can refuse to consider their products, you can shame their fanboys, you can laugh at their silly OS names and you can say what you will about their past and how its been dealt with and the influences it has had. In the end, Apple is a business, run by people who are accountable to shareholders, and do you know what they do better than anyone else in the world? Make money, the point of a business.
An apple retail location makes 9.8x more profit, per square foot, than a Best Buy. 2.6x more, per square foot, than a Tiffany diamond store. They aren't going anywhere in a hurry. |
the police don't have to show it to you immediately
> Why not?
Because in the United States, the Constitution guarantees you the right to an attorney and to trial by jury. The police don't have the authority to put you on trial.
The U.S. Constitution also guarantees you the right of habeas corpus. The police can't decide to keep you prisoner on their own - the government has to bring your case in front of a judge within a day or two. Because the police can't decide by themselves whether they can hold you in jail or not, there wouldn't be a point in presenting evidence before a judge is there.
Cops aren't going to do this stuff anyway, lawyers are. The jobs are very different and require different skillsets. They also might work for different parts of the government (like local cops may arrest you for a state or federal crime).
So, basically, to do pretty much anything with you other than hold you for a day or two, the government needs to talk to a judge through a lawyer.
These judges and lawyers do not work 24/7. They do not work in the same buildings that the police do. They also have lots of work and can't necessarily drop everything they're doing to deal with your case immediately.
Also, for a trial to be fair, both sides need time to prepare their cases. The cost of presenting your own evidence to a jury of your peers is that the government gets an opportunity to put together and present its evidence too. And again here you run into the limited time and availability of lawyers and judges, who are not necessarily sitting around waiting for you to get arrested.
This all means there is going to be a delay between when you get arrested and when the evidence in your case gets presented.
In this case, it's extra complicated because a lot of these things can't happen until Kim Dotcom is physically in the United States. If he were there now, the trial would come a lot sooner. But in the meantime, the people conducting hearings now can't put him on trial any more than the cops can - he has the right to a trial by jury, and most states have laws that forbid getting trials started unless the person is physically present. |
Microsoft doesn't even follow the whole Apple strategy. When developing OS X and iOS apps you get a full set of dev tools for $99 a year ($0 if you only want to experiment in OS X and/or distribute to knowledgeable OS X users). By full set I mean memory leak detection, profiling and other nice stuff to have when developing quality apps. Not all devs use these tools but you have an option to do it. AFAIK not all these quality increasing tools are not available on Visual Studio 2012 Express. This can lead to less quality in the Windows Store e.g. apps that could be battery guzzlers from individual devs which can't justify the purchase of a license of VS 2012 Pro($500) for their app moonlighting. |
Hi there -- this is Parker Higgins, the author of this article. The parent post here might choose another way to describe me, so I wanted to chime in and clarify some things.
For example, the comment above says:
> THEY DID NOT OVERTURN THE FIRST SALE DOCTRINE
I think the implication is that I said that. I didn't. Check the article. In fact, I didn't even discuss the lower court rulings in this article. However, what follows is incorrect:
> In other words, if you buy something from a store in the US, and then resell it to someone also in the US, you are fine. You can still resell your music CD's, you can still sell games to Gamestop, and you can still resell your old electronics on Amazon; assuming of course you purchased them from a seller within the US.
That is the opposite of what the government and Wiley argued today. Justice Breyer (joined by Justice Kagan and a few others) brought up these claims that have been denounced elsewhere as sensationalistic, calling them a "parade of horribles." But today neither the government nor Wiley refuted them, just saying that they were beyond the scope of this case. Justice Kennedy rightly pointed out that they ought to consider the implications of their decision, but again, the plaintiff here didn't have a response.
Now, for the statement that the parent comment objects to most vociferously: I can only point out that it's not an origination of mine or some crackpot theory. It was mentioned explicitly in a 2nd Circuit dissent in this same case, where Judge Murtha said the following:
> Such a result would provide greater copyright protection to copies manufactured abroad than those manufactured domestically: Once a domestic copy has been sold, no matter where the sale occurred, the copyright holder’s right to control its distribution is exhausted. I do not believe Congress intended to provide an incentive for U.S. copyright holders to manufacture copies of their work abroad.
And again, today in Court, the Justices explored this question at length. I'm a bit at a loss, here -- is there any more evidence you'd like to consider it convincing? I should think that this should be enough.
> |
Can we get this in layman terms? Or |
The Copyright Act states that a copyrighted product can't be imported into the US without the permission of the copyright holder. At the same time, the act also gives you permission to sell a copyrighted product that you purchased without the permission of the copyright holder. Because the first sale doctrine is codified into the Copyright Act, the Supreme Court can't overturn it.
The problem that is before the court is that Supap Kirtsaeng realized that college textbooks were cheaper in his home country of Thailand than they were here in the US. So his family purchased textbooks and mailed them to him in the US where he resold them, making $1.2 million. John Wiley & Sons is accusing him of importing the books without their permission while Kirtsaeng is claiming the first sale doctrine.
What the lower courts stated was that Kirtsaeng imported the books without the copyright holder's permission and was therefore violating the Copyright Act. THEY DID NOT OVERTURN THE FIRST SALE DOCTRINE. What they stated was that you can't buy something overseas, bring it to the US, and then resell for a profit unless the copyright holder gives you permission. In other words, if you buy something from a store in the US, and then resell it to someone also in the US, you are fine. You can still resell your music CD's, you can still sell games to Gamestop, and you can still resell your old electronics on Amazon; assuming of course you purchased them from a seller within the US.
Furthermore, I think the article doesn't understand how the first sale doctrine works. For example, it says in the article:
> if the Supreme Court rules in Wiley’s favor, U.S. copyright holders will likely ensure that as many of their works as possible are manufactured outside the United States, so that they, too, can escape that pesky first sale doctrine
Let's assume that a publisher manufactured all of their textbooks in China, with paper manufactured in Vietnam, and with ink manufactured in India. They then import the book into the US where you purchase it at your college bookstore for a stupidly high price. In this scenario, you would still be able to resell your textbooks at the end of the semester because 1) the textbook was imported into the US with the copyright holder's permission and 2) the first sale of the textbook to the end consumer was within the US. |
You can still resell your music CD's, you can still sell games to Gamestop, and you can still resell your old electronics on Amazon; assuming of course you purchased them from a seller within the US.
And you don't see a problem with this caveat? You don't see a problem with someone shopping online, buying a good, trying to resell it later under first sale, and then getting sued because the retailer is based outside the US? You seem to be saying that because it's just that that this is no big deal but that's flatly wrong, it is a big deal.
You're flatly wrong about what the publisher is arguing and what the Second Circuit found. They are arguing that first sale doesn't apply to items manufactured outside the US. They're arguing they aren't manufactured 'under this title' when it comes to first sale. By accepting that argument first sale would absolutely be eroded. The court confirmed this in its opinion:
>Applying these principles to the facts of this case, we conclude that the District Court correctly decided that Kirtsaeng could not avail himself of the first sale doctrine codified by § 109(a) since all the books in question were manufactured outside of the United States. In sum, we hold that the phrase “lawfully made under this Title” in § 109(a) refers specifically and exclusively to works that are made in territories in which the Copyright Act is law, and not to foreign-manufactured works.
So it's technically correct to say it doesn't overturn the First Sale doctrine, because the doctrine is still in place, but it absolutely remove wide swaths of goods from being eligible for First Sale rights.
The statement you marked as '100% bullshit' is literally something the one of the court noted in its opinion on what might happen as a result:
>Kirtsaeng argues that this holding is undesirable as a matter of public policy because it may permit a plaintiff to vitiate the first sale doctrine by “manufactur[ing] all of its volumes overseas only to then ship them into the U.S. for domestic sales.” Defendant-Appellant’s Br. at 21. Phrased differently, it is argued that any such decision may allow a copyright holder to completely control the resale of its product in the United States by producing its goods abroad and then immediately importing them for initial distribution. In this sense, the copyright holder would arguably enjoy the proverbial “best of both worlds” because, in theory, the consumer could not rely on the first sale doctrine to re-sell the imported work. In other words, the copyright holder would have an incentive to“outsource” publication to foreign locations to circumvent the availability of the first sale doctrine as a defense for consumers wishing to re-sell their works in the domestic market. The result might be that American manufacturing would contract along with the protections of the first sale doctrine. Kirtsaeng argues that this could not possibly have been Congress’s intent. We acknowledge the force of this concern, but it does not affect or alter our interpretation of the Copyright Act. |
The issue is in that the company needs to recoup their initial investment. Assuming marginal costs are negligible, the company needs to make a shitton of money to get back their investment. If they only had the American market, everything would be very expensive (in order to recover the investment). If they sell to other markets as well, they cant sell at the same high price, as no one will buy it. They sell at a low price and make money. However, if they were to sell to America at the same low price, they wouldn't make enough money to recover that investment. |
First, don't sigh me. It is disrespectful.
Second, what you just cited was some editor's interpretation of two trial level court cases. Neither one of them says anything about allowing a copyright on the physical building itself. The editor cited to the first page of each case, which maybe they didn't mean to do, but as it stands, the editor's entry is completely unsupported by the cases the editor referred to.
What is protected under 102(a)(8) is the design which the building may embody and ONLY the parts of the building which are not functional but rather aesthetic (so normal looking doors, windows, etc. don't count). This is a nuanced distinction, but an important one. Stick to the statutory language rather than the misinterpreted and miscited language of Wikipedia editors whenever possible. |
Do you have any support from your colleagues ? Have you talked it out with them ? Or is this just one more statistic, that you introduce and that dies the usual death in the house because you did not do the necessary behind the scenes lobbying with the other house members. |
Do you have any proof of this? Just curious.
Yes, there is tons of research I linked to in the comment to which you initially replied. You ignored it in favor of accusing me of being "anti-immigrant".
Scroll up and read it. Until then, you are transparently engaging in unwarranted ad hominems .
> We do some of that but it's very difficult to get someone integrated into a team. We work in a "pit" type environment so everyone can be tightly integrated.
And yet in the very next breath you say they have developed these extensive and unique abilities all while overseas, not integrated into your "pit".
It sounds like the problem is your own lack of flexibility, and clinging to a particular model of working which is clearly unnecessary.
> Some of these people have knowledge that's been accumulated over many years and it isn't comparable to just a hiring a normal software engineer.
So they became very familiar with a particular game engine, educating themselves over a period of years, at no expense to you.
And yet you are finding excuses not to hire them.
Sounds like the problem is you.
> ( for example our AI programmer Sorian who created the Sorian AI which is very specialized knowledge).
Specialized, yes. Unique, no. Game AIs are present in virtually all games.
