Arbitrary deadlines are fine, too. What's not fine are deadlines that don't match the work required. If you give me a month to get a new release of an app shipped, I can do it. If you give me a week, I can do that, too. The difference is that the one released after a week will less than a quarter of the changes that would have been in the one released after a month.
Of course, at some point, a too-fast release cadence can slow down development by requiring you to maintain too much redundant code while you do large redesigns of parts of the app that require multiple release cycles to complete, but that's a separate issue.
There are two approaches that work: A. choose an arbitrary feature set and then figure out how long it will take to implement those features, or B. choose an arbitrary deadline and then figure out which proposed features you can pull off by that deadline. What doesn't work is choosing an arbitrary feature set and an arbitrary deadline independently.:-)
Why would content providers cripple their own services? For what gain?
Dunno, ask Netflix. They literally did what the parent was saying to AT&T and Verizon customers just 2 years ago.
Wait... are we talking about AT&T/Verizon, or are we talking about AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless here? They're two entirely different networks. If you think Netflix throttled their content to wired AT&T or wired Verizon, then your information is factually incorrect. Netflix did, however, deliberately limit the maximum video quality to cellular customers on those networks so that their users wouldn't pay a small fortune in data charges. After some complaints, they added controls in the app so that users on unlimited plans could opt out if they wanted to do so. That's an entirely different situation than throttling content to try to get concessions out of the ISP, which is a patently ridiculous notion.
Also, there was that little thing about throttling Comcast to force them to provide free hosting for a "Netflix box", not to mention the throttling Cogent, Netflix's ISP, did that got blamed on Telcos and Cable providers.
If you really think Content providers aren't up to shenanigans themselves, you're deluded. Both sides are as bad. Regulations that only apply to one side are equally as bad. If they are lobbying for it, there's good chance it's not "pro consumer".
Uh, no, that's not what happened at all. Netflix didn't try to force Comcast to do anything. Netflix shifted their peering in such a way that more of it came from Cogent than before. Historically, as those links approached saturation, Comcast added more capacity, but once they realized that Netflix made up the bulk of the new traffic, they decided to stop paying to upgrade those links to Cogent, resulting in deliberate congestion caused by Comcast. Netflix even offered to pay to upgrade those links, and Comcast refused, instead demanding that Netflix pay them money. Netflix then offered to GIVE Comcast boxes that could be used to reduce the load on their peering points, in exchange for Comcast merely providing a closet to hold them, plus electricity and a connection to their network, and Comcast refused unless Netflix paid them colocation fees, even though Comcast was the main beneficiary of such an arrangement (by not having to pay to upgrade their upstream bandwidth).
You can try to distort the facts all you want to try to paint Netflix as the bad guy, but that doesn't make it so. Comcast extorted money from a company that wasn't their customer, forcing them to pay Comcast money in exchange for not throttling traffic that comes in from one of Comcast's upstream providers. That's fundamentally wrong, and there is exactly one bad guy in that story: Comcast.
If Netflix throttled Comcast to try to get Comcast to pay them for priority bandwidth, FCC couldn't do a thing because Netflix is outside of FCC control.
That's what we in the rural South used to call "cutting off your nose to spite your face", and is essentially the corporate equivalent of suicide.
If Netflix throttles access to Comcast customers, the only possible results would be either A. causing more Netflix users to complain to Comcast or B. causing customers to ditch Netflix for somebody else. Even if Comcast relented, the best that they could hope to achieve would be Comcast letting Netflix stream higher-quality streams to their customers, and the only way that would realistically be a problem would be if Comcast were violating NN, meaning that they wouldn't need to do that under the rules that the FCC is currently ripping out.
Moreover, there are better ways to achieve those same results. Netflix controls the content. They could show an interstitial ad that says, "Trouble viewing high-quality content? Call Comcast and demand that they improve their bandwidth." And unlike Netflix throttling Comcast customers, that would actually get results without causing Netflix to bleed customers.
Basically, there's no plausible scenario where a non-ISP content provider could cause harm to an ISP by throttling data from that ISP, because every scenario would cause more harm to that non-ISP content provider than to the ISP they're targeting. The reverse isn't true. In short, the very premise you're operating under is wrong, and as a result, your conclusion is wrong.
An AT&T rep knocked on my door a couple weeks ago to announce they were rolling out fiber to my area, and were expecting pricing to be around $45/mo. Competition fixes both abusive pricing and throttling.
