I'll concede that's what it looks like, but that's not really what I meant. Perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be that for most of those students, the ICT lessons they're receiving will have minimal impact on their daily lives.
The Sekyedumase region is very near where my lab was... it's a big (by local standards) city in the middle of a farming community. The crowning achievement in the area at the time was a 3-story building. The vast majority of employment is local commerce or farming. When I was there, the city of Ejura had just gotten Internet access, delivered via microwave from a tower on the hill nearby. Despite English being the official language since it was a colony, many school classes are still taught in Twi,
and there is a widespread reluctance to do anything non-traditional, mostly because parents don't want their kids to do anything differently from what they did.
That "good enough" culture has had some very interesting effects. Students consider school as completely optional, with 50% attendance being very high. Farming equipment is still usually pulled by oxen. Having a car is seen as an extravagance, like Americans view having a private plane. A shopkeeper having a calculator is high-end, and the really fancy stores even have a functional cash register!
At the same time, there's the incredible advancement of the African continent. While the farmer's oxen are pulling the plow, he's carrying a smartphone, connected to a high-speed cellular network, at least as good as anything in America. Everyone, even the beggar outside the market, has a cell phone. The Internet cafe' doesn't even have a land line telephone... their connection is data-only. As a culture, they've skipped a generation of technology, because they're arriving late to the game, and get to jump in without having anything left behind from inferior implementations.
I would predict that Ghana has a market for highly-integrated convenience devices far more than desktop workstations. That cash register will eventually be replaced by a standalone NFC POS terminal, completely managed from an office in Kumasi or Accra. For personal computing, I'd expect the majority will be tablets and other portable devices more compatible with the open-community lifestyle, where the notion of privacy is almost entirely foreign. Note that most folks don't have valuables, so most doors don't have locks, so most folks try not to keep valuables at home.
In short, I expect that Ghana (and Africa at large) will see rapid adoption of technologies that don't follow the UI/UX paradigms that America has had since the 1970s. While America moves slowly toward IoT and tiny personal systems, Ghana will embrace the new technologies from the start, completely skipping the old. Yes, the students do have their whole lives ahead of them... but the lessons they learn today in an ICT class will be roughly as useful for them as New Math was for American students.
I'm glad you asked! I actually am really glad you asked... I would much rather talk about the principles of explosives and how they behave (hopefully inspiring further injury-free education), than name particular compounds and say how much fun they can be (usually inspiring stupid mistakes).
Essentially, what makes explosives dangerous is primarily that they release so much gas during their reaction that it can't expand into the atmosphere fast enough, creating a shock wave. That expansion is primarily limited by the speed of sound, so having more explosive material mostly just raises the pressure behind the shock wave. Raising the pressure, in turn, increases the rate of the explosion, both due to physical effects and adding compression heat.
With just a small amount of (low) explosive at normal conditions, setting it on fire will usually just make it burn. Sometimes it will burn quickly, but it still isn't particularly dangerous. Once compression happens, either by confining the explosion into a bomb or by having enough material to cause compression behind the shock wave, each additional gram of explosive adds not just to the total power, but also amplifies the rest of the reaction.
Eh... groupthink and vitriolic anti-corporate shitposts get bumped up in far less than 16 minutes, but I digress.
When a good comment that perfectly responds to the topic at hand (and with good information) sits at 0 because it happened to come from someone unregistered, what's really disappointing to me is that there is no good solution. Heuristics to guess an expected score can be gamed. Tracking users without accounts is a privacy minefield. Assuming an initial score and letting the mods do their thing leaves a time gap where good comments are scored unfairly... and that's precisely what we have now.
Slashdot's scoring and moderation system is the worst, except for everything else that's been tried.
I built a computer lab in Ghana. One laptop is plenty.
A single laptop is enough to make a huge improvement in the students' lives, through demonstrations and guided lessons. Despite the promises of the Ghanaian government, a lot of these kids won't actually be taking the ICT test, and a large percentage of those that do will not be using computers in their daily lives for the foreseeable future. Having a laptop demonstrating key concepts is a good first step towards the education they need if they're one of the lucky few.
A lab is stuck in one location. It's a prime target for theft. In time, it will be neglected, repurposed, and broken. A laptop is portable. It can be secured in a cabinet, carried discreetly in a bag, and taken to a repair shop (there's was a nice one in Kumasi a few years ago) frequently. The logistics of handling a single laptop are far easier to manage than a classroom full of them, and far easier than desktops.