If you're running Kickstarter campaigns to fund your development then you don't get to complain about how "hard" it is to hire people.
Yes, every business wishes it could have everyone it wants, for as cheap as it wants, doing everything it says.
But you aren't paying much, are located in a poor weather area, and there is no big financial upside for the employee. It isn't like a startup that has a chance of making everyone wealthy. It's just making an incrementally better RTS.
You are having trouble hiring because the job offer is just not very attractive. People can get paid better at jobs with less work in better climates.
And if you can create this with your existing team, then you didn't NEED to hire anyone, so what are you complaining about?
And if you refuse to even try to work with extremely specialized remote talent, then it obviously wasn't important to you in the first place. |
I had a guest teacher in my material science class who was a bioengineer and would get requests such as this from doctors. He said that he was once contacted by a doctor who was treating a patient. I guess the guy had been in a motorcycle crash and about a 1/4th of his scull had to be removed because it had been completely crushed, somehow he survived. The doctor gave them all the specifics and they made a 3d model or his skull then a 3d model of the replacement piece and printed it out of metal (I can't remember what type exactly). They had to lighten it up to make sure it weighed the same as the piece that had been removed from the guys skull. The problem is the material and application has to be approved (by the FDA? I can't really remember who had to approve it), which would have taken a few months to a year. They decided to send it to the doctor and marked with "NOT FIT FOR USE! DO NOT USE!", this way they wouldn't be liable if something reacted strangely or the guy ended up dying. To this day they don't know if it worked or not, the bioengineer has never wanted to know.
Also that is most definitely not a 75% skull replacement. |
No, I have infinite tries to bruteforce. The phone is put into DFU mode (FindMyiPhone, Prey, etc won't work), a custom firmware is loaded that creates an accessible ramdisk. At that point, the keybag is extracted and bruteforced (for passcodes) or dictionary attack (for passwords). If your iOS version isn't up to date, it's even easier (no encryption, so I just dd a copy of the filesystem and mount it). For more info, see [this]( I've used this software to recover lockcodes on devices running iOS 6.0.1. It's quite effective, especially considering that 4 hours before I started I knew nothing about iOS devices and I was running OS X on an emulator to compile the needed firmware.
The encrypted hfs image can also be extracted even without encryption keys, and a lot of the data is not encrypted. After that's extracted, along with the device-specific key, there's no theoretical reason why the bruteforce/dictionary attack can't be continued even after the device is returned to its owner. |
Why RAID10 over RAID6 for data resiliency?
Since RAID6 loses data if three drives fail and RAID10 loses data if two "wrong" disks fail, it would seem to me like RAID6 is better for resiliency.
Let's pull a random value from our hat and say there is a 0.1% probability for a total failure during a rebuild (which for our purposes includes the time for drive replacement if there are no hot spares), and that we have 8 drives. Let's also assume a probability of 1% for all failures including single sector errors during a rebuild.
Now, lets consider a scenario where a single drive has already failed on a RAID6 array. The probability that a single drive does not fail during a rebuild is 99.9%, and therefore the probability of none of the remaining 7 drives failing is (0.999)^7 . So the probability that one or more of the 7 drives fails is 1-(0.999)^7 . The probability that one or more of the thereafter remaining 6 drives fails is again 1-(0.999)^6 . Therefore the probability of two additional drives failing during a RAID6 rebuild and therefore causing total data loss is (1-(0.999)^7 )*(1-(0.999)^6 ) = 0.000042. A partial data loss probability is approx. (1-(0.99)^7 )*(1-(1-0.01*P)^6 ) = 0.0040*P, where P is the probability that the third failure intersects the second failure (which we can't calculate with our simplistic input values, but should be relatively low, and with our input values absolutely in range [0.01;1] since (partial data loss probability) > (full data loss probability)), since otherwise the remaining parity can be used to completely recover the data.
Let's think about RAID10 then. Again, a single drive has already failed and 7 remain. Now, 1 of those remaining drives contains the mirror of the perished drive, and we don't want it fail (the rest of the drives are not even in a "rebuild" situation). The probability for that, however, as hat-pulled above, is 0.1%. The single+ sector failure probability is 1%.
Hence on a disk failure RAID10 seems to have a significantly higher chance of data loss, with 0.0042% vs 0.1% chance of of big failure (1/6 lost on RAID6, or 1/4 of data lost on RAID10 - in practice this can usually be considered a total loss due to striping with both RAID levels), and a single sector loss at (0.0042%...0.40%) vs. 1% (not to mention that, assuming 2TB drives, RAID6 gives us 12TB while RAID10 gives us 8TB).
If we alter the scenario by using less drives, RAID6 wins with a larger margin: with 6 drives, 0.0020% vs 0.1% for big fail, 0.0020%...0.19% vs. 1% for small. With more drives the margin in turn narrows, and with e.g. 16 drives it is 0.021% vs 1% for big fail, 0.021%...1.8% vs. 1% for small (so RAID6 has a higher chance of single sector errors when compared to RAID10 if we assume that any two failures during a rebuild have a >55% chance of affecting the same disk area on different disks - otherwise RAID6 is still better; big failure probability is much lower with RAID6 in any case). Note that with 16x 2TB drives RAID6 and RAID10 provide 28TB and 16TB, respectively.
If we alter the scenario by making the individual failure rates larger, RAID6 failure rate climbs faster relative to RAID10. For example, if we change the complete failure rate 10x upwards to 1%, with original 8 drives, it is 0.40% and 1.0%, and with 16 drives 1.8% vs. 1.0%. However, in my experience total failures during rebuild are not nearly as common as smaller 1..500 sector failures; the probability of a total failure in a rebuild situation does not climb relatively as much as the probability of a small failure, when compared to the baseline regular failure probability outside a rebuild situation.
Of course all of this is rather simplified, but it gives an idea on the reliability differences. |
Why is he a piece of shit?
Is it just because he was making guns?
Why do you think any one should pay him attention?
From what you have linked I can't build a full story.
Did he build a full auto ak or a semi auto most ak's you see are semi auto btw(here in the states). Is he selling these?
Like I said I just see pictures of a guy building a gun and that is not breaking any law at all unless he is selling them or is making them full auto. |
This is not the warrantless wiretapping which people are so vehemently opposed to that was boosted by the Patriot Act. If you actually read the article youll see it just updates the current law which HAS ALWAYS ALLOWED (well, for a long-ass time) warrant-backed phone wiretapping and makes it so internet-based communication needs to work the same way. |
I'm less worried about the wiretap, and more about the cost and precedent it sets for minimal gain. Nefarious activities, at least the ones I would be worried about, by and large are not carried out over established companies, but are more cryptic in nature. This legislation would seemingly increase the burden on established companies while doing nothing to solve the greater issue. I'm guessing that the criminal talking on Skype or gchat isn't going to last too long; the one on unsearchable message board with some mirrored host will probably thrive a bit longer.
Second, the US seems to willingly fly in the face of the concept of law/precedent cutting both ways, especially in a "flat" world. As Gidari points out, this could set a precedent where foreign governments force companies operating in their countries to pursue wiretapping capabilities as well. |
Correct, but it's still cause for some alarm. Prior to the "digital age" you physically had to tap into a phone line. Something that required special equipment and physical access to the line. Not to mention that most phone companies are considered utilities and backed by the government anyways. (Cellular companies are the exception to this)
This potential legislation would require regular companies to build back doors into their technology that would allow remote access and most likely require no more than a computer connected to the internet and a password. These kinds of things get hacked all the time. When they do it's not the government that looks bad it's the company, and it's not the government that gets hurt it's the users. |
Because it's simply worth caring about. I want people to be nihilistic in the right direction... towards people who abuse their power that others trusted them with. I don't want people or media make excuses for a tyrannous government. (Who would probably not make excuses had they done more research.) It admittedly brings out emotion in me to see wrongs being done by the government, and then someone trying to cover for them like the government actually has good intentions. Then on top of that, making other people believe that excuse, thus making everyone more stupid.
I think the craziest part about all of this, is the fed openly saying they are going to start wiretapping, and barely make an effort to make up an excuse for it like "we got to protect ourselves from Chinese hackers!" Nope, they're just going to spy on it's own citizens. The official story is that they aren't going to do it without warrants, as if no abuse of power will take place. Cause it won't right? I mean we can look back in history and see how many times the good ol government has held up to it's word right?
Do you really think a government who has been considering SOPA, SISPA, PIPA, isn't going to take it a step further when people aren't looking? COME ON! I want people to use some goddamn logic. |
The fourth amendment needs to be revised. I will voluntarily give up my privacy to save lives. I would even sacrifice my life to save lives.
The fourth amendment is out dated and when it was written nuclear bombs and terrorism did not exist at the levels it did today.
Back then you had the Boston massacre where 11 people were shot and 5 died. That was a massacre!? We have civilians killing that many people and it barely makes the evening news locally, forget national news reporting it.
We live in a different world, we all believe in evolution for science and survival of the fittest. The constitution is outdated,the 4th A came to be because of taxes and smuggling. We the Americans did not want catch all warrants searching our property to find smuggled goods.
The NSA is looking for terrorism, people that want to kill you for no reason other than you are different.
The right to privacy. Please interpret that. You can't, even scholarly justices have arguments over it. You have cookies tracking your online movements, is that a violation?
Step back and have a vision. Technology is going to be ever increasing and connected. You are tracked with your phone everywhere, you credit card info is not private, 3 private companies grade your credit. Your car is registered, your taxes and pay are all known by the government. We all have SS #, where is your privacy you speak of?? Our medical insurance is about to be run by the government, they will have access to your private records. God forbid Republicans control the healthcare system in the future. Who knows what rules they will put on place. |
Government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Instead of signing online petitions or writing politicians, let's just pick a random state and write him in on the next ballot and make him a U.S. congressman. Even if he's terrible at it, there is no way he could be worse than our current congressmen. It would be the first congressmen in my lifetime who's name I would actually remember. |
he could swim. In the 70s, before the reform and opening, Chinese citizens used to swim from the mainland to HK hoping for a better life. There's a story about Deng Xiaoping traveling to Shenzhen in the late 70s/early 80s and asking the locals about dead bodies on the beaches. The locals told him they were the bodies of people that had tried to swim to HK. Supposedly DXP was inspired and used the dead bodies as a metaphor for a reason to grow China's economy so that people wouldn't have to die fleeing their own country.
