In the same way when you sunbathe in your backyard or fuck your girlfriend in the window you probably don't mind if your neighbors see you, but you have every right to be pissed if someone decides to take photographs.
It's pretty much this in a nutshell. What so many other slashdotters appear to misunderstand is that privacy isn't a dichotomy of "have it" or "don't have it", but instead there are (or were) various shades of privacy. Except more and more, the various shades are being pushed more & more into a dichotomy, and the disappearance of those semi-private events is the source of much of the hate.
Like your example, it's one thing if your neighbors see you--what is that, perhaps 5-10 people, most of whom you know--and its' something else if it's up on Google Streetview and 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 people view it, most of whom are complete strangers.
Have you not checked out the T-mobile Even More Plus plans? They require you to pay full price for the phone, but they are cheaper per month. In my case, It is $60/mo vs $80/mo. I only paid an extra $150 for my phone, so after 8 months, I am ahead of the game. The Nexus One would have taken longer, 17 months to pay off that difference, because it is after all a better phone than the one I bought. Still, 17 months is less than 24 months. It is cheaper to get a Even More Plus plan than a Even More plan. Unfortunately, T-mobile is the only one doing this right now, but it is the main reason I switched from Sprint.
When I evaluated this for my wife & I, we did not get this to work out cheaper for us over 24 months (i.e. term of a usual with-subsidy contract). I called T-Mobile and found out the lowest family plans we needed and what our "discount" would be for avoiding the subsidy cost. After 24 months, it turned out to be more expensive. Of course, Google locked its users out of family plans WITH the new-subscriber subsidy by requiring T-Mobile to only allow single user contracts. Two single user contracts were prohibitively expensive, comparatively.
I did some serious homework on this phone and all possible variations, comparing it against similar offerings by other carriers (i.e. Droid by Motorola w/ Verizon Wireless) and I found all variations of the Nexus One to be overpriced. Like the GPP said:
The reason why the Nexus One failed is because it was so damned expensive out of pocket.
Dioxins/furans are a byproduct of fuel combustion, especially notable in municipal solid waste combustors and/or incinerators, where the "fuel" source may harbor additional precursors (chlorine atoms). Dioxins don't just "appear" in meat, dairy, and shellfish; they are ingested at the lowest levels of the food chain and bioaccumulate. That does not mean, however, that dioxins/furans are absent from the air you breathe or the soil in which your plans grow... they're there, else how'd they get into the food chain?
An additional fun fact: based on some evidence I've been able to turn up, chlorine is much more prevalent in biomass-based, renewable fuels compared with coal, oil, or natural gas. Also, I am an environmental scientist.
If they (performers, pop "music") do not make money, how is it that so many of them are obscenely rich?
Advertising. Britney Spears, once established as a "household name" through her music career, was featured in many, many commercials. At some point, it doesn't matter if you continue doing/getting paid for your "primary job", because the money you can command by being in an advertising spot can greatly supersede it.
Western culture (and the US in particular) have so drastically overvalued IP (and more specifically entertainment) that we have a lot more people "working" in those industries than ever before to make a quick buck. It's a huge bubble waiting to burst. Thankfully, in the music industry that bubble is all but finished.
Very interesting, relating the current state of IP as a "bubble," perhaps analogous to an economics (e.g. housing) bubble. I'm curious to see if that's how it plays out, over time, though I'm a bit leery that--if true--this bubble will be more catastrophic than the housing one.
Sweazey argues that a truly non-rivalrous system makes commerce too difficult, even impossible, and that we need to create ways for the digital world to mirror the constraints of the physical one.
On a philosophical level, I am opposed to artificial scarcity for the sake of profiteering. It scares the hell out of me. However, playing devil's advocate for myself, it *could* work to allow sharing, resale, and the other benefits currently enjoyed by physical items.
However, as the parent poster rightfully states, the whole tamper-protected circuit notion is nice on paper but going to be impossible to implement while actually "giving" it to the same people who hold the data.
