which encrypt text and calls to other people who use it. Which includes my wife... because I installed it for her... and that's about it. My paranoid friends that might use such things wont even get a smartphone so... yea...
anyways, both applications are pretty good. I'm with Verizon and they have a TERRIBLE messaging app that they replaced the standard android app with. It literally crashes my phone it's so bad. So I replaced it with this. The only annoying bit is having to enter your password if you reboot the phone. Textsecure even sends the texts via the internet rather than using the cellular network to save you messages if the other users got it as well.
It's Electric. Hands down. Hydrogen would be better, but with electric you can use an IC engine to charge the batteries via generator. That makes it capable of using both fuels on the fly. Can't do that with a fuel cell. Get to Texas where they've likely banned Hydrogen refueling stations and you're screwed.
Rather that deal with it in such a complex way, they should just do what linux did for years with MP3s. Popup box "This is an MP3, we can install the thing you need to listen to it, but it's not open source. Do you want it? Yes/No" Simple as that. Let users chose. I don't see how this is any different.
Then they can let their plugin community quietly subvert the entire mechanism, just like they have everything else, and the industry will abandon it.
LOL... of course, I doubt it was actually wax unless it was a studio master. But old 78s (the kind that shatter when you drop one) were made of shellac. Shellac dissolves in alcohol. Maybe someone had a little drinking accident at his last house party and forgot to tell the host?
Right, it was a Shellac record (or, I dunno if it is actually shellac which comes from insects, but it's very similar)
But it was in storage on a shelf in a spare room. But that room is over my garage and I have a lot of hobbies so it's likely I created some fumes while I was building one of my crazy projects or something. It ruined other records I had next to it as well. It was a total mess!
I think this is more pie in the sky theory than anything. Based on what we do know already, worm holes likely do exist but they're sub-atomic and exists very very briefly. A wormhole the size of Sagittarius A* would require an entirely new form of physics to exist. Everything we think is true would have to be wrong. Which isn't impossible, just pretty unlikely. Blackholes that size do, however, fit within our models.
Wasn't there already a hole poked in the BICEP findings, like a day after publication? Something about not accounting for the possibility that their findings were evidence of post expansion gravity polarization, not pre-expansion...or something like that. I recall that the consensus was still "this is super cool observation and probably right, but the Nobel hangs on that tiny detail."
Lots of holes have been poked into it since it came out. This is a revelation on the scale of Relativity and that wasn't entirely settled for decades. Expect there to be a LOT of criticism going forward. As there should be. Something this big has to have every concern addressed before it can be totally accepted.
Vinyl is still fairly superior for physical archiving
The problems they're having with CDs also exist with vinyl... it's just a lot worse. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of Vinyl myself because it's fun. My Steve Martin records are great at parties. But I'm under no audiophile allusions about their superiority. I had one very old classical record literally turn into a puddle of goo for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me.
"you may have noticed that many of them won't play won't play."
Why? Normal people realize Slashdot is nothing more than a glorified forum where you can only reply to stickies. Grammar/Spelling Nazis should avoid this site... and especially my posts.
ok, yes, but you still only had 1 choice. Which was my point.;-)
But they were heavily regulated and not allowed to do a lot of the BS that they get away with today. in fact back in the 80's they had to start working on a phone problem within 24 hours of reporting the problem or they got fined.
Thats not true today either. You can file a complaint with the PSC but they only fine based on aggregate results. Not 1 customer complaint. i.e. 95% or their troubles must be worked in X amount of time, etc... and that data is provided by the phone company. But in my experience they don't lie to the PSC. The fines are too low to bother with it.
Deregulation happened, and now people will go days without phone/DSL/cable because they dont have a regulatory gun to their head to actually respond.
It's time we put a gun back to the head of ISP's, because they cant be trusted to do the right thing.
I can't argue with the lack of service. But it's not due to the lack of regulation. It's due to customers buying the cheapest service at all costs. You have competition in the market place now, the telco has to compete with the cable company who has no regulation. As a result the cable companies have terrible customer service, but are cheaper and faster. Most customers never have a problem so that's what they go with. Put that regulatory gun to their head and yes, service will likely improve. But something else will suffer... like speed or innovation... or your price will go up. Which is exactly what the cable companies are saying here. They can't raise the price too far or people will just switch back to DSL. So something else has to give.