It's disappointing that this is currently scored 0. This is the right answer for this scenario.
With strong Net Neutrality laws, there are limits to how sophisticated ISP throttling can be and still pretend to be legitimate. With that essentially eliminated now, the only meaningful test is to use actual traffic. Netflix has preempted this need for their own services by creating fast.com to look identical, going to Netflix servers over the same ports and protocols as normal Netflix traffic. It will be subject to the same throttling, and thus allows you to measure the speed you get when working with Netflix.
I'd love to see other services hosting similar tools, but for now Netflix is the only major company I know of offering their own user-accessible performance test.
On principle, I will not name a compound to anyone in context where it might be an inspiration to do things unsafely. If you want names of such things, even easily-found things, find a local chemistry or pyrotechnics group, and start setting up safe environments under appropriate supervision, who have the awareness and experience to intervene before you start creating excessive paperwork.
That said, there are processes for making large quantities of unstable compounds like what I've described, in such an arrangement as to control the physical stress on the final composition. When it was describe to me, I shook my head, covered my ears, turned around, and walked away at a brisk pace.
There is no technical solution for user awareness.
Sure, you can verify senders... then you only get spam from compromised hosts, or free relays/mass-mailers, or any other way that attackers are increasingly using to get around such things.
You can mangle unrecognized URLs... but then your users complain that their legitimate emails from partners and vendors aren't getting through properly (especially when they just signed the contract), and it still doesn't help when the attackers use bit.ly and other common services to hide.
Once all that has failed, you're still relying on end users to not click links... but if you sold your boss on this "simple basics" security checkbox, you suddenly realize that you never got funding for a user-education course, and that targeted phishing campaign is now wildly successful and claiming victims across your enterprise.
Sure, go ahead and include all of that technical wizardry, and it will indeed reduce your exposure, but please don't spread the myth that a technical barrier is a one-step fix for email security problems. Users are the last bastion of a defense-in-depth solution, which is also one of those "simple basic" concepts.
It is entirely possible to produce explosive compounds recreationally, without making them into anything that could be considered a bomb. The best candidate I know of is a highly-unstable compound that used to be often used in basic chemistry classes. Immediately after production, it is a wet paste, and can easily be spread in a very thin layer, preferably no more than a few grams covering a 2cm radius circle. Once it dries, that circle will make a lovely pop if disturbed, making it great fun to put on desk surfaces.
Of course, people are dumb. This particular compound grows in destruction exponentially as its quantity increases. A few grams is fun. A few dozen grams is dangerous. A few hundred is lethal. A kilogram in one location is probably a good reason to evacuate the building.
I am part of a group that, among many other things, handles explosives for educational purposes, partly to help chemists who are not "bomb makers" get an intuitive understanding for just how much of an explosive substance is actually safe, and how to treat them with respect. Sure, we do also build bombs, but they're also detonated safely and in a controlled environment, in full compliance with applicable laws.
And now to burn some karma with Slashdot's most unpopular opinion...
The world runs on faith. We have faith that people will keep waking up, going to their jobs, and keep society running. We have faith that the people we trust will live up to that trust. We have faith that our observations of the world have been genuine.
Adrian Lamo extended that faith to the government. He had faith that the people in government offices were true to their oaths, and he had faith that eventually a proper justice would be served. He had faith that talking to the authorities would lead to a righteous outcome.
I do not know exactly what considerations Mr. Lamo had when he made his choices. I have faith that he was trying to do what was right for the world, and I have faith that were I in his position, having had his experiences and knowing what he knew, I would also understand his decisions.
Rest in peace, fellow human. From my perspective, I may or may not have agreed with you, but that different perspective is what makes us all important.
My station tried that for a while. We found that most podcast producers actually fall into three major categories:
First, there are the planning-limited amateurs. By far the largest group, these are the folks who buy a microphone and start talking. They product a dozen segments of precisely one hour... or maybe 43 minutes... or maybe 67 minutes. They don't leave slots for commercial breaks or other station announcements, they don't follow a consistent format, and they don't have a long-term sustainable plan for content. Once that plan runs out, the podcasts stop, often with no warning to the broadcaster.