I'm all for eating healthier, but THIS COUNTRY IS GETTING NUTTIER AND NUTTIER. I never smoked, but banning it and making it illegal were harbingers of things to come. Then the Safety Police got involved with seatbelts... Then trans fats and high fructose corn syrup... As they are all hard to defend against, everyone has let this country start down the slippery slope because 'Well, it won't affect me much and its a good thing...".
Everyone should WAKE-UP. Tell the Health Police to pound sand and demand more personal accountability responsibility, not hand over more decisions to the government!
Detention in school as she had a piece of candy that didn't meet 'minimal nutrition guidelines'!!!? ARE YOU KIDDING, AMERICA?
Personal accountability is necessary, but it's not the end-all, be-all, panacea. Smoking, unlike other vices, affects more than simply the user. It's exceedingly difficult to avoid breathing in second-hand smoke when in the vicinity of a smoker, and because the user is someone else, you are not at liberty to regulate the amount the other uses/produces. Should we hold children personally accountable for their inability to avoid their parents' second hand smoke?
Trans fats and HFCS are food additives, not foods in and of themselves. They weren't even on the proverbial radar but for a few years ago. How can I hold myself personally accountable if the pervasiveness of HFCS is such that it is in every food I purchase? How can I hold myself personally accountable for trans fats if they aren't included on the nutritional label (where applicable)?
I agree that this article is an extremely bad example, but the government plays a very useful role and, as other posters have noted, this event has absolutely nothing to do with the state or local government, and instead has everything to do with a knee-jerk administrator reaction and misappropriation of rules.
And who says the "next-gen" fuels won't have equivalent dangers, once some are found which will scale to what oil use is today?
I'm not certain if you're rebutting or supporting my argument; I'll assume the latter, since I, too, fully acknowledge that it is plausible for a hypothetical "next-gen" fuel to have equally problematic externalities.
It is unfortunate that the knee-jerk reaction of a certain number of politicians is going to be to defend the oil companies and their actions will predictably be enough to keep us from making any real progress.
And just how fast do you imagine "real progress", with respect to the world use of oil, should proceed? I'm all for moving to next-gen fuels as the next guy---perhaps more than the next guy, as I'm part of the slashdot crowd---but seeing as how the world economically is virtually tethered to oil use, I'd prefer the approach that doesn't lead to chaos overnight.
"Troll" mod while parent's comment that "Comcast's only success is ABSOLUTE FAILURE" gets +5 "informative"? Well, it was expected for the audience, I suppose. Comcast has failings, but one of them is not the length of the window in which a service tech may arrive at the destination.
"We'll be there between 8-12, and we'll call you the day of the appointment. If you do not answer this phone call, the appointment will be canceled." - An automated message prior to a service visit from Comcast
Yea, CANCELED! So, if I'm on the phone, in the bathroom, or otherwise incapable of answering this idiotic call in a 4-hour bracket, the service is canceled. This has happened to me before, months ago, and I yelled at several people about this to no avail. Today, we actually had a service call for work... answered the phone call, and even after waiting 4 hours, they're still not here.
Comcast's only success is ABSOLUTE FAILURE.
Someone please take this company away.
Brush the dust off your geek card and take off your tinfoil hat for a moment and let's have a little thought experiment.
If you're a service tech, you're in a van driving from appointment to appointment, of which you may have a half-dozen or more in a single day. So, in addition to accounting for a variable amount of time to actually get from points A to B to C, you also have to account for the variable amount of time it will take to set up the service. When the rep arrived at my house, he had to not only figure out WTF the previous owner had done to the wires in the house, he had to reconnect a new wire at the box and run about 200 feet of temporary wire around the house and drill a new entry hole through the cinderblock. They're even coming back out to run a whole new, permanent line using a special digger to route it under my driveway, all included with the $100 hook-up fee.
