Do you think the government is smart enough to spread propaganda by making a file which, in a very subtle way, promotes whatever they want to promote, and then putting it on the prohibited list?
Even if they find that someone who has filed an appeal hasn't transferred any copyrighted stuff, I bet people won't get their $35 back most of the time. It will happen the same way as mail-in rebates or perhaps other forms of corporate refund.
Maybe they will require $35 to refute each individual instance of supposed infringement and then only give you a refund as a credit on your bill, meaning that you will have to remain a (probably now throttled and therefore highly profitable) customer for a long time to get your multi-$35 fees back. Switch ISPs? Sorry, no refund. All the while of course, they will be getting interest on your fee money, while you won't be. You might even be paying interest on it if you had to borrow it.
Maybe the appeal phone number will be staffed from 9AM-3PM Bangalore time by a single elderly, asthmatic Indian woman with severe hearing loss.
$35 is about the same amount that banks charge for late fees on CCs, presumably because it is about the maximum they can charge before people start spending lots of both parties' time trying to get the money back.
This is all stuff sociopathic corporations have pulled before. As far as I know, it still isn't illegal. Nobody should give them a single sent in refutation fees.
I'm sure the MPAA/RIAA companies and the ISPs who also plug their own "on demand" services just love this. If you get throttled, not only can you not use the bandwidth you paid for, you can't realistically use any legit streaming services like Netflix or even watch YouTube either.
It just occurred to me that this might not even just be about torrents. Maybe they will throttle anyone that, say, watches a YouTube video that contains some copyrighted music in the background. Sure, they are robo-spamming Google with DMCA takedown notices about the video too. Or maybe they will stop that, since they haven't had a whole lot of success with stemming the flow of free content that way. It would be easier for them to just throttle essentially everyone who streams any content at all, thereby basically turning the internet off for their captive customers as a content distribution system.
Maybe this is just a prelude to new MPAA/RIAA sanctioned streaming services via the "on demand" ISPs. "Want to watch what you want when you want without being throttled for stealing movies? Join Cramcastic for only $49.99 / month and get as much guaranteed genuine content as you want! (fine print)(Up to your monthly cap.)(/fine print)"
Good point. I almost forgot about Next. Even if Apple made that decision because it was the path of least resistance, I can still say that I think it was probably the best decision they could have made. The fact that the BSDs are the oldest OSs in common usage today isn't a coincidence.
I don't think that is why Apple based OSX on various open BSDs. Apple is and always has been a hardware company. They don't make money on software by itself like Microsoft does. They sell laptops that would sell for $800 with Windows on them for $2000 because they are the only laptops that run OSX without all sorts of hacking. (Yes, there are other reasons, but 95% or more of the reason they keep selling those laptops for that price is due to OSX.) When Apple embarked on OSX, they were circling the drain. They knew they needed a complete OS rewrite; they needed an OS that did preemptive multitasking. (Even Windows did preemptive multitasking then.) Apple was never in competition with software companies.
They did the smartest thing they could have done, which was to put an Apple-style interface on a free, high quality implementation of an operating system that was more than powerful enough to hang with the industry leaders, well understood by geeks, and which contained, essentially, the reference implementation of the protocols that the internet runs on.
At that point, lots of people, especially geeks, (geeks had recently become cool,) wanted to buy a laptop that ran "UNIX" and that had fully supported hardware that "just worked".
Unfortunately, no, I don't know much about American Express, but I can engage in some speculation. I know that they have cards that must be paid off every month and I believe those cards don't have interest like regular CCs because the cardholder isn't allowed to carry a balance. They aren't really credit cards in the traditional sense; they aren't really a vehicle for borrowing money; they seem to be a way just to use the CC processing system to make payments.
It seems to be the case that borrowers in general either pay on time the vast majority of the time or they default. Most accounts that are more than a few days past due seem to end up defaulting. Because they don't have the cardholder's money ahead of time, American Express cards still involve a short term loan which involves the risk of default.
If it is true that nobody pays interest or additional fees until they are already past due on a payment, then American Express probably loses money on a lot of the accounts that end up paying interest or fees. This is probably why they have such high interchange fees -- they don't have any other way to make money.
I thought about why anyone would want to deal with American Express if this is their business model. It kind of makes sense that there would have been a market for them back in the day when people at the point of sale couldn't verify anything about the payment except that the buyer had a card with their signature on it that appeared to be legit. For people that had money, (American Express cards were marketed as carrying prestige -- if you had one, you didn't *need* a loan,) and didn't need or want a credit line but still wanted the convenience of a card, someone with an American Express card could guarantee an honest merchant that payment would be forthcoming.
Merchants probably decided to accept them because they figured that they would generate larger sales since the people who used them had money to spend. It was also the only on-demand alternative to cash, (dangerous to carry in significant amounts,) or check, (dangerous to take because the risk of a check being bad is high,) for large transactions. They were like debit cards before real time, 24/7 transaction authorization existed. The merchant paid for that bit of insurance and for the business of those moneyed customers with high interchange fees on those transactions.
It is hard to see how they are relevant today except as corporate credit cards.
You can still pursue your dream job while you earn a living, and you can do your laughing at the other people on payday.
That's just it though -- you can't realistically do this very well. You can't exactly tell your factory foreman, "sorry, can't work this afternoon, I have a job interview." And that is after the fact that one is not likely to have much energy for finding a job after working all day. (Yes, I realize this is the time to suck it up and work a full day and then come home and work on your resume or whatever, but realistically, you could do a better job of it when you aren't fatigued; looking for a job can easily be a full time job by itself. The fatigue bit isn't an intractable part of the problem, it is just another thing that makes it harder.)
I work for a credit union as a programmer. I am fairly involved in card stuff. The 2-4% gets split up between Visa/MC, the bank that is lending the money to the customer, and any other processors / stand-ins along the way. The majority of the amount the lending bank gets goes to reward programs and fraud. For debit cards, most of the fraud gets eaten by the bank / credit union that issued the card because most debit card fraud does not involve using a PIN; in debit card fraud situations, the bank's customer usually gets a refund after filing a dispute. This is why debit card interchange fees are almost as high as credit card fees.
