They forgot one thing, though; their residential customers. They are the ones who need the additional capacity, and without it their service will continue to degrade.
You're giving Verizon too much credit: the way you write this, you imply they care about their customers and the service they offer.
You can easily convert to more useful measures using Google.
Of course it'd have been nice had they use their own tools to advance science. Or maybe that should be: to have the US catch up with the rest of the world.
Google requires AC output, so even if you're adding batteries in the mix, you still need to build the inverter, with even less space for your inverter part as added bonus.
Also Google provides a DC input, and a conversion efficiency. So they'll measure what goes in and what comes out. Having batteries in the box providing the power will show itself quickly there and then.
Of course - but I hope you realise that the source of the income is rather irrelevant - it even works like that when the income they receive is something like an unemployment benefit that's almost as much as what they make when working, or under a guaranteed "basic income" system where the state provides an basic income to everyone.
Just have a look at the rate of inflation in Zimbabwe over the past years (thousands of percent a month of even a week it has been) vs. the economic growth (highly negative) for an example.
Money is just one motivation for people to get a job.
There are other motivations as well: to have a life, for starters. To feel (somewhat) useful. To get out of the house, meet other people.
You may have heard of the concept of volunteering, people spending many hours every week doing unpaid work. In those cases, money is obviously not a motivation.
I have three bank accounts, two PayPal accounts and a credit card account. That's six highly sensitive logins.
Then I have my local computer (remote ssh login) and a remote cloud server (remote ssh login). Also requiring decent passwords. That's eight already. Plus one generic password for slashdot and all the other forums.
So that's nine passwords to remember. Well, I may be able to manage that.
Now the second part: remember which password belongs to which service, without making your passwords something like (still have to remember the first part separately), which in turn would compromise your password's security.
For added difficulty: I don't use all the above accounts actively. It is quite OK to remember a rather complex password you use on a daily basis, it gets harder if you check your bank maybe once a week, let alone that dormant account that is accessed maybe once or twice a year.
That just doesn't work. As a result, the banks that don't allow me to use my password manager have a relative weak password, something that at least I can remember easily and link to the correct account, for actual security relying on the second factor in the authentication chain there. The alternative would be the good old post-it note, or having them written down (or stored in a plain text file) somewhere.
People are not computers. Memories falter and fail, and are inaccurate. We'll have to live with that.
If so I doubt it'll pass the "right to be forgotten" criteria, one of which is that it is about something so long time ago that it is not relevant for the present. Can't say that about this case, which is positively current.
First of all, I'm old enough to remember a world without Internet, without mobile phones, even without computers (other than the occasional MSX or C64), and have been doing internet banking from the time you had to dial in and use a command line interface (probably telnet) with the bank to get things done.
Yet I still never heard of those products. Maybe they were US-only? Not worldwide?
No matter what, you totally confirm what I suspected: nothing of value was lost. Sure it may have been valuable, but such products long lost their value, being overtaken by much more powerful online solutions.
I for one had never even heard of these products, and I don't think I've ever encountered a web site using it. All I see is Google Maps when sites need to do something with mapping.
Which still makes me question: why 39 shots when the victim (allegedly) shot only once?
They don't have to start shooting back (certainly not 39 times). Maybe shoot once or twice, and demand the suspect to drop their weapons and surrender to them. As you say, they have no special forces training. So if the suspect doesn't respond, they take cover, keep an eye on the suspect, don't allow him/her to leave, shoot back only when absolutely necessary (e.g. when the suspect opens fire they may fire back), and call in the special forces - including a negotiator who can talk the suspect into dropping their weapons and surrender.
But of course they won't do that. That's going to cost a lot more than 39 bullets: the wages of these special forces people, the training costs, the court costs afterwards (a suspect caught life you'll have to put on trial after all - a dead one you just put in a grave), and of course the extra work for all those cops to do the paperwork in preparing for the court case. No, just killing your suspect is much quicker and cheaper. With the added bonus of being able to claim another victory in the "War on Drugs" and showing how dangerous those dealers really are, and how important it is to get more money to wage that war.
More likely: the killing of the granny was indeed an honest mistake, and then they tried to cover up their mistake by making her look like a criminal by planting drugs and the gun, in an attempt to justify their actions.