How could consumers possibly face "less choice" than they do now?! I moved about three months ago and my ONLY choice for wired internet (and cable, for that matter) is Comcast. For two and a half of those months, I had no service and was fighting with Comcast. It sure would have been nice if there WERE another choice. It's also not like I'm living in the middle of nowhere - this is in the DC Metro! This is not a rare thing, at all. Where I moved from I at least had two choices (AT&T and a local Cable / internet company), but that's still not much choice.
Regulation can only help at this point, because it will give consumers a leg to stand on when dealing with these people. I suggest anyone who thinks we DON'T need regulation should try dealing with Comcast customer support for a month, then get back to me.
Go back to the 1980s. Your only choice was AT&T. If it were still like it was then, you'd likely not have internet access at all. In fact, go outside the US and Europe and in most countries your only choice will be 1 phone company. If the Cable companies are forced to maintain your line for a competitor that rents the line from them... and that rent is less than it costs them to maintain the line, they will very likely just disconnect you. They are not forced to provide you service like the telcos are. I don't think that will happen however, the rates they are allowed to charge to CLECs are pretty high. More likely than not, nothing will change for you.
The existing ISPs are too large and monolithic. I suspect this is mostly local regulation making pole leasing fees unreasonable.
It needs to be practical for small ISPs to operate anywhere in the US. Any jackass should be able to start his own ISP. Lease the poles, buy some shake and bake ISP equipment, buy the appropriate back end bandwidth, and then run the business.
The majority of ISPs in this country are under 30k people. You just have only heard about the big ones.
The increased regulation will be to cable carriers, which Verizon is not. In fact, it will be applying regulations that Verizon is already under to the cable companies.
And the "boatload" of cash the feds handed out was to increase rural broadband access. That's insanely expensive to install and very unprofitable. That's why the ISPs wont do it without federal funding. Cable companies CANT do it, Coax sucks over long distances. They need amplifiers every 800ft. That federal program cost something like $300k per customer added. There's a reason the ISPs refuse to do it themselves, and it's not because they hate you.
First, you have to understand what the FCC is proposing. There are 2 kinds of ISPs we're talking about here. Telco and Cable. They are TOTALLY different. It may seem the same on your end, but its not.
Telcos are heavily regulated by the feds. Cable is almost completely unregulated.
Much of the telco regulation is left over from the days when there was no other way to get phone service, and no competition from cable companies. A lot of the rules you'd find ridiculous if you understood everything involved. In some places, abandoned homes are required by law to have a working phone line in them for example. They are not required to have working cable television however.
What the FCC suggested yesterday was to apply some of these rules to cable companies. Now, not all of them are dumb. So I don't want you to think this is a terrible idea. I've no idea which regulation they want to apply to cable companies. The one thing I do know is it will hurt their business and in turn hurt your service in the short term.
If you want evidence that it will hurt innovation, just look up what your local phone company charges for service and compare that to your cable company. Then look at each companies max speed. In most areas they charge about the same but your cable company is offering 15 to 50mb/s while your phone company likely caps out at 5mb/sec unless you're in one of the few areas that have fiber.
But again, I want to be clear, there are upsides to the regulation as well. In the long run it'll likely be better for the industry.
So now we're celebrating releasing unfinished games that don't work as some sort of innovation? How often to you get a game like this that has promise of becoming something great, only to get involved as you watch the game go in the completely opposite direction promised? "I paid $50 for this game and now they're turning it into a fermium game and releasing it for free! Fantastic!"
He is basing his objections on a screenshot of a PDF file and not the real data. I'm not saying his findings are incorrect, this is a huge discovery and needs to be thoroughly vetted, but come on. 1 guy suggesting a problem isn't news worthy.