That's extremely simplified and it's just a story, but I wrote my thesis about Chinese economics in the 70s/80s and SEZ creation and that was one of the stories that stuck with me. |
My opinion is simple. It doesn't matter if he was right or wrong in releasing the info that he did. I'm passing absolutely no judgement on that part. However, he should return to stand trial. To not goes against everything he's trying to do (uphold the constitution!). He's not allowed to just pick and choose what parts of the constitution and our society he likes. The justice system is one of the major foundations of our society. Avoiding court when charged with a crime is, in and of it self, a crime, which would make him a petty criminal, undoing everything he's trying to do. |
I disagree. Napoleon and the reign of terror was needed to drive out the nobility. There was no other way. Napoleonic Code, his law system, is still around in Europe today. Napoleon re-made a Polish state. He started German nationalism by uniting the Rhine kingdoms/Duchies into the Republic of the Rhine. |
Yes. Let's not get down to the part where you're trusting every piece of software you use, because you haven't personally inspected every line of source code . |
Oh, and don't piss off the big players. If your solution tramples all over someone else's toes, it's probably not going to work. On the other hand, if it actually benefits a big player while achieving your objectives, it's got a much better chance. Especially if it benefits a big player at the expense of a rival. |
All these tools don't provide a solution to the (core) problem. They only allow us to prolong our ability to avoid the problem.
It's the public perception of privacy, freedom and security (especially in the U.S. and the U.K.) that has to change, following by a reconstruction of the respective law.
Even if you only consider the last two decades it's incredible how broad the definition of terrorism, national security in general and excuses of the police and justice system have become at the cost of privacy and freedom of the natural or legal person.
However, especially the world history of the last six decades has shown us that already one aspect of every day life ( like technology, economic mechanism, politics, law) can completely change the next generation's approach towards the same issue.
So |
Good. It's common sense to give the consumer what they want. And you do that by analyzing trends.
On the other hand, from a different perspective, it's stealing IP from a competitor -- if anyone else did that to them, they'd sic the lawyers after them. |
It's an extremely important concept to grasp that people/organizations can often have the best of intentions and yield the worst of results. The idealistic view of markets is that they produce the opposite - great results even if the participant's intentions are pure greed.
So with that said, my view of Google is that they genuinely do not have ulterior motives . They genuinely seek to help humanity, by indexing pretty much all information in the world to make it easily searchable. They likely don't even view you, the user, as a "customer" so much as a "beneficiary"
I honestly do not believe that Larry Page sits in his office cackling like Mr. Burns about all the money he's going to rake in. I honestly believe that he (and most of the others working with him) think that they are doing genuinely good work. And for the most part, they really are!
The problem is that our notion of privacy runs counter to this goal of "gather all the info!" and when weighing those two values against each other, Google would say that privacy is not so universally valuable as to outweigh the good they're doing.
It is perfectly reasonable to disagree with their assessment, and value privacy more than they do, without attributing any malice to them.
Meanwhile, Facebook openly admits their whole point is just to harvest as much of your personal info as possible, for the sake of selling it to advertisers. Any "customer service" or "improved user experience" is essentially bait in the trap to attract more of that juicy personal info. Zuckerberg has admitted as much in interviews. |
The problem is that it does't do everything a laptop does, it does everything an iPod does, and while most people will do with that, I simply don't. Most people prefer to have stuff overly simplified even if it limits them, but for people that know Win/OSX, it's too simplified.
Example: I need a full MS Office Suite, but neither Pages, nor QuickOffice, nor DocsToGo, nor anything is as good as Office. There's OnLive Desktop too, which does give me a fully useable and intuitive (since it's running on touch mode, unlike LogMeIn / TeamViewer) Windows environment, but it's nature means it's unreliable, can't use anything other than Office or IE, and I can't multitask out of it. Also costs $5 a month.
I got to try once Win7 in a tablet (ExoPC), and it worked! The tablet wasn't that good, but I could do everything I wanted to without any compromises, and it was easy to use (easier than an iPad if you already knew how to use Windows). I'm pretty sure OSX can run on a tablet, but it wouldn't be as approachable as the iPad, which is known to be easy enough for toddlers to understand. |
Most of the "returns" Nokia sees on its patents are from the fundamental tech that allows cellular data transfer to occur, not from "consumer-facing" software.
As for OS development: look at the companies that are succeeding in the mobile OS space. Both Apple and Google have huge ecosystems and teams to support a developer community. Even Microsoft, with its long history of creating a platforms accessible for developers, is struggling getting Windows Phone off the ground. Blackberry, which once had one of (or the?) largest smartphone user base is dying and is finding it harder and harder to attract developers.
Why is all this happening? Because the game is no longer about hardware, it is about eco-systems. Nokia's board/management realized this, and subsequently ditched their project and decided to focus on hardware (which, I would argue, is their core competency to begin with). Think hard about the competitive landscape described above, and tell me if you think Nokia would have had more luck getting developers to build for their proprietary OS, keeping in mind that it would be competing in a space against iOS, Android, Windows Phone, AND Blackberry. |
Well /u/RIPPEDMYFUCKINPANTS actually put it pretty well in [his comment.](
For me though it was just being able to be free of trying to sync local files between my desktop, work laptop, phone and tablet, without the inconvenience of having to rebuild my library on something like Spotify. You upload everything once (it matches the majority of your music and gives you an equal or better bitrate copy in your library) and that was awesome, I get my music at home and at work via the browser and on my phone and tablet and by extension my car by pinning playlists to the devices, so it doesn't even cost me anything in data once I'm out of my home wifi. Then once All Access was released here in the UK it was a day 1 signup for me, you essentially get access to everything in the Google Play library with no restrictions or "you can only have this song if you buy the album" bullshit like Amazon pulls, no ads ala Spotify free, plus you can add music you haven't purchased to your library and you only lose access to it if you cancel your All Access subscription and for 8 quid a month I don't see why anyone would... I've gone from buying £20 of music on payday to adding probably hundreds to my library every week.
The browser interface is really neat and almost every feature extends to your mobile devices, the big pull is "pinning" playlists for me. When you "pin" a playlist everything on the list is saved locally to the device it's pinned to (encrypted of course, that'd just be a license to steal everything in the library otherwise) and any changes made in the browser are reflected on your devices, playlist order, additions and removals are all reflected next time I pick up my phone so there's no fiddling, I just make sure my playlists are sorted and it's all ready next time I get in the car. |
Could netflix perhaps also look at subtitle sites to determine which subs most dutch people download?
Hint: it is not dutch, its english.
Please offer me both options, dutch subs annoy me with the amount of mistakes in translation and the jokes lost in translation.
Why do I want subs at all? Because sometimes someone talks through a movie, or opens a chips bag and therefore you missed what main character just whispered dramatically
Also don't offer me only dubs of disney movies. I want phil collins music with my Tarzan; not crappy dubbed versions. Most disney movies I've seen in english as a kid; not dutch. So can I please get my nostalgia fix?
Oh right. Please let me watch the usa series my country refuses to buy/sub/air? Or buys/airs a year after the first season aired in USA because gasp needz dutch subs.
If I sound annoyed, I'm actually dissapointed, very. Waited for this for years. What do I get? Netflix Lite version. Argh flips table
I get it, rights, blablah, copyright, money blah. BREIN*, do you now understand why we still download series? Even tho TPB is blocked. (lol silly block is silly)
*BREIN is a anti piracy company that lobbys a lot. Could rant about that too, not going to so I'll leave it at this
Fix these things I've listed here, and I'll GLADLY give you all my money. However, I'm not paying for Netflix lite, no matter how awesome netflix is.
These are annoyances to most people I speak with. They tend to be the core group that downloads
Sorry for the rant. I just had to get this off my chest. I feel sorry for our neighbour country - germany - they are worse off and have everything dubbed on tv, right? Or did that change? |
I agree, yelp would have been sued a long time ago if this was the case. There are a ton of powerful companies (companies that generate ten times the amount of revenue of yelp in fact) that use Yelp that would not put up with any type of that shit. |
This headline is flat out wrong, not just misleading. The study cited by the article literally used the percentage of reviews on Yelp's site that are filtered as a heuristic for fake -- but Yelp's filters are designed to filter out unreliable or less useful reviews, not just fake ones and certainly not "paid shill" reviews. All it means is that Yelp is trying to filter out the less legit reviews and they've found that about 20% are better not to show on the site without extra effort to look at the "filtered reviews." The reviews you see on the first page of a business listing aren't those "fake" ones. |
The worst thing about this stat is that the 20 percent isn't evenly distributed. A brand-new restaurant could get themselves 10 or 20 paid reviews before anyone leaves a real one, dramatically raising the chance that people will eat there. Moreover, if their food isn't terrible, it's not likely that they'll get a ton of 'corrective' negative feedback. People are much more likely to leave a review if the food was bad, but if the food is half-decent, a bunch of early rave reviews can positively skew their image for months. |
Honestly, that's a little high.. This 'blog' is pretty vague on the details, and the article written by the assistant professor dismisses filtered reviews.. Yelp filters nearly all 'fake reviews' and is consistently changing and improving their filter algorithm..
So it comes to assume that they're adding that into the number.. which is just inflated and obviously written this way to be sensationalist.
The best way to check a listing to make sure the reviews are listed are to 1. know the competition of the industry (lawyers, marketers, clothing lines are much more likely to have fake reviews) 2. Check the friends and the amount of reviews 3. check the detail of a couple reviews, make sure the negative reviews (in a diff industry) is in depth and no 'I don't like this place' 4. Check the create of the account.. Many people who post fake reviews will create an account that week..
Bot programs get caught in the filter nearly every time, usually the fake reviews are by people. Good reviewers are hard to detect, and does far less frequent reviews, bad reviewers are plain as day if you take it from their perspective..
Source: I may or may not have written reviews for Yelp, G+, Yellow Pages, and random directory listings. |
MY parents own and operate an Inn. Yelp came and told us to pay them to allowed on the site 'ad free or some bullshit like that or premium' I forget. We said that we aren't going to pay for a service that has horrible reviewers. they sent 2 separate people to come and stay at our inn. both of those people wrote terrible reviews, even though there was no reason for them to do so. They hid all the other reviews besides their own. All the other reviews were of people raving about the place... |
It's these kinds of reports, and my own experiences that lead me to think Yelp is horrible for any business. There are too many ways to scam it - whether to the benefit or detriment of the business in question.
Would any of you visit a restaurant with 1-2 stars? Rarely, if at all, right?
Why should someone's livelihood, someone's business, be in the hands of such a broken system? Any customer can rate 1 star without it deserving it, and the business can make accounts to rate themselves 5 start without deserving it. It's a sham, and I feel for every business owner that depends so heavily on Yelp.
