Notwithstanding that this doesn't even sound remotely plausible. Anyone with just a basic idea of geography knows that Germany is on a much higher latitude, where the sun doesn't shine as brightly as on lower latitudes.
But then I guess that to some those deserts in southern US are best known for their dark, overcast winter days, and Germany is best known for their scorching hot summers.
Which is why I think it may only work as replacement for motorway driving: highways in the sky instead of on the ground (following those existing strips of mostly empty land that are now used as motorway), with current entry/exit ramps for take off and landing. In an urban area you would have vehicles taking off and landing all the time (landing strips in urban areas?), and that will cause terrible chaos. If only because breaking and stopping to give way to other traffic is simply not an option for an aircraft that is not a helicopter.
Scantily clad women are a staple of car shows and tech shows. Both have a mostly male attendance. Most of the tech/electronics related trade shows that I have been I think there were far more women working in the booths than that there were women amongst the visitors.
China, interestingly, doesn't really have brands. There are really few local brands that have any significant recognition (and virtually none with any recognition outside of China). This makes the products fully interchangeable: brands add value. You pay more for a Porsche because it's built by the Porsche factory. You wouldn't pay the same amount for a no-name brand sports car even if it looks and behaves just like a Porsche.
So what's left for the factories to compete on, is price. Consumers can not distinguish products by brand, so no way to judge quality that warrants higher prices. Naturally you go for the cheapest. And as now factories have to keep cost as low as possible, quality suffers.
The flying over one's house part is easy to solve by routing correctly.
Other issues:
1) space needed to take off and land. You will need some kind of a runway to get airborne unless gong for helicopter/autogyro types of aircraft, making the flight part a replacement of current motorway driving. The last mile to your home can't be flown practically due to this restraint.
2) the cost of the vehicle. Flying cars are expensive. The extra controls, and also the need to fold the wings (otherwise you don't fit on existing roads) makes it expensive.
3) the cost of fuel. Flying costs more fuel than driving.
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about Mastercard and Visa refusing to process donations to Wikileaks?
Cutting Wikileaks off from public support is effectively punishing them, but they have not been even accused [officially] of a crime.
I really don't like them for doing it, on the other hand it is of course their business. The trouble is that Visa and Master have a de-facto monopoly on credit card processing, and there is no reasonable alternative for such services.
As it stands, they simply have the right do refuse to do business with people they think are involved in criminal activity. They may even have a legal obligation there, considering how some non-US banks got punished in the US for suspected money laundering recently. It makes business sense to stop doing business with people you think may be involved in some kind of crime, to prevent becoming an accomplice in that crime.
They are not refusing a vendor because of a generic rule applied fairly and blindly to everyone.
By your logic, clubs should be able to prohibit women members, landlords don't have to rent to gay couples, and bars don't have to serve blacks.
That's the difference.
The difference is that there are laws that ban discrimination on things like race, gender, or sexual orientation.
But at least in the US you have those sex-offender registries, and isn't it so that landlords may look at those lists and refuse to rent out their premises to someone who is a registered sex offender?
Why does Google needs to see a warrant to remove an app from their shop?
It's their shop, what they want to sell in their shop is their free choice. No-one has the right to be listed in that shop, being listed is a privilege. Google decides they don't like the app, so they remove it. That's all there is to it.
Applying your ideas to the physical world: it is just as much a privilege to have your products on sale in a supermarket. The supermarket decides what they accept in their store, and if they don't like your product - or want to remove your product - they don't need anything like a warrant, or do they?
These situations are US-only. Really. All the rest of the world is as good or better than the EU when it comes to mobile service. Even a country like China is lightyears ahead in that respect.
What will stop you from changing prepaid all the time is the need to keep your number. Unless no-one ever calls you or so, and it doesn't matter that your number changes all the time.
While it may be true that most people want data, that is no reason for a carrier to just add it to your contract without asking.
A carrier sells mobile service. The customer decides which services they want to buy: voice, data, SMS, or other services. The customer decides which model phone they use to tap into those services. End of story.
It is a significant fine, yet much more reasonable than what happens in the US. Quite reasonable even I'd say, considering the offense committed.
However part of the problem is that there are maybe 10s of millions of people sharing such files in France alone, and just one got fined. The chance for any individual to be next, is so small, that people simply take that risk. In the US it's not much different.