The problem with the education system in this country are pretty strait forward. They stem directly from the completely inflexible teachers union (who should be ashamed of themselves) and management that does nothing more than attend endless meetings over and over that churn out bullet point after bullet point. My kids school actually has some pretty good teachers by some miracle, but the management issue is ridiculous. I try to be an involved parent but all the events they have are so ridiculous it borders on insanity. They always serve Pizza Pit, the champaign of pizza. Follow that up with great games or skits to entertain the crowd... then the principle gives a 30 to 45min speech about all the great plans she has (but will never implement) then they let the parents talk for about 10min and avoid answering all our questions like "When will you fill in the 6 foot sink hole in the middle of the playground?" and no, I'm not kidding, there really is a 6' sinkhole.
The last one I went to they sent out a questionnaire that asked: What is most important to you in the education of your child? a. Hands on learning b. A diverse and equitable learning environment c. An involved teaching staff
What the hell does that mean? I just circled them all and wrote "YES" underneath. And these people have 4 to 8 year degrees.
I am the senior writer and mobile editor of ReadWrite and have been writing about mobile payments for years now.
Ok, that means you're probably good at typing and spelling. You're at least ahead of me on the spelling bit. Congrats.
My conclusion is based on evidence of consumer usage (both empirical and data driven),
Great! Links? Or do I have to scroll through every post you ever made because your post is just the most recent car in your train of thought?
...for so many different reasons and every single hyped mobile wallet that has been released to the consumer market has, in one form or another, failed.
yada yada... again, you're just trying to make an argument. It's not facts based (you know, news) I can totally understand making a rational argument. Hell, we all do it here on slashdot replying to stories like this one. But linking to what is nothing more than a blog post with 0 references at all is not news. You're declaring an entire industry is dead with absolutely no evidence other than that you think people don't want what they are selling. That's not news, that's opinion.
That's how easy it is. No offense meant, but did you really think you could cross post your article to slashdot, have 0 references in it other than yourself and not be given a hard time? lol, welcome to Slashdot
Who the hell is Dan Rowinski and how does he know anything about mobile wallets and payments? He cites no references in his article other than other articles HE wrote and some anecdotal story about a coffee house he stops at in the morning. He provided a link to their website so I guess we could stop by and ask them if he's full of it or not.
Since we're on a roll, I declare balding middle aged men the new fashion trend that 20 something women just can't resist. For example, at lunch this cute redhead smiled at me while I was at the local Arbys. Citation: http://arbys.com/
Stop believing what you see on the news. The US and Russia both have agents on the ground in Ukraine stirring this whole thing up. Pretty much everything you see on TV was setup by one side or the other. I've no idea what's really going on other than that it's not whats on TV. Almost every time you read about something over there, you can go to youtube and watch video from people that were actually there and completely debunk what you just read.
Reporters are lazy, accept what the government feeds them, don't fact check, and don't retract their mistakes when they happen. Do some youtube searches on the Odessa government building fire. Pretty much everything I heard on the news about that was a lie... on both sides. You can read a fact on routers, go to youtube and clearly see it's not true with just a few minutes of research. I've pretty much resigned myself to knowing that I can't do anything about that situation, everything I'm hearing is a lie.
Do a quick bunch of mealy mouthed video bites proclaiming solidarity and further cooperation to, well, study the situation.
I have no faith in our leaders here in the US or in the EU to stop Putin.
We orchestrated a coup in a country bordering Russia. Imagine if Mexico overthrew their government, kicked out their president all while Russian advisers were in Mexico city giving them tips...
Then Russia stirred up unrest to prevent us from installing the government of our choice. The losers here are the Ukrainian people who are suffering because they just so happen to live on the newest battlefield of the 100 year old proxy war the US and Russia have been fighting.
That's a suspected conflict of interest, not an outright one. He may still have a financial interest in a company or have a secret deal. If working in the industry meant you couldn't ever move into government to regulate the industry you'd never get anyone competent to work for the feds. Would you want the FDA to never hire anyone with a medical degree?
Slashdot Mirror
It wont work.
I use textsecure: https://play.google.com/store/...
and redphone: https://play.google.com/store/...
which encrypt text and calls to other people who use it. Which includes my wife... because I installed it for her... and that's about it. My paranoid friends that might use such things wont even get a smartphone so... yea...
anyways, both applications are pretty good. I'm with Verizon and they have a TERRIBLE messaging app that they replaced the standard android app with. It literally crashes my phone it's so bad. So I replaced it with this. The only annoying bit is having to enter your password if you reboot the phone. Textsecure even sends the texts via the internet rather than using the cellular network to save you messages if the other users got it as well.