Possible solution? Other than take it down? Not sure...maybe have "professional reviewers" be its own category in the review section - just like video game reviews. Professional critics give it a score, and then you can see the general public's opinion as well if you wish. This isn't a flawless solution by any means (Not enough pro reviewers to go to every restaurant in the country, they are still human - can be bribed/be pissed off for other reasons, etc), but it is always productive to offer some alternatives. |
Not to mention that Yelp strong arms businesses into paying their subscription fees and when they refuse, bad reviews miraculously appear the next day followed by another call from Yelp informing the business that if they sign up for their service, the business can censor the negative reviews to be be below the public threshold so people have to enter a captsha in order to see them.
They also pressure restaurants to host parties for yelpers and provide thousands in free food. |
No guff? Yeah, I visited my sister in Long Beach this past weekend by metting her at a restaurant that Yelp had at 4.1 with 58 reviews. I thought, "sure, sounds pretty good." We get there and the place is a hole in the wall priced around $8 a plate. Normally that's cool, but we sat down after ordering and next to my girlfriend's head on the wall was a cochroach, just walking about minding his business. So grossed out... |
I had an experience with a fancy dog hotel here in Chicago where they returned my dog to me and he needed emergency spinal surgery. It wasn't so much that I thought they should have prevented him from getting hurt, but the fact that they surrendered my dog to me in that condition means their staff clearly don't have the requisite animal care expertise or I would have gotten a call that he needed medical attention. He was having full body spasms and couldn't lift his head up. It was ridiculous.
Long story short, I yelped about my experience, and yelp refused to publish the negative review of this place (that happens to be owned by Petco but it used to be private). They said I didn't have enough reviews to be considered legit or something. I challenged it, saying I was providing a clearly valuable experience for people who want to make sure their animals are with experienced dog handlers, but to no avail. |
I'd say i'm pretty familiar with it. I dealt with it on a regular basis for 2 years.
First i'm going to explain my stance on the issue, then i'm going to explain where i feel a lot of that attitude comes from:
my belief is that there is no validity to it. it's not even just my belief - Luca, the harvard professor who did the study featured in the article above, did a study to see if there was a correlation between filtered reviews and advertising. he could not find one. (Can't find the actual study now, but here's an article that references it. just ctrl+f: luca to find the mention - ) . Additionally, every time yelp has been sued for this, it's been thrown out of courts for lack of evidence.
HERE'S WHERE I THINK THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES COME FROM:
As a salesperson at yelp, i'm basically given a geographical area and i'm in charge of closing business within that area. in any given area there might be thousands of businesses for me to look through to see who i want to try to sell ads to. sometimes i look for businesses that are brand new. sometimes i look for businesses that just got good reviews recently, etc. any number of things could make me decide that one business would be a good one to call
as part of the general sales process, probably the most important message you can drive home to the business owner is how important yelp is/could be for their business. Heck, i still believe in many cases (but certainly not all), yelp can make or break a business. So anyway, let's say i just talked to a business owner for a little bit, didn't really pitch them on ads or anything, but yelp and its impact on small businesses is at the front of their mind.
what's the first thing you would do if you were that business owner? probably go ask your friends to write reviews. maybe not even your friends - maybe you ask your legitimate customers walking in the doors "please go write a review on yelp!". as a business owner you see absolutely nothing wrong with this. it's certainly not immoral as far as i'm concerned. Here's where the issue comes up though - yelp HAS a review filter.
so the point of the review filter is to stop fake reviews. it uses a secret algorithm that maybe 1 or 2 people in the whole company knows. i cant say for certain or for sure, because i never was one of those 1 or 2 people, but one of the easier ways to sniff out if a review might not be totally legit is if it's written by a brand new account who doesn't really do anything after that review (like, never logs on again or does searches, buys deals, checks in places, etc). or maybe an unusually high number of that business' reviews are a user's first review ever (also an indicator of trying to game the system). Or maybe a business that's totally brand new to yelp suddenly has 10 reviews the next day - that doesn't happen under normal circumstances, so again, evidence that someone is trying to game the system.
all of these things happen if either 1) you hire people to write fake reviews for you, or 2) you ask your customers, who otherwise wouldn't use yelp, to write reviews for you. that's actually why you'll find the yelp official blog, and yelp press people at any sort of Q&A will always tell business owners not to ask for reviews.
still though, many can't help themselves so they ask. sometimes the filter is instant, sometimes stuff gets filtered out after a day or two. sometimes something looks suspicious at first so it gets filtered, but over time it seems more legit so it becomes unfiltered. how that stuff works is all secret.
but you can see how a business owner who might not be that familiar with yelp would, around the same time a salesperson starts talking to them, ask a bunch of people for reviews, right? and you see why many of those reviews would end up filtered. Additionally - perhaps one of the reasons a salesperson decides to call a business is that they see all the sudden a business is getting a ton of reviews and a lot of activity, not realizing that the business owner is probably asking for those reviews. so again, here's a situation in which a yelp salesperson is talking to a business owner and they're about to get a ton of stuff filtered anyway.
so yeah, that's where i think it comes from. |
Microsoft will trace the assembly code. They'll contact the vendor and point out where the bug is. Sometimes, if the vendor will consent, Microsoft will publish the fixed driver themselves. |
I've actually talked to a microsoft rep about this.
If anyone wants and I'm at a PC I could type out something more detailed.
Basically I was at frys helping my grandfsther pick out a new pc (he hated windows 8 but also the company he managed said the IT peoples didn't want to go to 8 yet so a if he got a new pc it would need to have 7 on it, or i assume they would just install it for him). So i helped him out a bit then when he was looking at them purely for comfort and looks I talked to the frys guy.
We talked about windows 8,the customers violent reaction to a lack of start menu, and then he was showing me how he had classic shell on a flash drive to show users a free way to bring back the start menu (personally I use start is back and love it, start 8 is great if your wallet is bigger and knowledge more lacking. Classic shell is the cheapest and most difficult [but still easy to use IMO] of the three).
After our talks the microsoft rep showed up, and him and the frys guy got in a bit of a spat. The frys guy argued that users were shocked by it and didn't like it, and that it was a bad move on microsofts part. The rep then said, and I shit you not, that people just don't understand it, and that they WILL like it once they figure it out and use it more. Oh and, if it wasn't clear, all talks have been about the lack of the old start menu and the new METRO (yeah fuck you microsoft. You coined a catchy name, and I'm sticking with it) UI.
Then the frys guy brought me in to the mix, saying how I also wanted the old start menu and I was tech savvy. I then explained how for me personally, I like the quick access to my computer, for seeing the stats and for the useful right click options, as well as easier access to the shutdown menu and things like control panel. I also like the search style better but technically, the new search with 8.1 (or maybe it was already fixed in 8) is actually about as fast and useful, just looks worse.
The microsoft guy said I was the first person to have valid points, but that metro was still the future and people just don't get it. |
Pedestrian and cyclist detection / full auto brake (many carmakers)
MPG improvements through regenerative braking (a number of carmakers)
New window treatments to improve visibility in very poor weather (Kia)
Quad zone climate control (Infiniti)
Increased aerodynamics (a number of carmakers, though making things like door handles flush with the exterior)
Integrated vacuum cleaner (Honda)
Variable transmission, which makes smoother and more fuel-efficient drives (Honda)
Blind spot cameras (Honda)
Lane centering (multiple brands)
That's just what I found in two minutes of Googling, and only changes between 2013 and 2014 model years. I think the difference between cars may be superficial in design, but the guts are getting an overhaul.
I think one of the justifications that Microsoft might use for the shutdown of Windows 7 is that people simply don't know what they want in a computer. There is some precedence for that: Does anybody else remember the ridicule that accompanied both the features and the name of the iPad before it came out?
Ultimately, it comes down to this: Companies need to innovate to justify their existence and to adapt to changing technology. Sometimes they do a good job (XP, 7) and sometimes they screw it up (Vista, 8). However, it should be noted that there wouldn't have been a Windows 7 without a Vista. Whether we like change or not, it's vital to innovation. |
Government has such a stranglehold over who is allowed to experiment and when that barrier to market is too high for people with new ideas to come in and give it a try. Thus, rather than a price system where customers can choose who has the best plan to offer you are left with government approved circle jerk that only needs to innovate then they feel like it. |
Can I get some background on this? |
I agree that those of us who live out in the country can't expect the same levels of service as those who live in the city. It would be foolish to expect otherwise. If I were living outside of Atlanta, I wouldnt expect a MARTA line to be run out to my house just for me.
But, I also expect not to have to pay 2 or 3 times as much for service that is only 25% as good as what those in the cities are getting. For instance, if my parents want to get "high-speed" internet they have two options: Satellite internet or OTA internet from AT&T/Verizon. Currently they are using OTA internet from AT&T and while it isn't super expensive, it has a low data cap and it is not much faster than the dial-up they had 10 years ago. If they decided to go with satellite internet they might be paying something like $150-$200 a month for a low-bandwidth solution with an extremely low data cap and terrible upload speeds.
Its ridiculous. This day and I age I would argue that the internet is becoming more and more important to everyday life and to have companies squeeze every customer until they bleed money for them, especially when the service is terrible, is just wrong in every sense of the word. |
Let me just me the first maybe to say this.
Are you ready ?.
Woah im so totally surprised! Holy shit, woah, no sorry, this isnt any surprise at all. |
I pay $55/month for unlimited calling, including long distance anywhere in Canada, and 1GB of data (I didn't negotiate for more because I don't need more... yet). Here's what I did:
I NEVER accept a new phone deal, I only pay full price on ebay for a factory unlocked. I NEVER accept a contract but go month-to-month only. I negotiate with customer retention (or whatever they call it when you threaten to quit. I am with a smaller provider owned by a larger player, and have been with them for a long time. I do research prior to negotiating. Once you are out of contract and free to move they will do a lot to keep you. My provider only has coverage in major centres, but because it is owned by a major, I have access everywhere. I love in a rural area that is only formally serviced by major players, and everyone is getting hosed bad. My number is in Toronto, but because I have unlimited long distance, it's all good in the hood. For people calling me locally, I have a VOIP number that forwards for free to my cell, so no issues there -- that's $15/mo, and it gives me a home line as well (even though I never use it). The only drawback is that people see the Toronto number and think I am a telemarketer, lol. |
I moved from Verizon Fios to Dish sat internet this year and the difference is noticeable. With Fios I paid about 30 USD less than with Dish total. I now live in an area that not only doesn't service Verizon but only services Dish, and Comcast. Being a previous Dish customer I went with them over Comcast. Satellite internet SUCKS. I, on average get between 50 B per second to 60 KB per second 80% of the time. Yes, that's bytes to kilobytes.