Sure, your 2 minutes of hate makes you feel good and all, but call it what you will, installation takes time and all the complexities are simply not predictable enough to give you an exact time. Or rather, not predictable enough to give you an exact time and to avoid charging you more for the time the techs are just sitting on their thumbs. Either way, you're going to pay in time or money. I pick time. You can now commence with your regularly scheduled hate session.
You are wrong. T-Mobile's no contract plan is $20/mo CHEAPER than the contract option, in the case of a single line. I haven't looked at the family share plans, but for 500 minutes + text+data, it is $60 vs $80. That would be $480 saved over 2 years. That more than makes up for the extra 150-200 you have to pay for a CLIQ, and it even more than makes up for the extra $350 you would have to pay for a Nexus One.
I dunno what to say, except that I'm most certainly not wrong. My wife and I would have, of course, a family share plan. Purchasing two individual plans would be ridiculous. Run those numbers, as I have already done, and then we can talk apples to apples.
A real-world example to support your "a big flop" argument:
My wife & I were shopping for smartphones and it came down to the Nexus One vs. the Motorola Droid. We already had T-Mobile service. Using the discount for new members and the cheapest two-year data+phone contract T-Mobile offered, the total two-year amount was cheaper than if I had purchased the unlocked phones and used T-Mobile's month-to-month plan for 2 years. Of course, we were ineligible for the new customer price, and T-Mobile could/would do nothing for us since it was partnered with Google (or, at least, that was the direction of the finger-pointing). There was no impetus to stay with T-Mobile. (We were able to get the Motorola Droid as a buy-one-get-one deal with Verizon). If you can't recoup the value of an unlocked phone in 2 years, then I fail to see the reason to get one: you can port your number to a new carrier, get a new phone, and pay less all at the same time.
Some other considerations regarding unlocked phones on the US carrier-controlled network with the Nexus one: I have read that while T-Mobile is 3G, it's not the same frequency as other 3G. This, as I was told, meant that an unlocked Nexus One for T-Mobile would not be able to use 3G for other carriers. Of course, the Motorola Droid was similarly "locked-in" with CDMA, but that factoid really undermined what I understood to be a significant advantage of the "unlocked phone".
No one is to blame for the eruption of a volcano but the stopping of air traffic can be blamed on government fearmongering. The airspace closings were entirely based on computer models, which according to every test flight taken by major air carriers in the past few days, has been proven to be completely wrong.
British Airways, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Air France-KLM Group all said today that airspace restrictions should be lifted, citing test flights into the ash cloud that showed no sign of impairment to aircraft performance. About 81,000 services have been canceled since the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted on April 14, spewing dust that could cause jet engines to fail by melting and then congealing in the turbines.
“These decisions were based on theoretical models,” International Air Transport Association Chief Executive Officer Giovanni Bisignani said today in Paris. “But the losses and chaos are not theoretical. When in a few weeks this situation is solved it will be a very embarrassing story for Europe.”
Hopefully, our government officials in North America won't make the same mistake.
If I were in that position--and I would hope should you be in such a position, too--I would err on the side of caution. I think it's unfounded to call their actions "fearmongering." The models they have are only as good as the data; in the light of this most recent event, the powers that be are bound to have some new data to improve future models.
Or do you honestly believe that the governments of the world, when presented with modeled, scientific information, should disregard it? There'd be an equally large or larger outcry, and I daresay it would be justified.
From what I've heard of it, jailbreaking is not aimed at the device itself, but at its software. While you might have a point if jailbreaking involved completely wiping the Apple OS from the phone and putting your own OS on it, IIRC it's actually aimed at modding the existing Apple software, which would certainly be considered a copyrighted work. If I am wrong here, I welcome correction.
This DMCA provision is in regards to the "Lock" behind which the "content" is stored. I'm not certain if an operating system qualifies as a work under this title. Regardless, it's definitely nonsensical, because "jailbreaking" is a case where the "lock" and the "content" are one and the same. I wonder if you could call a "jailbroken" OS as a derivative work...