Not trying to say what those cops did is good. Mistakes happen, sadly, and they should take all precautions to prevent that from happening.
Firing 39 shots sounds totally excessive - the hit rate is also pretty bad indeed. That indeed leaves some 33 stray bullets, no telling where they ended up. Flying out through windows hitting some innocent passer-by maybe? A few years ago in Macau a motorcyclist got hurt by a police bullet, after an officer fired a warning shot in the air a couple hundred meters away.
All in all the police definitely had motivation for a cover up if indeed it was a mistake. The victim being dead and unable to testify against them definitely makes such a cover up easier.
Wow... that means I wasted 30 years of my life so far!
Btw does anyone knows which keyboard has cursor keys that don't wear out so quickly? I hate having to stop the game just because I have to buy yet another keyboard.
For a whole association it's even harder to pull off such an extortion than for a single company due to politics (not every member will be interested in doing this for various reasons) and technical issues (many will have outsourced Internet service for starters).
Besides, what's stopping those students to just use their mobile phone for Internet connection if they can't to the sites they want to? That students are a major market for certain sites, also means the students want to access the sites. Blocking a site will just tell them to find a workaround, and with mobile Internet between affordable and dirt cheap (I pay the equivalent of less than USD10 a month for unlimited data and 1200 minutes or so airtime) the fixed line connection becomes less and less essential. College asks them to get a book for their course, they'll get the book. Is it not over the fixed line, it's just done over the mobile.
But it'd still be worth contacting some local business that needs access to your 15000 customers and taking them for a test shakedown, just to show you were a good soldier and looked in the sofa cushions for loose change.
Part of the problem you face there, is that the summary mentions "college towns across America". So if you're dealing with a business to whom these 15,000 are important, you're talking about a national business, and unless it's highly specialised it'll be too big to care about you.
On the other hand, any local business is local (and "local" I read as "operating in one town or less"), which means any local business would target no more than a fraction of the 15,000: the faction that happens to live in that town.
All manufacturers have to pay these costs, so they don't lose competitiveness. It just makes the handsets a bit more expensive than they would otherwise be - and as a result it's the consumer that suffers. They have to pay more for their phone.
There won't be a single manufacturer that can't compete due to these costs. They're the same for everyone. Just like the physical components, this is just a part of the bill of parts of a phone. And if a phone manufacturer doesn't pay for those patents, they can't sell their phone in a market where those patents are valid.
I'm also one of those oldies, and never heard of that particular site. However I'm on Slashdot from not too long after the beginning (many years of just reading - not commenting) - my friends told me about this site over a beer in the students' club. Good old days.
To come back to Slashdot and Google: I'm using Google quite extensively to search for all kinds of topics, including tech related ones. I don't recall having ever seen a link to a Slashdot article appear in Google, not even a link to a comment (which is of course where the real interesting bits can be found), probably as Slashdot doesn't produce any new content, they just aggregate what they find elsewhere. If Metafilter is indeed also just an aggregator, good that Google skips their links and instead provides the links to the actual content instead.
An animal which travels over 100 miles in a day in the wild is confined to an area slightly larger than itself. Put a human in a cage with a few inches of room between skin and cage wall. See how long it lives
That's done all the time. And then they're let out an hour a day or so to walk around a slightly larger space (like the Orca's get to a bigger pool to perform tricks), and get some exercise.
This is what's called "prisons". Humans generally don't seem to like it, but they also don't live that much shorter inside a prison than outside (it's suggested that it cuts lifetime to about a quarter of natural lifetime, which for humans would mean most prisoners should be dead within 20 years behind bars).
Sex is not the problem - the Africa is the fastest growing continent in the world, by far! We really don't have to provide that. On the contrary, that's something you'd want to slow down. Or at least educate the population on - where the Internet has a great role top play again. Oh, and the churches as well. The "no sex before marriage" moral isn't all that bad. Especially if combined with proper sex education and the provision of contraceptives and condoms as "second best" option.
Anything I had for the last 15 years or so has been booting from USB just fine. And anything older than ten years is probably not suitable for this purpose anyway, and there are plenty of younger disused computers out there so you don't need so really old ones.