On rare occasions I might get 5 MB per second download. Which means I could download from steam in only seconds, but most of the time I can't load a 240p YT video. It takes 23 minutes roughly to load 2 seconds. It's such shit, but I have NO OTHER OPTION. My only other option would be a 3,000 dollar landscaping project to extend hardwire cables from my house to the street (which is an acre and a half away from the street.) I can't afford that, AND I have a clear view of the southern sky 98% of the time living in SoCal.
The worst part is that I get charged more from Dish Network for this shitty service than I did with Verizon, AND I only get 1/10 of the TV channels I used to, AND I have absolutely zero HD channels. I had all channels in HD with Verizon, and a 100 MB connection averaging 4/5 MB per second in the city.
Also, 250 GB bandwidth limit PER FUCKING NEIGHBORHOOD.
Most of the time a 4 second gif file takes me 3 minutes to load.
You think Comcast is bad? Try Dish Satellite internet. Shits expensive, and sucks ass. I have no other options though. |
I am a Forms Analyst who works in health care and I have to say while this is a good idea it is not the most cost effective solution. There are many places and times were an electronic charting system just will not work and on top of it it doesn't go into details on the backup plans in place for when the system goes down, if they need to go back to paper chart for unseen event they are back at square one.
A properly designed form can easily mitigate errors and decrease the need for lengthy charting. I wish I remembered the exact resource as I do not have my presentation I give handy; but on average 4 hours of patient care require about 4 hours of charting. It is not enough to say get rid of paper and it makes the problem go away. If you update the forms and adapt the flow and layout based on form filling methodology then yes you can decrease the errors and increase the efficency without the need for a costly upgrade.
Now mind you I understand electronic forms are the future but if you create a chart or form based on what they did on paper you will still run into the same problems. The other thing is the users of the technology the now this is from a 2007 study but for every nurse under the age of 35 there are two over the age of 50. So you have to start with education of user group that will give care and teach younger nurses but still make it intuitive for them to use with out exhustive eduction. I will tell you it is very difficult as nurses are some of the most lovely and stubborn creatures out there. |
Here is how it's done. I got my ATT internet lowered from $41 a month, to $20 a month, and my sisters form $51 a month to $25 a month.
What you have to do is call them up, tell the operator you want to cancel, but your willing to talk to the RETENTION department. Thats the trick. A friend of mine works in a big companies retention department, and he said they are coached to basically do ANYTHING to keep the costumer, even if it means giving them exactly what they want.
I called AT&T and said I'm done, put me through to the retention department, and with in 30 min I had lowered my bill.
I told the guy that Time warner offered cheaper internet and I was switching unless they could get my bill cut in half if not more. He played ball and bam, I got lowered rates.
So, there ya go folks. |
Also if you use basic math
New Price 99 / 12 = $8.25 per month
Old Price 79 / 12 = $6.58 per month |
First of all: Is there evidence of disallowed submissions to the meta-reddit? Have you tried? Have you looked? Have you researched? Have you looked under the stones? Or are you just bitching and grasping at straws?
And even if there was evidence of a massive conspiracy to tamper down discussion of how /r/technology is moderated (who would even stand to materially benefit from that? Even after 8 years of being one of the most popular sites on the internet Reddit makes almost no money. And there's 3500 people on the technology subforum - that's not a lot of eyeballs for the internet, so that forum's not making a lot of money for anyone.) here's the kick to the gut: It. Does. Not. Matter.
Reddit is not a democracy or a constitutional monarchy or an organized government of any sort. It is a privately owned news and entertainment website run by a handful of paid staff and several dozen unpaid volunteers who serve at the whim of the Admins. Any article can and will be removed with or without discussion. And while you may not think that's "fair", you don't matter. Your opinion doesn't matter. I don't matter and my opinion doesn't. None of us matter. Sure, I get butthurt if something I submit gets removed and the illusion of democracy falls away. But there is no freedom of speech here. You're on a privately owned website. You have no freedom here. You have priviliges that can and will be revoked at any time. The end.
You want to bitch about it? Bitch about it, then! Write articles. Share them copiously on reddit and facebook and twitter and myface and google plus and pornhub. But any or all of them can remove them at any time because they're private businesses with socially oriented managed content. You want to message the mods and admins of those sites who removed your content? Message them! But they all reserve the right to ignore the fuck out of you. Think the discussion is being censored? Share your thoughts, but prepare to have them ignored especially if you put them in the wrong place. Which is ultimately my point: You are allowed to believe and write about how the moderators of reddit are assholes. You're allowed to post that in the appropriate place and the people who run those places are allowed to tell you to shove off even if you don't like it. |
Is it just me or is internet drama like this one of the most mundane, uninspiring, man-child-incarnate things imaginable? Like, really, why even give a fuck about something so completely unimportant in the grand scheme of things? Also, is it really any surprise that giving teenagers and young adults ANY form of power/control over a social platform resulted in calculated abuse of said power, and countless wasted man-hours of debate mixed with fleeting emotions, all of which are anchored in this self-satisfying Petri dish of 0's and 1's. |
I don't understand how people get upset when they need to pay for an install or service call after a self-install, when they clearly don't belong mucking around with low-voltage services themselves. (Disclaimer: I go all over, but bear with me, I'm trying to help. I'm a cable guy, not an author, lol!)
Absolutely true: Comcast customer service department sucks, and their decisions at the corporate level are appalling.
Rarely true: Comcast customers are totally capable of installing their cable themselves to the same standards the technicians with weeks or months of training and years of experience and ridiculously expensive equipment. [this is an issue on both sides of the telephone - phone reps think they know things they were never trained on and don't understand, and rely on break-room hearsay to troubleshoot things they aren't supposed to even address, and customers get fed up with phone reps, and take matters into their own hands.]
The bottom line is, you need a technician to run through your install. Some things you don't seem to know, gleaned by an actual tech, using the mostly unrelated words in your post:
Stronger signal to your modem is not always better. There is an accepted range (which depends on your system's specs) that everything is designed to work in. You DO NOT WANT an amp or "booster" between your modem and the cable tap on the pole. Need 2 outlets? Hook up 2 outlets on a 2 way splitter and check signal strength/quality. Do NOT hook up a 4- or 8-way splitter for 2 outlets. Signal strength drops from the equipment and materials in its path, and is not dependent on the number of devices actually hooked up and/or powered on.
Noise! Retail-quality splitters and other installation materials are not up to par with what the cable company uses, and believe me, if they could put in something cheaper than they use and have it work longer than a year consistently, then they would. Fortunately, most cable guys don't mind letting a few freebies go here and there. Catch one coming off lunch or out and about in town if you want a good splitter, or a new wire for behind your set.
I'm not saying you're stupid, but even many first year cable techs are ignorant of all of the things that need to come together in a certain way to end up with a long lasting cable install. When you "checked the wires", what were you looking for? Aside from an obvious physical break, there is an insane number of things that can go wrong without showing themselves on the outside of the protective jacket on a cable wire. Some things can be determined with some trial-and-error, but the wealth of information that will come from an industry-specific signal meter hooked up to the system at various points BY FAR outshines what can be gleaned by looking at the outside of a wire.
The fact that your service drops and comes back on STRONGLY hints at a problem with your service caused by a misconfiguration or poor install at your house, and by your description, it was never truly installed, just plugged in, hoping the last tech that did visit the install (whenever THAT was) did a job that would last that long, and that it wasn't tampered with [ahem, lol] between then and now.
From those of us that know in-depth how these systems actually work, there is no shame in having a professional do your install. Getting THAT guy out to your house can be a PITA, we know. We deal with the same idiotic bullshit the customers do, believe me, except we have to deal with it every day behind the scenes, and then walk up to strangers' houses wearing this badge/logo representative of the insanity of the entire rest of the company as well. |
What child? Where?
To paraphrase [Justice William Brennan from another case where the government wanted to use prior restraint]( since encryption would not cause an inevitable , direct , and immediate event imperiling the safety of any child, prior restraint is unjustified.
The government has to show some immediate, direct, and inevitable harm. If not: they can go fuck themselves.
Now, it's important to note that: they're not wrong . The DoJ is not trying to claim that everyone who uses encryption is a criminal. They are not trying to claim that only criminals would want to use encryption. They are not trying to claim that encryption is evil.
There are bad guys, who will use encryption to help them do bad things. This is the real world, and these things will happen.
But that's the price we pay to live in a free society. The government is simply sometimes not allowed to prevent crimes; not allowed to protect its citizens. There are a lot of crimes that could be prevented (or halted, or discovered) if police were allowed to search everyone's homes without reason.
The [three women held captive as sex slaves in Ohio for a decade]( could have been freed if police were allowed to search any home, at any time, for no reason. But police are not allowed to do that. We, as a society, have decided that it is right that crimes are allowed to continue; as the trade-off for allowing individual liberties. |
Correct me if I'm wrong...
But aren't individual cities and municipalities just as much to blame for lack of pole access? Some cities own the poles but exclusively rent them to telcos and power companies. Fuck cities even have their own taxes on utilities just to maintain the public rights of way.
Google learned a lot from Kansas, specifically that in order for Google to put fiber in a new city, that city must clear access or force non municipal owned rights of way to grant access to infrastructure for competitive fees. |
Google fiber just came here. I have TWC so I was super excited. I live in literally the only "fiberhood" without a single signup. Every single other one has met requirements. looks like im moving across the street.
EDIT: So many people asked if TWC changed their service for me to be more competitive. I had responded that no, I still have the same crappy 50mbps that I barely get as always. Should note that I was barely getting 5 meg over the week and having trouble streaming HD Netflix. So, I got a little worked up and contacted TWC via chat to ask if they planned to improve their service. The rep says that they already did improve my service, and its 300mbps now. I promptly ran a speed test (I did this much earlier in the day and got like 15) and I was pull in 170mbps. I don't know if she flipped some switch when the chat started or what. We then tried to troubleshoot why I wasn't getting 300. So, all I could do was point out that even if I can get the 300, I am still paying the same amount for a third of what Google Fiber offers. |
Comcast and Time Warner are evil and terrible companies because being non-shitty costs money and thereby reduces profit. But they have a monopoly so they can do that. Title II reclassification would mean competition which would motivate these companies to stop being douchebags. The fact of the matter remains: everyone who gives a fuck about how evil their provider is will switch to Google. Comcast and TW will have a hard time catching up, but they will change for the better. They might not be gone but remember they don't have the monetary advantage compared to Google who is absurdly rich, and they might be everywhere but Title II classification will let Google use all the infrastructure - it too will be everywhere. And once the media starts to eat up the story that Google is good and Comcast/TW is evil, most people will switch. |
I'm not saying you're dumb, I'm saying this is an ignorant viewpoint to hold and doesn't match either simple thought experiments or the realities we've seen and documented when monopolies occur--natural or otherwise.