Only for the first few months while they're still actively trying to recruit customers from the other guy. After a while, a duopoly still settles down and becomes approximately the same as a monopoly, because everybody wants to provide the minimum amount of service they can get away with for as much money as they can get away with.
In practice, healthy competition in a market is inversely proportional to the barriers to entry into that market. The only way you can ever have any meaningful competition in an industry is to make it cheaper for new competitors to enter the market. In this market, there's one huge barrier to entry, and it isn't the government-granted "monopoly" (which is really just a license that can easily be extended to additional companies, and frequently is).
If my ISP decides to throttle Netflix for not paying them, and I have a choice of ISPs, all I have to do is switch ISPs to one which doesn't throttle Netflix. The problem net neutrality is trying to solve is entirely caused by these government-granted cable/phone monopolies.
Actually, you only think that because you haven't run the numbers. It typically takes on the order of a decade to break even on new wire infrastructure, and the more players in the game, the longer that takes. Given that all the infrastructure will typically need to be replaced with something entirely new about every twenty years, that means you can't usefully have more than about two players unless you are in an area with significantly higher than average population density, and from an efficiency perspective, the optimal number of wire providers is exactly one, because that allows you to either charge half as much money or till your extra income into infrastructure upgrades over time.
Thus, if you want any real competition, and if you want good pricing for your service, there's only one way to achieve it: create a non-profit to maintain your wire infrastructure, and allow arbitrary companies to lease that infrastructure to provide Internet service. By separating the service provider from the wire provider, you make it possible for anybody willing to pay for a trunk line and a router in a wiring closet to become an ISP in a given community. Once the barrier to entry for new ISPs gets that low, the ISPs constantly have to fight to keep their customers, and the consumer wins.
Anything short of that approach is doomed to fail.
Creating the algorithm makes it copyrightable. The creativity is in developing an algorithm that produces an interesting output, and therefore they used significant creativity in constructing the output, albeit indirectly (but IMO no more indirectly than, for example, using an electronic synthesizer that uses algorithms to make note sounds when you press a key).
A somewhat more complicated and interesting question is whether those works are copyrightable if they publish the algorithms that created them before they publish the music. At the point where the output becomes reproducible by anyone, is the output still a creative work, or is it merely the algorithm itself that is really the creative work? Clearly you can use copyright to prevent reproducing that work by not allowing others to copy the algorithm or by deliberately preventing the use of the specific values that you used in your own work. But if you waive that right, do you also implicitly waive the right to those works that you programmatically constructed by using that algorithm? That's the point where the lines get blurry, and it becomes legally interesting, IMO.:-)
Pseudo-random white noise generators certainly have a human contribution and are repeatable.
The problem is that if the human component is just choosing an existing PRNG algorithm, then the whole thing is still a collection of mathematical facts like a phone book, and thus clearly ineligible. There generally has to be at least a minimal creative component for copyright eligibility. That is, after all, the purpose of copyright—to protect creative works of authorship.
Even if someone took the time to hand-seed the PRNG with various values and compare the calming qualities, it would still be an almost laughable stretch to argue that picking that number is sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection on that particular output of a commonly available algorithm, because other people's computers will randomly choose that particular number once in a while and create that output without the supposed creativity.
Now if somebody creates their own PRNG, that's a different story. Anything below that threshold seems dubious at best. That's not saying that some judge might not misinterpret the copyright act, or that somebody might not decide to sue in hopes of a pre-trial settlement, but the law is IMO pretty clear on the matter. Random noise cannot plausibly be copyrighted, and that is by design. Any abuse of the law that leads to any other interpretation is an indication of a flaw in the law rather than an intended outcome.
3.5GB is the read speed on that Samsung hardware. Its write speed is only 2.1 GB, which is only about two-thirds the speed of the Apple hardware in question.
Maybe the next Mac Pro will give more room to allow less garbage thermals but given Apple's obsession with thinness right now I'm not holding my breath.
Me either. But I'm more concerned about a supposedly "Pro" device that doesn't have a removable GPU. That's something that high-end pro users are likely to want to upgrade, whether because they need better performance or because the old one exhibited solder bump failure after two years and they don't want to have to replace the entire motherboard for most of the cost of the computer. You might be able to argue that soldered GPUs are necessary on laptops for mechanical reasons (vibrations loosening connectors), but on a desktop, they're an inexcusable design flaw. There's just no defending that decision.