As long as the chance of being caught and fined is about as much as winning the jackpot in a lottery, nothing will change. They would have to successfully prosecute at least a million individuals to really make a dent - a 10% chance of getting caught and having to pay a $600 fine I will be enough to have most people stop doing it.
However the court system is no way capable of handling that many cases in a reasonable time. It is just not designed for such a case load. The RIANZ themselves also won't be able to handle it. And with a $25 fee per warning e-mail, it'd bankrupt them before they're even halfway with the warnings alone.
So interestingly actually the NZ government did the file sharers a favour, by making cost so high for the RIANZ that it becomes effectively impossible to stop file sharing. And fines so low, that not many individuals will be seriously worried about that. Really the best of both worlds. RIANZ has their "three strikes" law, the Internet users can sleep comfortable knowing that it is totally uneconomical for RIANZ to enforce the law.
Sadly the only ones that are losing out are the artists themselves. The very people that law is to protect. Because the more money RIANZ spends going after file sharers, the less money is available as royalties for the artists. And this way the artists are losing out big time.
First of all of course the photoelectric effect itself. That I think can be seen as the main discovery that led to the LEDs as we have them now - the discovery of the mere existence of the effect, and then why and how it works. When that was understood, researchers could start to target materials that would potentially give light, and in various wavelengths.
The first LEDs were red, as the lower the frequency, the easier it gets, especially to get brightness. Yellow followed soon, green was trickier but human eyes helped a lot: we're so much more sensitive to green light than to red light that you don't need as much actual brightness to make it look just as bright.
And then after a long long wait finally we got blue LEDs that were actually bright as well, those were really tricky to make. That's just a few years, maybe a decade ago. And that was when white LEDs almost immediately followed, as a white LED is basically a red, a green and a blue LED in one package.
It is long known that ads may contain malicious parts - especially bits of javascript. It happened before that major ad servers got compromised, it will happen again. I recall reports that some ads were trying to infect an unsuspecting user directly, and such ads are displayed on sites all over the place, including personal blogs and lolcat sites.
When clicking an ad you don't really know which site you're going to be sent to. When visiting a porn or a warez site, you normally go there intentionally. Those sites are considered risky (especially the free ones - that use free porn/software to attract visitors - and somehow still have a desire to generate income), so many visitors will be more vigilant and may take extra precautions even.
And ads will likely have a greater reach. I think it's safe to assume that many more people visit general sites with ads, than visit porn/warez sites. Greater chance to find a vulnerable system. More chance for someone to (accidentally) click the ad, and have them redirected to a malware site.
The only somewhat surprising part is where online shopping sites are named as a major source of infection. Those sites have a reputation to keep up, or they will lose business. And as they are shopping sites, their income comes from direct sales, so there is no need to display third-party ads for revenue.
Where Cisco's wording is really ambiguous. Deliver may mean indeed as you interpret it, the total number of successful infections, it may also mean the chance that if you visit that site, it gets you infected, which indeed would be my interpretation of the wording Cisco uses.
And now I'd have to go read the report and look at the actual numbers and methodology they used, to figure out the actual meaning.
Maybe in the US it is different, but around here I always see phones advertised with low prices, and then clearly indicated "in combination with 24-month contract worth $xxx a month". At that price you can not buy JUST the phone. That should be pretty clear to anyone buying that phone. They sell it together with the contract, as is actually stated in the advertisement.
When going to the phone company to buy the phone, I've been offered a list of prices for the exact same phone, all with various contract options, including no contract. So if you want to buy the phone, sure you can buy just the phone, at full price. But if you buy a contract with it, you get steep discounts. So that's why I said: you're not buying a phone, you're buying a package phone+contract.
Copyright does not in any way regulate imports of anything. Other laws might do that, however. From what I understand US law on this matter is a bit murky, but in general if you buy something legally elsewhere it is legal to import as far as copyright status goes. Whether the US would view that sale as legal in Antigua is another matter. However, I don't believe I've seen anybody sue anybody for receiving copyrighted goods - likely because there is no end of people to sue for distributing them and that is a far easier case to win.
Then how about people getting stopped at the border for importing fake LV bags and Rolax watches when they come back from China? This happens, and the only law that I can think of is copyright law.