Drivers is usually not much of a problem when talking about Linux. It comes with drivers for all common and lots of less common hardware included, and older (even legacy) hardware tends to be supported best - this in contrast indeed to the latest and greatest hardware.
For a large part of Africans, those problems have been solved long time ago (if they every really existed to begin with). That's the part of Africa this project is useful for - and likely by pushing up the standard of living of those Africans, there'll be a trickle-down effect to other parts of the continent. Overall more and overall better paying jobs means more people can get to work, and those that work get better income, which hopefully is self-reinforcing.
The best help for those countries is to help them to help themselves, and helping them improve their Internet access and computer literacy is one of those ways. Sending large quantities of free food and clothing is great for emergency relief, after that it's becoming destructive (as it kills off any local food/clothing production).
And I personally think Africa will become the next China, just as China replaced S. Korea, that replaced Japan and so on for cheap labor. I see it as a good thing. This cycle has left all of those countries better off than before.
There is a major difference between most African countries and most Asian countries, and that is a strong, stable government. This as political stability is a requirement for businesses to thrive. In too many countries, larger companies need their own private army to protect their factories. You don't need that in China, or even Myanmar. Those countries are far more stable than most African countries. (note: in this argument I don't care about WHAT KIND OF government there is, just that it is STABLE).
Secondly, China alone has a far larger population than the whole of Africa. And even China is currently suffering from serious labour shortages, with factories not being able to take on more orders as they don't have the people to manufacture them.
I agree with you that Africa is a great candidate to become the next low-cost manufacturing hub, however first they'll have to get their politics in order. A stable government, that is firmly in power, and that rules the whole country, not just the big cities. Factories need space, they're not in the cities, they're out of the cities. Without proper safety there, and at least a half-decent protection of land ownership, it's a no-go.
Slashdot Mirror
They forgot one thing, though; their residential customers. They are the ones who need the additional capacity, and without it their service will continue to degrade.
You're giving Verizon too much credit: the way you write this, you imply they care about their customers and the service they offer.
You can easily convert to more useful measures using Google.
Of course it'd have been nice had they use their own tools to advance science. Or maybe that should be: to have the US catch up with the rest of the world.
Google requires AC output, so even if you're adding batteries in the mix, you still need to build the inverter, with even less space for your inverter part as added bonus.
Also Google provides a DC input, and a conversion efficiency. So they'll measure what goes in and what comes out. Having batteries in the box providing the power will show itself quickly there and then.
Of course - but I hope you realise that the source of the income is rather irrelevant - it even works like that when the income they receive is something like an unemployment benefit that's almost as much as what they make when working, or under a guaranteed "basic income" system where the state provides an basic income to everyone.
inflation != economic growth.
They're often not even closely related.
Just have a look at the rate of inflation in Zimbabwe over the past years (thousands of percent a month of even a week it has been) vs. the economic growth (highly negative) for an example.
Money is just one motivation for people to get a job.
There are other motivations as well: to have a life, for starters. To feel (somewhat) useful. To get out of the house, meet other people.
You may have heard of the concept of volunteering, people spending many hours every week doing unpaid work. In those cases, money is obviously not a motivation.
At least one of my banks complained of a too long password when I used an 8-character password. I had to shorten it to no more than 6 characters.
Some forums don't even accept that short passwords.
I have three bank accounts, two PayPal accounts and a credit card account. That's six highly sensitive logins.
Then I have my local computer (remote ssh login) and a remote cloud server (remote ssh login). Also requiring decent passwords. That's eight already. Plus one generic password for slashdot and all the other forums.
So that's nine passwords to remember. Well, I may be able to manage that.
Now the second part: remember which password belongs to which service, without making your passwords something like (still have to remember the first part separately), which in turn would compromise your password's security.
For added difficulty: I don't use all the above accounts actively. It is quite OK to remember a rather complex password you use on a daily basis, it gets harder if you check your bank maybe once a week, let alone that dormant account that is accessed maybe once or twice a year.