For credit cards, the interchange income the bank receives sometimes does not even cover the cost of fraud and rewards; the rest of the cost is paid for from the CC loan interest. Yes, that means financial institutions sometimes lose money on CC customers even when they don't default. Overall, banks generally do make a profit on CCs even when the card holder pays it off every month, but that profit is no where near 3% of the charges on the card.
This is clearly anti-net-neutrality propaganda, but I am glad it was submitted to Slashdot. It points out that someone with the power to commission such an article thinks, probably correctly, that this argument will actually make some of the readers angry at Netflix. I haven't even read the article, but I'd love to know whose personal/corporate army was supposed to be rallied by this.
It may be that the wireless device hasn't degraded. The RF environment may have just become noisier, thereby reducing the S/N ratio of your links. In fact, I would be very surprised if this hasn't happened regardless of any degradation in the condition of the wireless device.
Part of the reason petrol is what it is is that it comes from a part of the crude oil hydrocarbon pile that wasn't particularly useful for much else, at least not in the quantities that crude oil contains. If it doesn't get burned as fuel, what are we going to do with it? The answer: it will get burned as fuel in one way or another. We might end up burning it in Diesel cycle engines, but it will still be a motor fuel no matter what.
I doubt the pill will bring about any real social change; There's already effective male birth control, it's called a condom. Men don't want to wear it. Giving them more choices in birth control won't result in a significant change; A lot of men will then not wear a condom or take the pill or get their tubes tied. Giving people options doesn't make them more responsible. Male birth control won't cause a paradigm shift. If you ask me, it'll just be more evidence of what those feminists you seem to hate so much have been saying all along: Until social expectations of men and women are the same, any observations we make on the difference in behavior between men and women will continue to reflect our own prejudices.
---end quote---
New varieties of birth control that men can use to unilaterally prevent pregnancy may not make anyone more responsible but they may drastically improve responsible mens' relationships with women. Good fences make good neighbors and all that.
Much of the human brain's processing happens in ways that are inaccessible to consciousness; we may know what we do but much of our true motivation is hidden from us. As a man, I consciously know that want a lot more from a woman than just a warm, fertile body, yet for some reason, once I have had sex with a woman, if the relationship ceases to involve me ejaculating on her cervix on a regular basis, I cannot feel love from her anymore. As far as my limbic system is concerned, the relationship is over. My conscious thoughts, and my resulting statements about how I feel include nothing like the limbic system reaction. The only exception to this loss of love seems to involve her having a medical-grade excuse why she can't have sex with anyone.
Why do I bring this up? To point out that the deceptive relationship things that men and women accuse each other of probably do happen even though the accused swear, (honestly, because they genuinely believe it,) that there was no deception involved. People do shitty reproduction-related things unconsciously. People would rather propagate their genes in non-deceptive ways but if those ways fail to produce what they are wired to seek for reproductive success, people will seek it in ways that deceive others and usually themselves too. People are only predominantly logical when you think of them as gene replicators. Once people have enough experience with life to know this, they tend not to trust the opposite sex because of the differences between male and female optimal reproductive strategies.
Do men want to have sex even when they don't want the responsibility of kids? Yes. Do women want to have sex even when they don't want to have the responsibility of kids? Yes. Have women, (or men,) ever done deceptive things like cause an "unexpected" pregnancy either because they wanted kids or they wanted a relationship to become more permanent? Yes. Men need the ability to control their own reproduction while still having good relationships, which is more than condoms, abstinence, or vasectomy can currently provide for a large portion of the male population.
It is interesting that MS left the hosts file present and mostly functional if it is useless for everything except malware. I wonder how Win 8 resolves ad.doubleclick.com under normal circumstances. Maybe in Win 8 it resolves to MS's doubleclick equivalent if no entry is present in the hosts file for ad.doubleclick.com and they would rather the user keep it that way.
Probably the most telling part of all this is the fact that MS may have decided to override the hosts file according to a plan that can be easily disseminated to machines through anti-malware system updates. How long will it be before they start using that capability in self-serving ways that users don't want?
Just think about the rushed and surprise announcement of their Surface tablet announcement when the Nexus 7 was about to get media coverage. They could have made their Nexus 7 blackout attempt more effective by adjusting hosts files remotely.
As someone who lived in the Detroit area during the 80s and 90s and whose family members spent major portions of their careers employed by GM, I can say that the problems with American cars were not caused by insufficient engineering ability. The problems were the result of complacent and overly conservative management combined with a complacent and overly unionized manufacturing workforce. In the late 70s / early 80s, Complacency in management led to a situation where it didn't matter much what the engineers designed unless the design was for a cheaper version of something with a proven track record; the management effectively thought people would continue indefinitely to buy the same things that had sold well in the past. Instead of putting resources into developing what people were going to want in the future, they concentrated on lowering costs.
Attempts at factory automation were frequently sabotaged by factory workers who feared that humans would be replaced by robots. Pension payouts from the first big pile of pensioned employees were ramping up. Internal politics guaranteed that only "yes men" would get promoted. Basically, nobody was paying attention to the customer anymore -- the engineers were the only ones even paying attention to the product at that point.
They started turning things around in the early 90s, but they still haven't managed to overcome the reputation damage that was done during the 80s. They seem to have still not really managed to look beyond the market pigeon holes they currently occupy.
I have become aware over the last couple years that some companies have become so good at astroturfing that their efforts are almost undetectable as such. Microsoft is one such company. Starbucks is probably another. Companies like Starbucks probably do benefit from it simply because all they really need to do most of the time is remind people that they exist.
Amazon has been plugging the Kindle pretty hard...