It's Electric. Hands down. Hydrogen would be better, but with electric you can use an IC engine to charge the batteries via generator. That makes it capable of using both fuels on the fly. Can't do that with a fuel cell. Get to Texas where they've likely banned Hydrogen refueling stations and you're screwed.
Cheaper? It hasn't cost them any money yet.
Rather that deal with it in such a complex way, they should just do what linux did for years with MP3s. Popup box "This is an MP3, we can install the thing you need to listen to it, but it's not open source. Do you want it? Yes/No" Simple as that. Let users chose. I don't see how this is any different.
Then they can let their plugin community quietly subvert the entire mechanism, just like they have everything else, and the industry will abandon it.
LOL... of course, I doubt it was actually wax unless it was a studio master. But old 78s (the kind that shatter when you drop one) were made of shellac. Shellac dissolves in alcohol. Maybe someone had a little drinking accident at his last house party and forgot to tell the host?
Right, it was a Shellac record (or, I dunno if it is actually shellac which comes from insects, but it's very similar)
But it was in storage on a shelf in a spare room. But that room is over my garage and I have a lot of hobbies so it's likely I created some fumes while I was building one of my crazy projects or something. It ruined other records I had next to it as well. It was a total mess!
by "repressive regimes" they meant all of them.
Agreed. It's a cool, idea, but that's all. We'd have to upend the whole of astrophysics for it to be true.
I think this is more pie in the sky theory than anything. Based on what we do know already, worm holes likely do exist but they're sub-atomic and exists very very briefly. A wormhole the size of Sagittarius A* would require an entirely new form of physics to exist. Everything we think is true would have to be wrong. Which isn't impossible, just pretty unlikely. Blackholes that size do, however, fit within our models.
Wasn't there already a hole poked in the BICEP findings, like a day after publication? Something about not accounting for the possibility that their findings were evidence of post expansion gravity polarization, not pre-expansion...or something like that. I recall that the consensus was still "this is super cool observation and probably right, but the Nobel hangs on that tiny detail."
Lots of holes have been poked into it since it came out. This is a revelation on the scale of Relativity and that wasn't entirely settled for decades. Expect there to be a LOT of criticism going forward. As there should be. Something this big has to have every concern addressed before it can be totally accepted.
...but come on. 1 guy suggesting a problem isn't news worthy.
This is Slashdot.
"You must be new here."
point taken
Vinyl is still fairly superior for physical archiving
The problems they're having with CDs also exist with vinyl... it's just a lot worse. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of Vinyl myself because it's fun. My Steve Martin records are great at parties. But I'm under no audiophile allusions about their superiority. I had one very old classical record literally turn into a puddle of goo for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me.
Please proof read proof read!
"you may have noticed that many of them won't play won't play."
Why? Normal people realize Slashdot is nothing more than a glorified forum where you can only reply to stickies. Grammar/Spelling Nazis should avoid this site... and especially my posts.
Actually no. I had the only choice of GTE
ok, yes, but you still only had 1 choice. Which was my point. ;-)
But they were heavily regulated and not allowed to do a lot of the BS that they get away with today. in fact back in the 80's they had to start working on a phone problem within 24 hours of reporting the problem or they got fined.
Thats not true today either. You can file a complaint with the PSC but they only fine based on aggregate results. Not 1 customer complaint. i.e. 95% or their troubles must be worked in X amount of time, etc... and that data is provided by the phone company. But in my experience they don't lie to the PSC. The fines are too low to bother with it.
Deregulation happened, and now people will go days without phone/DSL/cable because they dont have a regulatory gun to their head to actually respond.
It's time we put a gun back to the head of ISP's, because they cant be trusted to do the right thing.
