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It is cheaper to give animals antibiotics as a preventative measure then to try to treat an infection that could quickly spread not to mention losing that infected animal.
Which is why people have a goddamn problem with it! It might be cheaper right now, but for that cheap price we are paying by creating strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria simply so we can pack our cows a little more tightly. |
I think it's hilarious that you are calling it a shitty business model only when small companies are the ones "skimming". Apparently when apple (or say, amazon, another quite successful ebook vendor) skims the same amount, giving the authors and the consumers the same price as before, it is somehow miraculously a legitimate business model. |
Saying 'fuck you, apple' is how we eventually convince people to stop supporting them and demand changes. After a decade of people saying 'fuck you M$', they finally got hit with an anti-trust investigation. This is what we want for Apple, and agitating is part of the process. It's the great big middle finger on the invisible hand of the free market. |
Ahh, but as a small company, sometimes you have to focus on a single platform to start things off (cost, staffing, etc.), and someone who chose Apple as that single platform like iFlowReader gets screwed because Apple changed the rules in this manner.
Yes, Apple has the right to change the rules. It is possible Apple may be circumventing some anti-trust issues because it is their platform... but I would not be surprised if there is a case there - hell, if Netscape was able to hit Microsoft because MS had IE packaged with Windows, I feel this is a similar kind of issue (IANAL). |
There's a difference though, in the sense that a website works for all platforms already. You build one site for Google, sure it sucks they changed and you drop down a couple pages but at least everything you did is still worth something.
Not really the case when all the apps and things they put money into are very platform specific. Not to mention that Apple did this to ensure they profit more, whereas Google would change to ensure better (more relevant search results). |
What's the perceived value in having multiple vendors if they're all selling the same product for the same price bearing in mind that
The content owner/publisher is one of those vendors
The pricing was determined by the publisher
The purchase and delivery of the product was effectively identical across all vendors?
I'm with Mantipath. Apple did what Apple have always tried to do - create the most compelling path possible between content and consumer. They're entirely within their rights to manage the ecosystem they created, fund, manage and develop as they see fit.
As a developer for or consumer of Apple products you either subscribe to Apple's way of doing things or you go elsewhere. The problem is, I suspect, that elsewhere isn't even close to being as profitable as Apple's ecosystems so the advice to move to Android is effectively "Invest the money to port to a platform which generates a fraction of the income". I don't think that's likely, and I suspect that this realization is a significant driver for BeamItDown's wailing and gnashing of teeth thinly disguised as moral outrage (at Apples behavior).
I don't see that BeamItDown nor anyone else has the right to profit from the ecosystems Apple have built. You have the opportunity and that's quite something, but not the right. In this case the opportunity BeamItDown saw was short-lived. Surely that's the nature of business, you exploit an opportunity and when it's gone, move on to the next. If you're lucky, the opportunity turns into something more e.g. a stable market. If you're not lucky (i.e. most of the time), you need to move onto the next opportunity... |
Here's the thing I don't understand aboit Bitcoin: Where's the work?
If a business sells something I want that costs $10, I can in theory work for the business for one hour (assuming that's what my work is worth) to acquire the item. Or, I can work for another company for an hour, they give me a piece of paper with Alexander Hamilton's picture on it that proves I have worked an hour somewhere. I can then give that to the business owner, who can go to another business and use what was once my work that I traded to him to get something else.
Bitcoins are all made the same way, and aren't really based on work. Our economy grows because we put more workers into the workforce and /or work harder to increase value and productivity. Bitcoins are artificially controlled through a method that does not in any way relate to the labor required to produce them. They may be based on the work computers are doing for us, but we don't really know what that work is, and apparently it can be throttled in proportion to what someone decides that work should be worth. So it's like there's a "superfed" overseeing the currency, with even less transparency than the US Dollar, and that's saying something! |
Population density is not an issue
The article said no such thing:
>Meanwhile, the size of the U.S. may be a red herring. Most of the region between Boston and Washington is as densely populated as most of Europe and the UK. So is the California coast between San Francisco and San Diego. And so is the region of the Midwest centered on Chicago. Those areas are home to about a quarter of all Americans. In other words, we live in a big country, but a lot of it is relatively empty space.
So only a quarter of the US population is serviced by the same overall density of europe. The telcos still need to pay to link these pockets of population together. So population density is a big issue.
Furthermore, other countries with high density have the highest speed and cheapest costs, by far.
Canada and Australia both have data caps, and both have low population density.
For example, the study notes:
>Australia is one of just four OECD countries where all advertised plans were capped. Further, the average cap among the surveyed offers was around half that of Canada. Once the cap was reached, the average rice per additional Mbps was the highest in the OECD.
This is despite:
> Telstra NextG reaches 99% of the population, Optus 96%, and Vodafone, which recently merged its 3G operations with Hutchison, 94%, though these networks reach far smaller percentages of Australia’s land-mass.
which is essentially the argument raised in the article, "In other words, we live in a big country, but a lot of it is relatively empty space." (99% of Australia's population lives in a far smaller percentage of Australia's land mass) |
The main thing this piece needs - both OP's headline and the Inquirer piece - is a little thing called "journalism".
OK, so Zuckerberg has closed off his G+ account (closed or, more likely, switched to private).
I've followed the links down through the complete daisy chain, and nowhere can I find a quote from Zuckerberg or any substantive indication as to why he has chosen to go dark.
The Inquirer headline "Zuckerberg closes off Google+ account so he can't be tracked" could be read in two ways. Either:
"Zuckerberg closes off Google+ account in order to ensure he can't be tracked ", or;
"Zuckerberg closes off Google+ account. So now he can't be tracked "
Big difference. We're left to decide for ourselves, based on our own perception and biases, which version we prefer. It's artful headline writing but shoddy journalism. Borderline speculation.
OP's submission title, meanwhile, adds the scare quotes and subtly shifts our perception even further by using "doesn't want to be" instead of "can't be". We've no evidence to suggest this was Zuckerberg's motivation in closing off his account.
It seems like a reasonable assumption, perhaps - he's an incredibly wealthy man, I can think of several million reasons why he'd value a little privacy - but it's still speculation.
I'm not defending Zuckerberg for a second, btw. There are volumes of evidence clearly indicating that the man is a serpent-tongued tool who couldn't give a shivering fuck about user privacy.
But it would be nice to see a little less sensationalist speculation and rather more objective linking around here. |
Old way, store locally, backup remotely. New way, store remotely, backup locally. Not that complicated.
I have a $50/year Google Apps account with an extra 80GB's of [Google Docs storage]( for another $20/year. So my cost is $70/year for email, documents, file storage, calendars, tasks, bookmarks, and so on. I also use Google Voice, but I kept my own number.
I use Thunderbird (free) to store a local copy of all my email on my computer. If I have an important document and I want to immediately backup, I email to myself and Thunderbird will automatically download a copy to my computer.
About every couple of weeks I download all my Google Docs. I keep them all in a folder(s) and right click to download the folder. It zips all the files before it downloads them, but it gives you an option to send you an email letting you know the zip file is ready to download. It's convenient because it adds a date for the zip file which makes it easy to archive on your computer.
I also download my calendars, contacts, bookmarks and other stuff in my Google Docs account as well and keep a copy of that.
I delete old copies on my hard drive after awhile, it's not like I don't have everything already stored in the cloud. I don't bother to back them up to disc because it's already my backup. So I don't waste money or time using discs or other media to make more backups. |
Fuck you. He has every right to be pissed off.
Also, |
Just chiming in...
The costs of production whatever they may be are irrelevant in valuation.
Basically the product creator charges what the market will bear. If that price is higher than the entire system cost it's a profitable exchance. The entire system cost is the 'big picture' cost. It might include production, licensing, distribution, sales, misc overhead, blowjobs for senators, whatever. |
One of the great things I love about Android is the huge variety of phones. With Apple, you are limited to a new device every year or so and now have a total of what, 5 options if you want iOS?