Indeed, the physical infrastructure is the key. Very expensive to build up, needs huge upfront investments. And indeed you don't want ten cables from ten providers but much rather just one shared cable. The companies that historically own infrastructure have a huge advantage.
First in The Netherlands. POTS is owned by KPN, the telecom part of the former PTT, the Dutch national mail and telephone company. KPN still owns all the wires, but is by law obliged to give anyone that asks access to those wires to provide ADSL services. That network was rolled out under government mandate, with government subsidies. Still now they are the common carrier for fixed-line telephone and anyone can be connected at a fixed fee, whether you live in the city or in the countryside, as long as it is near a public road. And that fixed low fee is even if they have to dig a trench of a few km to get the wires installed for you. Now anyone can choose from dozens of Internet service providers, who of course compete hard for customers.
In Hong Kong the situation is a bit different, networks were not rolled out with as much government subsidies, but until recently the second fixed line provider had the right to use the cables of the first one. The second provider has now rolled out its own network so well that this is not so any more. Most of the buildings here are high-rises, making rolling out networks cheap. Fibre optic is getting more and more available, I am currently paying about USD 40 per month for a 20 Mb (up/down) business service, with fixed IP.
In mobile there are about five networks competing, and by law customers can switch networks within days while keeping their number. Providers do lock in customers with contracts, but many people do not have a current contract and are free to switch any time. So a basic 2G voice plan with some 800 minutes and voice mail and call forwarding can go as cheap as USD 3-4 a month. 2G and 3G is basically legacy by now (here it's considered the old technology - while US is barely on 3G), and as such data is getting cheap too. Currently major providers all have 4G services.
It would be great if Google is taking up the task really seriously, and becomes an infrastructure provider. Where anyone who wants can get access to that infrastructure, at fixed prices (level playing field). So that where-ever Google's network is available, you also have a dozen providers that can sell you an internet service.
The trickiest part may be the last mile, the actual connection to the end user's home.
Slashdot Mirror
Notwithstanding that this doesn't even sound remotely plausible. Anyone with just a basic idea of geography knows that Germany is on a much higher latitude, where the sun doesn't shine as brightly as on lower latitudes.
But then I guess that to some those deserts in southern US are best known for their dark, overcast winter days, and Germany is best known for their scorching hot summers.
Which is why I think it may only work as replacement for motorway driving: highways in the sky instead of on the ground (following those existing strips of mostly empty land that are now used as motorway), with current entry/exit ramps for take off and landing. In an urban area you would have vehicles taking off and landing all the time (landing strips in urban areas?), and that will cause terrible chaos. If only because breaking and stopping to give way to other traffic is simply not an option for an aircraft that is not a helicopter.
Some women can work as programmers or so, others not so much and they choose to work as booth babes.
Actually that puts women in an advantage over men, as they have more choice of available jobs.
Scantily clad women are a staple of car shows and tech shows. Both have a mostly male attendance. Most of the tech/electronics related trade shows that I have been I think there were far more women working in the booths than that there were women amongst the visitors.
China, interestingly, doesn't really have brands. There are really few local brands that have any significant recognition (and virtually none with any recognition outside of China). This makes the products fully interchangeable: brands add value. You pay more for a Porsche because it's built by the Porsche factory. You wouldn't pay the same amount for a no-name brand sports car even if it looks and behaves just like a Porsche.
So what's left for the factories to compete on, is price. Consumers can not distinguish products by brand, so no way to judge quality that warrants higher prices. Naturally you go for the cheapest. And as now factories have to keep cost as low as possible, quality suffers.
The flying over one's house part is easy to solve by routing correctly.
Other issues:
1) space needed to take off and land. You will need some kind of a runway to get airborne unless gong for helicopter/autogyro types of aircraft, making the flight part a replacement of current motorway driving. The last mile to your home can't be flown practically due to this restraint.
2) the cost of the vehicle. Flying cars are expensive. The extra controls, and also the need to fold the wings (otherwise you don't fit on existing roads) makes it expensive.
3) the cost of fuel. Flying costs more fuel than driving.
Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about Mastercard and Visa refusing to process donations to Wikileaks?
Cutting Wikileaks off from public support is effectively punishing them, but they have not been even accused [officially] of a crime.
I really don't like them for doing it, on the other hand it is of course their business. The trouble is that Visa and Master have a de-facto monopoly on credit card processing, and there is no reasonable alternative for such services.