I find it more interesting to consider why it doesn't generally work that way. I have only one answer: we care a HELL of a lot more about immediate convenience and instant gratification than we have ever cared about being consistent with our principles. So we'll buy from abusive companies that deliver poor service before we'll do without their products/services.
I gave up mod points to comment. I find your statement to be dubious in that you suggest that there is a clearly and demonstrably "good" alternative in this (or in all) situations. I recently switched to Comcast, from Qwest. After receiving about a dozen flyers for their FIOS service and after calling and pestering them about it a half-dozen times, they finally said that they have no plans within the next several YEARS to upgrade beyond their 1.5 Mbps service, the maximum they support in my area. I'd give up my geek card before I went without internet. So, I signed up for Comcast and got 16 Mbps for less.
I held out with Qwest on principles, but good "service" also includes the provided service itself. After waiting for several years and without the prospect of improvement, I switched. There was no "good" alternative in my case.
SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives
SSDs are much like anything else, you get what you pay for.
Buy the cheapest hard drive you can find; it won't last 5 years. Same for CD-R media and SSDs.
It's a pretty safe bet that under normal workloads, a good SSD will outlive just about any HDD.
I'm going to have to agree, especially considering I've just recently suffered a premature HDD failure. If you read the customer specs for any of the larger capacity platter drives, you really notice the failure rates: failures at the 3-6 month mark should be one in 100,000, not a one in 100 (or less).
Funnily enough I have this cheap no-name external-HD/Media-Player device that allows me to play XViD and DivX encoded files on my TV. I can either play files from my PC via Ethernet (NOT streaming, just files in shared folders), from the internal HD or from USB mass storage devices.
There are out there other (more expensive) devices just like it that play HD.
No DRM, no issues: my PC doesn't even need to be on. It's not even brand new technology: I've had this for 3 years now.
Going for media playing solutions from the likes of Sony, Microsoft or Apple is like tatooing on your forhead "I'm a Dumb Media Bitch".
While I admit that *what* you use does have a real-world effect, it's really beside Eldavojohn's point. The problem wasn't what he purchased, instead it was DRM. The solution shouldn't be "lol you should have bought this instead," but instead should be the removal of the DRM.
From TFA in a nutshell: studios *could* do it well, like Avatar, which costs really big bucks and is time consuming, but they're more likely to do it on the cheap just to get a few more bucks out of the consumer.
I suppose its' a scam only if they do it on the cheap. The headline's a bit more sensationalist than the article, which is more measured in its position.
I don't believe brevity can necessarily make something non-newsworthy.
Perhaps, but the brevity in this article is due to a gross lack of information which, in turn, is almost certainly guaranteed to promote even more knee-jerk, inflammatory, and ill-founded reactions than usual.
So scant, it's a travesty to call this a "news article." Here it is, in entirety:
Iran's telecommunications agency announced that it would be suspending Google's email services permanently, saying it would roll out its own national email service.
Google didn't have an immediate comment about the announcement.
An Iranian official said the measure was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The measure comes on the heels of celebrations to mark the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic.
For once, everything you need to know is safely found in the Slashdot summary.
if I was going to unscientifically guess at the number of times I go to Google News and don't see any headlines that garner my interest enough to click, ~50% would have been it
My sentiments exactly. But I'd also like to comment that usually the headline plus the two-sentence blurb tell me as much as the entire story. So rarely is the actual article a 'trove' of information, that my habits have been trained to [i]not[/i] read the article.
Slashdot Mirror
In the same way when you sunbathe in your backyard or fuck your girlfriend in the window you probably don't mind if your neighbors see you, but you have every right to be pissed if someone decides to take photographs.