Is for the FSF or some other trustworthy organization to commit a patent spam atrocity that involves patenting all sorts concepts related to generating patent applications. Perhaps they can patent the abstract concept of a mental algorithm by which numerous obvious patents can be generated from a single thought. Maybe they should go all the way and patent the abstract concept of a mental algorithm -- just make thinking an activity that might cause expensive litigation while simultaneously making thinking about litigation a cause of potentially expensive litigation. Before long, everyone who even likes to dabble in the realm of patent spam or patent related legal asshattery will be locked in a litigation loop until they die of dehydration. It will be like a virus that does a while(1) { fork(); } to the patent trolls.
Microsoft has always been robustly anti-competitive. As TFA shows, they aren't even trying to hide the fact that the passion behind their "kick-ass product" is really more like the passion of a temper tantrum than the passion of someone creating something that kicks ass.
Microsoft used to at least be clever about their anti-competitive behavior. Now that Bill Gates left and they aren't even good at being anti-competitive any more, they're basically just an 800 pound retarded, spoiled, wealthy gorilla toward which almost nobody has any remaining good will. I can't imagine that a company more concerned with destroying the competition than with satisfying customers can continue being profitable forever. I am having a hard time seeing how they are going to get themselves out of the predicament they are in, (especially when they don't seem to understand that they are in one.) I suspect they might have to pull an IBM and almost go bankrupt before they finally get around to curing their cranio-rectal inversion.
I know P ~ V^2 assuming constant impedance. I am not arguing with you about the physics. "3dB" does not include any information about units. "3dB" is a ratio, it doesn't care what it is a ratio of. "3dB" is a purely quantitative concept. "3dB" can apply equally to elephants, libraries of congress, Volts, or kielbasas.
My post about "3dB" being conceptually equal to "200%" is correct because "3dB" has nothing inherently to do with power or voltage or anything except a *ratio*. Only if one adds units to it, can it *imply* a *ratio* of something.
"3dB" is the same thing as "2:1", "2", "200%", "2.0x10^0", "0x02", "2/1", "16/8", "two to one", "two" and "II". "2" does not mean "2 Volts" or "2 Watts" or "2 overly pedantic slashdot posts" or 2 of anything else unless you put units after it to indicate that it is supposed to mean *two of something*. "3dB" is in the same unitless boat as "2". I can say "I have 200% of the chickens I used to have" or "my chicken gain is 3dB" and either way, I will be saying the same thing, because "200%" is a ratio, (200:100), and so is "3dB", (2:1), and (200:100) == (2:1).
Any ratio can be expressed in deciBels; to do so, one takes one's ratio, takes the base-10 log of it, and multiplies that result by 10. This final result is the ratio in deciBels. *That* is how deciBels are defined, regardless of what their application is or what the ratio represents. Any definition of the deciBel where the ratio 2:1 equals anything other than 3dB either has the deciBel confused with something else or is confusing the definition of the deciBel with the definition of whatever they are trying to use them for.
The assertion that deciBels are a unit of signal strength is wrong unless, by "signal strength", you mean "signal-to-noise ratio." DeciBels can only quantify signal strength when they are used in conjunction with a reference signal strength and then they only describe signal strength as a ratio relative to the reference one. If you want to call deciBels units of something, they are a unit of *ratio*, and that is *all* they are. They are not inherently a unit of signal strength, sound pressure, voltage, power, or anything else. There is not a physics book in the known universe that disagrees with me about this if you read it carefully. When someone speaks of "signal strength" in "dBm", like other posts have pointed out, they mean a quantity of power or voltage relative to 1mW or 1mV respectively -- a ratio of mW to 1mW or a ratio of mV to 1mV. "dBm" != "dB".
Again, you are right that P ~ V^2. You are right that when you change the voltage by a ratio of 1.414:1, you get a change in power of 2:1. When the ratio of (power now):(power before) is 2:1, when before turned into now, the power went up by 3dB. When the ratio of (voltage now):(voltage before) is 1.414:1, when before turned into now, the voltage went up by (10*log10(1.414))dB.
If you want to indicate that P~V^2 using deciBels, you could say that a 3dB increase in voltage implies a 6dB increase in power, or that the ratio of the power ratio to the voltage ratio is 3dB. Anyone who simply states in a textbook, (textbooks are supposed to be clear and unambiguous,) that a 2:1 ratio comes out to an unqualified "6dB" when the ratio happens to represent voltage and then provides a formula to make it work out that way is suffering from cranio-rectal inversion. It always has been and always will be incorrect. If your textbook says otherwise, whomever wrote it should be soundly chastised after having their cranio-rectal inversion cured.:)
I realize that this post has exceeded standard allowable limits of pedantry, but if you will refer to my initial post, you will see that I summarized this problem by saying something about someone turning a voltage knob while reading a power meter and incorrectly claiming that a factor of 2 is 6dB. The problem is not that they are wrong about the physics, the problem is either that they don't really understand what "6dB" means or they haven't explained that they are turning a voltage knob but measuring power, thereby making their ratio a ratio of two different kinds of things where X units of one thing really does translate into X^2 units of the other.
I know dBm is widely accepted. It is ubiquitous in the optical communications world too. Most optical power meters designed for telecom-type usage measure optical power in dBm by default. For that matter, "dBm" is also commonly used to mean "dB relative to 1mV." I'm also aware that nobody uses "dBm" to mean "dB relative to 1/1000th," but if we are being pedantic, "dBm" means nothing more than "dB relative to 1/1000th". This was the point in my first post.
I have no problem with dBmW, dBmV, or dBm for short where there isn't ambiguity about what the units are. Those "factor of 2 == 6dB" people piss me off though. They are taking a nice, clean, useful concept and notation and totally screwing it up. They are also just wrong.
Things like signal-to-noise ratio and amplifier gain are usually specified in "dB". This usage is correct because the quantity always refers to a ratio of two quantities of the same thing.
