Android App Store doesn't vet apps at all: not the first time, not after fixes.
Apple's App Store does vet apps: first time, every time.
Not sure which is better... Android's model is high-risk, but it's known to be so. Apple's model is supposed to be clean and safe, but it's vetting process is known to be far from perfect.
My solution: don't download brand new apps, but wait for the first reviews to come in.
Apple's walled garden works actively against responsiveness: every bug fix release has to be approved, and this approval process is said to take around two weeks, typically. That's a long time to receive a lot of 1-star ratings.
Android's app store allows instant publishing of bug fixes. Allows for much faster response to user issues.
There probably is quite some power available. At the walls somewhere, where you can plug in some heavy duty cables or so. No idea how they do it exactly, but this is not the only type of event that needs a lot of power: concerts, but also trade shows with their well-lit booths, or even sports events that need enough light for the TV cameras. OK the latter's power supply will be relatively small but still it's a lot.
Now this are 12,000 participants, say 1,000 W available for each, that's 12 MW. About 10,000 Amps 3-phase supply. Totally possible that they just have it.
Anecdote, DRM related. A while ago I had my hands on a PDF file. In this case some shipping document for my own shipment, sent to me by the shipping line.
Routinely I tried to select some text, then copy it. On my iBook G4 I got the message "you are not allowed to copy from this document" or something in those lines. That's obviously some DRM restriction. Why I wouldn't be allowed to copy this information is beyond me, as it's my own shipment we're talking about. Downright silly.
So I switched to my Linux system, opened the exact same file in the pdf viewer, and copy-pasted the lines that I needed without any fuss. The Linux viewer just choose to requested restrictions.
To come back to BluRay: these DRM licenses (basically decryption keys, afaik the algorithm is published) are handed out to many many many companies. Maybe hundreds if not thousands of Chinese companies have such a license, to be able to make their BluRay players. Well this unless the DRM parts are built in some special factories and that the Chinese player builders just get the pre-programmed chips. From what I have read about it I think it's the first.
Now it will only be a matter of time before such keys end up on the streets. One leak is enough; I know they can start revoking keys but if it's a popular player that's being revoked they can get quite some backlash from customers who suddenly can not play newer DVDs anymore (bringing more attention to DRM and how bad it is for customers).
Amazon has 80% of the e-book market. They have their own DRM. Or do they license it to other players (both retailers and hardware producers), allowing their DRM scheme to be used by competitors? Or is it, like music, that you have to sell DRM free to be compatible with other players in the market?
I understand strict requirements for being allowed to fly a drone. They're largely in their own control; if you make a mistake in the programming bad things may happen. Most are small, and not of building-destroying grade like a commercial airliner, yet being hit by normal sized RC model aircraft hurts badly at best, and may kill someone.
Now of course there may be different kinds of drone, anything between a dumb RC craft that will fall out of the sky if you're not controlling it directly, to a fully automatic craft that can take off, fly a mission, and land all by itself.
Requiring a pilot's license sounds a bit odd to me, especially for small sized craft.
Well I don't think that's entirely true, yet. Pilots do operate their aircraft themselves a lot, especially when talking about airliners.
But for the rest I wonder what this "integration problem" is. Communication with traffic control can be automated. When it comes to choosing flight paths, altitudes, and general collision avoidance pilots already have not much if any say in the matter, they follow instructions from the tower. Sure they can request routes, but have to get permission to do it. In a way it doesn't matter whether such instructions are given to a human pilot or a robot pilot in case of a drone craft.
Then indeed many drones are small. In many areas they may fly unrestricted, like small human piloted aircraft do already (unregulated airspace it's called I think). Add a radar or so for them to look out for obstacles and other traffic, GPS and proper maps so the know where they are and where they can go, and you're good to go. And yes I'm simplifying I know that.
Flying drone aircraft in commercial air traffic lanes or nearby commercial airports may not be such a good idea anyway. There's enough air traffic there already.
Of course. But that's where the distribution ends: when it's in my hands. Somehow it has to be paid for.