There are also the quality-limited amateurs, who produce well-planned podcasts and have a chance of delivering great content... but it's not suitable for use. These folks think that a bedroom makes a great recording studio, or that walking down the street and talking provides a casual ambiance, and they generally have never heard of noise removal or normalization. Some of these could be good if they were properly adjusted, but that requires a lot of quality time with a good audio engineer, and that isn't often cheap.
Finally, there are the professionals. These folks have been radio personalities for decades, been in every role in the station, and now see radio production as a way of life. They do everything right, and they know it. Unfortunately, though, these are also the folks who see radio as a moneymaker. They know that they have quality material, and they know that they can charge for it, so they'll charge for a radio station to play their content. It's typically cheaper than music to fill a time slot, but it still cuts into the station budget. A good number of these professionals also think they're good enough to demand particular time slots, or expect the station to promote them as more than just a way to fill time.
It ended up being cheaper and simpler to run a regular studio, bring in local personalities, and have an in-house production team. They made enough content to fill peaks, and we had a few licensed shows from other studios to round out the main listening hours. An automatic DJ filled the rest of the time with music, commercials, and station announcements.
Unfortunately, those locally-run stations usually can't afford to survive on their own. That's why they mostly joined the big conglomerates in the first place.
I've worked at a local radio station. It's not a cheap business. Beyond the equipment costs, there are licensing fees that are essentially mandatory to keep content on the air. Even for talk radio, people want to be paid for their time. If you're going to avoid licensing by producing your own content, you need a studio, with facility expenses. Then, of course, you have all of the overhead of handling the technology involved, which today involves a significant IT budget, as well as the usual communications link to the transmitters, transmitter space rental, and so on...
My station was pretty much just the hobby of a few wealthy listeners. Some folks dump money into a boat-shaped hole in the lake, but these folks likes to burn their cash at the top of an antenna tower. Our advertising income barely covered the electricity costs.
Amazon isn't a retail company. They aren't a hosting company, or a media production company... They are a logistics company.
Amazon follows a loose definition of the term "logistics" compared to most others in the field, but it's what they do best. They handle distribution of high volumes of goods, and they happen to handle order placement as well, just to keep their shipping volumes up. They also handle information logistics, with huge server farms and highly-scalable systems to handle their own information needs... and they just happen to sell off their capacity and capabilities, as well.
They are essentially logistics at scale, which allows them to move in industries at extremely low cost, since a large expense in most industry changes is figuring out the logistics of a new enterprise.
For a while, I worked in a financial management office. For what you describe, the best tool I've ever seen was a plain spreadsheet in capable hands.
Every expense gets broken down, and per-unit costs (like price per gallon of water) are filled out in one section. Every adjustable parameter (like number of toilets) goes in another section, and all of the system rules (like number of gallons/minute wasted) go in a third section. Finally, all of the results go in the last section, accompanied by all of the charts and projections.
When presenting, the first two sections are discussed first, and the client (or HOA board) gets to put in whatever numbers they think are realistic. Then you switch to the end, and they see the computed cost of everything, exactly as their own numbers work out. That shows in plain view how their money is spent, confronting their assumptions. After that, you can go back and show hypothetical fixes (like lowering the number of leaky toilets), and show the changes in outcome. It tends to be very convincing to see almost all of their own numbers driving the output.
I'm one of those other people, and it sounds pretty bad.
I didn't think plants on stairs was a common thing, but I've lived in an apartment building where a tenant thought it was absolutely necessary to "liven up the place". I figured it was fine to add a personal touch in one's living area. Just one small potted flower at the top of the stairs, then one at the bottom, then a few more... then my grandmother came to visit, and couldn't get up the stairs to my apartment.
My opinion has changed. It's not fine. Keep your stuff in your space, or at least make absolutely sure it's not going to interfere with anybody else in any way. Perhaps there could be some kind of group to represent the other people living in the same area... some kind of Dwellers' League, or maybe an Association of Inhabitants?
There are paper straws, which are biodegradable and recyclable. They typically do survive a drink with a meal, unless you're the sort of person to keep a cup around for a few hours.
I've made a few movies. We had an injury from an actor falling (from standing up) entirely on his own, because he didn't do anything to catch or control himself. It looked great, though!
There are lots of "safety reasons" that aren't obvious in the final cut. Falling on concrete, debris, or from any height above standing is immediately a cause for concern. Given how cheap it is to throw an extra in a costume compared to the price of a CGI editor, I would expect that there is some reason we just can't see.