Correct. A market like this has a huge first-mover advantage. Unless you have very deep pockets and investors that are willing to wait a very long time for a possible return, competing with an incumbent provider basically impossible. There are lots of markets where it's easy to make money as the first person to do something and almost impossible to make money as the second.
No, it actually doesn't matter how deep your pockets are or how dedicated your investors are. Two wire providers can't work except in dense urban areas.
The problem is that it isn't feasible to run a single line to a single house. You have to run a bundle big enough to cover all future expansion, which means running enough fiber for 100% coverage of an area. If a single wire provider doesn't break even until after a decade, then that means two wire providers in the same area wouldn't break even for two decades. Unfortunately, the infrastructure usually doesn't last that long. So the only way two providers could ever break even would be if you convinced both companies to charge higher prices for service.
Because collusion is illegal, this effectively means that the only way to do it successfully is to build the infrastructure, take a huge loss on service for a long enough period of time to bankrupt the incumbent provider, buy them out, and then crank up the price to make up for your losses. However, this still results in only a single wire provider in the end, and thus still doesn't solve the problem.
And if you don't have the money to do that, you can safely assume that the incumbent will lower their prices to keep you out of the market until you go bankrupt, at which point you'll end up selling your brand new wires to the incumbent for pennies on the dollar, and the area goes back to having a single provider.
A duopoly of wire providers is never stable outside of an urban area unless both providers got started at the same time, and even then, it can only remain stable as long as neither company has any significant size advantage over the other. I've heard of only one town in the entire country that meets those criteria. If we're really lucky, there might be two or three. Competing wire providers just doesn't work unless you're talking about companies that have been around for decades and weren't initially competing (e.g. cable companies vs. telephone companies). And even then, it is provably more expensive to have two wire providers than one, which means consumers will always benefit financially from not allowing this.
So if competition at the wire level doesn't work, what does? Competition at the ISP level. The cost for actually providing service over an existing fiber is negligible. If a community pays for the cost of running fiber and retains control over that fiber, then it can allow multiple ISPs to provide service over top of that fiber in much the same way that phone companies were forced to allow multiple ISPs to provide service over their phone lines.
It is arguable whether forcing cable and fiber providers to lease access to other ISPs is worth doing, though. The problem is, those are for-profit companies, which means they have no incentive to improve the lines to allow faster service, etc. unless they are making a profit on it. A municipal nonprofit works much better, because it doesn't have that profit motive and tills all of its profit into the infrastructure, which means it can actually afford to upgrade things, and can ask for slightly higher fees to cover the cost of upgrades when needed.
Doesn't that flight use codesharing with a U.S. carrier? That's usually how overseas carriers handle domestic flights, which would mean that you can probably book the flight, just not directly through Quantas.....
The FCC tried to regulate, was sued, and had to roll back the original net neutrality rules because the relevant legislation did not give the FCC the power to do so. So they chose to use the draconian, vastly out of date Title II designation as a round about. While the intent might have been good, the additional consequences were not.
What additional consequences? Thus far, I've seen no evidence that the Title II designation did much of anything other than give the FCC the authority to crack the whip when needed.
No, the FCC is explicitly authorized by law to pass regulations that govern telecommunications services, including ISPs, and most of that regulation is not created by any legislative body. If the FCC had to wait for Congress to act on every little decision, nothing would ever get done.
Moreover, the FCC is, by its nature, a largely apolitical body, or at least it is supposed to be. The people working at the FCC are hired because they understand the industry, they understand the technology, and therefore, they are in the best position to come up with regulations that make sense. By contrast, most of Congress talk about getting "an Internet" from one of their constituents when they really mean "an email". These people are almost all absolutely incapable of coming up with regulations that make even the slightest bit of sense unless those regulations are written by industry lobbyists, in which case they will be technically correct but devastatingly harmful.
No, I absolutely do not want any congressperson getting within a hundred miles of net neutrality. The best they can do is screw things up beyond all repair, and the most likely outcome is even worse than that. These are people who scratched their heads and said, "Durh, health insurance is really hard." Can you imagine what they're going to do when asked to explain settlement-free peering versus metered interconnections, or explain why video chat requires low latency and low jitter, but Netflix doesn't? They'll gibber more incoherently than a schoolkid who forgot to do his or her homework. Please, keep the mentally incompetent ruling class as far away from this as possible, and make the FCC do their jobs.
Are you saying you think the unwashed masses are graceful and/or professional?