I can't argue with the lack of service. But it's not due to the lack of regulation. It's due to customers buying the cheapest service at all costs. You have competition in the market place now, the telco has to compete with the cable company who has no regulation. As a result the cable companies have terrible customer service, but are cheaper and faster. Most customers never have a problem so that's what they go with. Put that regulatory gun to their head and yes, service will likely improve. But something else will suffer... like speed or innovation... or your price will go up. Which is exactly what the cable companies are saying here. They can't raise the price too far or people will just switch back to DSL. So something else has to give.
How could consumers possibly face "less choice" than they do now?! I moved about three months ago and my ONLY choice for wired internet (and cable, for that matter) is Comcast. For two and a half of those months, I had no service and was fighting with Comcast. It sure would have been nice if there WERE another choice. It's also not like I'm living in the middle of nowhere - this is in the DC Metro! This is not a rare thing, at all. Where I moved from I at least had two choices (AT&T and a local Cable / internet company), but that's still not much choice.
Regulation can only help at this point, because it will give consumers a leg to stand on when dealing with these people. I suggest anyone who thinks we DON'T need regulation should try dealing with Comcast customer support for a month, then get back to me.
Go back to the 1980s. Your only choice was AT&T. If it were still like it was then, you'd likely not have internet access at all. In fact, go outside the US and Europe and in most countries your only choice will be 1 phone company. If the Cable companies are forced to maintain your line for a competitor that rents the line from them... and that rent is less than it costs them to maintain the line, they will very likely just disconnect you. They are not forced to provide you service like the telcos are. I don't think that will happen however, the rates they are allowed to charge to CLECs are pretty high. More likely than not, nothing will change for you.
The existing ISPs are too large and monolithic. I suspect this is mostly local regulation making pole leasing fees unreasonable.
It needs to be practical for small ISPs to operate anywhere in the US. Any jackass should be able to start his own ISP. Lease the poles, buy some shake and bake ISP equipment, buy the appropriate back end bandwidth, and then run the business.
The majority of ISPs in this country are under 30k people. You just have only heard about the big ones.
The increased regulation will be to cable carriers, which Verizon is not. In fact, it will be applying regulations that Verizon is already under to the cable companies.
And the "boatload" of cash the feds handed out was to increase rural broadband access. That's insanely expensive to install and very unprofitable. That's why the ISPs wont do it without federal funding. Cable companies CANT do it, Coax sucks over long distances. They need amplifiers every 800ft. That federal program cost something like $300k per customer added. There's a reason the ISPs refuse to do it themselves, and it's not because they hate you.
They're right, it will.
First, you have to understand what the FCC is proposing.
There are 2 kinds of ISPs we're talking about here. Telco and Cable. They are TOTALLY different. It may seem the same on your end, but its not.
Telcos are heavily regulated by the feds.
Cable is almost completely unregulated.
Much of the telco regulation is left over from the days when there was no other way to get phone service, and no competition from cable companies. A lot of the rules you'd find ridiculous if you understood everything involved. In some places, abandoned homes are required by law to have a working phone line in them for example. They are not required to have working cable television however.
What the FCC suggested yesterday was to apply some of these rules to cable companies. Now, not all of them are dumb. So I don't want you to think this is a terrible idea. I've no idea which regulation they want to apply to cable companies. The one thing I do know is it will hurt their business and in turn hurt your service in the short term.
If you want evidence that it will hurt innovation, just look up what your local phone company charges for service and compare that to your cable company. Then look at each companies max speed. In most areas they charge about the same but your cable company is offering 15 to 50mb/s while your phone company likely caps out at 5mb/sec unless you're in one of the few areas that have fiber.
But again, I want to be clear, there are upsides to the regulation as well. In the long run it'll likely be better for the industry.
Wow, nice slashvertisement.
So now we're celebrating releasing unfinished games that don't work as some sort of innovation? How often to you get a game like this that has promise of becoming something great, only to get involved as you watch the game go in the completely opposite direction promised? "I paid $50 for this game and now they're turning it into a fermium game and releasing it for free! Fantastic!"
He is basing his objections on a screenshot of a PDF file and not the real data. I'm not saying his findings are incorrect, this is a huge discovery and needs to be thoroughly vetted, but come on. 1 guy suggesting a problem isn't news worthy.