As it stands, they simply have the right do refuse to do business with people they think are involved in criminal activity. They may even have a legal obligation there, considering how some non-US banks got punished in the US for suspected money laundering recently. It makes business sense to stop doing business with people you think may be involved in some kind of crime, to prevent becoming an accomplice in that crime.
They are not refusing a vendor because of a generic rule applied fairly and blindly to everyone.
By your logic, clubs should be able to prohibit women members, landlords don't have to rent to gay couples, and bars don't have to serve blacks.
That's the difference.
The difference is that there are laws that ban discrimination on things like race, gender, or sexual orientation.
But at least in the US you have those sex-offender registries, and isn't it so that landlords may look at those lists and refuse to rent out their premises to someone who is a registered sex offender?
Why does Google needs to see a warrant to remove an app from their shop?
It's their shop, what they want to sell in their shop is their free choice. No-one has the right to be listed in that shop, being listed is a privilege. Google decides they don't like the app, so they remove it. That's all there is to it.
Applying your ideas to the physical world: it is just as much a privilege to have your products on sale in a supermarket. The supermarket decides what they accept in their store, and if they don't like your product - or want to remove your product - they don't need anything like a warrant, or do they?
It's not that no-one wants to sell it to him, it's that they're not allowed to sell it to him even if they wanted to.
These situations are US-only. Really. All the rest of the world is as good or better than the EU when it comes to mobile service. Even a country like China is lightyears ahead in that respect.
What will stop you from changing prepaid all the time is the need to keep your number. Unless no-one ever calls you or so, and it doesn't matter that your number changes all the time.
How does your carrier find out which phone you use?
It sounds like they're spying on their customers. Privacy breach?
While it may be true that most people want data, that is no reason for a carrier to just add it to your contract without asking.
A carrier sells mobile service. The customer decides which services they want to buy: voice, data, SMS, or other services. The customer decides which model phone they use to tap into those services. End of story.
They just use robots for lack of sharks.
I'm sure RIANZ is doing just that right now.
It is a significant fine, yet much more reasonable than what happens in the US. Quite reasonable even I'd say, considering the offense committed.
However part of the problem is that there are maybe 10s of millions of people sharing such files in France alone, and just one got fined. The chance for any individual to be next, is so small, that people simply take that risk. In the US it's not much different.
As long as the chance of being caught and fined is about as much as winning the jackpot in a lottery, nothing will change. They would have to successfully prosecute at least a million individuals to really make a dent - a 10% chance of getting caught and having to pay a $600 fine I will be enough to have most people stop doing it.
However the court system is no way capable of handling that many cases in a reasonable time. It is just not designed for such a case load. The RIANZ themselves also won't be able to handle it. And with a $25 fee per warning e-mail, it'd bankrupt them before they're even halfway with the warnings alone.
So interestingly actually the NZ government did the file sharers a favour, by making cost so high for the RIANZ that it becomes effectively impossible to stop file sharing. And fines so low, that not many individuals will be seriously worried about that. Really the best of both worlds. RIANZ has their "three strikes" law, the Internet users can sleep comfortable knowing that it is totally uneconomical for RIANZ to enforce the law.
Sadly the only ones that are losing out are the artists themselves. The very people that law is to protect. Because the more money RIANZ spends going after file sharers, the less money is available as royalties for the artists. And this way the artists are losing out big time.
For LEDs there have been many iterations.
First of all of course the photoelectric effect itself. That I think can be seen as the main discovery that led to the LEDs as we have them now - the discovery of the mere existence of the effect, and then why and how it works. When that was understood, researchers could start to target materials that would potentially give light, and in various wavelengths.
The first LEDs were red, as the lower the frequency, the easier it gets, especially to get brightness. Yellow followed soon, green was trickier but human eyes helped a lot: we're so much more sensitive to green light than to red light that you don't need as much actual brightness to make it look just as bright.
And then after a long long wait finally we got blue LEDs that were actually bright as well, those were really tricky to make. That's just a few years, maybe a decade ago. And that was when white LEDs almost immediately followed, as a white LED is basically a red, a green and a blue LED in one package.
It is long known that ads may contain malicious parts - especially bits of javascript. It happened before that major ad servers got compromised, it will happen again. I recall reports that some ads were trying to infect an unsuspecting user directly, and such ads are displayed on sites all over the place, including personal blogs and lolcat sites.