Of course not. Part of being professional while working at a restaurant is remembering to wash. The health department is pretty strict about that. No wonder they got fired.:-D
It's not like it's a manufacturing defect, where Apple would actually replace a part. The whole system is acting as designed, and in fact in the best interests of the users - lots of other companies would have just added an info panel and called it good. The batteries are still working just fine. The cheap battery replacement is beyond what they really had to do, but is good customer service.
Actually, it is a manufacturing defect — and one that they admitted to, but only for a narrow range of serial numbers. Unfortunately, that range didn't cover the entire range of devices that were failing, and those early, defective devices started hitting the end of the one-year manufacturer warranty just twelve days after the iOS 10 release came out and started making them shut down, resulting in a ludicrously small window for noticing the problem and getting it corrected before the devices went out of warranty.
Batteries normally do not fail within the first year. That's almost always caused by the battery being defective from the start. The nominal life has to be at least as long as the median replacement cycle (three years) or else they're probably in violation of any number of consumer protection laws (e.g. the Massachusetts fitness for a particular purpose law). A failure at or around one year should be at least two standard deviations below the norm, so IMO, Apple should be compelled by force of law to replace these defective batteries gratis.
From what I can find the GPS system doesn't work nearly as well in space - especially if you're above the GPS orbits. Might be serviceable in low orbit, but why bother with all the potential failure modes when you already know exactly where it starts from. You did double-check that before the launch, right?
Of course, that's exactly what didn't happen. So $50 worth of GPS hardware would have prevented the loss of a ~$95 million-dollar launch ($45M for the satellite, ~$50M for the launch costs), because the launch computers in the satellite would have said, "Wait, what the f***? My trajectory, fuel, etc. were calculated based on launching from a launch site 4,000 miles from here. I can't launch like this."
Those who repeatedly cut corners eventually run out of paper.
The fact that their infrastructure spending is predicted to be only 4% higher than you would expect by multiplying their typical expenditure by the time period means that the impact of those laws/policies was at most about $2B. So it might not prove that the Comcast folks are lying, but it proves that they're deliberately distorting the truth to an extent that is almost indistinguishable from lying.
I don't know about Russian law, but under U.S. law, the insurance company would pay the insured, and would subsequently go after the responsible party (in court, if necessary) to recover its losses (assuming that the gross negligence can be adequately proven).
It's not quite that simple. It isn't that they are mouthpieces for corporate PR, so much as that they don't always look too carefully at the PR blurbs that corporations send out, nor apply a healthy enough dose of skepticism.
The problem fundamentally is that at the local level, journalism doesn't pay very well, and only a few people are lucky enough to make it to the top tier TV/radio/newspaper outlets where it does pay well. This means most of the best and brightest tend to avoid the whole field unless they are really motivated. You have to assume that most of the people doing the reporting and investigating did not double-major in anything, and have no deep knowledge of any other subject besides communications, lack solid grounding in statistics, and so on, which makes them easier to mislead. And by the time they get old enough to be cynical enough to distrust the corporate PR stuff, they're too expensive to keep on the payroll.
Of course, eventually even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and there are a lot of journalists out there, so in aggregate, mistakes tend to be self-correcting eventually, but it's a very real problem, and IMO is getting worse with each passing year.
And as far as utility, I'm going to guess that the useful reproductive life of a female human - what, 25 years now, nominally?
Depends on how you determine it. If you count from puberty to zero viable eggs, about 30–35 years. Of course, most societies frown upon taking twelve-year-old brides, and even at eighteen, most women prefer to put off having kids until after college and perhaps even for a few more years while they get their careers started. If you start counting at twenty-five and stop counting when the birth defect rate starts to skyrocket, you end up at ten to fifteen years, which is way less than the average service lifespan of an expensive car.
The car analogy is actually pretty good. If there were a market for twice as many of a given luxury car brand at those prices, they would ramp up production to accommodate the demand (or maybe increase the price to reduce demand). By contrast, the only way to ramp up production of women relative to the number of men is to kill off some of the men. And this is what wars excel at doing.
Pretty much what I was going to say. With a limited war, you only have two possible outcomes: a stalemate or a loss. If you aren't in it to win it, you won't. Vietnam, we lost. Korea, it was at best a draw. First Iraq War, again a draw, in that nothing really changed other than punting the problem down the road a few years. Then Operation Desert Fox had about the same effect. And finally, they got serious about regime change under Bush Jr., but constructed false pretenses to justify doing what they should really have done under Bush Sr.