I think this deserves a little focus and appreciation. A "gadget guy" will look at the platforms and see closed and isolated versus wide open, whereas a "lay person" will look at and see near-instant phone depreciation and a scary number of choices. I think this is where Apple has succeeded. The product they offer is a good example of why physical specs don't matter too much as long as satisfy the 80/20 rule.
It's a long business rule to offer somebody three choices for a solid sale. The Halo, the middle-row, and the economy. Apple has followed that philosophy for recent history and has been very successful with it. You don't mind buying an apple product because the process is so simple. I want a phone: Okay, here's last years budget model, this years budget model, or this years larger capacity models. I want a tablet for a lot of travel: three options available, or for home: three options available. I want a laptop: two models, two or three sizes each. Desktop? Three models available (but really... who buys Mac Pros anymore?) Mobile music? Three options.
Lets get off apple. I want an Android: Three options available that were released today. Another three tomorrow. And again. and again. Every day manufacturers are one-upping or under-selling each other. It's great for prices for consumers that don't care about bells and whistles, but its impossible to navigate for most people. Android Tablet? Most people's mothers/grandmothers wouldn't know how to navigate the plethora of choices. |
I appreciate your utter capitulation, not just the embarrassingly juvenile manner in which you did it. |
Wrong. The CMO of T-Mobile has publicly came out and said that [device subsidies are the one thing he would fix in the industry if he could](
First of all, as the CMO says, subsidies distort the real price of the hardware, and lead to a throwaway culture. If everyone knew that their phone actually costs $700, they may decide to keep it for longer than 2 years. Instead, most of us just throw our phones away. Now, it's easy to say "Well, we should be upgrading every two years anyway, because that's how technology works".
I disagree. The only reason why technology is moving so fast today is because of how new the smartphone market is. In a couple years we'll see mobile chip development begin to match how desktop chips are developed today. Then it won't be so out-of-the-ordinary for a cell phone to, technologically speaking, baring any environmental disasters, last 3-4 years. But even then, no one would keep them for that long, because they can get a brand new one for super-cheap after 20 months, thanks to subsidies.
Subsidies also do a huge number to competition in the mobile space. Let me give you a hypothetical example. Samsung releases a brand new phone (Phone S) to the market. They've put a lot of R&D into driving the cost of the device down; when they give it to the carriers, Phone S costs $500 unsubsidized. Apple releases the new iPhone to the carriers at the same time; they didn't try to drive the cost down, so it costs the full $700 unsubsidized.
The carriers get their paws on both of these phones, and subsidize them both down to $200. What does this mean? Well it means the carriers get to offer a -$300 subsidy on the Samsung phone, and a -$500 subsidy on the iPhone. All of the other costs, like the monthly fees, are the same for both of these, but the Samsung is costing carriers less.
Let's take this out of the hypothetical. Verizon Wireless.
Samsung Illusion: $329 base price - $0 subsidized price = $329 subsidy .
Galaxy Nexus: $650 base price - $300 subsidized price = $350 subsidy .
LG Spectrum: $589 base price - $200 subsidized price = $389 subsidy .
Droid Razr: $600 base price - $200 subsidized price = $400 subsidy .
iPhone 4: $550 base price - $100 subsidized price = $450 subsidy .
iPhone 4S: $650 base price - $200 subsidized price = $450 subsidy .
iPhones have the largest subsidies of any device on Verizon. A couple Android phones match it, but none exceed it. This leads to a couple of things.
Firstly, carriers will always prefer cheaper devices. In other markets, resellers would be allowed to pass the full cost of the device on to the customer; the price of the device should be more-or-less irrelevant to the reseller. But in the cell-phone world, carriers prefer cheaper devices because they can give them smaller subsidies. Obviously this has a huge negative effect on competition, because carriers may choose not to carry super high-end devices (like the iPhone).
Secondly, it sort-of throws the middle finger to hardware companies who actually put a lot of effort into reducing the cost of their smartphones. Competition is all about driving down costs; who can make the device for the cheapest? But with subsidies, the real cost of the device is distorted to match other devices which may-or-may-not actually cost more. Companies then have less incentive to drive down the prices of high-end cell phones; this not only hurts primary market consumers, like us, due to high prices, but it primarily hurts secondary-market consumers, like Asia, who may not be able to afford the huge cost of a $600 phone.
From the viewpoint of the consumer, it's also a horribly bad thing. In fact, it's one of the most egregious attacks on the consumer I can imagine, if you consider the full extent of the damage.
The most important thing to remember when shopping for cell phones is that subsidies do not save you money . You're paying the full price of that $650 smart phone over the course of two years, due to increased prices for cell phone plans.
Not only do they not save you money, but they lock you into a contract. You have to pay ridiculous fees to get out of it. Just think about this for a second: The only reason why you have to sign a contract with a cell phone company is so you can pay the same price for a device as you would without the contract, assuming they would price their plans accordingly (which they don't).
That's just it; they don't price their plans accordingly. So if you already have a cell phone you want to bring to the carrier, or you want to pay the full price, you have the pay the same monthly price as everyone else. Again, think about this: Everyone else is paying an extra $10 - $15 per month on their bills to pay off that cell phone that was subsidized. You shouldn't have to pay that, because you didn't get the subsidy; yet, here you are, paying it.
Finally, cell phone companies love to use subsidies as a way to offset the cost of network upgrades. The first 4G smartphone that was released on Verizon, the Thunderbolt, was $250 subsidized. That's $50 more than the most expensive non-4G phone at that time. Yet, if you looked at the unsubsidized prices, it didn't cost any more. Verizon charged more for the Thunderbolt because it was accessing their 4G network, and they needed to help offset the cost of deployment. It sounds perfectly ok, until you (AGAIN) think about it for a minute: Why should any cost for the network be integrated into the cost of the hardware? These are two separate things. Network costs should be integrated into the monthly bill for accessing it. |
While it may not seem like it, you and I are in agreement.
I did state that I expect full disclosure. However, I don't expect it from the current gov't. Therefore, I have lost all respect for it. It was more of a general sense of the sentiment.
This gov't is broken and must be fixed if there is any hope of survival for it. Sadly, I don't think it will happen. That's why I feel a grassroots movement is needed to make things right.
I feel it's on its way.
Any gov't funded by its citizens, must be at their mercy. The People have forgotten this and this current gov't knows it. It's taken full advantage of that.
Anyway, I'm rambling. |
Anyone wanna read it and |
Its simple, unless you are paying (or paying the most for something) you are not the customer, you are the product. How many times Firefly or Community fanboys watch reruns is irrelevent in and of itself since you pay nothing. What IS relevant is how much advertising companies are willing to pay for each person who views a show. And time and again it has been shown that advertisers are only willing to pay pennies on the dollar for internet viewing compared to TV and ESPECIALLY compared to DVD sales. Your Hulu+ subscriber fee is a nice little bonus for the companies, rather than any substantial income
So, until advertisers change their mind and DVD sales arent so insanely profitable, it is in the networks' best interest to try and funnel as many people away from Hulu as possible. Hulu still exists though to catch any stragglers who still insist on watching it online anyway. |
OK, I just want to jump in here and explain to everyone what sports blackouts are and why they happen. I am typing this from what I recall so please feel free to look it up.
Back in the mid to late '80s when cable TV had started to become popular certain cable sports channels struck deals with MLB. Recall HSE (Home Sports Entertainment.) They would broadcast all home games but leave the Sunday games for the local broadcasts. The reason behind this was to pump up ticket sales. If your local team was home you either had to subscribe to the premium service (HSE) which MLB got a cut or buy a ticket.
Then they started to blackout home games that did not hit a certain capacity. MLB wants you to go to the games rather than just watch it on TV.
Now as far as MLB.com is concerned your local team most likely has a deal with FSN (Fox Sports Net) to broadcast their games. Except the Cubs who are covered by WGN and to a lesser extent the Braves (TBS.) and Jesus Christ does ESPN broadcast a lot of Yankees games. Schedules are divided up even before the season begins. If any part of that schedule steps on the toes of any larger market broadcast it will be blacked out. That is why there are times that if your team is playing on ESPN Saturday Night Baseball it will be blacked out on FSN or more likely because they had set it up ahead of time they will just run some other shitty programming. |
Time Warner's doing it wrong.