Kakari said it best: the ratio 2 (in dB) == 10*log10(2)dB == 3dB *always*, because that is the definition of the *deciBel*. Note here that I am not talking about dBmW or dBmV or dBm -- just "dB". The ratio 2:1 can be a ratio of voltages, powers, elephants, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as the ratio compares some quantity of something against another quantity of the same thing. If one wants to express a ratio (2:1) of voltages in dB, one cannot correctly use 20*log10(2) = 6dB, because 20*log10(ratio) is not how one calculates deciBels! These should be called "dodeciBels" or some other conglomeration of "Bels" and a prefix that means 1/20th, but not "deciBels", because it just doesn't make sense. This is like saying "percent" sometimes means "out of 200" instead of "out of 100" depending on what the quantity in question is a percentage of. Nobody who understands that "cent" refers to 100 and "per" refers to something like "for each" would take an "out of 200" definition of "percent" seriously.
This 20*log10(ratio) stuff is bullshit I tell you!
The whole point of a "signal strength" meter is so that one can determine when one is approaching a "no signal" zone and so that one can determine how well their phone will work at a given location without having to make a call. It is disappointing that traditional signal strength meters (with 3-6 "bars") fail to do this reliably.
You can tell if the phone will work or not should you try to make a call or transmit data by a simple on/off indicator like you said. If the meter just displayed the S/N ratio, it would be the equivalent of having a traditional meter with lots of bars. This would convey more information, probably take up less space on the display, and allow people to generate detailed enough data that they might be able to fix things in places where performance is bad.
The problem of large or mysterious numbers could be remedied by offsetting the value by some fixed amount so that "0" is where the S/N ratio is so bad that the phone can't do anything.
To further add to the pedantry, I would like to point out the following:
In the beginning of the Wikipedia article about the venerable dB, it points out (correctly) that decibels are used to denote ratios and are therefore inherently devoid of units. When discussing the decibel, we are discussing only numerical notation here, not physics.
The Wikipedia article (correctly) stops just shy of stating that the decibel is inherently related to physical concepts like electric field strength, power, and pressure. One does not define "percent" as being inherently related to financial concepts. For the same reason, one should not define "decibel" as being inherently related to physical concepts. Writing "-10dB" is *exactly* the same conceptually as writing "10%". Writing "3dB" is conceptually *exactly* the same as writing "200%". The fact that I have never seen the annual yield of a savings account expressed using dB does not mean that it isn't correct to do so.
To be slightly but meaningfully pedantic, "dBm" should be interpreted effectively the same way "dB" is, (except you should add 30 to it -> 0dB == 30dBm,) because there aren't any units present. The "m" just adds the "milli" prefix to a unit that isn't stated. If you mean dB relative to 1 mW, you want dBmW. If you want dB relative to 1 mV, you want dBmV. If you've ever had an argument with someone about whether a "factor of 2" is 3 dB or 6 dB, this is usually because the 6 dB guy is unaware that he is turning a voltage knob but measuring the resulting change in power. If you have ever had this argument, you are probably a geek. (Just for posterity, a factor of 2 == 3dB *always*.)
I agree with most of what you said. Be careful about believing commonly talked about macroeconomic measurements like "inflation" and "the unemployment rate" in the US. I'm not sure how those quantities are measured in other countries, but the definitions of "inflation" and "the unemployment rate" as commonly discussed on American TV news are laughable. Over the past 40 years or so, the powers that be have changed how they measure those quantities such that they're mostly meaningless. When you say the government maintains a stable and relatively low unemployment rate, the way in which the government measures and reports this rate is part of how they attempt to regulate the economy. One could easily imagine a situation where an unstable employment or currency value situation could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. (It has happened before.) If you were to look at the unemployment rate in the US the way it used to be measured decades ago or how many other countries measure it, the 9.7% number, (or whatever the unemployment rate supposedly is now,) would probably double or triple, which says to me that the standard of employment availability in the US is really not unusually high at all.
With regard to the standard of hardship in the US, also keep in mind that most of the people in the US that are really bad off are fairly invisible to those who attempt to count them. Those who don't have an official address or an income they report or a credit record or a phone are simply hard to track because they don't leave much of a paper trail. I was looking at some data a couple weeks ago about the average life expectation in the US, (divided up by county,) and I was fairly astonished to see that since the early/mid 80s, some poor parts of the US have been experiencing a declining average life expectancy. While life expectancy is probably not a particularly good proxy for "hardship" for small variations in life expectancy, these gaps were huge. There were substantial sections of the US where the average male life expectancy was in the mid 50s. I think the most recently published number for the average male life expectancy over the whole US was 76. To me, this is a pretty large difference. I find it rather strange that the US government and the media don't really talk much about the lives of the poor in the US. (They both acknowledge that the poor exist, but before I looked at that data, I was under the impression that the poor in the US were still pretty well off by global standards. It seems that the reality is significantly worse than I thought. I'm aware that there are places in the world where the average male life expectancy is significantly shorter than "mid 50s," and where "hardship" is a totally inadequate term for what the residents of those places experience. I was just surprised to see that there were parts of the US where people probably score "below average" on a global scale of comfort and well-being and that this score is probably still dropping.)
That's not the only error they made. I can think of lots of potential problems with this, even though it might work on paper. One of the biggest problems would probably be simply keeping the surface clean enough that the photons that make it through the layer of scum on the surface would be numerous enough to generate a meaningful amount of power. After that, when we're talking about road panels that have lots of internal structure, (the article mentions power and data cabling, LEDs, electronics, and the fact that the panels themselves would be composed of a tough glass surface with solar panels underneath,) there are lots of places that water could cause havoc. Water on road surfaces would be pretty dirty with all sorts of corrosive solutes in it. The panels would have to have seals on them somewhere, and if any of them leaked, moisture would get in. Mold or algae could grow inside. Galvanic corrosion could occur. When the outside temperature drops below freezing, any parts that aren't successfully actively heated could have water freeze and break things. This whole system wouldn't be very fault tolerant. There are ways of improving the reliability of all of those things, but we would then be talking about panels that aren't even remotely simple anymore.
I do think it is good that people are thinking about how to solve the energy problem in unusual ways. There are some ideas in this article that are probably useful. (Even embedding glass in the surface of normal roads to make them more durable might be a good idea although I'm sure that some of the material that is naturally present in the gravel component of an asphalt road is silica anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think the government is smart enough to spread propaganda by making a file which, in a very subtle way, promotes whatever they want to promote, and then putting it on the prohibited list?