That just doesn't work. As a result, the banks that don't allow me to use my password manager have a relative weak password, something that at least I can remember easily and link to the correct account, for actual security relying on the second factor in the authentication chain there. The alternative would be the good old post-it note, or having them written down (or stored in a plain text file) somewhere.
People are not computers. Memories falter and fail, and are inaccurate. We'll have to live with that.
If so I doubt it'll pass the "right to be forgotten" criteria, one of which is that it is about something so long time ago that it is not relevant for the present. Can't say that about this case, which is positively current.
First of all, I'm old enough to remember a world without Internet, without mobile phones, even without computers (other than the occasional MSX or C64), and have been doing internet banking from the time you had to dial in and use a command line interface (probably telnet) with the bank to get things done.
Yet I still never heard of those products. Maybe they were US-only? Not worldwide?
No matter what, you totally confirm what I suspected: nothing of value was lost. Sure it may have been valuable, but such products long lost their value, being overtaken by much more powerful online solutions.
I for one had never even heard of these products, and I don't think I've ever encountered a web site using it. All I see is Google Maps when sites need to do something with mapping.
Which still makes me question: why 39 shots when the victim (allegedly) shot only once?
They don't have to start shooting back (certainly not 39 times). Maybe shoot once or twice, and demand the suspect to drop their weapons and surrender to them. As you say, they have no special forces training. So if the suspect doesn't respond, they take cover, keep an eye on the suspect, don't allow him/her to leave, shoot back only when absolutely necessary (e.g. when the suspect opens fire they may fire back), and call in the special forces - including a negotiator who can talk the suspect into dropping their weapons and surrender.
But of course they won't do that. That's going to cost a lot more than 39 bullets: the wages of these special forces people, the training costs, the court costs afterwards (a suspect caught life you'll have to put on trial after all - a dead one you just put in a grave), and of course the extra work for all those cops to do the paperwork in preparing for the court case. No, just killing your suspect is much quicker and cheaper. With the added bonus of being able to claim another victory in the "War on Drugs" and showing how dangerous those dealers really are, and how important it is to get more money to wage that war.
More likely: the killing of the granny was indeed an honest mistake, and then they tried to cover up their mistake by making her look like a criminal by planting drugs and the gun, in an attempt to justify their actions.
Not trying to say what those cops did is good. Mistakes happen, sadly, and they should take all precautions to prevent that from happening.
Firing 39 shots sounds totally excessive - the hit rate is also pretty bad indeed. That indeed leaves some 33 stray bullets, no telling where they ended up. Flying out through windows hitting some innocent passer-by maybe? A few years ago in Macau a motorcyclist got hurt by a police bullet, after an officer fired a warning shot in the air a couple hundred meters away.
All in all the police definitely had motivation for a cover up if indeed it was a mistake. The victim being dead and unable to testify against them definitely makes such a cover up easier.
Wow... that means I wasted 30 years of my life so far!
Btw does anyone knows which keyboard has cursor keys that don't wear out so quickly? I hate having to stop the game just because I have to buy yet another keyboard.
For a whole association it's even harder to pull off such an extortion than for a single company due to politics (not every member will be interested in doing this for various reasons) and technical issues (many will have outsourced Internet service for starters).
Besides, what's stopping those students to just use their mobile phone for Internet connection if they can't to the sites they want to? That students are a major market for certain sites, also means the students want to access the sites. Blocking a site will just tell them to find a workaround, and with mobile Internet between affordable and dirt cheap (I pay the equivalent of less than USD10 a month for unlimited data and 1200 minutes or so airtime) the fixed line connection becomes less and less essential. College asks them to get a book for their course, they'll get the book. Is it not over the fixed line, it's just done over the mobile.
But it'd still be worth contacting some local business that needs access to your 15000 customers and taking them for a test shakedown, just to show you were a good soldier and looked in the sofa cushions for loose change.
Part of the problem you face there, is that the summary mentions "college towns across America". So if you're dealing with a business to whom these 15,000 are important, you're talking about a national business, and unless it's highly specialised it'll be too big to care about you.
On the other hand, any local business is local (and "local" I read as "operating in one town or less"), which means any local business would target no more than a fraction of the 15,000: the faction that happens to live in that town.