It's pretty much this in a nutshell. What so many other slashdotters appear to misunderstand is that privacy isn't a dichotomy of "have it" or "don't have it", but instead there are (or were) various shades of privacy. Except more and more, the various shades are being pushed more & more into a dichotomy, and the disappearance of those semi-private events is the source of much of the hate.
Like your example, it's one thing if your neighbors see you--what is that, perhaps 5-10 people, most of whom you know--and its' something else if it's up on Google Streetview and 5,000,000 to 10,000,000 people view it, most of whom are complete strangers.
Have you not checked out the T-mobile Even More Plus plans? They require you to pay full price for the phone, but they are cheaper per month. In my case, It is $60/mo vs $80/mo. I only paid an extra $150 for my phone, so after 8 months, I am ahead of the game. The Nexus One would have taken longer, 17 months to pay off that difference, because it is after all a better phone than the one I bought. Still, 17 months is less than 24 months. It is cheaper to get a Even More Plus plan than a Even More plan. Unfortunately, T-mobile is the only one doing this right now, but it is the main reason I switched from Sprint.
When I evaluated this for my wife & I, we did not get this to work out cheaper for us over 24 months (i.e. term of a usual with-subsidy contract). I called T-Mobile and found out the lowest family plans we needed and what our "discount" would be for avoiding the subsidy cost. After 24 months, it turned out to be more expensive. Of course, Google locked its users out of family plans WITH the new-subscriber subsidy by requiring T-Mobile to only allow single user contracts. Two single user contracts were prohibitively expensive, comparatively.
I did some serious homework on this phone and all possible variations, comparing it against similar offerings by other carriers (i.e. Droid by Motorola w/ Verizon Wireless) and I found all variations of the Nexus One to be overpriced. Like the GPP said:
The reason why the Nexus One failed is because it was so damned expensive out of pocket.
So, couldn't you, uh, just not eat those things?
Dioxins/furans are a byproduct of fuel combustion, especially notable in municipal solid waste combustors and/or incinerators, where the "fuel" source may harbor additional precursors (chlorine atoms). Dioxins don't just "appear" in meat, dairy, and shellfish; they are ingested at the lowest levels of the food chain and bioaccumulate. That does not mean, however, that dioxins/furans are absent from the air you breathe or the soil in which your plans grow... they're there, else how'd they get into the food chain?
An additional fun fact: based on some evidence I've been able to turn up, chlorine is much more prevalent in biomass-based, renewable fuels compared with coal, oil, or natural gas. Also, I am an environmental scientist.
If they (performers, pop "music") do not make money, how is it that so many of them are obscenely rich?
Advertising. Britney Spears, once established as a "household name" through her music career, was featured in many, many commercials. At some point, it doesn't matter if you continue doing/getting paid for your "primary job", because the money you can command by being in an advertising spot can greatly supersede it.
See also Tiger Woods.
...the French Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques et des Postes...
They had to add in the regular mail, you see, else the acronym could have been "FARCE"...
Western culture (and the US in particular) have so drastically overvalued IP (and more specifically entertainment) that we have a lot more people "working" in those industries than ever before to make a quick buck. It's a huge bubble waiting to burst. Thankfully, in the music industry that bubble is all but finished.
Very interesting, relating the current state of IP as a "bubble," perhaps analogous to an economics (e.g. housing) bubble. I'm curious to see if that's how it plays out, over time, though I'm a bit leery that--if true--this bubble will be more catastrophic than the housing one.
Sweazey argues that a truly non-rivalrous system makes commerce too difficult, even impossible, and that we need to create ways for the digital world to mirror the constraints of the physical one.
On a philosophical level, I am opposed to artificial scarcity for the sake of profiteering. It scares the hell out of me. However, playing devil's advocate for myself, it *could* work to allow sharing, resale, and the other benefits currently enjoyed by physical items.
However, as the parent poster rightfully states, the whole tamper-protected circuit notion is nice on paper but going to be impossible to implement while actually "giving" it to the same people who hold the data.