When clicking an ad you don't really know which site you're going to be sent to. When visiting a porn or a warez site, you normally go there intentionally. Those sites are considered risky (especially the free ones - that use free porn/software to attract visitors - and somehow still have a desire to generate income), so many visitors will be more vigilant and may take extra precautions even.
And ads will likely have a greater reach. I think it's safe to assume that many more people visit general sites with ads, than visit porn/warez sites. Greater chance to find a vulnerable system. More chance for someone to (accidentally) click the ad, and have them redirected to a malware site.
The only somewhat surprising part is where online shopping sites are named as a major source of infection. Those sites have a reputation to keep up, or they will lose business. And as they are shopping sites, their income comes from direct sales, so there is no need to display third-party ads for revenue.
Where Cisco's wording is really ambiguous. Deliver may mean indeed as you interpret it, the total number of successful infections, it may also mean the chance that if you visit that site, it gets you infected, which indeed would be my interpretation of the wording Cisco uses.
And now I'd have to go read the report and look at the actual numbers and methodology they used, to figure out the actual meaning.
Maybe in the US it is different, but around here I always see phones advertised with low prices, and then clearly indicated "in combination with 24-month contract worth $xxx a month". At that price you can not buy JUST the phone. That should be pretty clear to anyone buying that phone. They sell it together with the contract, as is actually stated in the advertisement.
When going to the phone company to buy the phone, I've been offered a list of prices for the exact same phone, all with various contract options, including no contract. So if you want to buy the phone, sure you can buy just the phone, at full price. But if you buy a contract with it, you get steep discounts. So that's why I said: you're not buying a phone, you're buying a package phone+contract.
Copyright does not in any way regulate imports of anything. Other laws might do that, however. From what I understand US law on this matter is a bit murky, but in general if you buy something legally elsewhere it is legal to import as far as copyright status goes. Whether the US would view that sale as legal in Antigua is another matter. However, I don't believe I've seen anybody sue anybody for receiving copyrighted goods - likely because there is no end of people to sue for distributing them and that is a far easier case to win.
Then how about people getting stopped at the border for importing fake LV bags and Rolax watches when they come back from China? This happens, and the only law that I can think of is copyright law.
Indeed, the physical infrastructure is the key. Very expensive to build up, needs huge upfront investments. And indeed you don't want ten cables from ten providers but much rather just one shared cable. The companies that historically own infrastructure have a huge advantage.
First in The Netherlands. POTS is owned by KPN, the telecom part of the former PTT, the Dutch national mail and telephone company. KPN still owns all the wires, but is by law obliged to give anyone that asks access to those wires to provide ADSL services. That network was rolled out under government mandate, with government subsidies. Still now they are the common carrier for fixed-line telephone and anyone can be connected at a fixed fee, whether you live in the city or in the countryside, as long as it is near a public road. And that fixed low fee is even if they have to dig a trench of a few km to get the wires installed for you. Now anyone can choose from dozens of Internet service providers, who of course compete hard for customers.
In Hong Kong the situation is a bit different, networks were not rolled out with as much government subsidies, but until recently the second fixed line provider had the right to use the cables of the first one. The second provider has now rolled out its own network so well that this is not so any more. Most of the buildings here are high-rises, making rolling out networks cheap. Fibre optic is getting more and more available, I am currently paying about USD 40 per month for a 20 Mb (up/down) business service, with fixed IP.
In mobile there are about five networks competing, and by law customers can switch networks within days while keeping their number. Providers do lock in customers with contracts, but many people do not have a current contract and are free to switch any time. So a basic 2G voice plan with some 800 minutes and voice mail and call forwarding can go as cheap as USD 3-4 a month. 2G and 3G is basically legacy by now (here it's considered the old technology - while US is barely on 3G), and as such data is getting cheap too. Currently major providers all have 4G services.
It would be great if Google is taking up the task really seriously, and becomes an infrastructure provider. Where anyone who wants can get access to that infrastructure, at fixed prices (level playing field). So that where-ever Google's network is available, you also have a dozen providers that can sell you an internet service.
The trickiest part may be the last mile, the actual connection to the end user's home.
Some people care about ppv.
The rest knows about the existence of The Pirate Bay.