This wall has fallen. Great. The step-by-step information is available now. There's no challenge left, so if your argument is correct, Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection will be the only game UWP broken, with maybe a few exceptions as folks experiment with other techniques.
We certainly won't see a flood of new titles being broken and released hours or days after their release like we have when other DRM schemes have been broken, right?
This is pretty much dead-on correct. Sorry, folks, but we live in a capitalist society. You aren't entitled to anything just by right of being able to copy, take, or otherwise acquire it.
If you can't afford (or don't want to pay for) some piece of software, don't use it. It's that simple. In many cases there are FLOSS alternatives that will do the job (perhaps not as easily or effectively, but well enough to pass muster), or especially in the case of games, the software itself is a luxury that you can simply do without. I'm terribly sorry if you feel you just can't live without your Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection, but that's the way the world works. You don't get to cheat and get off scot-free.
I'm not saying they're innocent. I'm saying they may not have had intent. That matters for some (but not all) of the things they've been accused of.
As one example, let's consider funding sources. It's one crime to knowingly and willfully accept foreign funds for a campaign, but a different crime to simply not ask where the funding came from. For the majority of its transgressions, I expect the Trump campaign falls into the latter area: At least during the campaign, I think they were far more likely to commit uninformed negligence, rather than intentional misconduct.
Junior's emails are certainly damning, but as an idealist who still has faith in the Constitution, I'll stick with the "innocent until proven guilty" doctrine for now. I figure there's like a 5% chance he'll have a decent excuse* (and frankly that would be the more interesting outcome), but we won't get to see those cards for a while. Trump is extremely family-oriented, so Mueller's unlikely to make any move against Trump's family until he has an absolutely solid case, with all of the smaller players (like Flynn and these Russians) already indicted, and with several ready to make deals.
* Unfortunately, I expect the not-decent excuses we'll get are "I didn't know that was illegal", "I don't remember what I was taught," and "I didn't think those things I signed were important". Those lines won't get him out of a criminal charge, but they will sow the seeds of doubt that will help the defense.
Do you realize that Obstruction requires PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of a crime, and malicious intent to impede investigation of that crime?
That's a very interesting claim you're making. Do you perhaps have some citation for that, like perhaps the actual statute establishing that requirement?
See, I went looking, and it's not in 18 USC 1510(a), 1512(b), or 1513(e). Those only require interfering with an investigation or a witness (such as making clear that anyone who talks to the FBI will be fired), but they don't include any clauses about having knowledge of the subject of the investigation. They do require intent to obstruct, but do not require knowledge of a crime.
To use a less political example, a mob boss who threatens his lackeys to never talk to police would be committing an act of obstruction, even if he actually has no idea precisely what crimes are under investigation, because the intent is still to prevent the police from doing their job.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make with the reference to Reddit, but to be clear, I'll restate mine.
I have yet to see a credible (meaning backed by actual law, as explained by actual lawyers) argument for how foreign interference would actually invalidate the election result.
At this point, even if Trump himself came out and said he'd bribed every state's election officials, it wouldn't change the results of the election. Like many other injustices, election fraud is the kind of thing where there is no remedy. We can't really erase the policy decisions of the past year. We can't un-speak Trump's speeches. We can't reinstate the civil servants who chose to leave rather than work for him. We can't convince other nations to forget the intelligence he's allowed to leak. The most that we would be able to do is impeach him and anyone else involved, pick up the pieces of a functional civil government, and move on.
The point of any investigation is to uncover the facts, not to rewrite history.
In a normal administration promoted by a normal campaign, thirteen trolls would be a cause for an investigation, maybe ultimately leading to a few indictments and bans from ever getting US visas, but the whole thing would be handled mostly silently, with a report to Congress and maybe a mention on the 4th page of a newspaper in Boston.
The actions of the Trump campaign and administration have necessitated further investigation, because they didn't have (or adhere to) policies to minimize the impact of such foreign interference, and they currently still don't have (or adhere to) policies to avoid breaking laws. That's the cause for the ongoing circus: the clown in the Oval Office.
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I'll concede that's what it looks like, but that's not really what I meant. Perhaps a more accurate phrasing would be that for most of those students, the ICT lessons they're receiving will have minimal impact on their daily lives.