I cancelled TV service a year ago or so, after deciding that Hulu Plus and Netflix served my needs well enough. So I cancelled my TV package, gave back the HD DVR, and kept RoadRunner which cost $57.95/mo alone.
Two weeks ago, TWC dude knocks on my door, offers a special deal. I get HD cable back, an HD DVR, and keep my RoadRunner, for a TOTAL of $57.25/mo. For two years, no contract. After grilling him a bit, since this seemed to make no sense, I found that his story checked out.
As I was signing up, he allowed that "yeah, Time Warner is trying to kill off Netflix and Hulu."
So their master plan is to give me HDTV service, a DVR, and approximately 70 cents each month for two years. I am paying less now for TV + DVR + internet than I was for just internet.
This is how a Bond villain would kill Hulu and Netflix. |
What i mean is that a retailer will often offer a "we'll match any better price!" deal, and require that they are the exact same model number to confirm. But then they'll slightly alter the model number in their registry, so it's "1234 TD-5" instead of "1234T D5", or they'll add a letter or remove one or something. So when you come to them with the exact same product, they'll compare it and say "nope, sorry, it's a different series" or something similar.
This Australian chain apparently went further, and blamed it on exclusivity, which i don't think most stores would do for a totally normal non-exclusive product, regardless of model number tampering. |
Assuming the only thing the data does is make advertisements relevant to people's interests, I am wholeheartedly against DNT being default.
People are under the mistaken impression that this is going to stop advertisements. It is going to have no effect on how many advertisements you see. What it IS going to do, however, is make you see advertisements that you do not want to see MUCH more often and you will have far less exposure to products and services you would benefit from or enjoy.
Advertisements always get a bad rap as being evil, but the reason they exist is because they work, both for the consumer and the companies that use them. It is a good thing for both sides, whether you believe so or not.
Generally speaking, the majority of the population does not hear about a product or service without advertising. The occasional media/celebrity mention being the exception, but in reality those are just advertisements as well(Not saying that these situations are companies paying the people to say it. I am saying they have the same effect as advertisement, they are just unsolicited).
Sure, you may have heard about some awesome obscure product from a friend or a guy on a forum, instead of from an advertisement, but that is the exception not the rule. The vast majority of people will not see that same thing you saw or heard from a "private" source.
In case anyone thinks I am in advertisement or some nonsense, I quit Sprint Technical Support because they made me try and sell things to people when they called in. I believe in advertisement, but they have a place. Just like pop-up advertisements, the only thing trying to advertise a product or service on a tech support call does, is piss your customers off. |
wait until ad companys hear that we can block all their servers with a customized HOSTS file[1]
Wait until they hear? Hosts file blocking has been around longer than you I am guessing. And advertisers have known about it the entire time .
Not only that, but hosts file blocking is a bad idea. It fills up the DNS cache with a bunch of crap that windows has to load on startup (this slows down boot times). It also is a maintenance nightmare because you have to update it manually. Thirdly it is only loaded on logon. Fourth, if an advertising company references a server by IP address instead of DNS name, the hosts file moot because your computer does not need to perform DNS resolution and will just connect to the advertiser's server anyway . |
I agree with the last point, but I do not think it is a coincidence that post WWI psychological problems related to warfare became an immense problem. just because humanity can invent supreme weapons does not mean we are psychologically or physically equipped to deal with the fallout. Again WWI illustrates this excellently with ubiquitous use of the machine gun leading to massive slaughter because of archaic tactics. Also, products born of human intelligence being natural is a semantically driven argument. I don't think anyone looks at skyscrapers for their majestic "natural beauty". And Ants organizing =/= Napalm, NBC weapons, recoil-less rifles, nearly unlimited supplies of bombs ect. ect. |
Assuming there was such a thing as ubiquitous Wi-Fi .... then I think the obvious answer is "Yes" (why the fuck would you pay for Cellular if you had ubiquitous Wi-Fi ?)
Course... ubiquitous Wi-Fi is probably still a long way off (technologically I think we can do it now... but the logistics, politics and coordination it would take is a whole nother story. ) |
Apple's claim is that Samsung is making phones that directly imitate iPhone to confuse buyers. People that are not geeks don't know anything about operating systems, appstores and etc. They want an iphone because they saw an ad or one of their friends have one and they liked it or for any other reason they want to buy an iPhone. When they see very similar device that mimics all the functionality and look of the iPhone and it is little bit cheaper they go and buy it thinking it is an iPhone because for many people iPhone is not a device made by Apple, but it is a phone category, something like smartphone = iPhone.
These phones on the list can't be confused with an iPhone though individually they have some functions/aspects that are similar to these in iPhone. |
Apple won anything because they filed silly design patents on everything they did. They also convinced the patent examiners, who have their souls sucked out by crawlies from the dungeon dimension and are now walking husks with luminous worms writhing in their eyes, that their patents should be granted regardless of any obviousness or prior art (Apple is using a class 5 reality distortion glamour).
In patent law, which was invented by horrors from the deep, it's much harder to invalidate a patent than any other defense. Ordinarily you'd go after "but I didn't violate the patent because of claim XYZ which we don't do.". But in this case the patents are so bleedingly obvious that there's hardly any claims involved. Ordinarily you couldn't get that stuff patented. But remember, Apple is using a class 5 reality distortion glamour. |
Oh, you mean the five whopping posts on varying subreddits
in the last few days? If you search for Dennis Ritchie and
sort the posts relevance as "new" you'll see that the seventh post is a
month old, the twelfth is seven months old. Whereas if you search Steve
Jobs it takes six full pages to find a post regarding him that wasn't within the past seven days. |
Incorrect. Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died with a couple of days. The media attention to Steve Jobs's death was overwhelming while there wasn't even a peep in the media about Dennis Ritchie. This brought about a stark contrast to what people value today. One was a great businessman and the other guy was a great computer scientist. People involved in computer engineering/science were able to see Dennis Ritchie's influence everywhere in the world of computers, but others did not. If you erased Steve Jobs from history there would probably be zero(or close to zero) impact on the world of computer science/engineering. You cannot say the same about Dennis Ritchie. The contrasting media coverages of their death left a mark on all of us in computer engineering/science, a reminder of what people consider as influential and valuable. If Dennis Ritchie had died a year later or before Jobs we wouldn't have been making any sort of comparison. |
In fact probably easier without a microscope. Just look at some of the |
I like how people think Stargate is scifi. It's just the wormhole xtreme of our world, creates deniability if a leak happens.
I mean come on, they had someone from the Air Force on site as an adviser, for a scifi show on basic cable.
Also:
>The show’s producers maintained a close working relationship with the US Air Force. Two Air Force Chiefs of Staff, Generals Michael Ryan and John Jumper (right) made cameos on the show. In 2004, Richard Dean Anderson received a special award by the Air Force rarely given to civilians in order to thank him and the other people behind Stargate SG-1 for their very positive portrayal of that organization. Anderson was declared an honorary Air Force brigadier general. |
did they use any actual military equipment to save money building set pieces/props/vehicles themselves? if so,there would have been coordination with military personnel to ensure positive portrayal of the military in exchange for the loaned equipment. this would also explain the aforementioned award. |
My feedback(and what would keep me from buying it):
It can't dive. I want my water toy to be able to dive and snoop around underwater.
Put in a flood chamber and small pump to purge flood water. IDK. I could maybe engineer something but this is napkin-work/brainstorming. |
So.. I hate DRM in all it's forms, but particularly with Blu-ray encoding. I bought a new laptop last year that has a BD drive and unfortunately both Asus and Roxio stopped supporting the program used to play the Blu-rays, so it stopped getting updates to let it read the newest movies to come out in that format. I have bought 3-4 movies in Blu+DVD because it's not a guarantee that the Blu will work, but Game of Thrones season 2 (which just came out last week) came through for me.