Even if they find that someone who has filed an appeal hasn't transferred any copyrighted stuff, I bet people won't get their $35 back most of the time. It will happen the same way as mail-in rebates or perhaps other forms of corporate refund.
Maybe they will require $35 to refute each individual instance of supposed infringement and then only give you a refund as a credit on your bill, meaning that you will have to remain a (probably now throttled and therefore highly profitable) customer for a long time to get your multi-$35 fees back. Switch ISPs? Sorry, no refund. All the while of course, they will be getting interest on your fee money, while you won't be. You might even be paying interest on it if you had to borrow it.
Maybe the appeal phone number will be staffed from 9AM-3PM Bangalore time by a single elderly, asthmatic Indian woman with severe hearing loss.
$35 is about the same amount that banks charge for late fees on CCs, presumably because it is about the maximum they can charge before people start spending lots of both parties' time trying to get the money back.
This is all stuff sociopathic corporations have pulled before. As far as I know, it still isn't illegal. Nobody should give them a single sent in refutation fees.
I'm sure the MPAA/RIAA companies and the ISPs who also plug their own "on demand" services just love this. If you get throttled, not only can you not use the bandwidth you paid for, you can't realistically use any legit streaming services like Netflix or even watch YouTube either.
It just occurred to me that this might not even just be about torrents. Maybe they will throttle anyone that, say, watches a YouTube video that contains some copyrighted music in the background. Sure, they are robo-spamming Google with DMCA takedown notices about the video too. Or maybe they will stop that, since they haven't had a whole lot of success with stemming the flow of free content that way. It would be easier for them to just throttle essentially everyone who streams any content at all, thereby basically turning the internet off for their captive customers as a content distribution system.
Maybe this is just a prelude to new MPAA/RIAA sanctioned streaming services via the "on demand" ISPs. "Want to watch what you want when you want without being throttled for stealing movies? Join Cramcastic for only $49.99 / month and get as much guaranteed genuine content as you want! (fine print)(Up to your monthly cap.)(/fine print)"
Good point. I almost forgot about Next. Even if Apple made that decision because it was the path of least resistance, I can still say that I think it was probably the best decision they could have made. The fact that the BSDs are the oldest OSs in common usage today isn't a coincidence.
I don't think that is why Apple based OSX on various open BSDs. Apple is and always has been a hardware company. They don't make money on software by itself like Microsoft does. They sell laptops that would sell for $800 with Windows on them for $2000 because they are the only laptops that run OSX without all sorts of hacking. (Yes, there are other reasons, but 95% or more of the reason they keep selling those laptops for that price is due to OSX.) When Apple embarked on OSX, they were circling the drain. They knew they needed a complete OS rewrite; they needed an OS that did preemptive multitasking. (Even Windows did preemptive multitasking then.) Apple was never in competition with software companies.
They did the smartest thing they could have done, which was to put an Apple-style interface on a free, high quality implementation of an operating system that was more than powerful enough to hang with the industry leaders, well understood by geeks, and which contained, essentially, the reference implementation of the protocols that the internet runs on.
At that point, lots of people, especially geeks, (geeks had recently become cool,) wanted to buy a laptop that ran "UNIX" and that had fully supported hardware that "just worked".
Unfortunately, no, I don't know much about American Express, but I can engage in some speculation. I know that they have cards that must be paid off every month and I believe those cards don't have interest like regular CCs because the cardholder isn't allowed to carry a balance. They aren't really credit cards in the traditional sense; they aren't really a vehicle for borrowing money; they seem to be a way just to use the CC processing system to make payments.
It seems to be the case that borrowers in general either pay on time the vast majority of the time or they default. Most accounts that are more than a few days past due seem to end up defaulting. Because they don't have the cardholder's money ahead of time, American Express cards still involve a short term loan which involves the risk of default.
If it is true that nobody pays interest or additional fees until they are already past due on a payment, then American Express probably loses money on a lot of the accounts that end up paying interest or fees. This is probably why they have such high interchange fees -- they don't have any other way to make money.
I thought about why anyone would want to deal with American Express if this is their business model. It kind of makes sense that there would have been a market for them back in the day when people at the point of sale couldn't verify anything about the payment except that the buyer had a card with their signature on it that appeared to be legit. For people that had money, (American Express cards were marketed as carrying prestige -- if you had one, you didn't *need* a loan,) and didn't need or want a credit line but still wanted the convenience of a card, someone with an American Express card could guarantee an honest merchant that payment would be forthcoming.
Merchants probably decided to accept them because they figured that they would generate larger sales since the people who used them had money to spend. It was also the only on-demand alternative to cash, (dangerous to carry in significant amounts,) or check, (dangerous to take because the risk of a check being bad is high,) for large transactions. They were like debit cards before real time, 24/7 transaction authorization existed. The merchant paid for that bit of insurance and for the business of those moneyed customers with high interchange fees on those transactions.
It is hard to see how they are relevant today except as corporate credit cards.
You can still pursue your dream job while you earn a living, and you can do your laughing at the other people on payday.
That's just it though -- you can't realistically do this very well. You can't exactly tell your factory foreman, "sorry, can't work this afternoon, I have a job interview." And that is after the fact that one is not likely to have much energy for finding a job after working all day. (Yes, I realize this is the time to suck it up and work a full day and then come home and work on your resume or whatever, but realistically, you could do a better job of it when you aren't fatigued; looking for a job can easily be a full time job by itself. The fatigue bit isn't an intractable part of the problem, it is just another thing that makes it harder.)
I work for a credit union as a programmer. I am fairly involved in card stuff. The 2-4% gets split up between Visa/MC, the bank that is lending the money to the customer, and any other processors / stand-ins along the way. The majority of the amount the lending bank gets goes to reward programs and fraud. For debit cards, most of the fraud gets eaten by the bank / credit union that issued the card because most debit card fraud does not involve using a PIN; in debit card fraud situations, the bank's customer usually gets a refund after filing a dispute. This is why debit card interchange fees are almost as high as credit card fees.