The Sekyedumase region is very near where my lab was... it's a big (by local standards) city in the middle of a farming community. The crowning achievement in the area at the time was a 3-story building. The vast majority of employment is local commerce or farming. When I was there, the city of Ejura had just gotten Internet access, delivered via microwave from a tower on the hill nearby. Despite English being the official language since it was a colony, many school classes are still taught in Twi, and there is a widespread reluctance to do anything non-traditional, mostly because parents don't want their kids to do anything differently from what they did.
That "good enough" culture has had some very interesting effects. Students consider school as completely optional, with 50% attendance being very high. Farming equipment is still usually pulled by oxen. Having a car is seen as an extravagance, like Americans view having a private plane. A shopkeeper having a calculator is high-end, and the really fancy stores even have a functional cash register!
At the same time, there's the incredible advancement of the African continent. While the farmer's oxen are pulling the plow, he's carrying a smartphone, connected to a high-speed cellular network, at least as good as anything in America. Everyone, even the beggar outside the market, has a cell phone. The Internet cafe' doesn't even have a land line telephone... their connection is data-only. As a culture, they've skipped a generation of technology, because they're arriving late to the game, and get to jump in without having anything left behind from inferior implementations.
I would predict that Ghana has a market for highly-integrated convenience devices far more than desktop workstations. That cash register will eventually be replaced by a standalone NFC POS terminal, completely managed from an office in Kumasi or Accra. For personal computing, I'd expect the majority will be tablets and other portable devices more compatible with the open-community lifestyle, where the notion of privacy is almost entirely foreign. Note that most folks don't have valuables, so most doors don't have locks, so most folks try not to keep valuables at home.
In short, I expect that Ghana (and Africa at large) will see rapid adoption of technologies that don't follow the UI/UX paradigms that America has had since the 1970s. While America moves slowly toward IoT and tiny personal systems, Ghana will embrace the new technologies from the start, completely skipping the old. Yes, the students do have their whole lives ahead of them... but the lessons they learn today in an ICT class will be roughly as useful for them as New Math was for American students.
I'm glad you asked! I actually am really glad you asked... I would much rather talk about the principles of explosives and how they behave (hopefully inspiring further injury-free education), than name particular compounds and say how much fun they can be (usually inspiring stupid mistakes).
Essentially, what makes explosives dangerous is primarily that they release so much gas during their reaction that it can't expand into the atmosphere fast enough, creating a shock wave. That expansion is primarily limited by the speed of sound, so having more explosive material mostly just raises the pressure behind the shock wave. Raising the pressure, in turn, increases the rate of the explosion, both due to physical effects and adding compression heat.
With just a small amount of (low) explosive at normal conditions, setting it on fire will usually just make it burn. Sometimes it will burn quickly, but it still isn't particularly dangerous. Once compression happens, either by confining the explosion into a bomb or by having enough material to cause compression behind the shock wave, each additional gram of explosive adds not just to the total power, but also amplifies the rest of the reaction.
Eh... groupthink and vitriolic anti-corporate shitposts get bumped up in far less than 16 minutes, but I digress.
When a good comment that perfectly responds to the topic at hand (and with good information) sits at 0 because it happened to come from someone unregistered, what's really disappointing to me is that there is no good solution. Heuristics to guess an expected score can be gamed. Tracking users without accounts is a privacy minefield. Assuming an initial score and letting the mods do their thing leaves a time gap where good comments are scored unfairly... and that's precisely what we have now.
Slashdot's scoring and moderation system is the worst, except for everything else that's been tried.
I built a computer lab in Ghana. One laptop is plenty.
A single laptop is enough to make a huge improvement in the students' lives, through demonstrations and guided lessons. Despite the promises of the Ghanaian government, a lot of these kids won't actually be taking the ICT test, and a large percentage of those that do will not be using computers in their daily lives for the foreseeable future. Having a laptop demonstrating key concepts is a good first step towards the education they need if they're one of the lucky few.
A lab is stuck in one location. It's a prime target for theft. In time, it will be neglected, repurposed, and broken. A laptop is portable. It can be secured in a cabinet, carried discreetly in a bag, and taken to a repair shop (there's was a nice one in Kumasi a few years ago) frequently. The logistics of handling a single laptop are far easier to manage than a classroom full of them, and far easier than desktops.