And no matter what it's added in the price of books: within the US Amazon offers "free shipping" (of course I don't know the exact terms as I'm not in US). And you bet this shipping cost is included in the book price already!
So you have two options: the e-book (very low cost, just some server storage space and band width) versus the paper book (which has to be printed, quality checked, packed, shipped to Amazon's distribution warehouse, and then shipped to the customer's home - involving many people working on it, trucks that have to run, warehouses that have to be rented and heated/cooled, etc). Note that indeed I do not include cost like authoring, editing, marketing, whatever as those costs are the same for the printed and the e-book.
With all that extra cost, I just don't believe the extra cost can be just US$1 for a paper book.
And if you still think it's really that cheap, please show me some references with actual, realistic cost breakdowns of the COMPLETE process.
Music industry HAD to go drm-free to muscle themselves away from the enormous power Apple had over their product. Apple owned the market: the shop and the players. To sell DRMed music they could sell through Apple or well the 2% Microsoft had with the Zune or the 5% of the plays-for-sure DRM scheme. Amazon and others wanted a slice of the electronic music sales. The music industry wanted more money for their music, sell more music, and have more control over what price to sell it for. Apple's DRM (which Apple wouldn't license to anyone else) blocked all that. They had no choice but to go DRM free or remain in locked in the stranglehold of Apple's iTunes with it's rigid $0.99 a song pricing model.
When it comes to discounting, psychology plays a role too.
I recall my brother-in-law once tried to run a small shoe shop. You know such a 3x3m shop in a mall stocking mostly cheap shoes, the low-to-mid end $150-250 a pair made-in-China stuff they bought on the wholesale markets across the border in mainland.
They were selling shoes at well about $180 a pair, but sales were not good enough, and they found their margin too small. So what did they do? They discounted the shoes: "30% discount! Original price $300, now $210!" And guess what, their sales went up. Significantly.
So in case of Valve, they may sell more if they discount from US$60 to US$30, than what they would have sold if that game had been US$30 all along. People seem to value goods partly by the price tag that's attached to it, and a 50% discount deal sounds much better than when it's the normal price already. So leaving it at a high price may actually help sales - it makes people eager to buy but they think it's too expensive, and when there is a temporary discount they put themselves under pressure to make the buy, as it's a good deal and who knows when it comes along again.
There is no such thing as industry-wide-standard DRM that has any use. It's self-defeating. Well DRM is in itself self-defeating anyway.
First of all, remember that the R has to do with Restrictions, no more no less. Just that, restrictions in what you can do with a file. Now if all devices all over the industry use the exact same DRM, that means all these devices can decode all materials just fine. All resellers incorporate it in their media, all reader software and devices incorporate it, and the end user basically never sees any restrictions. So why add it to begin with? If DRM doesn't get in the way of the end user, it's not doing anything, and you'd just as well not have it at all and save money in the process (as in: the work to implement the restriction scheme on both the media and the reader sides).
Of course it's used to prevent copying, including making backups for oneself. But with all those devices out there it will be cracked, and cracked fast. There may also be devices that simply ignore the DRM - to make it industry standard it means you need wide adoption, and control of who has the keys is getting more and more difficult.
It won't prevent copying either: one would just copy the complete file DRM and all. It's an industry-wide standard so anyone can read it anyway, DRMed or not. If it works on device A it works on device B. For books requiring on-line verification is troublesome as books are often read off-line and out of reach of a network, e.g. on the bus or on the train.
And by restricting your DRM to a single vendor, that's self-defeating. Amazon has now something like 80% of the e-book market, so if you want to use DRM on your book media you're kinda obliged to at least use Amazon's system. Otherwise you lose out on most of the market. This gives Amazon a huge market power: it can dictate prices, refund policies, their commissions, being exclusive reseller of the book, whatnot. They are in control of the whole process, and by the publisher's decision to require DRM the publisher also completely locks out any competition between resellers.