And even the most recent war in the Gulf barely counts as a win. The region is still pretty screwed up, and the U.S. is still having to help keep things from going completely bonkers fourteen years later, mainly because they forgot one of the key rules of war: Don't ignore the enemy troops that got away. All they had to do was employ the Iraqi military to help keep peace to begin with, and things wouldn't have gone from bad to worse. Instead, they refused to give jobs to any of them, and they joined ISIS.
It doesn't necessarily require, as you put it, blowing the country to rubble, but it does require at least fighting with the intent of actually toppling the other government, rather than just slapping it across the face a few times.
Slashdot Mirror
Arbitrary deadlines are fine, too. What's not fine are deadlines that don't match the work required. If you give me a month to get a new release of an app shipped, I can do it. If you give me a week, I can do that, too. The difference is that the one released after a week will less than a quarter of the changes that would have been in the one released after a month.
Of course, at some point, a too-fast release cadence can slow down development by requiring you to maintain too much redundant code while you do large redesigns of parts of the app that require multiple release cycles to complete, but that's a separate issue.
There are two approaches that work: A. choose an arbitrary feature set and then figure out how long it will take to implement those features, or B. choose an arbitrary deadline and then figure out which proposed features you can pull off by that deadline. What doesn't work is choosing an arbitrary feature set and an arbitrary deadline independently. :-)
Why would content providers cripple their own services? For what gain?
Dunno, ask Netflix. They literally did what the parent was saying to AT&T and Verizon customers just 2 years ago.
Wait... are we talking about AT&T/Verizon, or are we talking about AT&T Wireless and Verizon Wireless here? They're two entirely different networks. If you think Netflix throttled their content to wired AT&T or wired Verizon, then your information is factually incorrect. Netflix did, however, deliberately limit the maximum video quality to cellular customers on those networks so that their users wouldn't pay a small fortune in data charges. After some complaints, they added controls in the app so that users on unlimited plans could opt out if they wanted to do so. That's an entirely different situation than throttling content to try to get concessions out of the ISP, which is a patently ridiculous notion.
Also, there was that little thing about throttling Comcast to force them to provide free hosting for a "Netflix box", not to mention the throttling Cogent, Netflix's ISP, did that got blamed on Telcos and Cable providers.
If you really think Content providers aren't up to shenanigans themselves, you're deluded. Both sides are as bad. Regulations that only apply to one side are equally as bad. If they are lobbying for it, there's good chance it's not "pro consumer".
Uh, no, that's not what happened at all. Netflix didn't try to force Comcast to do anything. Netflix shifted their peering in such a way that more of it came from Cogent than before. Historically, as those links approached saturation, Comcast added more capacity, but once they realized that Netflix made up the bulk of the new traffic, they decided to stop paying to upgrade those links to Cogent, resulting in deliberate congestion caused by Comcast. Netflix even offered to pay to upgrade those links, and Comcast refused, instead demanding that Netflix pay them money. Netflix then offered to GIVE Comcast boxes that could be used to reduce the load on their peering points, in exchange for Comcast merely providing a closet to hold them, plus electricity and a connection to their network, and Comcast refused unless Netflix paid them colocation fees, even though Comcast was the main beneficiary of such an arrangement (by not having to pay to upgrade their upstream bandwidth).
You can try to distort the facts all you want to try to paint Netflix as the bad guy, but that doesn't make it so. Comcast extorted money from a company that wasn't their customer, forcing them to pay Comcast money in exchange for not throttling traffic that comes in from one of Comcast's upstream providers. That's fundamentally wrong, and there is exactly one bad guy in that story: Comcast.
That's what we in the rural South used to call "cutting off your nose to spite your face", and is essentially the corporate equivalent of suicide.
If Netflix throttles access to Comcast customers, the only possible results would be either A. causing more Netflix users to complain to Comcast or B. causing customers to ditch Netflix for somebody else. Even if Comcast relented, the best that they could hope to achieve would be Comcast letting Netflix stream higher-quality streams to their customers, and the only way that would realistically be a problem would be if Comcast were violating NN, meaning that they wouldn't need to do that under the rules that the FCC is currently ripping out.
Moreover, there are better ways to achieve those same results. Netflix controls the content. They could show an interstitial ad that says, "Trouble viewing high-quality content? Call Comcast and demand that they improve their bandwidth." And unlike Netflix throttling Comcast customers, that would actually get results without causing Netflix to bleed customers.