Ghana has both fairly reliably. Petty crime like theft is present, but mostly towards outsiders... the sense of community is still very strong.
It's disappointing that this is currently scored 0. This is the right answer for this scenario.
With strong Net Neutrality laws, there are limits to how sophisticated ISP throttling can be and still pretend to be legitimate. With that essentially eliminated now, the only meaningful test is to use actual traffic. Netflix has preempted this need for their own services by creating fast.com to look identical, going to Netflix servers over the same ports and protocols as normal Netflix traffic. It will be subject to the same throttling, and thus allows you to measure the speed you get when working with Netflix.
I'd love to see other services hosting similar tools, but for now Netflix is the only major company I know of offering their own user-accessible performance test.
It's all fun and games until a residence hall is condemned.
"Hilarious", indeed.
On principle, I will not name a compound to anyone in context where it might be an inspiration to do things unsafely. If you want names of such things, even easily-found things, find a local chemistry or pyrotechnics group, and start setting up safe environments under appropriate supervision, who have the awareness and experience to intervene before you start creating excessive paperwork.
That said, there are processes for making large quantities of unstable compounds like what I've described, in such an arrangement as to control the physical stress on the final composition. When it was describe to me, I shook my head, covered my ears, turned around, and walked away at a brisk pace.
There is no technical solution for user awareness.
Sure, you can verify senders... then you only get spam from compromised hosts, or free relays/mass-mailers, or any other way that attackers are increasingly using to get around such things.
You can mangle unrecognized URLs... but then your users complain that their legitimate emails from partners and vendors aren't getting through properly (especially when they just signed the contract), and it still doesn't help when the attackers use bit.ly and other common services to hide.
Once all that has failed, you're still relying on end users to not click links... but if you sold your boss on this "simple basics" security checkbox, you suddenly realize that you never got funding for a user-education course, and that targeted phishing campaign is now wildly successful and claiming victims across your enterprise.
Sure, go ahead and include all of that technical wizardry, and it will indeed reduce your exposure, but please don't spread the myth that a technical barrier is a one-step fix for email security problems. Users are the last bastion of a defense-in-depth solution, which is also one of those "simple basic" concepts.
It is entirely possible to produce explosive compounds recreationally, without making them into anything that could be considered a bomb. The best candidate I know of is a highly-unstable compound that used to be often used in basic chemistry classes. Immediately after production, it is a wet paste, and can easily be spread in a very thin layer, preferably no more than a few grams covering a 2cm radius circle. Once it dries, that circle will make a lovely pop if disturbed, making it great fun to put on desk surfaces.
Of course, people are dumb. This particular compound grows in destruction exponentially as its quantity increases. A few grams is fun. A few dozen grams is dangerous. A few hundred is lethal. A kilogram in one location is probably a good reason to evacuate the building.
I am part of a group that, among many other things, handles explosives for educational purposes, partly to help chemists who are not "bomb makers" get an intuitive understanding for just how much of an explosive substance is actually safe, and how to treat them with respect. Sure, we do also build bombs, but they're also detonated safely and in a controlled environment, in full compliance with applicable laws.
And now to burn some karma with Slashdot's most unpopular opinion...
The world runs on faith. We have faith that people will keep waking up, going to their jobs, and keep society running. We have faith that the people we trust will live up to that trust. We have faith that our observations of the world have been genuine.
Adrian Lamo extended that faith to the government. He had faith that the people in government offices were true to their oaths, and he had faith that eventually a proper justice would be served. He had faith that talking to the authorities would lead to a righteous outcome.
I do not know exactly what considerations Mr. Lamo had when he made his choices. I have faith that he was trying to do what was right for the world, and I have faith that were I in his position, having had his experiences and knowing what he knew, I would also understand his decisions.
Rest in peace, fellow human. From my perspective, I may or may not have agreed with you, but that different perspective is what makes us all important.
My station tried that for a while. We found that most podcast producers actually fall into three major categories:
First, there are the planning-limited amateurs. By far the largest group, these are the folks who buy a microphone and start talking. They product a dozen segments of precisely one hour... or maybe 43 minutes... or maybe 67 minutes. They don't leave slots for commercial breaks or other station announcements, they don't follow a consistent format, and they don't have a long-term sustainable plan for content. Once that plan runs out, the podcasts stop, often with no warning to the broadcaster.