And to see a classic example on how that works out: iTunes. Music industry demands DRM on music sales, Apple owns well 80-90% of the market or so (not just the retail side, but also the player side) and offers DRM, and as a result Apple has enormous power to set prices - like the $0.99 per song demand. And this DRMed iTunes music is restricted to Apple's devices only to boot. The only way for the music industry to get back their pricing power and control over the sales of their music, was to drop DRM, which in the end they did.
Search engines need size. Size matters. Without enough size there is not enough to be searched for, and queries do not give useful results. And for this application critical mass will be really hard to reach - unless they're going to specialise in searching within very specific topics.
Just thinking of all those TCO studies which basically say you need one admin for every 20 Windows workstations or one admin for every 200 Linux workstations. Something like that. This means you have to apply 10 admins for Windows versus one for Linux. So using Linux costs 90% of employment for admins.
I forgot the exact numbers, but the point is the same: one Linux admin can handle many more workstations than one Windows admin.
Now I'm not too worried about those admins not being able to find other jobs, assuming they are skilled at what they're doing. It just means labour is used more efficiently, and the same number of people can produce more.
And it's likely going to be as slow, as so many servers on so many different (and often relatively slow) connections have to be queried. Sorry but I don't like waiting for search results for more than a second or so, when Google provides them almost instantly.
Google sets the standard, that's what you have to beat. So yes the bar to get into the search engine market is really high, and not many players will be able to give it a go with much chance for success.
The index you can keep on your own hard disk and that of your direct peers is always going to be tiny compared to the indexes Google and Bing et. al. have. That in itself is an issue. Add to that the problem of finding and ranking results that come from a highly fragmented database and doing so at a good speed and I don't see it take off any time soon.
It may help for the food part, to get at least the type of food you expect - but from the outlook you can not normally see whether it has been sprayed with DDT or not sprayed at all. There is a good reason DDT is prohibited now, as are certain other insecticides and pesticides, but you can not trust the farmers themselves to set up or enforce such a prohibition. Personally I also try to buy local food, but with 7 mln people on just 1,000 sq.m. of which half is country park, there is not much produced locally.
For other products, like tooth paste and toys, it's anyone's guess as to what's really in it. And that is where regulation is needed, and I don't trust industry to do it by themselves.
This approach means that if I read it correctly the file sharer gets four warnings (one "educational letter" and three formal warnings) before anything happens.
That means that smart file sharers will take action after the first letter, to cover their tracks. E.g. starting to use encryption, or other methods that hide to the ISP what you're up to. And after that there are three warning letters that allow fine tuning of their methods. Receiving such a letter basically means "you're doing something wrong, we can still see what you're doing!".
And the end result: the ISP happy as there is not much for them to do; the recording industry happy because they don't see any file sharing taking place any more; and the user happy because they can continue what they've been doing over the last decade but now they're safe.
Many Groupons I doubt whether the price is really such a discount.
I have had a pretty nice set dinner some time ago, a Groupon, claiming to be 70% off ($350 (USD45) instead of $1050 or so). What an offer! Or was it? The dinner was good, that notwithstanding, the restaurant was serving Groupon only, and with a choice of just three sets they could save a lot on their food and handling costs. Considering the quality of the meal and the location of the restaurant, what we paid was a good price, but definitely not cheap. Absolutely not worth the original price, they'd never be able to compete on that.
Then my wife came with an offer: a laptop, 30% off! Top deal! Or is it? In that case in seconds I found the exact same laptop model in other on-line shops at almost the same price. Barely any discount for the groupon sale. The "original price" was obviously fake.
So many more of the same I see on Groupon: the discounts are just too big to be economical. Giving a try-out discount is one thing; losing out on the deal is another. Restaurants and so will at least want to have their cost covered; other goods have a purchase price and a reseller wants to have at least their purchase cost back.
In previous stories here on/. it was mentioned that Groupon takes a 50% cut on the deal - this I also start to doubt more and more. I don't know how much they take, but laptops are low-margin products so it can't be that much, or the reseller would be taking a huge loss.
Back to the cakes in question: no doubt the margin is lower than on their normal sales, but if the bakery's manager is not totally stupid they have at least their cost covered on it, possible a small margin, and with the current economy of scale that he's (unintentionally) achieving he may be able to make them a bit cheaper even.