Basically, there's no plausible scenario where a non-ISP content provider could cause harm to an ISP by throttling data from that ISP, because every scenario would cause more harm to that non-ISP content provider than to the ISP they're targeting. The reverse isn't true. In short, the very premise you're operating under is wrong, and as a result, your conclusion is wrong.
Only for the first few months while they're still actively trying to recruit customers from the other guy. After a while, a duopoly still settles down and becomes approximately the same as a monopoly, because everybody wants to provide the minimum amount of service they can get away with for as much money as they can get away with.
In practice, healthy competition in a market is inversely proportional to the barriers to entry into that market. The only way you can ever have any meaningful competition in an industry is to make it cheaper for new competitors to enter the market. In this market, there's one huge barrier to entry, and it isn't the government-granted "monopoly" (which is really just a license that can easily be extended to additional companies, and frequently is).
Actually, you only think that because you haven't run the numbers. It typically takes on the order of a decade to break even on new wire infrastructure, and the more players in the game, the longer that takes. Given that all the infrastructure will typically need to be replaced with something entirely new about every twenty years, that means you can't usefully have more than about two players unless you are in an area with significantly higher than average population density, and from an efficiency perspective, the optimal number of wire providers is exactly one, because that allows you to either charge half as much money or till your extra income into infrastructure upgrades over time.
Thus, if you want any real competition, and if you want good pricing for your service, there's only one way to achieve it: create a non-profit to maintain your wire infrastructure, and allow arbitrary companies to lease that infrastructure to provide Internet service. By separating the service provider from the wire provider, you make it possible for anybody willing to pay for a trunk line and a router in a wiring closet to become an ISP in a given community. Once the barrier to entry for new ISPs gets that low, the ISPs constantly have to fight to keep their customers, and the consumer wins.
Anything short of that approach is doomed to fail.
Creating the algorithm makes it copyrightable. The creativity is in developing an algorithm that produces an interesting output, and therefore they used significant creativity in constructing the output, albeit indirectly (but IMO no more indirectly than, for example, using an electronic synthesizer that uses algorithms to make note sounds when you press a key).
A somewhat more complicated and interesting question is whether those works are copyrightable if they publish the algorithms that created them before they publish the music. At the point where the output becomes reproducible by anyone, is the output still a creative work, or is it merely the algorithm itself that is really the creative work? Clearly you can use copyright to prevent reproducing that work by not allowing others to copy the algorithm or by deliberately preventing the use of the specific values that you used in your own work. But if you waive that right, do you also implicitly waive the right to those works that you programmatically constructed by using that algorithm? That's the point where the lines get blurry, and it becomes legally interesting, IMO. :-)
The problem is that if the human component is just choosing an existing PRNG algorithm, then the whole thing is still a collection of mathematical facts like a phone book, and thus clearly ineligible. There generally has to be at least a minimal creative component for copyright eligibility. That is, after all, the purpose of copyright—to protect creative works of authorship.
Even if someone took the time to hand-seed the PRNG with various values and compare the calming qualities, it would still be an almost laughable stretch to argue that picking that number is sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection on that particular output of a commonly available algorithm, because other people's computers will randomly choose that particular number once in a while and create that output without the supposed creativity.
Now if somebody creates their own PRNG, that's a different story. Anything below that threshold seems dubious at best. That's not saying that some judge might not misinterpret the copyright act, or that somebody might not decide to sue in hopes of a pre-trial settlement, but the law is IMO pretty clear on the matter. Random noise cannot plausibly be copyrighted, and that is by design. Any abuse of the law that leads to any other interpretation is an indication of a flaw in the law rather than an intended outcome.
3.5GB is the read speed on that Samsung hardware. Its write speed is only 2.1 GB, which is only about two-thirds the speed of the Apple hardware in question.
Me either. But I'm more concerned about a supposedly "Pro" device that doesn't have a removable GPU. That's something that high-end pro users are likely to want to upgrade, whether because they need better performance or because the old one exhibited solder bump failure after two years and they don't want to have to replace the entire motherboard for most of the cost of the computer. You might be able to argue that soldered GPUs are necessary on laptops for mechanical reasons (vibrations loosening connectors), but on a desktop, they're an inexcusable design flaw. There's just no defending that decision.
No, it actually doesn't matter how deep your pockets are or how dedicated your investors are. Two wire providers can't work except in dense urban areas.