For credit cards, the interchange income the bank receives sometimes does not even cover the cost of fraud and rewards; the rest of the cost is paid for from the CC loan interest. Yes, that means financial institutions sometimes lose money on CC customers even when they don't default. Overall, banks generally do make a profit on CCs even when the card holder pays it off every month, but that profit is no where near 3% of the charges on the card.
This is clearly anti-net-neutrality propaganda, but I am glad it was submitted to Slashdot. It points out that someone with the power to commission such an article thinks, probably correctly, that this argument will actually make some of the readers angry at Netflix. I haven't even read the article, but I'd love to know whose personal/corporate army was supposed to be rallied by this.
> Say what you want about Microsoft's shoddy products, at least they're consistent.
Like the Zune and the content database/service that accompanied it?
It may be that the wireless device hasn't degraded. The RF environment may have just become noisier, thereby reducing the S/N ratio of your links. In fact, I would be very surprised if this hasn't happened regardless of any degradation in the condition of the wireless device.
Part of the reason petrol is what it is is that it comes from a part of the crude oil hydrocarbon pile that wasn't particularly useful for much else, at least not in the quantities that crude oil contains. If it doesn't get burned as fuel, what are we going to do with it? The answer: it will get burned as fuel in one way or another. We might end up burning it in Diesel cycle engines, but it will still be a motor fuel no matter what.
Looks like Microsoft decided Apple is currently a bigger threat to them than Android. They're wrong, of course, but they might not yet know why.
I doubt the pill will bring about any real social change; There's already effective male birth control, it's called a condom. Men don't want to wear it. Giving them more choices in birth control won't result in a significant change; A lot of men will then not wear a condom or take the pill or get their tubes tied. Giving people options doesn't make them more responsible. Male birth control won't cause a paradigm shift. If you ask me, it'll just be more evidence of what those feminists you seem to hate so much have been saying all along: Until social expectations of men and women are the same, any observations we make on the difference in behavior between men and women will continue to reflect our own prejudices.
---end quote---
New varieties of birth control that men can use to unilaterally prevent pregnancy may not make anyone more responsible but they may drastically improve responsible mens' relationships with women. Good fences make good neighbors and all that.
Much of the human brain's processing happens in ways that are inaccessible to consciousness; we may know what we do but much of our true motivation is hidden from us. As a man, I consciously know that want a lot more from a woman than just a warm, fertile body, yet for some reason, once I have had sex with a woman, if the relationship ceases to involve me ejaculating on her cervix on a regular basis, I cannot feel love from her anymore. As far as my limbic system is concerned, the relationship is over. My conscious thoughts, and my resulting statements about how I feel include nothing like the limbic system reaction. The only exception to this loss of love seems to involve her having a medical-grade excuse why she can't have sex with anyone.
Why do I bring this up? To point out that the deceptive relationship things that men and women accuse each other of probably do happen even though the accused swear, (honestly, because they genuinely believe it,) that there was no deception involved. People do shitty reproduction-related things unconsciously. People would rather propagate their genes in non-deceptive ways but if those ways fail to produce what they are wired to seek for reproductive success, people will seek it in ways that deceive others and usually themselves too. People are only predominantly logical when you think of them as gene replicators. Once people have enough experience with life to know this, they tend not to trust the opposite sex because of the differences between male and female optimal reproductive strategies.
Do men want to have sex even when they don't want the responsibility of kids? Yes. Do women want to have sex even when they don't want to have the responsibility of kids? Yes. Have women, (or men,) ever done deceptive things like cause an "unexpected" pregnancy either because they wanted kids or they wanted a relationship to become more permanent? Yes. Men need the ability to control their own reproduction while still having good relationships, which is more than condoms, abstinence, or vasectomy can currently provide for a large portion of the male population.
It is interesting that MS left the hosts file present and mostly functional if it is useless for everything except malware. I wonder how Win 8 resolves ad.doubleclick.com under normal circumstances. Maybe in Win 8 it resolves to MS's doubleclick equivalent if no entry is present in the hosts file for ad.doubleclick.com and they would rather the user keep it that way. Probably the most telling part of all this is the fact that MS may have decided to override the hosts file according to a plan that can be easily disseminated to machines through anti-malware system updates. How long will it be before they start using that capability in self-serving ways that users don't want? Just think about the rushed and surprise announcement of their Surface tablet announcement when the Nexus 7 was about to get media coverage. They could have made their Nexus 7 blackout attempt more effective by adjusting hosts files remotely.
As someone who lived in the Detroit area during the 80s and 90s and whose family members spent major portions of their careers employed by GM, I can say that the problems with American cars were not caused by insufficient engineering ability. The problems were the result of complacent and overly conservative management combined with a complacent and overly unionized manufacturing workforce. In the late 70s / early 80s, Complacency in management led to a situation where it didn't matter much what the engineers designed unless the design was for a cheaper version of something with a proven track record; the management effectively thought people would continue indefinitely to buy the same things that had sold well in the past. Instead of putting resources into developing what people were going to want in the future, they concentrated on lowering costs.
Attempts at factory automation were frequently sabotaged by factory workers who feared that humans would be replaced by robots. Pension payouts from the first big pile of pensioned employees were ramping up. Internal politics guaranteed that only "yes men" would get promoted. Basically, nobody was paying attention to the customer anymore -- the engineers were the only ones even paying attention to the product at that point.
They started turning things around in the early 90s, but they still haven't managed to overcome the reputation damage that was done during the 80s. They seem to have still not really managed to look beyond the market pigeon holes they currently occupy.
I have become aware over the last couple years that some companies have become so good at astroturfing that their efforts are almost undetectable as such. Microsoft is one such company. Starbucks is probably another. Companies like Starbucks probably do benefit from it simply because all they really need to do most of the time is remind people that they exist.