I'll also point out that if you simply google "Why are monopolies bad" there are over a million pages that have explanations on this point, and any one of them can do a more thorough job than I can in a reddit post. But here goes anyways.
The fundamental problem with monopolies, regardless of how they came to be, is that they allow a single entity disproportionate market power. When you add the fact that these entities (other than certain public monopolies, utility companies and so on) have a raison d'être to maximize revenue, the results are exactly as expected: bad-to-very-bad for consumers.
Monopolies have no incentive to keep prices of goods they sell in line with their costs of production. Instead, their goal is (again) to maximize revenue, and since there are no competitors they are better off raising prices until the lesser of "lower gross revenue" or "providing enough incentive for others to enter the market."
Markets fundamentally require competition to work efficiently--for both sellers and buyers. Sellers compete on prices and other things (like quality of goods, "I ask more because I'm giving you a better product"). Buyers also compete, for example by being willing to pay more or purchase more goods (generating more revenue for a seller in a single transaction).
Once a company has achieved one of more local monopolies, they are able to then participate in other undesirable behaviors like loss leading. WalMart has been extremely successful at driving local competitors out of business by charging less than the costs of production for a particular good--or even simply be benfiting from more efficient economies of scale that allow their prices to be lower. The latter isn't a problem per se, except that we've seen time and time again that when WalMart has crushed their local opposition, they raise prices back to (or above) local market norms.
Another behavior monopolies perform is supply limitation. The de Beers diamond cartel is a perfect example of this. In fact, the de Beers cartel has been referred to by many economists as the most successful monopoly of all time. [This article]( goes into more detail than I could or would, and is extremely interesting. |
You don't really know what you're talking about.
A photographer always retains copyright of his photos unless he's employed and has contracted away the rights (basically, you're hired by reuters as an employee and since you're "acting on the behalf of reuters" the photos are theirs). That does not work with people.
Depending on where you live the laws are different, but basically a photographer can take any photograph he wants and you haven't got any right as the subject to delete it. Publication, though, is a different matter.
The |
It's always a pattern with them...
DOS: What is this? What are all these weird words and commands I need to memorize? Where'd I put my glasses?
Win 3.1: People loved it, greatly simplified the DOS OS and made computers far more user friendly.
Win 95: It was OK, but generally people didn't really like it. Shares many features with 98, but was unstable on release.
98: Loved. 98SE opened the doors of what the Internet could really do.
2000/NT*/ME: Hated (I lump these together since IIRC there wasn't much variation between them). I remember NT was stable, but all three didn't bring anything to the table that 98SE couldn't do. In part because developers kept making their software backwards compatible to work with 98SE, since many people refused to upgrade. Very similar to:
XP: Loved. Still used by many people today, even though it's full of security holes. Extremely widespread and still has a lot of software developed to be backwards compatible with it, although it's finally starting to die off in developed countries.
Vista: Hated. Very buggy, resource hog compared to XP, overall didn't run very well for the longest time. The latest service packs and patches have helped, but I still see computers that have run like molasses with Vista, then came to life when 7 was installed.
7: Loved, and will for another decade. It's the new XP, basically. Runs fast, doesn't need many resources, and is user friendly. On the surface it looks like Vista, but try dual booting Vista and 7 on the same PC and check out the difference. 7 usually is far more stable and faster, and has more support from developers than Vista.
8: Hated, albeit 8.1 has significantly improved upon it, many stay with 8 since they don't know how to update (...sigh. This one pisses me off since I'm in tech support and see 8 more than 8.1 still)
10: So far, looking pretty good. Too soon to say until it reaches the masses.
*Now that I've looked into it, NT4.0 seems to be more comparable to 98. Yet I remember seeing it the most around the same time as ME and 2000. I'll leave it here even though I'll probably attract some flak... |
You need to understand how phones work.
It takes absolutely no effort to build a device that can call phone numbers. You use them every day, they're called VOIP systems. I have one that was absolutely free and it's installed on my server.
I can call any other VOIP server by it's unique identifier provided we're using the same codecs and what not. The issue becomes when you want to connect a call with someone on the POTS or Plain Old Telephone System. In order to do this you have to use what's known as SIP trunking. Trunking connects two networks, in this case the POTS to the internet. If I want to call a telephone number I have to pay per minute fees to the SIP trunking service. This costs money because they physically have to run the infrastructure for the phone lines. It can never be free because it costs someone money. |
Between 2002 and 2005 I was in the top 1% of all computer resellers on ebay. I know because they called and told me. I often used paypal for payment, becasue people liked it. I hated it, I still think their 2%+ charge or whatever it is now is ridiculous. At one point, after never having any issues or complaints from customers, about a year and a half into my ebaying days, I get an email, not terribly unlike the one posted, telling me they are going to hold 15k in my account until the customers have received their machines. This was the day I received the payments. I called to inquire, they said it's just something they do for customer safety. It was absurd. They just held my money and there was nothing I could do. I called several times, tried to talk to supervisors, was always told I would get a call back from a supervisor, never did, and several times, was simply hung up on. I sent the computers out, they freed the money, life went on. But they put an unnecessary kink in my business (I used the money for more machines) and caused me an unnecessary risk (I usually waited for PayPal payments to clear to my bank, because, at least at the time, they were easily reversed once merchandise arrived). |
Um... backscatter scanners are being installed in airports around the world. It really doesn't have anything to do with being American. As far as other countries security measures should you decline a scan, that's another question. |
This is hardly mythbusting -- random evidence isn't really a good replacement for some knowledge about how these things work.
The first one is true -- this was required for old Ni-Cd batteries, but now it's not needed anymore. But then:
The second is half-true. Discharging a battery "completely" is not a problem today because the controlling circuit actually shuts down the battery (reports it as depleted) if the voltage goes below a certain threshold. At that moment the battery still holds some charge, but bringing it lower than that charge will make recharging it unsafe. So yea, it's ok to discharge it completely, at least in terms of safety.
> It does NOT matter if you let the battery remain in place when your notebook is plugged in.
Yes it does. The author's explanation (you can just as easily remove the battery and the laptop still works, so there's no electricity going through it) works the other way as well: if you unplug the cord, it immediately runs on battery.
What happens behind is that the battery is charged at a constant current, and when the required charge is reached, the circuitry behind it decouples it from mains. This far is right. However, the bad part is that now the battery will be kept at 100% charge level near a fairly good heat source (30-40 deg. Celsius) which facilitates the formation of non-conductive deposits in the electrolyte. The loss of charge due to this is fairly small in itself, but it increases the internal resistance of the battery, so it can supply less current under heavy load.
This is what makes batteries left inside when the laptop is plugged to AC 24 hours a day "drop dead" suddenly. They can technically hold enough charge, but their internal resistance has become so large that they can't supply the required current for more than 20-30 minutes, if at all. Quite a few charge carriers are most likely still there, but the conductivity of the electrolyte and the surface conductivity of the anode and cathode are now so low that most of them simply can't get out. It's just as if, in the famous experiment of powering a lightbulb from a potato, you would keep the potatoes in water long enough that the starch covers the electrodes. The electrolyte itself is ok, but charge can't move to the outer circuit at the required rate (i.e. giving up the required current). So there's still enough charge, but since what's left there can't power the laptop, the external circuitry (and consequently the operating system) sees it as discharged.
Ironically enough, if you unplug the battery while it's at 100% capacity, the effect isn't as bad, because the internal circuitry of the battery will intentionally discharge it slowly, so as to prevent the formation of these deposits. If left plugged in, the rate of discharge is effectively 0 for most batteries, and for those that do get discharged by the internal circuitry, the charge controller will immediately jump in and charge them back if it senses discharge.
Basically, the reason why the battery is affected has nothing to do with electricity still running through it. That's something people have figured out since the dawn of rechargeable batteries -- if you let them plugged in after full charge was reached and you're still passing current through it, they heat up because of their internal resistance and eventually kindda blow up. That's why most charge controllers also have a timer to shut off charging, in case charge "sensing" malfunctions (I hope this takes some of thuff's fears away...). The actual problem there is related to the battery not being allowed to discharge while kept at 100% charge level, and the fact that the laptop typically heats up doesn't really help. |
This is pretty awesome site. Let me throw in a tip as well from someone who formats their computer every few months.
When you format, install EVERYTHING you'd ever want (minus games and what not). So basically the essentials; word, utorrent, steam (no game), adobe flash (creative suite for me), firefox/chrome, codecs, bookmarks, plugins, fonts, ETC ETC. you get the idea.
Then get this program ACRONIS. I think they are on version 11 now. Anyways, make a FULL image backup of your computer. Dump that file on an external or another drive you have anddddddd boom. Any time you need to format your computer from it clogging up from spyware or what have you, just save the most important stuff, slap it on another drive then do a restore function on acronis. 10 minutes later your computer is back to how it was when you first formated and made that backup. It's great on new hard drives too that you want to use as the OS AND say you have xp and you restore to an image that has 7 on it, no problem! |
Whenever you get sick of installing/reinstalling your system, remember this site and save yourself a few years of your life.]( |
Thank you.
This is just legal stuff to cover their butts. Dropbox is a filesharing software. Depending on where you store stuff, those files are accessible to other people or even to the public. (There's a public folder.) When something is put in that folder, anyone can access it.
What I find funny is that some people are saying that they'll switch to other alternatives when (most of) those alternatives have the exact same provisions in their terms. Even Google has it. |
No. That's what the service does.
Dropbox copies your files from one computer to another. They need a copyright grant from you to do this. When you make folders and files available via a public link, they let you view videos and pictures and audio files in browser via a flash player. This requires a translation (derivative work) to accompolish.
It needs to be world wide because they offer the service everywhere. It needs to be sublicenable so they can contract with thirdparty datacenters. It needs to be nonexclusive so you retain the right to do these things. It needs to be royalty free, or YOU could ask them to pay you to provide the service for you (everytime they copy they'd have to pay you a fee).
Remember, you own the copyright for everything you create. Automatically. For anyone to do anything with it, you either sell/give them a license grant so they can do that, or you sell them an exclusive grant and then ONLY they can do it until the grant expires or you buy it back. |
I think I understand your point of view, and I'm happy with that interpretation of it. My issue isn't that they need some rights - it's that they have very broad rights and my only protection appears to be trust.
Here's an example. Let's say JK Rowling puts her next book onto dropbox to sync between computers. The day she finishes, dropbox could make it open to the world (right of display) in order to showcase their service.
I agree they aren't likely to. My point is that Ms Rowling would have no legal protection against that.