Good on them. |
Yeah, but that is not a list of how happy people are (aka "life satisfaction") but an entirely different measure that happens to have "happy" in the title". |
This is Skat just trying to milk more money out of a company, I hope Microsoft fights them tooth and nail.
Microsoft already paid taxes on what they internally sold Navision for. Skat just wants more money so now they have invented a ludicrous amount that Navision "should have" sold for and is saying that Microsoft needs to pay taxes on that. |
Reddit isn't against Apple, but Reddit is against Apple in this case. Why? Because this type of behavior is something Apple would do.
Hell, after looking at the evidence, even the judge thinks Apple is guilty, yet every Apple fan out there is still claiming Apple is innocent.
If Google was in this same position, myself and most Redditors would be just as upset at Google. The difeerance is that no one would be crying crocodile tears over it.
In general /r/technology is pretty fair and even handed. Does Google or MS do fucked up shit sometimes? Sure, but they get called out on their shit also. It just so happens that they pull a lot less shit then Apple. The difference here is that there exists this huge subset of people who think Apple's shit doesn't stink. They cry wolf and claim everyone hates them or that Apple is treated with disdain.
That's not the case. Apple is treated fairly considering what they are. The difference is that there is a huge subset of people on Reddit who practically worship Apple. Is that group of followers bigger than the number of people who visit /r/technology? No.
Let's look at the number of followers for different subs....
r/apple 145,966
r/google 37,982
r/microsoft 14,190
r/yahoo 270
r/xbox 2,435
Getting the picture yet?
Apple has problems and Apple acts in a predatory manner and pulls a lot of bullshit. Apple has no philanthropy going on and their dear departed leader was an asshole. Hell, I'll probably get down-voted or called a groupy of MS or Google or whatever bullshit the Apple cultists want to label me. |
That's a large part of the problem, but I think that another approach is altering the concentrations of power within our governmental systems. I believe that any sufficient concentration of power, by the very nature of being possible to abuse, will be abused at some point. The three branches of government/checks and balances system was an attempt to address this; by playing power concentrations off each other, it was thought that the abuse would be decreased.
However, we are in a situation now where those three branches seem to simply back each other up in following the money and fucking us over, so if we could redesign for a more fair system via dispersing that power further, it could potentially address a lot of those branches/leaves you're talking about.
Boycotting companies you disagree with is all well and good, but what happens when those companies lose money? People lose jobs, because god forbid they cut into their profit margin to keep the economy at large healthy. So long as survival is tied to your job, there is an imbalance of power that can be abused against the general population. I think that we should be moving to a more grounds-up organization of decision-making for our governmental systems in order to find ways to free people from the economic pressures that allow these awful giants to continue (for example, who the hell would work at WalMart if they didn't have to? Probably relatively few people compared to how many are employed there now).
Personally, I think that a system that ensures the means of survival plus education (and not just k-12, but true free-access college education, which, in this age of the internet, is very easily achieved) would remove that particular pressure, which would then give people the spare time and access to knowledge necessary to work on figuring out how to disperse the power structures in a realistic and fair manner to decrease the possibilities of systemic abuse such as we're seeing right now in our governments.
Obviously, that's just one way in which the issue can be approached, but not everyone can afford to simply remove their support from the evil giants, because that web of power is something we're caught fast in as a result of the economic pressures of our current "system." At least, as far as I see it. |
But the ability to speak out on a national scale is blocked by a sympathetic media.|
Anybody in ... oh say Madagascar care to comment on the audience /u/Eireannach has?
Madagascar was a stretch. How about Norway? |
Do you know what happens when a big ship is moving full steam and suddenly drops anchor?
Lavabit was tiny compared to Google, or Microsoft. Shutting down isn't the decision of one man. They have obligations to clients and stockholders that would make shutting down disatsterous, to the point of impossiblilty.
Even if a board of directors made the decision to turn of the lights and go home, stockholders could get an injunction, fire every board member for cause, install a new board, and sue the old members for gross negligence. |
Notice the defense fund link at the bottom of the page. There has been a lot of discussion on Reddit about doing something about the NSA. Most of congress doesn't support us. The best avenue may be the courts and here is a someone that has been willing to do the right thing and is also willing to push the legal challenge. |
Osama's goal wasn't to have the US government take away our rights. He wanted US influence the fuck out of the Middle East. He thought his attack would make Americans question the motives of such an attack and in turn learn that America was kind of an empire. In his own eyes, he did not succeed because there is even more American influence in the ME. |
Perhaps, if there is some grand oppressive conspiracy.
However, I think what we are dealing with is several competing power hungry people. In situations like this, those seeking more power may employ strategies that undermine those in power. Which may result in less access to food and/or technology to greater portions of the society. A dangerous game no doubt, but those who are used to taking risks and winning just may push beyond the limits they anticipate. |
unbuklethis 1 point 3 months ago*
Lavabit still will still gladly hand over your ass to the authorities when 'they' approach with the right amount of leverage, instead of fight the mighty on your side for your inbox for $7 bux/mo a pop. They are housed in the US, and the letter of the law says they have to co-operate and give data for legal investigation. In that respect, they are no different from Gmail- encrypted or not.
Whether you are guilty or otherwise, no federal authority or co-operating agency has to disclose why they are investigating you on, all they have to say is that you are a suspected terrorist, and that lavabits cooperation is of utmost importance to the countrys national security and to the President. Poof. Your encrypted inbox is gone. Lavabit doesn't know you, and they haven't vetted you. And that is what is scary about all this. Look, Im about 99% certain that not a single soul in this sub is planning anything nefarious, and values privacy very much. 'They' can use/say whatever they want about you, and get your data w/o much effort.
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Not really. Exchanges don't charge transaction fees unless there's actually a transaction. It's just matter of waiting for the right deal to arise. |
This article is just fanboy bait, and I don't mean it as "apple fanboys so dumb", I mean this is just not news at all. Wether it was android to windows, windows to iphone, iphone to android, this isn't significant.
People always need to fanboy over stuff, leading to bad decisions, in this case the bad decision of actually upvoting this shit. |
It would be the only way it could be seriously considered secure.
Skype has been considered secure in the past, they've touted decentralisation, encryption and other similar features in the past.
But they're (part of) an American company, which means the NSA can (and does!) just walk up to them with a backdoor request, a gag order, and privacy is fucked while users are none the wiser.
The only ways to prevent this is either move the company abroad to a place where the government is less draconian (e.g. Mega.co.nz) or open source it (preferable) so we can actually see that there's no backdoors (e.g. KeePass, GPG) |
With Korea, it's really, really, really understandable. South Korea is the only country where eSports has national popularity and the best players in games like Starcraft and League of Legends are put on a pedestal as national celebrities. A lot of the successful professional gamers had to basically defy the wishes of their parents to study hard and get good exam results to instead pursue their pro-gaming ambitions. In fact, there are only two examples of Korean pro-gamers who I think haven't had such pressure:
Jeong "Mvp" Jong Hyeon - Mvp was very ill as a child and so wasn't really pressured by his parents to try hard in school. He was rather mediocre in Brood War but is now one of the greatest players in the world in Starcraft 2. He is still in his early twenties but he's had many health complications interfering with his play such as cervical kyphosis and numerous wrist/neck issues.
Park "Go)Space" Seung Hyun - Go)Space suffered from an inveterate muscle disorder that left him completely disabled from the age of 11 and would eventually claim his life a few years later.
Pro-gaming isn't something you can do later in life either. A lot of Starcraft: Brood War pros retire from around the age of 24 - 25 because their brain and reflexes slow down as they age. Brood War has the mechanical and on-the-fly decision making requirements where this is absolutely noticeable.