Not to defend these suppliers, but keep in mind that part of the reason these toxic chemicals are used lies on your side of the Pacific. The US demands cheaper and cheaper goods, big buyers like Wal-Mart squeeze their suppliers to the max, and some unscrupulous suppliers respond by offering the prices Wal-Mart demands but replacing certain ingredients with sub-standard ones. Many of these toxic ingredients happen to be cheap.
The solution may lie in Wal-Mart et. al. demanding certification that the products are safe, and using only approved ingredients, on top of doing actual testing on those products for hazardous substances before putting them on store shelves, but that costs money, money Wal-Mart and many consumers are not willing to pay. Strict government regulation is the only way to have such testing/certification done and done properly, and that's something that again goes against general US culture.
You get what you pay for - and if you want good quality, you have to pay more.
Let's first try to fully understand the phenomenon, so we can be better prepared for it.
Then as a source of energy: well maybe, but going to be hard. A strike may carry a lot of energy, it's also short, and as such the energy density is huge. Hard to capture and store (and we're not exactly good at storing energy to begin with). And it's unreliable: you never know when and where the next one strikes.
The coils themselves 10 stories tall, the towers 260' apart - that's quite big. But the enclosure will have to be far enough from the coils to not attract the sparks: you want the sparks between the towers, not between a tower and the enclosure. So that should be easily a 20 stories tall enclosure.
And to make matters worse, no supports are possible, as naturally a support would become too close to the coils. Really wonder how they would go about that. The biggest unsupported roofs that I have heard of are stadiums, and this would have to be roughly twice that size.
I'd more likely expect this to be built far far away from civilisation in the middle of a desert or so. And when operating close air space as well so passing planes don't get hit by the EMP.
Slashdot Mirror
Android App Store doesn't vet apps at all: not the first time, not after fixes.
Apple's App Store does vet apps: first time, every time.
Not sure which is better... Android's model is high-risk, but it's known to be so. Apple's model is supposed to be clean and safe, but it's vetting process is known to be far from perfect.
My solution: don't download brand new apps, but wait for the first reviews to come in.
Doesn't Android allow you to do just that, already?
Apple's walled garden works actively against responsiveness: every bug fix release has to be approved, and this approval process is said to take around two weeks, typically. That's a long time to receive a lot of 1-star ratings.
Android's app store allows instant publishing of bug fixes. Allows for much faster response to user issues.
There probably is quite some power available. At the walls somewhere, where you can plug in some heavy duty cables or so. No idea how they do it exactly, but this is not the only type of event that needs a lot of power: concerts, but also trade shows with their well-lit booths, or even sports events that need enough light for the TV cameras. OK the latter's power supply will be relatively small but still it's a lot.
Now this are 12,000 participants, say 1,000 W available for each, that's 12 MW. About 10,000 Amps 3-phase supply. Totally possible that they just have it.
Anecdote, DRM related. A while ago I had my hands on a PDF file. In this case some shipping document for my own shipment, sent to me by the shipping line.
Routinely I tried to select some text, then copy it. On my iBook G4 I got the message "you are not allowed to copy from this document" or something in those lines. That's obviously some DRM restriction. Why I wouldn't be allowed to copy this information is beyond me, as it's my own shipment we're talking about. Downright silly.
So I switched to my Linux system, opened the exact same file in the pdf viewer, and copy-pasted the lines that I needed without any fuss. The Linux viewer just choose to requested restrictions.
To come back to BluRay: these DRM licenses (basically decryption keys, afaik the algorithm is published) are handed out to many many many companies. Maybe hundreds if not thousands of Chinese companies have such a license, to be able to make their BluRay players. Well this unless the DRM parts are built in some special factories and that the Chinese player builders just get the pre-programmed chips. From what I have read about it I think it's the first.
Now it will only be a matter of time before such keys end up on the streets. One leak is enough; I know they can start revoking keys but if it's a popular player that's being revoked they can get quite some backlash from customers who suddenly can not play newer DVDs anymore (bringing more attention to DRM and how bad it is for customers).