Amazon has been plugging the Kindle pretty hard...
Is for the FSF or some other trustworthy organization to commit a patent spam atrocity that involves patenting all sorts concepts related to generating patent applications. Perhaps they can patent the abstract concept of a mental algorithm by which numerous obvious patents can be generated from a single thought. Maybe they should go all the way and patent the abstract concept of a mental algorithm -- just make thinking an activity that might cause expensive litigation while simultaneously making thinking about litigation a cause of potentially expensive litigation. Before long, everyone who even likes to dabble in the realm of patent spam or patent related legal asshattery will be locked in a litigation loop until they die of dehydration. It will be like a virus that does a while(1) { fork(); } to the patent trolls.
Microsoft has always been robustly anti-competitive. As TFA shows, they aren't even trying to hide the fact that the passion behind their "kick-ass product" is really more like the passion of a temper tantrum than the passion of someone creating something that kicks ass.
Microsoft used to at least be clever about their anti-competitive behavior. Now that Bill Gates left and they aren't even good at being anti-competitive any more, they're basically just an 800 pound retarded, spoiled, wealthy gorilla toward which almost nobody has any remaining good will. I can't imagine that a company more concerned with destroying the competition than with satisfying customers can continue being profitable forever. I am having a hard time seeing how they are going to get themselves out of the predicament they are in, (especially when they don't seem to understand that they are in one.) I suspect they might have to pull an IBM and almost go bankrupt before they finally get around to curing their cranio-rectal inversion.
I know P ~ V^2 assuming constant impedance. I am not arguing with you about the physics. "3dB" does not include any information about units. "3dB" is a ratio, it doesn't care what it is a ratio of. "3dB" is a purely quantitative concept. "3dB" can apply equally to elephants, libraries of congress, Volts, or kielbasas.
My post about "3dB" being conceptually equal to "200%" is correct because "3dB" has nothing inherently to do with power or voltage or anything except a *ratio*. Only if one adds units to it, can it *imply* a *ratio* of something.
"3dB" is the same thing as "2:1", "2", "200%", "2.0x10^0", "0x02", "2/1", "16/8", "two to one", "two" and "II". "2" does not mean "2 Volts" or "2 Watts" or "2 overly pedantic slashdot posts" or 2 of anything else unless you put units after it to indicate that it is supposed to mean *two of something*. "3dB" is in the same unitless boat as "2". I can say "I have 200% of the chickens I used to have" or "my chicken gain is 3dB" and either way, I will be saying the same thing, because "200%" is a ratio, (200:100), and so is "3dB", (2:1), and (200:100) == (2:1).
Any ratio can be expressed in deciBels; to do so, one takes one's ratio, takes the base-10 log of it, and multiplies that result by 10. This final result is the ratio in deciBels. *That* is how deciBels are defined, regardless of what their application is or what the ratio represents. Any definition of the deciBel where the ratio 2:1 equals anything other than 3dB either has the deciBel confused with something else or is confusing the definition of the deciBel with the definition of whatever they are trying to use them for.
The assertion that deciBels are a unit of signal strength is wrong unless, by "signal strength", you mean "signal-to-noise ratio." DeciBels can only quantify signal strength when they are used in conjunction with a reference signal strength and then they only describe signal strength as a ratio relative to the reference one. If you want to call deciBels units of something, they are a unit of *ratio*, and that is *all* they are. They are not inherently a unit of signal strength, sound pressure, voltage, power, or anything else. There is not a physics book in the known universe that disagrees with me about this if you read it carefully. When someone speaks of "signal strength" in "dBm", like other posts have pointed out, they mean a quantity of power or voltage relative to 1mW or 1mV respectively -- a ratio of mW to 1mW or a ratio of mV to 1mV. "dBm" != "dB".
Again, you are right that P ~ V^2. You are right that when you change the voltage by a ratio of 1.414:1, you get a change in power of 2:1. When the ratio of (power now):(power before) is 2:1, when before turned into now, the power went up by 3dB. When the ratio of (voltage now):(voltage before) is 1.414:1, when before turned into now, the voltage went up by (10*log10(1.414))dB.
If you want to indicate that P~V^2 using deciBels, you could say that a 3dB increase in voltage implies a 6dB increase in power, or that the ratio of the power ratio to the voltage ratio is 3dB. Anyone who simply states in a textbook, (textbooks are supposed to be clear and unambiguous,) that a 2:1 ratio comes out to an unqualified "6dB" when the ratio happens to represent voltage and then provides a formula to make it work out that way is suffering from cranio-rectal inversion. It always has been and always will be incorrect. If your textbook says otherwise, whomever wrote it should be soundly chastised after having their cranio-rectal inversion cured. :)
I realize that this post has exceeded standard allowable limits of pedantry, but if you will refer to my initial post, you will see that I summarized this problem by saying something about someone turning a voltage knob while reading a power meter and incorrectly claiming that a factor of 2 is 6dB. The problem is not that they are wrong about the physics, the problem is either that they don't really understand what "6dB" means or they haven't explained that they are turning a voltage knob but measuring power, thereby making their ratio a ratio of two different kinds of things where X units of one thing really does translate into X^2 units of the other.
I have no problem with dBmW, dBmV, or dBm for short where there isn't ambiguity about what the units are. Those "factor of 2 == 6dB" people piss me off though. They are taking a nice, clean, useful concept and notation and totally screwing it up. They are also just wrong.
Things like signal-to-noise ratio and amplifier gain are usually specified in "dB". This usage is correct because the quantity always refers to a ratio of two quantities of the same thing.
Kakari said it best: the ratio 2 (in dB) == 10*log10(2)dB == 3dB *always*, because that is the definition of the *deciBel*. Note here that I am not talking about dBmW or dBmV or dBm -- just "dB". The ratio 2:1 can be a ratio of voltages, powers, elephants, whatever, it doesn't matter as long as the ratio compares some quantity of something against another quantity of the same thing. If one wants to express a ratio (2:1) of voltages in dB, one cannot correctly use 20*log10(2) = 6dB, because 20*log10(ratio) is not how one calculates deciBels! These should be called "dodeciBels" or some other conglomeration of "Bels" and a prefix that means 1/20th, but not "deciBels", because it just doesn't make sense. This is like saying "percent" sometimes means "out of 200" instead of "out of 100" depending on what the quantity in question is a percentage of. Nobody who understands that "cent" refers to 100 and "per" refers to something like "for each" would take an "out of 200" definition of "percent" seriously.