The truth is. there are a lot of Korean gamers who try to play competitively and turn pro and either dominate their amateur competition to the point where they are scouted and signed to a professional gaming team or play long enough to be ostracized and demonized as addicts and treated as such. Having said that, there are even more Korean gamers who aren't trying to turn pro and play mainly for the social aspects, whether that's going to a PC bang with friends or socializing with online friends in a MMORPG.
Ever played any Korean MMORPG such as MapleStory? Korean MMORPGs, many of which are disgustingly focused on grinding, are likely a leading cause of game addiction. In addition, developers and publishers would often liaise with PC bangs to include exclusive content for those who played in a PC bang. For example in MapleStory there were exclusive zones or in the case of Riot's Korean version of League of Legends, you have immediate access to all champions if you play from a PC bang. |
Amazonian here. I can't speak officially for the company, but I feel I have some insight to these arguements. I want to clear up some things, both the articles that /u/hampa9 listed and OP's article brought up.
With regard to Heating and A/C: It's really expensive to heat a warehouse. A GM at one of the fulfillment centers I worked at said it was in the six-digit range just on heating and AC for a month. So Amazon has tried to keep that cost down by not installing heating and AC when possible, and instead providing water stations all around the FC, and free gatorade in the break rooms. With that said, associates are in a continual discussion with leadership (who also have to deal with the heat - they don't get to go sit in an office all day!), and many many FCs have had AC installed.
Unions: The whole fundamental point of a union is to use the force of the workers to ensure they don't get dicked over by the company. Make sure they're paid a fair wage, with tolerable working conditions, coverage, retirement, etc. The one thing they should NOT do is guarantee your job even if you are unproductive, which tends to be the view I think many non-unionized Americans have of union workers. Amazon pays workers a fair wage. Each FC-node pays well above minimum wage. In my area, tier 1 (those that do the direct physical labor) workers can expect to start at 12-something/hr, and have guaranteed raises every six months, up to two years making about 14-something an hour. Tier 3s (roles like junior IT, non-inventory, Process Assistants - kind of like a team lead) typically make exactly $2 more than a tier one, and have a similar pay scale. Internal job offerings are posted all the time. Leadership is very clear on what productivity or educational benchmarks you need to be considered for a promotion. HR does a yearly survey of local wages to make sure they're paying enough - I got a $1.50 raise because HR thought I wasn't making enough! Amazon grants vested stock every year (how much you get is dependent on your tier in the company), which is yours free and clear after two years. Then there's 401(k), health, dental, housing discounts, cell discounts, car discounts...the list goes on. Bottom line, Amazon tries very hard to make sure they don't dick their own workers over.
Not getting paid: The whole idea of paying someone to work for you is, they have to be productive to earn that pay. The workers complaining about non-payment are griping because they have to pass through a metal detector before they can leave the building. The time clocks are just before the metal detectors in 99% of FCs, so they're not getting paid to be scanned. But at that point (and indeed, 2-3 minutes even before that) they are no longer stowing/picking/packing/etc product for the company. I know of no company that would think that's reasonable. If there's an unreasonably long line (which might be likely during the christmas seaon with all the seasonal work we bring on), Security needs to look at setting up additional temporary exits. But to argue you should be paid for not doing anything is silly. That's like saying the airlines should re-imburse you because there was a line at the TSA checkpoint.
Unemployment benefits: The instance specifically linked in the article is not an Amazon worker, but a temp worker from a company we contract with called Integrity. Now I don't know all of Integrity's policies, but I know it uses a 6-point system for attendance, being late is .5 points; no-call no-show is 1.5. And while I would assume Integrity has policies in place for medical absence, I don't know for sure. I DO know that Amazonians starting out get 48 hours of non-acrruing paid personal time (this number goes up with tenure) and 40 hours of accruing vacation time, up to 160 hours. Each year. Amazon also has a two-week minimum Medical Leave of Absence policy (which I will admit I am not well versed on, but I know guarantees you are't gonna get fired because you were sick). |
Exactly, that's what I took from this article as well. They're not trying to pull an Apple here and tell you what you can and cannot do, they're merely upgrading the security of the browser so that illegitimate apps and malware won't be interfering and changing your homepage/search provider, etc.
For people who want to use extensions like mediahint, etc, all you'll have to do is check the developer box, and you're good to go. |
As a VFX artist I can tell you that Offshoring of jobs isn't what's killing studios. It's Hollywood under paying studios for the work and VFX studios being run by project driven artists rather than savvy business men. Studios would rather chase big movies like Life of Pi and underbid the hell out of everyone else, just to show they did Life of Pi. Instead, a movie like Life of Pi should cost billions in VFX and make studio rich. Then what happens to the artists? We don't get overtime, working 6-7 days a week, 12 hour days to meet ridiculous deadlines that were promised, even though the cut changed and there are more dificult shots now. Most of the industry is Freelance, and happily so, but everyone in this industry from the ground up undercuts everyone and we all get slightly more screwed. It's starting to get better, but overseas subsidies play a tiny tiny part. Even one of the studios mentioned, Digital Domain, is a Vancouver based company(Lots of major studios are). |
The inevitable effect of an "unregulated" global free market is everyone, even in first world countries gets paid the lowest wage the market can bare
The economics of scarcity dictate this inevitability, don't they? As long as labor and resources are limited, the ultimate end of any economic system would be to minimize loss and maximize gain.
>Meanwhile "content producers" (who bankroll but produce nothing really) keep as large a share of the profits as possible... But it is not ethical that producers feel they are entitled to as large a share of the profits they can manage by sabotaging their domestic work force and paying people the bare minimum.
The distribution of profit is different than cost of production (i.e. - paying employee salary). You can't run an effective company by paying employees with profit. Workers are (typically) a kind of capital investment. A company would dedicate resources to training and properly compensating its employees, which would be returned in the form of productivity.
However, many companies do offer an employee compensation package (e.g. bonuses, PTO, ESOP, other benefits, etc.). It is in a company's best interest to take care of its employees, particularly in the skilled labor market. The trouble begins when there is a disconnect between management and operations, and the bean-counters fail to accurately assess the contribution of the production employees. It's like if your brain decided your heart needs to stop pumping blood into your limbs.
>A change to this would require global trade unions, producer nations setting pay minimums even for foreign labor and enforcing it, or laughably content producers caring that they are sabotaging domestic markets by focusing solely on profits over the people who help them create their products.
Option one presented here would be almost impossible to implement effectively. Too much bureaucracy. It'll also be difficult to start setting pay minimums that have to account for huge gulfs in socioeconomic states between producer countries. If the Vietnamese factory workers started making 70 cents an hour instead of 35 cents (cost of living), it'll be a blow to the bottom line of the producer but hardly cause to ship labor back to the country of origin where the workers will need to be paid 16$ an hour.
Option two is already an important consideration, as I mentioned in my argument above. The globalization of labor is different for different industries, by the way. Many technology and consumer products are made overseas, because the volume of production vs. the return on each product is low. Compare that to heavy industry (mining, O&G, aerospace, etc.), where the cost of moving raw material and finished components across the ocean is astronomically higher than just making the parts here.
>That is simply the nature of unregulated capitalism, it is a very very very flawed model if you look at it from a quality of life perspective for workers because it forces workers to compete against each other, as apposed to them being paid a slice of profits comparable to their contribution to the product.
I don't think the flaw is in capitalism, but in the individual markets and companies that undervalue their employees. Competition is essential for innovation and productivity when you have limited resources, and workers that are adequately compensated will outperform their competition. |
I have a LOT of trouble understanding why some journalists think I want to spend 10 minutes reading their article waiting for the information they promised in the title.
> "Before getting to the case at hand, it is worth reviewing how..."
=> I'm getting the fuck out of here.