Amazon has 80% of the e-book market. They have their own DRM. Or do they license it to other players (both retailers and hardware producers), allowing their DRM scheme to be used by competitors? Or is it, like music, that you have to sell DRM free to be compatible with other players in the market?
I understand strict requirements for being allowed to fly a drone. They're largely in their own control; if you make a mistake in the programming bad things may happen. Most are small, and not of building-destroying grade like a commercial airliner, yet being hit by normal sized RC model aircraft hurts badly at best, and may kill someone.
Now of course there may be different kinds of drone, anything between a dumb RC craft that will fall out of the sky if you're not controlling it directly, to a fully automatic craft that can take off, fly a mission, and land all by itself.
Requiring a pilot's license sounds a bit odd to me, especially for small sized craft.
Well I don't think that's entirely true, yet. Pilots do operate their aircraft themselves a lot, especially when talking about airliners.
But for the rest I wonder what this "integration problem" is. Communication with traffic control can be automated. When it comes to choosing flight paths, altitudes, and general collision avoidance pilots already have not much if any say in the matter, they follow instructions from the tower. Sure they can request routes, but have to get permission to do it. In a way it doesn't matter whether such instructions are given to a human pilot or a robot pilot in case of a drone craft.
Then indeed many drones are small. In many areas they may fly unrestricted, like small human piloted aircraft do already (unregulated airspace it's called I think). Add a radar or so for them to look out for obstacles and other traffic, GPS and proper maps so the know where they are and where they can go, and you're good to go. And yes I'm simplifying I know that.
Flying drone aircraft in commercial air traffic lanes or nearby commercial airports may not be such a good idea anyway. There's enough air traffic there already.
Of course. But that's where the distribution ends: when it's in my hands. Somehow it has to be paid for.
And no matter what it's added in the price of books: within the US Amazon offers "free shipping" (of course I don't know the exact terms as I'm not in US). And you bet this shipping cost is included in the book price already!
So you have two options: the e-book (very low cost, just some server storage space and band width) versus the paper book (which has to be printed, quality checked, packed, shipped to Amazon's distribution warehouse, and then shipped to the customer's home - involving many people working on it, trucks that have to run, warehouses that have to be rented and heated/cooled, etc). Note that indeed I do not include cost like authoring, editing, marketing, whatever as those costs are the same for the printed and the e-book.
With all that extra cost, I just don't believe the extra cost can be just US$1 for a paper book.
And if you still think it's really that cheap, please show me some references with actual, realistic cost breakdowns of the COMPLETE process.
Music industry HAD to go drm-free to muscle themselves away from the enormous power Apple had over their product. Apple owned the market: the shop and the players. To sell DRMed music they could sell through Apple or well the 2% Microsoft had with the Zune or the 5% of the plays-for-sure DRM scheme. Amazon and others wanted a slice of the electronic music sales. The music industry wanted more money for their music, sell more music, and have more control over what price to sell it for. Apple's DRM (which Apple wouldn't license to anyone else) blocked all that. They had no choice but to go DRM free or remain in locked in the stranglehold of Apple's iTunes with it's rigid $0.99 a song pricing model.
Last time I checked Amazon charged me much more than that for just the warehouse-to-my-home part of the distribution...
Hey they have to amortise those idle presses somewhere! For lack of paper book sales they just add it to the e-books.
When it comes to discounting, psychology plays a role too.
I recall my brother-in-law once tried to run a small shoe shop. You know such a 3x3m shop in a mall stocking mostly cheap shoes, the low-to-mid end $150-250 a pair made-in-China stuff they bought on the wholesale markets across the border in mainland.
They were selling shoes at well about $180 a pair, but sales were not good enough, and they found their margin too small. So what did they do? They discounted the shoes: "30% discount! Original price $300, now $210!" And guess what, their sales went up. Significantly.