The problem is that it isn't feasible to run a single line to a single house. You have to run a bundle big enough to cover all future expansion, which means running enough fiber for 100% coverage of an area. If a single wire provider doesn't break even until after a decade, then that means two wire providers in the same area wouldn't break even for two decades. Unfortunately, the infrastructure usually doesn't last that long. So the only way two providers could ever break even would be if you convinced both companies to charge higher prices for service.
Because collusion is illegal, this effectively means that the only way to do it successfully is to build the infrastructure, take a huge loss on service for a long enough period of time to bankrupt the incumbent provider, buy them out, and then crank up the price to make up for your losses. However, this still results in only a single wire provider in the end, and thus still doesn't solve the problem.
And if you don't have the money to do that, you can safely assume that the incumbent will lower their prices to keep you out of the market until you go bankrupt, at which point you'll end up selling your brand new wires to the incumbent for pennies on the dollar, and the area goes back to having a single provider.
A duopoly of wire providers is never stable outside of an urban area unless both providers got started at the same time, and even then, it can only remain stable as long as neither company has any significant size advantage over the other. I've heard of only one town in the entire country that meets those criteria. If we're really lucky, there might be two or three. Competing wire providers just doesn't work unless you're talking about companies that have been around for decades and weren't initially competing (e.g. cable companies vs. telephone companies). And even then, it is provably more expensive to have two wire providers than one, which means consumers will always benefit financially from not allowing this.
So if competition at the wire level doesn't work, what does? Competition at the ISP level. The cost for actually providing service over an existing fiber is negligible. If a community pays for the cost of running fiber and retains control over that fiber, then it can allow multiple ISPs to provide service over top of that fiber in much the same way that phone companies were forced to allow multiple ISPs to provide service over their phone lines.
It is arguable whether forcing cable and fiber providers to lease access to other ISPs is worth doing, though. The problem is, those are for-profit companies, which means they have no incentive to improve the lines to allow faster service, etc. unless they are making a profit on it. A municipal nonprofit works much better, because it doesn't have that profit motive and tills all of its profit into the infrastructure, which means it can actually afford to upgrade things, and can ask for slightly higher fees to cover the cost of upgrades when needed.
Actually, works created by random selection without any contribution by a human author are not eligible for copyright protection. It is highly unlikely that white noise could be copyrighted even if you took someone else's white noise.
Ah. Yeah, that wouldn't work. Never mind.
Doesn't that flight use codesharing with a U.S. carrier? That's usually how overseas carriers handle domestic flights, which would mean that you can probably book the flight, just not directly through Quantas.....
What additional consequences? Thus far, I've seen no evidence that the Title II designation did much of anything other than give the FCC the authority to crack the whip when needed.
No, the FCC is explicitly authorized by law to pass regulations that govern telecommunications services, including ISPs, and most of that regulation is not created by any legislative body. If the FCC had to wait for Congress to act on every little decision, nothing would ever get done.
Moreover, the FCC is, by its nature, a largely apolitical body, or at least it is supposed to be. The people working at the FCC are hired because they understand the industry, they understand the technology, and therefore, they are in the best position to come up with regulations that make sense. By contrast, most of Congress talk about getting "an Internet" from one of their constituents when they really mean "an email". These people are almost all absolutely incapable of coming up with regulations that make even the slightest bit of sense unless those regulations are written by industry lobbyists, in which case they will be technically correct but devastatingly harmful.
No, I absolutely do not want any congressperson getting within a hundred miles of net neutrality. The best they can do is screw things up beyond all repair, and the most likely outcome is even worse than that. These are people who scratched their heads and said, "Durh, health insurance is really hard." Can you imagine what they're going to do when asked to explain settlement-free peering versus metered interconnections, or explain why video chat requires low latency and low jitter, but Netflix doesn't? They'll gibber more incoherently than a schoolkid who forgot to do his or her homework. Please, keep the mentally incompetent ruling class as far away from this as possible, and make the FCC do their jobs.
Of course not. Part of being professional while working at a restaurant is remembering to wash. The health department is pretty strict about that. No wonder they got fired. :-D
Actually, it is a manufacturing defect — and one that they admitted to, but only for a narrow range of serial numbers. Unfortunately, that range didn't cover the entire range of devices that were failing, and those early, defective devices started hitting the end of the one-year manufacturer warranty just twelve days after the iOS 10 release came out and started making them shut down, resulting in a ludicrously small window for noticing the problem and getting it corrected before the devices went out of warranty.