Thank reddit for |
Basically, (if I understand correctly) the American visual arts industry is going to use the MPAA's court filing suggesting that if the visual effects for a movie are done over seas, then the whole film should be considered an import, against them. To make a film an import subjects it to import taxes that to my knowledge must be paid by the manufacturer, and I guess the cost of those taxes would be high enough to negate the foreign subsidies being recieved by the studios for out sourcing their VFX work. Don't take my explanation as gospel, I'm sure someone else in the comments has a better |
Just be careful because a lot of the time the |
I think you're in that it could have been paraphrased to something much shorter, but sometimes I do like long articles with a lot of detail. In a way, it would be awesome if journalism adopted |
I was starting to think "Wow, I'm too dumb to understand all this, and what the MPAA had to do with this" after reading the first 1/3 and throwing in the towel. I'm glad the top comment is |
Negative, I'm half sleep and it didn't seem too bad. There's nothing wrong with an article that is written more than 3 paragraphs long. It stayed on point and helped the reader understand the current state of the visual artists vs the studios. I know I didn't have a firm grasp of it before reading the article.
It's kind of funny that someone would make a big deal about not understanding an article after admitting they only read a fraction of it.
I do understand the convenience of a |
Haha. I do get your point, and considered not adding them in the first place. But it is a nuisance scrolling through a hundred nonsense comments and finding that noone has explained it clearly. If the top voted comment/replies were simply a request for a |
Indeed, I read the first 20 or so comments and still didn't quite understand what happened until /u/notian's |
I didn't get too far in the article until I came here hoping for a |
OK, now we've started the movement. We're on their radar but haven't caused a scratch. We need to keep on phoning in and pestering them for reclassification. However, we also need the tech giants behind us.
We need Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Reddit, 4chan, all the major web businesses and a ton of others to join in our protests. We can do this, the fight is not over yet. |
You may misunderstand, as campaign finance reform is not about getting rid of campaigns or financing. In fact, there are frameworks of financing which free the politicians to not hunt for donations all the time. Have a look at the [Fair Elections Now Act]( for instance, and its Fair Elections Fund. [More reforms are listed here]( and the US public [just raised a million dollar]( to support candidates supporting them. |
Well if all internet packages just specify "up to" 30 mb/s, then the speed that consumers "paid for" could be 0.1 mb/s.
It's worse than that. What you've paid for is not a speed , it's a width . Nobody's ever advertised a ping time (possibly outside of extremely niche dedicated gamer-focused ISPs, if those have ever even existed) in their marketing materials and nobody would know what one is, and yet it's this that matters here because it's this that will increase. Having a pipe that's 30Mb/sec wide is no good if those packets are taking several seconds to get there and/or getting lost along the way because someone else on the backend has paid for higher QoS of their packets. No website has ever sent you 30Mb in one lump that's travelled as one packet. They send lots of smaller ones with lots of back and forth to fetch other assets. So, it's the in-transit time that matters, the ping; that's what high priority packets, paid for on the backend, will ruin. You'll still be able to fit 30Mb down at once, but it's going to take ages to arrive. |
reddit has already placed the "Call the FCC" logo on the side of the site, but they need to take it a step further. This is a really, really big deal.
Admins should sticky this post at the top of reddit for a week or so to ensure millions of people see it. It's the top post now but will disappear before the end of the day. |
I've called and sent emails. It didn'take a difference. Apparently only money does, if we want this to stop than reddit and netflix and all the other big websites will have to throw more money at the gov than the ISPs have. We need to boycott the websites untill they lobby congress. Our phone calls are worthless. They reroute them to an answering machine nobody is listening to anyway. |
It is fucked up. But it's not beyond repair. I keep hearing everyone complain on here how big business owns everything and everyone and how the government is bought and paid for and has no intention of representing the people. And you know what? Honestly, there's more and more truth in that every day.
But as long as we still can vote, as long as we can still determine who gets to represent us, we can fix it. As powerful as the dollar is in politics, if enough people start to care and enough people take advantage of the one simple little power we all have, we can beat it. Maybe not overnight, but America (and any other country with legitimate voting rights) isn't beyond the event horizon of change yet. All it'd take is enough people motivated enough to change it. |
Alright, so I'm going to hijack the top comment to post something I just put in r/teachers. Basically, it is my idea for organizing large demonstrations for important issues like this one. Here goes:
To get right down to it, teaching isn't a very well-respected profession. We aren't well-paid, and are generally perceived as lazy. Our unionization, which is absolutely necessary to protect our interests, takes an otherwise altruistic profession and makes it seem self-serving. This perception extends itself to our opinions on educational reform, making fights against standardized testing and ridiculous evaluation systems seem selfish in nature, rather than a reflection of sound professional judgement.
I have an idea that can change this, and simultaneously work toward effective social change as a whole. I propose that large, powerful teaching organizations like the NEA take up causes that are in the best interests of the American public and the future of our children. Issues that an overwhelming majority of the American population would get behind. Issues that have absolutely nothing to do with education. For example, public opinions on things like government surveillance, net neutrality and campaign finance reform likely have a solid, one-sided populous support.
Despite public outcry over issues like these, it is nearly impossible for the average person to demonstrate publicly in any meaningful capacity. This provides an opportunity for teachers to sort of stand in as social reformers for strong, populous causes. Teachers are members of the sole profession that is afforded a universal block of uninterrupted time off. Teachers could organize and demonstrate on behalf of the American public, make important issues come to light, and earn respect and social capital that could later be used as a bargaining chip for future battles against bullshit educational reform or massive budget cuts.
Sorry for the massive wall of text, and thanks for reading. |
The problem is the bribes aren't paid up front in cash. They're paid by mean like apparently arbitrarily high speakers fees after office.
The person being bribed has to have faith that the laundered bribe will be paid afterwards since they can't sue for it, and that requires being in the "gentlemen's club" that broker's such corruption. |
Your comment will stay mostly at the bottom, because this is a circlejerk, and I get the impression that a lot of people haven't even been out of the country (this place I've only been a tourist in is SOO AWEOSME, GAIS!), but as someone who's just gotten back from traveling in 3 non-English speaking countries, I have to say that it doesn't get amazingly better, much like you're saying.
Further, don't get me started on how rare or restrictive public wi-fi is in some of the countries, and well, if you think the U.S. has shitty internet, the amount of countries with worse internet is much greater than the amount of countries with better internet. |
I took it to mean that Americans don't know what they're missing. I moved to South Korea 10 years ago. Upon returning to the states 2 years ago, it was like nothing about American ISPs had changed. Little speed difference, costs about the same or higher as a decade ago. In comparison, South Korea grew by leaps and bounds all while providing great service at a reasonable price. Americans 'know' that their capabilities are crappy in comparison, but have never actually experienced even good and certainly don't know what good service can do for them. |
Oh and one last thing, the reason why very fast (1gbps available in basically all medium to large cities for $50 a month from literally dozens of available ISPs) is because NTT, which is the largest Telco in the world is the one who lays the lines and the infrastructure and then even small ISPs can use their fiber lines if they request to do so. That way even very small companies with a 100 employees provide gigabit service. Basically NTT cannot refuse to sell bandwidth on these fiber networks. |
Oh they do, but they don't now why they suck.
I have spent hours and hours drinking in my local watering hole, and the majority of patrons are working class. Great folks. (not sarcastic, they are really awesome and my best friends ever. And there are a few Progressive among us, but we have more education, or more larege-scale labor experience).
They constantly complain about potholes, crumbling overpasses--ignored infrastructure basically.
Then, in the same conversation without a trace of self-awareness they complain about The Government, and how high taxes are, how taxes on the wealthy would fuck them under, because freedom...
In my experience, even though most Americans agree with progressive ideas in principle, they vote against them in fact because they feel it would betray what "America stands for" and what "being a real American is all about". As in, certain ideas are "UnAmerican". Which is paradoxical in itself, as the only idea that is actually "UnAmerican" is the very idea that a concept can be "UnAmerican".
For the last 30 years, Americans have been conditioned that to think collectively is against their interests, and that the government--specifically created and operating to look out for them--is their enemy.
As long as YouTube loads in a decent amount of time on their phone and they can keep track of whatever their friends are doing on social media they give a fuck. And they have that now, and so give a fuck. They don't know what they are missing and how they would benefit, but "Fuck Socialism" blah blah blah.