I'm all for eating healthier, but THIS COUNTRY IS GETTING NUTTIER AND NUTTIER. I never smoked, but banning it and making it illegal were harbingers of things to come. Then the Safety Police got involved with seatbelts... Then trans fats and high fructose corn syrup... As they are all hard to defend against, everyone has let this country start down the slippery slope because 'Well, it won't affect me much and its a good thing...". Everyone should WAKE-UP. Tell the Health Police to pound sand and demand more personal accountability responsibility, not hand over more decisions to the government! Detention in school as she had a piece of candy that didn't meet 'minimal nutrition guidelines'!!!? ARE YOU KIDDING, AMERICA?
Personal accountability is necessary, but it's not the end-all, be-all, panacea. Smoking, unlike other vices, affects more than simply the user. It's exceedingly difficult to avoid breathing in second-hand smoke when in the vicinity of a smoker, and because the user is someone else, you are not at liberty to regulate the amount the other uses/produces. Should we hold children personally accountable for their inability to avoid their parents' second hand smoke?
Trans fats and HFCS are food additives, not foods in and of themselves. They weren't even on the proverbial radar but for a few years ago. How can I hold myself personally accountable if the pervasiveness of HFCS is such that it is in every food I purchase? How can I hold myself personally accountable for trans fats if they aren't included on the nutritional label (where applicable)?
I agree that this article is an extremely bad example, but the government plays a very useful role and, as other posters have noted, this event has absolutely nothing to do with the state or local government, and instead has everything to do with a knee-jerk administrator reaction and misappropriation of rules.
And who says the "next-gen" fuels won't have equivalent dangers, once some are found which will scale to what oil use is today?
I'm not certain if you're rebutting or supporting my argument; I'll assume the latter, since I, too, fully acknowledge that it is plausible for a hypothetical "next-gen" fuel to have equally problematic externalities.
It is unfortunate that the knee-jerk reaction of a certain number of politicians is going to be to defend the oil companies and their actions will predictably be enough to keep us from making any real progress.
And just how fast do you imagine "real progress", with respect to the world use of oil, should proceed? I'm all for moving to next-gen fuels as the next guy---perhaps more than the next guy, as I'm part of the slashdot crowd---but seeing as how the world economically is virtually tethered to oil use, I'd prefer the approach that doesn't lead to chaos overnight.
Soap + undisclosed proprietary chemicals that are known to bio-accumulate. It will be nice having that enter the food chain.
I think we'll need a citation, specifically with reference to the bioaccumulation aspects, to avoid calling that complete FUD.
"Troll" mod while parent's comment that "Comcast's only success is ABSOLUTE FAILURE" gets +5 "informative"? Well, it was expected for the audience, I suppose. Comcast has failings, but one of them is not the length of the window in which a service tech may arrive at the destination.
"We'll be there between 8-12, and we'll call you the day of the appointment. If you do not answer this phone call, the appointment will be canceled." - An automated message prior to a service visit from Comcast Yea, CANCELED! So, if I'm on the phone, in the bathroom, or otherwise incapable of answering this idiotic call in a 4-hour bracket, the service is canceled. This has happened to me before, months ago, and I yelled at several people about this to no avail. Today, we actually had a service call for work... answered the phone call, and even after waiting 4 hours, they're still not here. Comcast's only success is ABSOLUTE FAILURE. Someone please take this company away.
Brush the dust off your geek card and take off your tinfoil hat for a moment and let's have a little thought experiment.
If you're a service tech, you're in a van driving from appointment to appointment, of which you may have a half-dozen or more in a single day. So, in addition to accounting for a variable amount of time to actually get from points A to B to C, you also have to account for the variable amount of time it will take to set up the service. When the rep arrived at my house, he had to not only figure out WTF the previous owner had done to the wires in the house, he had to reconnect a new wire at the box and run about 200 feet of temporary wire around the house and drill a new entry hole through the cinderblock. They're even coming back out to run a whole new, permanent line using a special digger to route it under my driveway, all included with the $100 hook-up fee.