... when I sell a story, I try to read the contract and I then sign to accept the money for the rights given. Here, I thought I was only giving rights for them to move my stuff between my computers, but it looks like I'm giving them much broader rights and having to trust them. |
I did the exact same thing (Roku & Hulu+) and am very disappointed that only some of the shows, some of the time are available. In fact, I ditched Hulu+ altogether and have gone to [RSS]( + [Torrent]( + [Plex]( to get my TV fix. So far its working much better than Hulu+ ever did and its free. |
I went first thing to my local Walmart today. They had two 32gig TouchPads in stock marked @ 500$. I talked to the kid working electronics and he said that the price listed was what I was going to have to pay. I asked to see the store manager and brought the walmart website up on my phone. She began to tell me that the price on the net wasnt the price in the store because (and get this) they buy in volume for the website and get a better deal. I countered that the website and the store are fed from the same stock/warehouses/suppliers and that doesnt make sense that the price is different.
So then she changed her tune and said their maybe differences in the software/processor/whatever that made the price different. So I showed her the SKU and model # were the same. She said there was nothing that she could do and walked away.
I began searching for a customer service phone number for walmart and went back to the kid that helped me to (politely) ask for the store managers name and his name. He provided it and I went back to the tablet section and continued to look for a good number.
About 3 minutes later I had the store manager, asst manager, and the first kid arrive. I think "Oh great here we go". The store manager has print outs from the website and has the group of them looking over the box and comparing it to the print out. Luck would have it a 4th employee arrives and she knows all about the HP situation and the fire sale.
She grabs one of the hand scanner for inventory and scans the barcode. It comes up @ 500$, she fiddles with it (I assume probably a forced update) and rescans and voila its @ 149.00$
The manger apologies for the convenience and I proceed to buy my TouchPad. I was tempted to buy them both but decided against it, let someone else have the good fortune of my persistence. |
I consider myself skeptical of government "faith and credit"
Based on the historical precedent of the governments handling of money in pretty much every aspect of its existence. I find it illogical to be anything less than skeptical. |
If it's a third party cookie you really need then it's most likely already a first party cookie form a site you've already white listed. I only allow stuff from the domain I'm at. If I'm on some webpage that is trying to load a facebook cookie, I've already white listed that URL because I've already gone to facebook.com. You do this by selecting "Don't use 3rd party cookies" AND "ask me every time". |
Just going to add a note here: if anyone has any questions, you can ask me here or in email: adam <at> ghostery dot com
and, for transparency's sake:
Yes, Ghostery is owned by a for-profit privacy (NOT advertising) company. We make money by monitoring the internet with our volunteer panel that collects completely anonymous data about various page elements the extension "sees" as it wanders the interwebs. This option is off by default, though. We simply ask that our users turn it on if they support us, many opt-in, many don't.
You can actually download the extension and crack it open if you really want. It's read-only, but it's all there and we're always available to answer questions should you have any.
Also, I'd like to ask everyone here that does use Ghostery to please consider not blocking ads on Reddit if you're comfortable with that. I love this site and want to make sure they make lots of money and continue to keep making it better. You can whitelist the domain in the extension's options. |
Disconnect from Chrome is great. The Firefox one is buggy as hell because it was ported using automated software. |
There are so many things that are wrong with your comment that I'm not even gonna downvote it
likewise
> Since nobody published anything about the factories of any other electronics manufacturer, they're probably doing everything ok.
Its amazing what a very rudimentary internet search can throw up about this...
"primarily serves as a manufacturing site for Apple's iPads, iPhones, and iPods has claimed another life", "Foxconn reportedly has been making employees work increasingly long hours to satisfy the growing demand for the iPad, including unpaid overtime"
And a relatively good news one
"It took a string of suicides to spur it to action, but Apple is finally taking a big step towards trying to ensure that the workers who build its bestselling iPads, iPods, and iPhones enjoy a decent standard of living."
still, that's a fairly blatant admission of guilt, right there. but don't let that good news put you off..
"Foxconn just increased the compensation for their worker that killed himself as a result of possible beatings and interrogations over a lost iPhone"
Maybe foxconn are 100% to blame here.. but with such a bad track record, and apple so demanding in terms of meeting quotas and very high QA levels, why are apple using them and not a manufacturer with a better track record? |
Yes I get all that. That's my whole point. You can't use FoxConn labor costs to calculate the 217 hour figure because that isn't whats going on. The FoxConn labor is probably the cheapest labor in the entire pipeline. |
Not really. Considering inflation, computers basically cost a tenth of what they did not even 20 years ago. Apple sells some damned expensive computers, but there is an Apple product in the price range of just about anyone with money for a new computer. This is especially true if you consider the reality of computer ownership. I'm not going to claim that Macs are maintenance-free, since that's not at all true, but the problem is that most non-savvy users are going to re-buy their Windows PC at least once over its lifetime in tech support costs, whereas the Mac users are extremely unlikely to need as much help. This perhaps applies less to the non-computer products, such as phones, tablets, and music players, but their pricing is much more competitive in those areas anyway. |
Right, but the Android phone I write this comment on is rooted, flashed and running a different build of the operating system from the one is was sold with, all with the manufacturers' blessing. I've replaced parts of the OS I wanted to (camera app, dialler, soft keyboard, etc) and I can customised the way the phone looks and works to an astonishing degree.
It's running apps - hell, entire market applications - not officially blessed by the company that owned the OS, and even some that were downloaded straight off the web, solely at my discretion.
It's full of unrestricted audio and video files I bought or copied, and I can copy those files back off the device to another machine for my viewing pleasure if I so desire.
When people talk about the restricted, walled-garden approach of Apple they aren't talking about the iMac and earlier devices. They're talking about the iPod, iPad and iPhone, which together represent Apple's entire foray into mobile computing; the fastest-growing area of computing today, and is eventually almost certain to squeeze out traditional desktop computing into a minority of the market. |
technology is more about streamlining and seamlessly integrating systems into our lives by providing a product that almost serves as a second skin; the less one has to think about dealing with the product the more ubiquitous it is likely to become.
That's completely true - good technology acts as an intuitive and increasingly almost subconscious tool that we use without even thinking to enhance our lives.
It's also why such a lot of people get really itchy about the idea of these subliminal systems being overly restrictive.
Tools shape the thinking of the person who uses them, and while most people don't stretch the capabilities of their technology, they still benefit from the minority of others who do. If that minority is the (comparatively large) minority of a world-wide, decentralised, meritocratic ecosystem of geeks, tinkerers and hackers who can push the platform forward in any direction people want, everyone wins.
If that minority is a small group of powerful businessmen all working for a single company, who value profits, legal/patent liability and their own market position over the freedom their devices grant users, the only people who win are them (and increasingly, not even then).
There's a reason Android - even though it launched slow and ugly - quickly became first the geeks' favourite (and then hugely more functional than the iPhone), to the point it's now [busy burying iOS]( and has almost caught up on aesthetics. It's because geeks love openness and flexibility, geeks drive a platform forward, and that makes the platform better for everyone . The device is already flexible because it's open, then it's made powerful by geeks and tinkerers, and then all companies have to do is come along, round off the rough edges and slap a pretty, more idiot-proof UI on it. |
I think Apple distinguishes between computers and iAppliances; the former not walled gardens, the latter are. To be clear, as a hacker I don't like Apple doing that with iStuff, but the sort of mods you're talking about would – in the hands of someone less skilled, perhaps – lead to a lot of crashing.
(iTunes downloads can now be copied, and certainly the Macbook Air is pretty mobile, fwiw. )
If anything Apple computers are less restrictive than they once were; you can run other operating systems on them. They control hardware, which is a negative, but it does result in fewer conflicts and crashes than the plethora of windows machines offer. |
I think Apple distinguishes between computers and iAppliances
I think that's true, but I also think it's a largely self-serving, false differentiation they're making - an iPhone is a computer, just as is an iPad; they're just lobotomised and locked down.
I can certainly see the conceptual difference between selling a "general purpose" computer and selling an "appliance" - I just think that it's an artificial distinction that merely gives names to the different devices (open/free and locked-down/walled-garden) without actually affecting the value judgements I drew about each one at all.
To use an intentionally hyperbolic example (going for humour, not straw-manning you ;-), it's like saying "oh no, these people aren't slaves - they're iPeople . People are free and have self-determination, but iPeople are owned and traded like property, have no rights and don't get the vote".
I agree there's a distinction being made there, and I also agree you can give names to the two types of "thing" we're differentiating between, and I agree the guy selling them might intend they're used for very different things - I just dispute that the distinction is valid or meaningful, or that it in any way excuses the way one half of it is treated.
> the sort of mods you're talking about would – in the hands of someone less skilled, perhaps – lead to a lot of crashing.
Here's the thing - Android phones are selling like hot-cakes, and inexplicably people aren't bricking them or returning them to the shops en-masse because they've broken them.
Most normal users aren't even really aware they can root or flash their device, let alone brave or inquisitive enough to actually do it, so the risks associated with doing it are a bit of a lame argument against allowing it. Likewise, I have yet to meet anyone who's savvy enough able to install a replacement dialler who isn't also savvy enough to work out how to remove it in short order if they don't like it.
> iTunes downloads can now be copied
What, from the iPhone/iPod up to another computer? Fair play if so - that's news to me.
> and certainly the Macbook Air is pretty mobile, fwiw.
Actually the MacBook air is a laptop or "netbook", and we've had those for years - people are familiar with them, and they're conceptually lumped in with laptops and desktop machines because people are used to them and have certain expectations regarding their functionality and freedom.
"Mobile computing" is a whole other class of device - phones, tablets, wearable computers, etc - and people have much lesson the way of expectations, so Apple (and other manufacturers) have been much more free to indulge in their natural anticompetitive or authoritarian instincts.
Don't get me wrong - almost all companies have these instincts, and it's a rare company or product which is entirely free of them (even Google has its proprietary apps on Android, and many carriers subsequently added layers of lock-outs and walls to various Android devices they offered).
You're certainly right that some of the tendency towards draconian restrictions comes from a desire to keep quality high, and/or offer the best user-experience to the end user. The thing is, plenty (most?) of it also comes from a desire to lock out competitors, retain absolute control over their platform, and preserve their market share, even at the expense of the user-experience.
You can't claim that some of the more capricious or self-serving of Apple's app store approvals decisions have been anything other than self-serving, and you can't claim that locking out functional apps that compete with (and in many ways improve upon) Apple's own is to improve the user experience.