This 20*log10(ratio) stuff is bullshit I tell you!
(storms off)
The whole point of a "signal strength" meter is so that one can determine when one is approaching a "no signal" zone and so that one can determine how well their phone will work at a given location without having to make a call. It is disappointing that traditional signal strength meters (with 3-6 "bars") fail to do this reliably.
You can tell if the phone will work or not should you try to make a call or transmit data by a simple on/off indicator like you said. If the meter just displayed the S/N ratio, it would be the equivalent of having a traditional meter with lots of bars. This would convey more information, probably take up less space on the display, and allow people to generate detailed enough data that they might be able to fix things in places where performance is bad.
The problem of large or mysterious numbers could be remedied by offsetting the value by some fixed amount so that "0" is where the S/N ratio is so bad that the phone can't do anything.
I'm all for it.
To further add to the pedantry, I would like to point out the following:
In the beginning of the Wikipedia article about the venerable dB, it points out (correctly) that decibels are used to denote ratios and are therefore inherently devoid of units. When discussing the decibel, we are discussing only numerical notation here, not physics.
The Wikipedia article (correctly) stops just shy of stating that the decibel is inherently related to physical concepts like electric field strength, power, and pressure. One does not define "percent" as being inherently related to financial concepts. For the same reason, one should not define "decibel" as being inherently related to physical concepts. Writing "-10dB" is *exactly* the same conceptually as writing "10%". Writing "3dB" is conceptually *exactly* the same as writing "200%". The fact that I have never seen the annual yield of a savings account expressed using dB does not mean that it isn't correct to do so.
To be slightly but meaningfully pedantic, "dBm" should be interpreted effectively the same way "dB" is, (except you should add 30 to it -> 0dB == 30dBm,) because there aren't any units present. The "m" just adds the "milli" prefix to a unit that isn't stated. If you mean dB relative to 1 mW, you want dBmW. If you want dB relative to 1 mV, you want dBmV. If you've ever had an argument with someone about whether a "factor of 2" is 3 dB or 6 dB, this is usually because the 6 dB guy is unaware that he is turning a voltage knob but measuring the resulting change in power. If you have ever had this argument, you are probably a geek. (Just for posterity, a factor of 2 == 3dB *always*.)
I agree with most of what you said. Be careful about believing commonly talked about macroeconomic measurements like "inflation" and "the unemployment rate" in the US. I'm not sure how those quantities are measured in other countries, but the definitions of "inflation" and "the unemployment rate" as commonly discussed on American TV news are laughable. Over the past 40 years or so, the powers that be have changed how they measure those quantities such that they're mostly meaningless. When you say the government maintains a stable and relatively low unemployment rate, the way in which the government measures and reports this rate is part of how they attempt to regulate the economy. One could easily imagine a situation where an unstable employment or currency value situation could become a self-fulfilling prophesy. (It has happened before.) If you were to look at the unemployment rate in the US the way it used to be measured decades ago or how many other countries measure it, the 9.7% number, (or whatever the unemployment rate supposedly is now,) would probably double or triple, which says to me that the standard of employment availability in the US is really not unusually high at all.
With regard to the standard of hardship in the US, also keep in mind that most of the people in the US that are really bad off are fairly invisible to those who attempt to count them. Those who don't have an official address or an income they report or a credit record or a phone are simply hard to track because they don't leave much of a paper trail. I was looking at some data a couple weeks ago about the average life expectation in the US, (divided up by county,) and I was fairly astonished to see that since the early/mid 80s, some poor parts of the US have been experiencing a declining average life expectancy. While life expectancy is probably not a particularly good proxy for "hardship" for small variations in life expectancy, these gaps were huge. There were substantial sections of the US where the average male life expectancy was in the mid 50s. I think the most recently published number for the average male life expectancy over the whole US was 76. To me, this is a pretty large difference. I find it rather strange that the US government and the media don't really talk much about the lives of the poor in the US. (They both acknowledge that the poor exist, but before I looked at that data, I was under the impression that the poor in the US were still pretty well off by global standards. It seems that the reality is significantly worse than I thought. I'm aware that there are places in the world where the average male life expectancy is significantly shorter than "mid 50s," and where "hardship" is a totally inadequate term for what the residents of those places experience. I was just surprised to see that there were parts of the US where people probably score "below average" on a global scale of comfort and well-being and that this score is probably still dropping.)
That's not the only error they made. I can think of lots of potential problems with this, even though it might work on paper. One of the biggest problems would probably be simply keeping the surface clean enough that the photons that make it through the layer of scum on the surface would be numerous enough to generate a meaningful amount of power. After that, when we're talking about road panels that have lots of internal structure, (the article mentions power and data cabling, LEDs, electronics, and the fact that the panels themselves would be composed of a tough glass surface with solar panels underneath,) there are lots of places that water could cause havoc. Water on road surfaces would be pretty dirty with all sorts of corrosive solutes in it. The panels would have to have seals on them somewhere, and if any of them leaked, moisture would get in. Mold or algae could grow inside. Galvanic corrosion could occur. When the outside temperature drops below freezing, any parts that aren't successfully actively heated could have water freeze and break things. This whole system wouldn't be very fault tolerant. There are ways of improving the reliability of all of those things, but we would then be talking about panels that aren't even remotely simple anymore. I do think it is good that people are thinking about how to solve the energy problem in unusual ways. There are some ideas in this article that are probably useful. (Even embedding glass in the surface of normal roads to make them more durable might be a good idea although I'm sure that some of the material that is naturally present in the gravel component of an asphalt road is silica anyway.)