Sure, your 2 minutes of hate makes you feel good and all, but call it what you will, installation takes time and all the complexities are simply not predictable enough to give you an exact time. Or rather, not predictable enough to give you an exact time and to avoid charging you more for the time the techs are just sitting on their thumbs. Either way, you're going to pay in time or money. I pick time. You can now commence with your regularly scheduled hate session.
You are wrong. T-Mobile's no contract plan is $20/mo CHEAPER than the contract option, in the case of a single line. I haven't looked at the family share plans, but for 500 minutes + text+data, it is $60 vs $80. That would be $480 saved over 2 years. That more than makes up for the extra 150-200 you have to pay for a CLIQ, and it even more than makes up for the extra $350 you would have to pay for a Nexus One.
I dunno what to say, except that I'm most certainly not wrong. My wife and I would have, of course, a family share plan. Purchasing two individual plans would be ridiculous. Run those numbers, as I have already done, and then we can talk apples to apples.
A real-world example to support your "a big flop" argument:
My wife & I were shopping for smartphones and it came down to the Nexus One vs. the Motorola Droid. We already had T-Mobile service. Using the discount for new members and the cheapest two-year data+phone contract T-Mobile offered, the total two-year amount was cheaper than if I had purchased the unlocked phones and used T-Mobile's month-to-month plan for 2 years. Of course, we were ineligible for the new customer price, and T-Mobile could/would do nothing for us since it was partnered with Google (or, at least, that was the direction of the finger-pointing). There was no impetus to stay with T-Mobile. (We were able to get the Motorola Droid as a buy-one-get-one deal with Verizon). If you can't recoup the value of an unlocked phone in 2 years, then I fail to see the reason to get one: you can port your number to a new carrier, get a new phone, and pay less all at the same time.
Some other considerations regarding unlocked phones on the US carrier-controlled network with the Nexus one: I have read that while T-Mobile is 3G, it's not the same frequency as other 3G. This, as I was told, meant that an unlocked Nexus One for T-Mobile would not be able to use 3G for other carriers. Of course, the Motorola Droid was similarly "locked-in" with CDMA, but that factoid really undermined what I understood to be a significant advantage of the "unlocked phone".
No one is to blame for the eruption of a volcano but the stopping of air traffic can be blamed on government fearmongering. The airspace closings were entirely based on computer models, which according to every test flight taken by major air carriers in the past few days, has been proven to be completely wrong.
British Airways, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Air France-KLM Group all said today that airspace restrictions should be lifted, citing test flights into the ash cloud that showed no sign of impairment to aircraft performance. About 81,000 services have been canceled since the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted on April 14, spewing dust that could cause jet engines to fail by melting and then congealing in the turbines.
“These decisions were based on theoretical models,” International Air Transport Association Chief Executive Officer Giovanni Bisignani said today in Paris. “But the losses and chaos are not theoretical. When in a few weeks this situation is solved it will be a very embarrassing story for Europe.”
Hopefully, our government officials in North America won't make the same mistake.
If I were in that position--and I would hope should you be in such a position, too--I would err on the side of caution. I think it's unfounded to call their actions "fearmongering." The models they have are only as good as the data; in the light of this most recent event, the powers that be are bound to have some new data to improve future models.
Or do you honestly believe that the governments of the world, when presented with modeled, scientific information, should disregard it? There'd be an equally large or larger outcry, and I daresay it would be justified.
From what I've heard of it, jailbreaking is not aimed at the device itself, but at its software. While you might have a point if jailbreaking involved completely wiping the Apple OS from the phone and putting your own OS on it, IIRC it's actually aimed at modding the existing Apple software, which would certainly be considered a copyrighted work. If I am wrong here, I welcome correction.