So in case of Valve, they may sell more if they discount from US$60 to US$30, than what they would have sold if that game had been US$30 all along. People seem to value goods partly by the price tag that's attached to it, and a 50% discount deal sounds much better than when it's the normal price already. So leaving it at a high price may actually help sales - it makes people eager to buy but they think it's too expensive, and when there is a temporary discount they put themselves under pressure to make the buy, as it's a good deal and who knows when it comes along again.
There is no such thing as industry-wide-standard DRM that has any use. It's self-defeating. Well DRM is in itself self-defeating anyway.
First of all, remember that the R has to do with Restrictions, no more no less. Just that, restrictions in what you can do with a file. Now if all devices all over the industry use the exact same DRM, that means all these devices can decode all materials just fine. All resellers incorporate it in their media, all reader software and devices incorporate it, and the end user basically never sees any restrictions. So why add it to begin with? If DRM doesn't get in the way of the end user, it's not doing anything, and you'd just as well not have it at all and save money in the process (as in: the work to implement the restriction scheme on both the media and the reader sides).
Of course it's used to prevent copying, including making backups for oneself. But with all those devices out there it will be cracked, and cracked fast. There may also be devices that simply ignore the DRM - to make it industry standard it means you need wide adoption, and control of who has the keys is getting more and more difficult.
It won't prevent copying either: one would just copy the complete file DRM and all. It's an industry-wide standard so anyone can read it anyway, DRMed or not. If it works on device A it works on device B. For books requiring on-line verification is troublesome as books are often read off-line and out of reach of a network, e.g. on the bus or on the train.
And by restricting your DRM to a single vendor, that's self-defeating. Amazon has now something like 80% of the e-book market, so if you want to use DRM on your book media you're kinda obliged to at least use Amazon's system. Otherwise you lose out on most of the market. This gives Amazon a huge market power: it can dictate prices, refund policies, their commissions, being exclusive reseller of the book, whatnot. They are in control of the whole process, and by the publisher's decision to require DRM the publisher also completely locks out any competition between resellers.
And to see a classic example on how that works out: iTunes. Music industry demands DRM on music sales, Apple owns well 80-90% of the market or so (not just the retail side, but also the player side) and offers DRM, and as a result Apple has enormous power to set prices - like the $0.99 per song demand. And this DRMed iTunes music is restricted to Apple's devices only to boot. The only way for the music industry to get back their pricing power and control over the sales of their music, was to drop DRM, which in the end they did.
Search engines need size. Size matters. Without enough size there is not enough to be searched for, and queries do not give useful results. And for this application critical mass will be really hard to reach - unless they're going to specialise in searching within very specific topics.
That it costs jobs, well no surprise.
Just thinking of all those TCO studies which basically say you need one admin for every 20 Windows workstations or one admin for every 200 Linux workstations. Something like that. This means you have to apply 10 admins for Windows versus one for Linux. So using Linux costs 90% of employment for admins.
I forgot the exact numbers, but the point is the same: one Linux admin can handle many more workstations than one Windows admin.
Now I'm not too worried about those admins not being able to find other jobs, assuming they are skilled at what they're doing. It just means labour is used more efficiently, and the same number of people can produce more.
The idea of hiding is that the downloads are hidden. So the recording industry can't see it either. Just the ISP sees a lot of traffic coming through.
And it's likely going to be as slow, as so many servers on so many different (and often relatively slow) connections have to be queried. Sorry but I don't like waiting for search results for more than a second or so, when Google provides them almost instantly.
Google sets the standard, that's what you have to beat. So yes the bar to get into the search engine market is really high, and not many players will be able to give it a go with much chance for success.
The index you can keep on your own hard disk and that of your direct peers is always going to be tiny compared to the indexes Google and Bing et. al. have. That in itself is an issue. Add to that the problem of finding and ranking results that come from a highly fragmented database and doing so at a good speed and I don't see it take off any time soon.
It may help for the food part, to get at least the type of food you expect - but from the outlook you can not normally see whether it has been sprayed with DDT or not sprayed at all. There is a good reason DDT is prohibited now, as are certain other insecticides and pesticides, but you can not trust the farmers themselves to set up or enforce such a prohibition. Personally I also try to buy local food, but with 7 mln people on just 1,000 sq.m. of which half is country park, there is not much produced locally.