There are also the quality-limited amateurs, who produce well-planned podcasts and have a chance of delivering great content... but it's not suitable for use. These folks think that a bedroom makes a great recording studio, or that walking down the street and talking provides a casual ambiance, and they generally have never heard of noise removal or normalization. Some of these could be good if they were properly adjusted, but that requires a lot of quality time with a good audio engineer, and that isn't often cheap.
Finally, there are the professionals. These folks have been radio personalities for decades, been in every role in the station, and now see radio production as a way of life. They do everything right, and they know it. Unfortunately, though, these are also the folks who see radio as a moneymaker. They know that they have quality material, and they know that they can charge for it, so they'll charge for a radio station to play their content. It's typically cheaper than music to fill a time slot, but it still cuts into the station budget. A good number of these professionals also think they're good enough to demand particular time slots, or expect the station to promote them as more than just a way to fill time.
It ended up being cheaper and simpler to run a regular studio, bring in local personalities, and have an in-house production team. They made enough content to fill peaks, and we had a few licensed shows from other studios to round out the main listening hours. An automatic DJ filled the rest of the time with music, commercials, and station announcements.
Unfortunately, those locally-run stations usually can't afford to survive on their own. That's why they mostly joined the big conglomerates in the first place.
I've worked at a local radio station. It's not a cheap business. Beyond the equipment costs, there are licensing fees that are essentially mandatory to keep content on the air. Even for talk radio, people want to be paid for their time. If you're going to avoid licensing by producing your own content, you need a studio, with facility expenses. Then, of course, you have all of the overhead of handling the technology involved, which today involves a significant IT budget, as well as the usual communications link to the transmitters, transmitter space rental, and so on...
My station was pretty much just the hobby of a few wealthy listeners. Some folks dump money into a boat-shaped hole in the lake, but these folks likes to burn their cash at the top of an antenna tower. Our advertising income barely covered the electricity costs.
Amazon isn't a retail company. They aren't a hosting company, or a media production company... They are a logistics company.
Amazon follows a loose definition of the term "logistics" compared to most others in the field, but it's what they do best. They handle distribution of high volumes of goods, and they happen to handle order placement as well, just to keep their shipping volumes up. They also handle information logistics, with huge server farms and highly-scalable systems to handle their own information needs... and they just happen to sell off their capacity and capabilities, as well.
They are essentially logistics at scale, which allows them to move in industries at extremely low cost, since a large expense in most industry changes is figuring out the logistics of a new enterprise.
For a while, I worked in a financial management office. For what you describe, the best tool I've ever seen was a plain spreadsheet in capable hands.
Every expense gets broken down, and per-unit costs (like price per gallon of water) are filled out in one section. Every adjustable parameter (like number of toilets) goes in another section, and all of the system rules (like number of gallons/minute wasted) go in a third section. Finally, all of the results go in the last section, accompanied by all of the charts and projections.
When presenting, the first two sections are discussed first, and the client (or HOA board) gets to put in whatever numbers they think are realistic. Then you switch to the end, and they see the computed cost of everything, exactly as their own numbers work out. That shows in plain view how their money is spent, confronting their assumptions. After that, you can go back and show hypothetical fixes (like lowering the number of leaky toilets), and show the changes in outcome. It tends to be very convincing to see almost all of their own numbers driving the output.
I'm one of those other people, and it sounds pretty bad.
I didn't think plants on stairs was a common thing, but I've lived in an apartment building where a tenant thought it was absolutely necessary to "liven up the place". I figured it was fine to add a personal touch in one's living area. Just one small potted flower at the top of the stairs, then one at the bottom, then a few more... then my grandmother came to visit, and couldn't get up the stairs to my apartment.
My opinion has changed. It's not fine. Keep your stuff in your space, or at least make absolutely sure it's not going to interfere with anybody else in any way. Perhaps there could be some kind of group to represent the other people living in the same area... some kind of Dwellers' League, or maybe an Association of Inhabitants?
There are paper straws, which are biodegradable and recyclable. They typically do survive a drink with a meal, unless you're the sort of person to keep a cup around for a few hours.
If the miner had its own tinfoil hat, there wouldn't have been any interference!
I've made a few movies. We had an injury from an actor falling (from standing up) entirely on his own, because he didn't do anything to catch or control himself. It looked great, though!