This DMCA provision is in regards to the "Lock" behind which the "content" is stored. I'm not certain if an operating system qualifies as a work under this title. Regardless, it's definitely nonsensical, because "jailbreaking" is a case where the "lock" and the "content" are one and the same. I wonder if you could call a "jailbroken" OS as a derivative work...
I find it more interesting to consider why it doesn't generally work that way. I have only one answer: we care a HELL of a lot more about immediate convenience and instant gratification than we have ever cared about being consistent with our principles. So we'll buy from abusive companies that deliver poor service before we'll do without their products/services.
I gave up mod points to comment. I find your statement to be dubious in that you suggest that there is a clearly and demonstrably "good" alternative in this (or in all) situations. I recently switched to Comcast, from Qwest. After receiving about a dozen flyers for their FIOS service and after calling and pestering them about it a half-dozen times, they finally said that they have no plans within the next several YEARS to upgrade beyond their 1.5 Mbps service, the maximum they support in my area. I'd give up my geek card before I went without internet. So, I signed up for Comcast and got 16 Mbps for less.
I held out with Qwest on principles, but good "service" also includes the provided service itself. After waiting for several years and without the prospect of improvement, I switched. There was no "good" alternative in my case.
SSD reliability is highly variable, and in no case as good over the long term as hard drives
SSDs are much like anything else, you get what you pay for.
Buy the cheapest hard drive you can find; it won't last 5 years. Same for CD-R media and SSDs.
It's a pretty safe bet that under normal workloads, a good SSD will outlive just about any HDD.
I'm going to have to agree, especially considering I've just recently suffered a premature HDD failure. If you read the customer specs for any of the larger capacity platter drives, you really notice the failure rates: failures at the 3-6 month mark should be one in 100,000, not a one in 100 (or less).
Funnily enough I have this cheap no-name external-HD/Media-Player device that allows me to play XViD and DivX encoded files on my TV. I can either play files from my PC via Ethernet (NOT streaming, just files in shared folders), from the internal HD or from USB mass storage devices.
There are out there other (more expensive) devices just like it that play HD.
No DRM, no issues: my PC doesn't even need to be on. It's not even brand new technology: I've had this for 3 years now.
Going for media playing solutions from the likes of Sony, Microsoft or Apple is like tatooing on your forhead "I'm a Dumb Media Bitch".
While I admit that *what* you use does have a real-world effect, it's really beside Eldavojohn's point. The problem wasn't what he purchased, instead it was DRM. The solution shouldn't be "lol you should have bought this instead," but instead should be the removal of the DRM.
From TFA in a nutshell: studios *could* do it well, like Avatar, which costs really big bucks and is time consuming, but they're more likely to do it on the cheap just to get a few more bucks out of the consumer.
I suppose its' a scam only if they do it on the cheap. The headline's a bit more sensationalist than the article, which is more measured in its position.
another option is to prevent sneaking unrelated crap on top of new bills
Mod parent up. Pork is definitely a significant contributor to the political headache of the US.
I don't believe brevity can necessarily make something non-newsworthy.
Perhaps, but the brevity in this article is due to a gross lack of information which, in turn, is almost certainly guaranteed to promote even more knee-jerk, inflammatory, and ill-founded reactions than usual.
Iran's telecommunications agency announced that it would be suspending Google's email services permanently, saying it would roll out its own national email service. Google didn't have an immediate comment about the announcement. An Iranian official said the measure was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government, according to the Wall Street Journal. The measure comes on the heels of celebrations to mark the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic.
For once, everything you need to know is safely found in the Slashdot summary.
if I was going to unscientifically guess at the number of times I go to Google News and don't see any headlines that garner my interest enough to click, ~50% would have been it
My sentiments exactly. But I'd also like to comment that usually the headline plus the two-sentence blurb tell me as much as the entire story. So rarely is the actual article a 'trove' of information, that my habits have been trained to [i]not[/i] read the article.