Batteries normally do not fail within the first year. That's almost always caused by the battery being defective from the start. The nominal life has to be at least as long as the median replacement cycle (three years) or else they're probably in violation of any number of consumer protection laws (e.g. the Massachusetts fitness for a particular purpose law). A failure at or around one year should be at least two standard deviations below the norm, so IMO, Apple should be compelled by force of law to replace these defective batteries gratis.
Of course, that's exactly what didn't happen. So $50 worth of GPS hardware would have prevented the loss of a ~$95 million-dollar launch ($45M for the satellite, ~$50M for the launch costs), because the launch computers in the satellite would have said, "Wait, what the f***? My trajectory, fuel, etc. were calculated based on launching from a launch site 4,000 miles from here. I can't launch like this."
Those who repeatedly cut corners eventually run out of paper.
The fact that their infrastructure spending is predicted to be only 4% higher than you would expect by multiplying their typical expenditure by the time period means that the impact of those laws/policies was at most about $2B. So it might not prove that the Comcast folks are lying, but it proves that they're deliberately distorting the truth to an extent that is almost indistinguishable from lying.
I don't know about Russian law, but under U.S. law, the insurance company would pay the insured, and would subsequently go after the responsible party (in court, if necessary) to recover its losses (assuming that the gross negligence can be adequately proven).
And you can buy a full replacement battery kit for $25 from third parties.
Apple isn't doing their customers any kind of favor with this.
For $4, you get the repair done by someone who does it five times each week, plus a 90-day warranty.
It's not quite that simple. It isn't that they are mouthpieces for corporate PR, so much as that they don't always look too carefully at the PR blurbs that corporations send out, nor apply a healthy enough dose of skepticism.
The problem fundamentally is that at the local level, journalism doesn't pay very well, and only a few people are lucky enough to make it to the top tier TV/radio/newspaper outlets where it does pay well. This means most of the best and brightest tend to avoid the whole field unless they are really motivated. You have to assume that most of the people doing the reporting and investigating did not double-major in anything, and have no deep knowledge of any other subject besides communications, lack solid grounding in statistics, and so on, which makes them easier to mislead. And by the time they get old enough to be cynical enough to distrust the corporate PR stuff, they're too expensive to keep on the payroll.
Of course, eventually even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and there are a lot of journalists out there, so in aggregate, mistakes tend to be self-correcting eventually, but it's a very real problem, and IMO is getting worse with each passing year.
And as far as utility, I'm going to guess that the useful reproductive life of a female human - what, 25 years now, nominally?
Depends on how you determine it. If you count from puberty to zero viable eggs, about 30–35 years. Of course, most societies frown upon taking twelve-year-old brides, and even at eighteen, most women prefer to put off having kids until after college and perhaps even for a few more years while they get their careers started. If you start counting at twenty-five and stop counting when the birth defect rate starts to skyrocket, you end up at ten to fifteen years, which is way less than the average service lifespan of an expensive car.
The car analogy is actually pretty good. If there were a market for twice as many of a given luxury car brand at those prices, they would ramp up production to accommodate the demand (or maybe increase the price to reduce demand). By contrast, the only way to ramp up production of women relative to the number of men is to kill off some of the men. And this is what wars excel at doing.
The proper term is pescatarian.
Well, they don't have central nervous systems, but there is some evidence that plants do feel pain.
Pretty much what I was going to say. With a limited war, you only have two possible outcomes: a stalemate or a loss. If you aren't in it to win it, you won't. Vietnam, we lost. Korea, it was at best a draw. First Iraq War, again a draw, in that nothing really changed other than punting the problem down the road a few years. Then Operation Desert Fox had about the same effect. And finally, they got serious about regime change under Bush Jr., but constructed false pretenses to justify doing what they should really have done under Bush Sr.
And even the most recent war in the Gulf barely counts as a win. The region is still pretty screwed up, and the U.S. is still having to help keep things from going completely bonkers fourteen years later, mainly because they forgot one of the key rules of war: Don't ignore the enemy troops that got away. All they had to do was employ the Iraqi military to help keep peace to begin with, and things wouldn't have gone from bad to worse. Instead, they refused to give jobs to any of them, and they joined ISIS.
It doesn't necessarily require, as you put it, blowing the country to rubble, but it does require at least fighting with the intent of actually toppling the other government, rather than just slapping it across the face a few times.