There are lots of "safety reasons" that aren't obvious in the final cut. Falling on concrete, debris, or from any height above standing is immediately a cause for concern. Given how cheap it is to throw an extra in a costume compared to the price of a CGI editor, I would expect that there is some reason we just can't see.
So we're done now, right?
This wall has fallen. Great. The step-by-step information is available now. There's no challenge left, so if your argument is correct, Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection will be the only game UWP broken, with maybe a few exceptions as folks experiment with other techniques.
We certainly won't see a flood of new titles being broken and released hours or days after their release like we have when other DRM schemes have been broken, right?
This is pretty much dead-on correct. Sorry, folks, but we live in a capitalist society. You aren't entitled to anything just by right of being able to copy, take, or otherwise acquire it.
If you can't afford (or don't want to pay for) some piece of software, don't use it. It's that simple. In many cases there are FLOSS alternatives that will do the job (perhaps not as easily or effectively, but well enough to pass muster), or especially in the case of games, the software itself is a luxury that you can simply do without. I'm terribly sorry if you feel you just can't live without your Zoo Tycoon Ultimate Animal Collection, but that's the way the world works. You don't get to cheat and get off scot-free.
I'm not saying they're innocent. I'm saying they may not have had intent. That matters for some (but not all) of the things they've been accused of.
As one example, let's consider funding sources. It's one crime to knowingly and willfully accept foreign funds for a campaign, but a different crime to simply not ask where the funding came from. For the majority of its transgressions, I expect the Trump campaign falls into the latter area: At least during the campaign, I think they were far more likely to commit uninformed negligence, rather than intentional misconduct.
Junior's emails are certainly damning, but as an idealist who still has faith in the Constitution, I'll stick with the "innocent until proven guilty" doctrine for now. I figure there's like a 5% chance he'll have a decent excuse* (and frankly that would be the more interesting outcome), but we won't get to see those cards for a while. Trump is extremely family-oriented, so Mueller's unlikely to make any move against Trump's family until he has an absolutely solid case, with all of the smaller players (like Flynn and these Russians) already indicted, and with several ready to make deals.
* Unfortunately, I expect the not-decent excuses we'll get are "I didn't know that was illegal", "I don't remember what I was taught," and "I didn't think those things I signed were important". Those lines won't get him out of a criminal charge, but they will sow the seeds of doubt that will help the defense.
Do you realize that Obstruction requires PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of a crime, and malicious intent to impede investigation of that crime?
That's a very interesting claim you're making. Do you perhaps have some citation for that, like perhaps the actual statute establishing that requirement?
See, I went looking, and it's not in 18 USC 1510(a), 1512(b), or 1513(e). Those only require interfering with an investigation or a witness (such as making clear that anyone who talks to the FBI will be fired), but they don't include any clauses about having knowledge of the subject of the investigation. They do require intent to obstruct, but do not require knowledge of a crime.
To use a less political example, a mob boss who threatens his lackeys to never talk to police would be committing an act of obstruction, even if he actually has no idea precisely what crimes are under investigation, because the intent is still to prevent the police from doing their job.
I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make with the reference to Reddit, but to be clear, I'll restate mine.
I have yet to see a credible (meaning backed by actual law, as explained by actual lawyers) argument for how foreign interference would actually invalidate the election result.
At this point, even if Trump himself came out and said he'd bribed every state's election officials, it wouldn't change the results of the election. Like many other injustices, election fraud is the kind of thing where there is no remedy. We can't really erase the policy decisions of the past year. We can't un-speak Trump's speeches. We can't reinstate the civil servants who chose to leave rather than work for him. We can't convince other nations to forget the intelligence he's allowed to leak. The most that we would be able to do is impeach him and anyone else involved, pick up the pieces of a functional civil government, and move on.
The point of any investigation is to uncover the facts, not to rewrite history.
In a normal administration promoted by a normal campaign, thirteen trolls would be a cause for an investigation, maybe ultimately leading to a few indictments and bans from ever getting US visas, but the whole thing would be handled mostly silently, with a report to Congress and maybe a mention on the 4th page of a newspaper in Boston.
The actions of the Trump campaign and administration have necessitated further investigation, because they didn't have (or adhere to) policies to minimize the impact of such foreign interference, and they currently still don't have (or adhere to) policies to avoid breaking laws. That's the cause for the ongoing circus: the clown in the Oval Office.