Likewise, Jobs' famous dictum that porn is banned from Apple devices has nothing to do with improving the user-experience (plenty of people want access to porn, and they could just add parental controls to iOS), and everything to do with enforcing Apple's puritan take on what their platform "should" look like, regardless of what users actually want. |
I can certainly see the conceptual difference between selling a "general purpose" computer and selling an "appliance" - I just think that it's an artificial distinction that merely gives names to the different devices (open/free and locked-down/walled-garden) without actually affecting the value judgements I drew about each one at all.
That it doesn't affect your value judgements doesn't mean it's an artificial distinction, except inasmuch as all distinctions are arbitrary. (Sex and gender, to pick two examples not quite at random.) Some distinctions are arbitrary and harmful. (I can't think of anything good that has come out of dividing humanity into races, and it is demonstrably an arbitrary distinction. Darwin pointed out there were two, three, four, five, eleven, sixteen, twenty-two, or sixty-three races according to the current experts.) Some are arbitrary and useful (high school teacher, grades).
Would you agree that having some computer appliances (remote controls, cars, ATMs) that can't be programmed makes sense, or would you like everything to be open? (I can see someone coming up with an improvement on my car's computer programming to change the efficiency/performance ratio in what I think is a useful way, and wanting to upload that. I can see also reasons why Toyota might not want that to happen.
>I have yet to meet anyone who's savvy enough able to install a replacement dialler who isn't also savvy enough to work out how to remove it in short order if they don't like it.
I don't have any experience with that, for sure, but I have never encountered any field in which people haven't screwed things up and needed help solving problems, and I've worked tech support for Mac labs. YMMV.
>Actually the MacBook air is a laptop or "netbook", ..."Mobile computing" is a whole other class of device
Woah! You argue that computer/ appliance is an arbitrary distinction, but netbook / mobile is a real distinction? It's equally arbitrary, and in the next decade we'll get stuff that overlaps and causes us to find new distinctions, equally arbitrary, but now more useful.
>You can't claim that some of the more capricious or self-serving of Apple's app store approvals decisions have been anything other than self-serving, and you can't claim that locking out functional apps that compete with (and in many ways improve upon) Apple's own is to improve the user experience.
>Likewise, Jobs' famous dictum that porn is banned from Apple devices has nothing to do with improving the user-experience (plenty of people want access to porn, and they could just add parental controls to iOS), and everything to do with enforcing Apple's puritan take on what their platform "should" look like, regardless of what users actually want.
You are completely right. I don't claim either of those, and I was and am deeply opposed to Apple's puritanical rules, which has resulted in many gay-friendly apps being refused as porn. That's wrong, and inevitable from trying to control individual choice, in a useless way that any web-browser circumvents anyway.
Apple hasn't been completely arbitrary about locking out competing apps: I use iCab, a browser far superior to Safari (IMHO), on the iPad. In some cases, sure looks to be as you say. |
A low or non-existent atmosphere would render most of a nuclear warheads normal means of damage impotent, for small ones anyway. We would more likely see much larger nukes in space where the radiation alone is relied upon to kill or disable enemy personnel as effective shielding would be too heavy and difficult to move around.
Some people might think that the EMP of a nuke would be effective but it turns out not to be the case, the EMP produced by a nuclear weapon is formed in large part by the weapons interaction with earths ionosphere which is the reason why high altitude and orbital nuclear tests are banned, no ionosphere no EMP however.
[Nuclear explosion effects](
I doubt a future force would bother slowing down a conventional aircraft and might just take advantage of the mach 1+ inertia to do damage, even today aircraft are pretty much superseded by satellites, which would be trivial to deploy as you would already have access to space, and to be honest, cruise missiles are pretty much the answer to all wars now, carriers and tanks are just toys.
As far as weapons in space though, the only one used so far to my knowledge is the 23mm Nudelmann mounted on the Soviet Salyut 3.
[Salyut 3 gun](
Projectile guns like this avoid having to deal with massive energy supplies to power lasers, don't generate too much heat that needs to be removed from a space ship, and should easily tear an enemy craft apart at extreme ranges, remember there would be no atmosphere to slow the bullets down.
We'd also be good at hitting with projectile guns, we can send probes to the outer planets so shooting someone in the same orbit as you would be easy.
Getting into the same orbit as your target though, that would be hard, you'd need a lot of stealth technology I expect just to get near. |
This looks like a time of flight depth camera. They are much better for up close experiences like those displayed here. Microsoft owns the two pioneers of this technology, Canesta and 3DV, but does not use their technology in Kinect. They also own their patents. Have fun getting a licensing deal, Leap. (Look up Canesta on YouTube to see Microsoft's nearly identical technology.)
Kinect is a structured light depth camera from PrimeSense. It allows for the long range and wide angles Kinect needs to do full body tracking, which this technology simply isn't capable of yet. Kinect's would also be useless without Microsoft's crazy complicated human skeletal tracking software. |
Last night I had a dream that I was shooting holes in the hull of my yacht because it was on fire. |
Lots of interesting information in reddits FAQ session:](
>How is a submission's score determined?
>
>A submission's score is simply the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes. If five users like the submission and three users don't it will have a score of 2. Please note that the vote numbers are not "real" numbers, they have been "fuzzed" to prevent spam bots etc. So taking the above example, if five users upvoted the submission, and three users downvote it, the upvote/downvote numbers may say 23 upvotes and 21 downvotes, or 12 upvotes, and 10 downvotes. The points score is correct, but the vote totals are "fuzzed". |
When I designed storage clusters, it was apparent that both SATA and SAS were faster than any individual hard disk, and so the increased interconnect speed of SAS was of no utility, as IO bandwidth was limited by device performance. You might be able to get slightly faster cached reads over SAS, but this is of little to no use on storage clusters, as writes are cached in NVRAM on the RAID controller, and reads are cached by the OS.
Disk arrays were attached to storage servers by CX4 connections, and the storage servers were attached to application servers by iSCSI, which we replaced with ATAoE because iSCSI has much higher cpu overhead, and pretty much offers nothing of value.
Engineering data seems to imply equivalent or better reliability for SATA drives than SAS drives, so the conventional wisdom is bullshit. Rather than pouring your money down the toilet on SAS drives, it is much better to put that money towards more system RAM or a RAID controller with larger and faster NVRAM. The thing is it's not "this and that" it's "this or that", so regardless of the size of a cluster, it's never going to be economic to buy SAS drives, because you could always use that budget to buy more RAM, more servers, or a faster frontend network (Infiniband, 10GbE, FC, Myri10g etc). |
Does not matter.
[FRE 606(b)](
It also does not matter that they ignored a jury instruction. *See above, c.f. [Jury Nullification]( |
Now why would they do this now, rather than with the iPad 3 back in march? If they had intended to do so they could have stopped the move to 4g LTE and left Apple hanging high and dry. |
I traveled all over Taiwan for around 3 months, with my girlfriend who is Taiwanese. I was able to see outside the touristy parts, and i was really amazed at what i saw. Besides feeling safe everywhere i went, everything was beautiful and pretty freaking clean. Yeah i saw garbage dumped off the side of cliffs in the country side, but the locals take great pride of their turf and clean it up themselves. In the major cities, everything was clean and well kept.
Calling Taiwan a 3rd world country is a bit far fetched, considering the strides they made in the last 2 decades. A lot of things that you see there might not be the same as here in the USA, but its just their style/culture. Considering at the time of my visit, i was attending school in Michigan, i felt like i was going from a 3rd world nation to a 1st. |
Remember when, just within the last month or so, Apple used their patents to block sales of HTC's latest phones and win a $1 billion jury award against Samsung? Well, it looks as if Samsung and HTC are fighting back, using their patents to block sales of the new iPhone 5.
I have extensive experience with the patent system, both as a lead inventor on an issued patent and a coinventor on several other applications, as well as a consultant to companies for IP landscaping. My experience leads me to conclude that the US patent system is in a horrible state.
Although the patent system was originally intended to protect innovators and spur innovation, just the opposite has happened. The total cost to file a "simple" patent is usually at least $10,000, but often much more. The USPTO filing fees are a tiny part of this cost. The rest are attorneys' fees.
The USPTO is not authorized to judge the worth of a patent, nor can it settle disputes. In the case of disputes, both sides have to resort to the courts. Patent cases are highly unpredictable, and the attorneys fees can run in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. On top of that cost, penalties can range in the millions to billions.
Because of the high degree of uncertainty and cost associated with patent cases, many individuals or smaller companies simply refuse to fight a patent case against a larger, more moneyed opponent, even when their case is strong.
Furthermore, many companies have to practice "defensive research" for fear of being accused of violating a patent. Part of the problem is the concept of a patent's "presumption of validity," which in essence says "If the USPTO awarded it, it's valid, no matter how stupid or obvious the claims are to someone of 'ordinary skill in the art.'"
When people were patenting cotton gins and steam engines, the USPTO examiners could be expected to stay current on most technology fields and staff their offices with experts. However, in todays world, with topics ranging from electronics, drugs, biotechnology, and nanomaterials, there is no way the USPTO can be expected to be experts in everything.
In this arena, the attorneys always win, regardless of their clients' outcome, and ultimately, consumers pay the higher costs. |
They're not "lifted out of crippling poverty from globalization" if they continue to reproduce at rates that keep their median incomes down. Yes, this does not apply to China which very wisely instituted laws/policies against large families decades ago. But in countries like India and Indonesia where births go completely unchecked, adding monies to their economies doesn't help because it encourages families to have more kids to work in those new factories to send money home. So their per capita incomes never rise. |
Wrong, wrong, and you better hope you are wrong.
Exclusive rights of copyright under §§101-106 et seq attach upon creation, however, exercising copyright claims via filing suit requires registration. Registration within three months of creation publication entitles a copyright holder to enhanced statutory damages. Please read 17 U.S.C. § 411(a):
>Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the author under section 106A (a), and subject to the provisions of subsection (b), [1] no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title.
Without registration within three months, she is not entitled to statutory damages: § 412:
> no award of statutory damages or of attorney’s fees, as provided by sections 504 and 505, shall be made for—
(1) any infringement of copyright in an unpublished work commenced before the effective date of its registration; or
(2) any infringement of copyright commenced after first publication of the work and before the effective date of its registration, unless such registration is made within three months after the first publication of the work.
Calculating Profits as part of damages as the Post indicated she is seeking requires proving actual profits attributable to the use of the photo: § 504:
>(b) Actual Damages and Profits.— The copyright owner is entitled to recover the actual damages suffered by him or her as a result of the infringement, and any profits of the infringer that are attributable to the infringement and are not taken into account in computing the actual damages. In establishing the infringer’s profits, the copyright owner is required to present proof only of the infringer’s gross revenue, and the infringer is required to prove his or her deductible expenses and the elements of profit attributable to factors other than the copyrighted work. |
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