The problem with the education system in this country are pretty strait forward. They stem directly from the completely inflexible teachers union (who should be ashamed of themselves) and management that does nothing more than attend endless meetings over and over that churn out bullet point after bullet point. My kids school actually has some pretty good teachers by some miracle, but the management issue is ridiculous. I try to be an involved parent but all the events they have are so ridiculous it borders on insanity. They always serve Pizza Pit, the champaign of pizza. Follow that up with great games or skits to entertain the crowd... then the principle gives a 30 to 45min speech about all the great plans she has (but will never implement) then they let the parents talk for about 10min and avoid answering all our questions like "When will you fill in the 6 foot sink hole in the middle of the playground?" and no, I'm not kidding, there really is a 6' sinkhole.
The last one I went to they sent out a questionnaire that asked:
What is most important to you in the education of your child?
a. Hands on learning
b. A diverse and equitable learning environment
c. An involved teaching staff
What the hell does that mean? I just circled them all and wrote "YES" underneath. And these people have 4 to 8 year degrees.
I am the senior writer and mobile editor of ReadWrite and have been writing about mobile payments for years now.
Ok, that means you're probably good at typing and spelling. You're at least ahead of me on the spelling bit. Congrats.
My conclusion is based on evidence of consumer usage (both empirical and data driven),
Great! Links? Or do I have to scroll through every post you ever made because your post is just the most recent car in your train of thought?
...for so many different reasons and every single hyped mobile wallet that has been released to the consumer market has, in one form or another, failed.
yada yada... again, you're just trying to make an argument. It's not facts based (you know, news) I can totally understand making a rational argument. Hell, we all do it here on slashdot replying to stories like this one. But linking to what is nothing more than a blog post with 0 references at all is not news. You're declaring an entire industry is dead with absolutely no evidence other than that you think people don't want what they are selling. That's not news, that's opinion.
Here, I'll cite data to support your opinion for you:
http://www.foxbusiness.com/mar...
That's how easy it is.
No offense meant, but did you really think you could cross post your article to slashdot, have 0 references in it other than yourself and not be given a hard time? lol, welcome to Slashdot
Who the hell is Dan Rowinski and how does he know anything about mobile wallets and payments? He cites no references in his article other than other articles HE wrote and some anecdotal story about a coffee house he stops at in the morning. He provided a link to their website so I guess we could stop by and ask them if he's full of it or not.
Since we're on a roll, I declare balding middle aged men the new fashion trend that 20 something women just can't resist. For example, at lunch this cute redhead smiled at me while I was at the local Arbys. Citation: http://arbys.com/
Ladies that want to be hip and cool can PM me.
Stop believing what you see on the news. The US and Russia both have agents on the ground in Ukraine stirring this whole thing up. Pretty much everything you see on TV was setup by one side or the other. I've no idea what's really going on other than that it's not whats on TV. Almost every time you read about something over there, you can go to youtube and watch video from people that were actually there and completely debunk what you just read.
Reporters are lazy, accept what the government feeds them, don't fact check, and don't retract their mistakes when they happen. Do some youtube searches on the Odessa government building fire. Pretty much everything I heard on the news about that was a lie... on both sides. You can read a fact on routers, go to youtube and clearly see it's not true with just a few minutes of research. I've pretty much resigned myself to knowing that I can't do anything about that situation, everything I'm hearing is a lie.
Do a quick bunch of mealy mouthed video bites proclaiming solidarity and further cooperation to, well, study the situation.
I have no faith in our leaders here in the US or in the EU to stop Putin.
We orchestrated a coup in a country bordering Russia. Imagine if Mexico overthrew their government, kicked out their president all while Russian advisers were in Mexico city giving them tips...
Then Russia stirred up unrest to prevent us from installing the government of our choice. The losers here are the Ukrainian people who are suffering because they just so happen to live on the newest battlefield of the 100 year old proxy war the US and Russia have been fighting.
A conflict of interest if I ever saw one.
That's a suspected conflict of interest, not an outright one. He may still have a financial interest in a company or have a secret deal. If working in the industry meant you couldn't ever move into government to regulate the industry you'd never get anyone competent to work for the feds. Would you want the FDA to never hire anyone with a medical degree?