It is a legacy of the Cold War. Anything that smacks of collective action has been so effectively demonized we are now reaping what we have sown. |
a long standing grant for the expantion of fiber into new households and once you have built those line you must sell the data connection at cost to your competion. this means diging down your own fiber cable isn't worth it if they allready have fiber and selling the connection at cost to your competion means people can choise which ISP they want. and a added bonus is if the connection gose down it becomes a business to business talk which has much harsher contracts about up time than you do to your ISP.
or |
FAT largely became a de-facto filesystem since windows was such a major desktop operating system and relied on FAT. For interoperability with what a large number of users used, the majority of vendors implemented FAT with their products (hard drives, compact flash, secure digital media, mp3 players, digital cameras, etc... up to phones).
It had well known limitations though. Microsoft even switched away from FAT to NTFS due to the limitations with XP (no permissions, file sizes, etc...). Although, the legacy still stood since it was good enough for most things, nearly universally implemented (windows, osx, linux, etc...), and there was no severely compelling reason to switch (cost, technical capability, etc...).
It's only recently a lot of the limitations have started to affect users (<4GiB file size with FAT32, <2TiB filesystem, etc...). Some vendors have been switching to exFAT, as opposed to other modern filesystems like Ext or even flash oriented filesystems like JFFS though, since exFAT is implemented in windows which a large number of users still rely on. However, there's no public specification, which keeps people from correctly implementing it, and requires purchasing a license from microsoft. |
Somebody works for Lockheed-Martin or one of their subcontractors!
>Overall the A-10 lacks the firepower to engage modern tanks with only a 30mm cannon, while weapons like guided missiles can penetrate and destroy tanks with ease.
CAS isn't just about tanks. In fact in the wars we're likely to be involved in, it's a non-issue. [Some footage of an A-10 supporting ground troops in AF.](
>while the F-35 was made to be affordable
LOL
> |
Overall the A-10 lacks the firepower to engage modern tanks with only a 30mm cannon, while weapons like guided missiles can penetrate and destroy tanks with ease. Also on the affordability note the A-10 is a massive waste of money in repair and maintenance costs while the F-35 was made to be affordable in that regard. |
I'm just going off of the reported age group of the workers who came down with leukemia in OP's article. It's obviously not a great statistical analysis on my part, but I feel comfortable enough with it to do an order of magnitude analysis. We're talking about a 10x greater incidence than expected in this factory for that demographic (and that number goes up, not down if it turns out that most of the workers in the factory are not in that population-wide lowest risk demographic). You don't need to do a fancy statistical analysis to confidently conjecture that an entire order of magnitude difference between expected and observed incidence is going to end up being statistically significant. I'll leave it to the epidemiologists to crunch the actual numbers and perform a more accurate analysis; the point of my post is to show that 13 young adults working in the same factory all coming down with leukemia isn't just something you can dismiss like the post above me suggested. |
100% wrong.
1) Apple doesn't ignore potentially emerging issues like this. In fact, they have a team of people who closely watch support cases from a network of THOUSANDS a of AppleCare, Apple Authorized Service Providers and Apple Retail Stores for trends that may indicate a widespread problem. It's simple math: If they sell 4,000,000 of a given model Mac and 4,000 report a problem that's what, 0.097%? That's not a "known issue" or even a widespread issue.
2) Apple has never issued a "recall". A "recall" is something mandated by an outside agency (government, etc). Apple has always issued a voluntary "repair extension program" for EVERY issue that's come up on their radar over time.
3) An Apple "repair extension program" would cover the cost of a repair to an eligible device regardless of it has been sold, resold or resold again.
4) You didn't have an Apple "laptop". You had an Apple "notebook"—and no, it didn't "get so hot it would burn (your) legs" or the (more than a dozen) thermal sensors inside would have forced the machine to shut off. Apple notebooks will feel warmer BY DESIGN because of their unique heat management (unibody aluminium construction encourages heat to leave the enclosure as efficiently as possible, resulting in a warm-to-the-touch enclosure), which might be why you're not encouraged to sit them on your lap (hence "notebook").
Just to add:
When you agreed to purchase and use the Mac you agreed to fair and clear terms of warranty. Those terms included that the Mac would be free of any manufacturing defect for a period of one year—meaning any issue, perceived as a manufacturing defect or otherwise—that might manifest after that one year would not be covered.
Hell, you even had the opportunity to hedge your bet a bit and extend that to three years with an Applecare support agreement. |
I'm not fine with Net Neutrality at all, since it screws with Internet "fast lanes." Reddit loves to harp on the big telecom companies about screwing people over via throttling or whatever, but there absolutely must be different priorities for traffic flow across the Internet. Too many people jump on the bandwagon when they hear the word throttling without realizing all of the implications behind removing higher priorities of traffic. Higher traffic applications must pay higher fees to run on the Internet, and throttling must occur, or there will be no bandwidth at all for all your games, movies, etc. The Internet is not some unlimited pipe like people like to believe where "if I pay for up to xx mb/sec, I better get it!" I'm sorry, but that is not how the Internet works. /rant |
You're right, I told me parents about what Ted Cruz said and they were immediately against net neutrality. After I explained it they still didnt think it was a good thing because "why would someone compare it to obamacare?" I eventually convinced them that this was a political ploy and that Ted Cruz is an educated ass hat born in Canada. My dad's response was "well at least we know where he was born! Who knows where Obama was created!" My mom took the bait and asked "wait, where was he born?" and my dad did his best Donald Trump impersonation saying "Nigeria or one of those countries" but i digress. Youre right. |
I don't think he wants to be president. I'd argue he doesn't even want to be the Senate leader. He's already influential enough and being in an official leadership role would put him under more scrutiny and under heavier criticism and attack. Right now he can say whatever he wants and influence policy from his safe seat. He can raise money for other people in his party and augment his influence.
The proof is that he helped lead the government shut down. He moved a lot of tea partiers to action against other Republicans politicians and the leaders of his party in both Senate and House. He isn't even in the House and there were, if memory serves me right, close to a hundred Republican congressmen (about 40% of his party) toe the line and keep their fight in the House.
The scarier part was his idea to default on the debt. He had followers again in the House. If the USA weren't such a powerful country this could have had terrible consequences. Not only economically but politically for the US and the whole world. Not a year before that the Republican party had been constantly saying that we had to much debt and we would default like Greece did. |
Who'd a thunk a webcomic would be |
This is my business and I'll explain why this is utter nonsense and propaganda.
>First, the FBI says its analysis spotted distinct similarities between the type of malware used in the Sony Pictures hack and code used in an attack on South Korea last year.
This is known as an off-the-shelf attack toolkit. Unsurprisingly these same toolkits were used in many other completely unrelated attacks. This is very much equivalent to saying "The criminal used a 9mm pistol... therefor the two robberies are related." Utter nonsense.
>Supposed IP address ties...
Publicly available and widely known addresses. North Korea is in possession/control of such a small address space my laptop could scan the entire thing in few hours or less.
If this "attack" was actually an inside job and the cyber equivalent of an insurance scam which I believe it was... pointing to NK address space would be an obvious red herring.
The question you have to ask yourself is thus... why would NK not make their purposes known in the first place? Why the attempted extortion with no mention of political motives?
If their intention was to keep north korean involvement a secret and hence not mention political motives... and frame it to be a plain extortion attempt... why the fuck would they use their own address space?
None of this makes any sense from any perspective other than that this is a contracted scam being run by Sony to write off what would have been huge losses.
The language analysis is inconsistent with Korean attackers. The motives make no sense whatsoever and are pretty obviously a post hoc attribution done by the hacking group after speculation of NK involvement.
I'd bet a dollar that if the real culprit is caught and they may be caught when someone from this group comes forward after heat from American law enforcement (It's likely the NSA has a good idea of who really did this)... it will turn out to be someone from Sony pulling the strings.