For other products, like tooth paste and toys, it's anyone's guess as to what's really in it. And that is where regulation is needed, and I don't trust industry to do it by themselves.
This approach means that if I read it correctly the file sharer gets four warnings (one "educational letter" and three formal warnings) before anything happens.
That means that smart file sharers will take action after the first letter, to cover their tracks. E.g. starting to use encryption, or other methods that hide to the ISP what you're up to. And after that there are three warning letters that allow fine tuning of their methods. Receiving such a letter basically means "you're doing something wrong, we can still see what you're doing!".
And the end result: the ISP happy as there is not much for them to do; the recording industry happy because they don't see any file sharing taking place any more; and the user happy because they can continue what they've been doing over the last decade but now they're safe.
Many Groupons I doubt whether the price is really such a discount.
I have had a pretty nice set dinner some time ago, a Groupon, claiming to be 70% off ($350 (USD45) instead of $1050 or so). What an offer! Or was it? The dinner was good, that notwithstanding, the restaurant was serving Groupon only, and with a choice of just three sets they could save a lot on their food and handling costs. Considering the quality of the meal and the location of the restaurant, what we paid was a good price, but definitely not cheap. Absolutely not worth the original price, they'd never be able to compete on that.
Then my wife came with an offer: a laptop, 30% off! Top deal! Or is it? In that case in seconds I found the exact same laptop model in other on-line shops at almost the same price. Barely any discount for the groupon sale. The "original price" was obviously fake.
So many more of the same I see on Groupon: the discounts are just too big to be economical. Giving a try-out discount is one thing; losing out on the deal is another. Restaurants and so will at least want to have their cost covered; other goods have a purchase price and a reseller wants to have at least their purchase cost back.
In previous stories here on /. it was mentioned that Groupon takes a 50% cut on the deal - this I also start to doubt more and more. I don't know how much they take, but laptops are low-margin products so it can't be that much, or the reseller would be taking a huge loss.
Back to the cakes in question: no doubt the margin is lower than on their normal sales, but if the bakery's manager is not totally stupid they have at least their cost covered on it, possible a small margin, and with the current economy of scale that he's (unintentionally) achieving he may be able to make them a bit cheaper even.
Not to defend these suppliers, but keep in mind that part of the reason these toxic chemicals are used lies on your side of the Pacific. The US demands cheaper and cheaper goods, big buyers like Wal-Mart squeeze their suppliers to the max, and some unscrupulous suppliers respond by offering the prices Wal-Mart demands but replacing certain ingredients with sub-standard ones. Many of these toxic ingredients happen to be cheap.
The solution may lie in Wal-Mart et. al. demanding certification that the products are safe, and using only approved ingredients, on top of doing actual testing on those products for hazardous substances before putting them on store shelves, but that costs money, money Wal-Mart and many consumers are not willing to pay. Strict government regulation is the only way to have such testing/certification done and done properly, and that's something that again goes against general US culture.
You get what you pay for - and if you want good quality, you have to pay more.
Let's first try to fully understand the phenomenon, so we can be better prepared for it.
Then as a source of energy: well maybe, but going to be hard. A strike may carry a lot of energy, it's also short, and as such the energy density is huge. Hard to capture and store (and we're not exactly good at storing energy to begin with). And it's unreliable: you never know when and where the next one strikes.
That's gonna be one huge enclosure then.
The coils themselves 10 stories tall, the towers 260' apart - that's quite big. But the enclosure will have to be far enough from the coils to not attract the sparks: you want the sparks between the towers, not between a tower and the enclosure. So that should be easily a 20 stories tall enclosure.
And to make matters worse, no supports are possible, as naturally a support would become too close to the coils. Really wonder how they would go about that. The biggest unsupported roofs that I have heard of are stadiums, and this would have to be roughly twice that size.
I'd more likely expect this to be built far far away from civilisation in the middle of a desert or so. And when operating close air space as well so passing planes don't get hit by the EMP.