It depends on how big that 35,000 students is on their total market. For some sites (Netflix) it's nothing. For other, it may be a large portion.
All manufacturers have to pay these costs, so they don't lose competitiveness. It just makes the handsets a bit more expensive than they would otherwise be - and as a result it's the consumer that suffers. They have to pay more for their phone.
There won't be a single manufacturer that can't compete due to these costs. They're the same for everyone. Just like the physical components, this is just a part of the bill of parts of a phone. And if a phone manufacturer doesn't pay for those patents, they can't sell their phone in a market where those patents are valid.
Agreed.
I'm also one of those oldies, and never heard of that particular site. However I'm on Slashdot from not too long after the beginning (many years of just reading - not commenting) - my friends told me about this site over a beer in the students' club. Good old days.
To come back to Slashdot and Google: I'm using Google quite extensively to search for all kinds of topics, including tech related ones. I don't recall having ever seen a link to a Slashdot article appear in Google, not even a link to a comment (which is of course where the real interesting bits can be found), probably as Slashdot doesn't produce any new content, they just aggregate what they find elsewhere. If Metafilter is indeed also just an aggregator, good that Google skips their links and instead provides the links to the actual content instead.
An animal which travels over 100 miles in a day in the wild is confined to an area slightly larger than itself. Put a human in a cage with a few inches of room between skin and cage wall. See how long it lives
That's done all the time. And then they're let out an hour a day or so to walk around a slightly larger space (like the Orca's get to a bigger pool to perform tricks), and get some exercise.
This is what's called "prisons". Humans generally don't seem to like it, but they also don't live that much shorter inside a prison than outside (it's suggested that it cuts lifetime to about a quarter of natural lifetime, which for humans would mean most prisoners should be dead within 20 years behind bars).
Oh sure, and those with the high gun ownership rates and absence of government are the best places to do business, of course!
Sex is not the problem - the Africa is the fastest growing continent in the world, by far! We really don't have to provide that. On the contrary, that's something you'd want to slow down. Or at least educate the population on - where the Internet has a great role top play again. Oh, and the churches as well. The "no sex before marriage" moral isn't all that bad. Especially if combined with proper sex education and the provision of contraceptives and condoms as "second best" option.
Anything I had for the last 15 years or so has been booting from USB just fine. And anything older than ten years is probably not suitable for this purpose anyway, and there are plenty of younger disused computers out there so you don't need so really old ones.
Drivers is usually not much of a problem when talking about Linux. It comes with drivers for all common and lots of less common hardware included, and older (even legacy) hardware tends to be supported best - this in contrast indeed to the latest and greatest hardware.
For a large part of Africans, those problems have been solved long time ago (if they every really existed to begin with). That's the part of Africa this project is useful for - and likely by pushing up the standard of living of those Africans, there'll be a trickle-down effect to other parts of the continent. Overall more and overall better paying jobs means more people can get to work, and those that work get better income, which hopefully is self-reinforcing.
The best help for those countries is to help them to help themselves, and helping them improve their Internet access and computer literacy is one of those ways. Sending large quantities of free food and clothing is great for emergency relief, after that it's becoming destructive (as it kills off any local food/clothing production).
And I personally think Africa will become the next China, just as China replaced S. Korea, that replaced Japan and so on for cheap labor. I see it as a good thing. This cycle has left all of those countries better off than before.
There is a major difference between most African countries and most Asian countries, and that is a strong, stable government. This as political stability is a requirement for businesses to thrive. In too many countries, larger companies need their own private army to protect their factories. You don't need that in China, or even Myanmar. Those countries are far more stable than most African countries. (note: in this argument I don't care about WHAT KIND OF government there is, just that it is STABLE).
Secondly, China alone has a far larger population than the whole of Africa. And even China is currently suffering from serious labour shortages, with factories not being able to take on more orders as they don't have the people to manufacture them.
I agree with you that Africa is a great candidate to become the next low-cost manufacturing hub, however first they'll have to get their politics in order. A stable government, that is firmly in power, and that rules the whole country, not just the big cities. Factories need space, they're not in the cities, they're out of the cities. Without proper safety there, and at least a half-decent protection of land ownership, it's a no-go.