However I also think that pointing to NK was strategically brilliant by the real attacker because they know that it gives the U.S. a brilliant political excuse to push their agenda of fear against "cyber attack". Even if the NSA knew for a fact that it wasn't NK... why would it be in their interest to not go with the narrative that protects themselves? |
Because he pegged it all on the republicans. While the republicans are responsible for most of this, he made it seem that they make up 100% of the people who are causing the problem. So now the republicans are downvoting him for oversimplifying things and implying that all republicans are bad/share identical views. It's understandable enough from their perspective. He's not WRONG, but he phrased his point in a pretty aggressive manner. That's why he's getting downvoted. |
There is no such thing as Imaginary Property. There is no scarcity of knowledge.
There is a scarcity of knowledgeable humans. We as a civilization must stand up and protect ourselves from this menace. |
A lot of things are not idiot proof. This does not mean the whole world needs to be Nerfed so as to avoid injury. Just put it in there with a warning. Those who don't follow the warnings can bare the consequences without holding back the rest of humanity. |
I'd like to inform you that Apple also bundles Flash with Mac OS X. It isn't because they believe in it or support it. It's because a shitload of people want/need it for shitload of reasons that Google and Apple are not able to control. The least they can do is not using it on their sites, which they already do, promote alternatives, which they do, and make the rest as straightforward as possible, as Google does by providing a way of sandboxing and auto-updating the plugin, so users don't have to mess with that unsecure crap of a plugin. |
A similar thing happened in the 80s: Everyone thought buttons and LEDs were the shit (and the price was coming down), so we swapped out all of our nice dials and knobs and switches for buttons and 7-segment displays. [Car speedometers]( radio tuners, synthesizers and even [multimeters]( and oscilloscopes were all buttons and LEDs and LCDs.
This continued through the 90s until we realized that buttons suck compared to knobs for many purposes, and 7-segment displays suck compared to dials. So we got our speedometer dials back, and our multimeter knobs (kept the display though), and all oscilloscopes have nice big chunky knobs for adjustments. Once we got over the "newness" we could finally have good interfaces.
So the same is happening now. Good designers know knobs and buttons and dials are better, but touchscreens are new and fancy and cheap, so we integrate them regardless. Give it 10 years and we'll have our knobs back and wonder why we ever didn't have them, you'll see. |
Well, the real bulk of the comment is actually identifying that what's happening now in this situation is analogous to an older situation, and then saying what happened in that case (we got back to a happy medium). The meaning of Ecclesiastes 1:9 follows (kinda...).
So, |
One gives a shady scareware vendor their credit card info. If people weren't doing it, utorrebt wouldn't have a disclaimer on their website and software telling you not to pay for it. |
The Admin's of the site, if you just click the link, are shutting down the site. They don't believe that they will be capable of existing in today's hostile internet. I believe this is direct result of the ACTA legislation. |
A terrific satirical piece on an important subject.
We have a copyright system in the US that is screwed up to a point that has become unworkable. Our old copyright system granted copyright for a term of 28 years, after which it could be renewed for another 47, for a total of 75 years. The Sonny Bono law extended the term to life of the author plus 70 years, and extended the term for stuff still under copyright at the time for another 20 years.
This extension has led to ridiculous situations like The Great Gatsby still being under copyright even though it was written 87 years ago by an author that died 72 years ago.
By what legitimate right does anyone living claim ownership of this work? Why should schoolkids have to fork over $15 bucks for a book that in a reasonable society would be available for free download from something like Project Gutenberg? By protecting most things created after 1923, you deny the public free access to the entirety of modern literature that was sparked by guys like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.
I always complain about people in the US being ignorant of their culture, and the draconian copyright laws certainly don't help anyone. Perhaps if you could read something other than outmoded Victorian novels through the courtesy of the public domain, more people might discover Faulkner and Hemingway, or the later noir-masters from the 40's and 50's like Jim Thompson and James M. Cain. Maybe if TV channels were free to show early Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and John Ford films more people would understand that great B&W films exist and want to explore further.
The current copyright system does nothing but reward the children of the creative and promote cultural illiteracy. |
But those were not facial animations . They were seriously just compressed videos that were mapped out on to a virtual head. If you look carefully, you could see that everything on their faces, say for their noses, were completely flat. Yeah they would start off with a 3d mesh during the scanning process but when they mapped the faces out on the heads, they just flattened everything ( the eyes, the lips, the teeth,) and bumped the moving textures. If you rotate around someone's face with the camera while they are talking you will notice that everything is flat. It was for this reason that games like Half Life 2, Grand Theft auto IV, Red Dead Redemption, really blew my mind because their faces had actual 3D geometry. The gameplay facial animations for BF3 were insane because not only were they very convincing, fluid, and expressive, they were 3D. That was one of the reasons why I was so disappointed with L.A. Noir's "facial animation." That was the main thing they were bragging about but for me, it didn't live up. |
I think they mean 100 hours of CPU time... And as far as I know the industry rule is 1 hour render time per frame which translate in a lot more than 100 hours CPU time... |
You actually expect me to check everyone's SteamID when they talk about pirating games to see if they are legit? Plus, like all your other arguments, it's unfounded. I didn't ask if you bought some games (which I've bought a lot more than that if we are measuring sticks), I said you're a pirate trying to justify your actions, which you are and nothing you've said has changed that.
I highly doubt games would look so much better, that's the part you don't understand. Just because YOU upgrade your computer every year doesn't mean society would or could and history has shown us they don't. I'll pick a game that has never touched consoles: WoW. That game sure is popular and has more people playing it then all of the games in your library combined probably because it runs on almost everyone's machines. Consoles exist for a reason, it fiscally viable for most people. Plenty of people still buy PS2 and haven't even hit the PS3/Xbox360 scene yet. |
It doesn't look that good ... Oh wait, changes quality to 720HD, that's impressive! |
whoosh
The point was that the majority of people who are purchasing iPads aren't doing so because they're in the market for a tablet computer, and the iPad just happens to fit their needs best. They're coming at it from the mindset that in order to appear "cool" they have to be seen using the latest device from Apple. In that sense, it is being viewed more as a piece of jewelry with multimedia capabilities than as an actual tablet computer.
That is not to say that there are not rational people out there that actually are purchasing iPads because it best fits their needs, but those people are in the minority by a wide margin. |
I honestly do not believe the pre-built models are expensive at all for what they offer. The Samsung chronos 7 laptop that I bought has a quad core i7 third gen processors. An SSD fast boot hdd (I'm up and running 8 seconds after pressing the power button) 1tb hard drive, back lit keyboard, gaming graphic card (plays all the latest games at max) 8gb of ram, and so much more for just 849 dollars plus tax.
If you check at other laptops with the same specs they are hundreds of dollars more expensive than what Samsung offers. You did say you want an nvidia card. The 1299 model provides you with a nvidia graphic card and a 17in screen. I can attest that the laptop is very well built. |
I've been saying for years that as a marketing tool, MSFT is doing this correctly. Say it's the late 90's people have been using Windows 98 for a few years now and everyone loves it, as a company we don't really have any new ideas on what to come up with so we'll try something wild, with a few "enhancements" and call it Windows ME for the new Millenium. It releases, is adopted by a few who absolutely hate it, all the while MSFT is working on it's next killer OS, XP. Then, when XP releases everyone who purchased ME is dying to upgrade, easy cash for MSFT. Also, an added benefit for users is that since thousands were installing XP to get off of ME, they could spread the word (for free mind you) of how amazing XP is. Now, apply the same marketing ideals to Vista and the upgrade path and numbers we see with 7. Exact same thing that happened in the late 90's is happening now with 7 to 8. A few enhancements to help tablet/phone integration, game breaking bugs and not much else.
MSFT IMO will never be able to get into the phone market the way Google and Apple have in the USA as they are many many quarters behind and have little to show for it. That is the biggest issue as with so little Windows phones sold, as well as the new Surface tablet being at the bottom of the Christmas sales stats, who really wants to deal with the METRO interface and 8? I'm sitting and waiting this out for 9 or whatever is next with the real enhancements. |
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