Did you miss my use of phrases like "well enough" and "less elegant means"?
My whole point is that RIM developed a (to the best of my knowledge) uniquely parsimonious and full featured mechanism for delivering email to power and computationally constrained clients. The battery life and minimal specs of blackberry handsets attests to this.
The problem for them(as it was for Palm) is that it has become possible to just throw power at the problem(in the sense that you can afford the SoC and squeeze just about one waking day out of the battery), which leads to devices that are capable of things that only full mobile computers are capable of and capable of largely adequately emulating the features of more parsimonious devices.
For whatever reason, it has proven to be quite difficult to take the historically platform-constrained system and augment it to take advantage of more powerful hardware(both Palm and RIM tacked on some features to their existing OSes, with limited success; but ended up grabbing an entirely new operating system and attempting to move to that. We now know that Palm did a good job; but not fast enough to save themselves. Jury is still out on RIM); but it is comparatively trivial(although deeply inelegant and wasteful) for a less platform constrained system to brute-force most of the features of a more carefully designed system.
Arguably, RIM's real problem(aside from glacial movement) was that their core specialty, mobile email, was something that could be done 'well enough' by the less elegant means of simply shoving technologies and protocols designed for full computers into smaller devices.(very strong similarity to Palm, here)
Back in the day, when pagers were still pretty hip and running from AAA batteries wasn't yet somewhat deviant for a mobile device, RIM's ability to shove email onto handsets was pretty serious business. Trouble is, as team silicon advanced, the "Um, just run an IMAP or Activesync client, like a real computer, y'know?" solution became viable. Harder on the battery and the data plan; but trivially interoperable with everything already set up for real computers to get email.
Windows Mobile should have been RIM's wake-up call: UX was pretty dismal; but it was a more or less architecturally successful implementation of 'well, just build the computer smaller!' school of mobile design. Once Apple came along and dealt with the UX problem... Game over man, game over.
Palm went down a somewhat similar road: under the assumption that mobile devices would be highly power constrained and very infrequently connected, their 'conduit/sync' system was crazy elegant, and they managed to shove some pretty impressive capability into gizmos with weedy little ColdFire CPUs and absurdly small slices of RAM. Again, though, team silicon marched on, and it became possible to just shove a computer into a smaller box. Microsoft's attempt was a usability disaster, which gave Palm some extra time to live; but their attempts to scale classic PalmOS up to take advantage of more powerful hardware and more frequent connectivity never really came to much.
Also, given the apparent 12% chance of dying horribly, which infants are you volunteering for the surgery?
The one that sat behind me on the last flight, kicking and screaming the whole damn time. In fact, I'm feeling so generous that I'll volunteer the kid's parents too.
Regardless of one's enthusiasm, and preferred metrics, for winnowing the innocent sufferers from the deserving ones, risky, experimental surgery isn't exactly altruistic.
For ethical reasons, of course, it is considered good taste to restrict it to consenting patients, and if it works you don't generally see the surgical team frowning seriously about the moral hazard of helping people who deserve to suffer; but the point is research. With an 88% survival rate and the complications likely to follow from the use of immunosuppresent anti-rejection therapy, it isn't even a sure thing that you could get an IRB to sign off on doing a face transplant on a baby. Maimed adults, on the other hand, can consent and provide a useful research population.
'Consumers' is just a code-word used by deep cover leftists to disguise the fact that they are really talking about "the masses", just like commies. Thus, the only way to Preserve Freedom is to avoid aiding these so-called 'consumers' in any way. Since, by definition, it's only oppression when the state does it, any bad things that should happen to happen to them during interactions with corporations are 100% non-oppressive.
What I find impressive about Redhat is not Linux volume per se(woah, you mean that a world with a zillion cheap webservers wants an x86 unix for free? I never would have guessed); but that they've continued to sustain demand for paid offerings in the face of free-if-you-bring-your-own-expert stuff(which is unattractive at a small scale; but becomes economic if you are big enough) and various 'appliance-ized' Redhat clones put out by the vendors of the software designed to run on top of them(eg. Oracle's database + I can't believe it's not Redhat offering)...
It seems totally unsurprising that much of the internet hosting going on today wouldn't even be economically possible if they were paying a tithe to Redmond, and it is similarly unsurprising that vendors of expensive applications would really rather that you pay for their software, not for the OS it happens to run on. Much more interesting that there is a place for Redhat in all this...
The google car not only knows to slow down, it displays a tasteful unobtrusive contextual advertisement, based on the type of play being conducted, to the kid as it drives past...
They probably also do a lot of their R&D on private courses/test tracks.
Unless I'm much mistaken, you don't need jack in terms of license, registration(except for tax purposes in some jurisdictions), insurance, road-worthiness, or much of anything else if you want to do questionably sensible things away from public roads. If you fuck up and somebody dies, the situation may get a good deal less convivial; and you won't gain magic immunity from lawsuits; but most of that is there to insure some vague minimum of operator skill and ability to pay to have the guy you just hit scraped off the road and stitched up, and doesn't apply at a closed, private, facility.
I'm not sure what the exact cutoff is(probably varies by state); but they do do some eye testing during the licensing process and you can lose your license for doing sufficiently dreadfully on the test. There are also certain conditions, it is my understanding, that can trigger a compulsory re-test.
Trouble is, the licensing tests are quite infrequent and people can go rather rapidly downhill between them(and, in much of the country, once you are too old to drive, you might as well go to the nursing home to die; because you are now about as independent as you were at 14...) The amount of risk that they pose to others is pretty selfish; but not having a license is Serious Shit in large areas of the US, in addition to the direct inconveniences of aging, so it is entirely understandable that people keep doing it for years after it stops being a good idea.
It is probably also the case that voting patterns really don't help: very young and very old drivers are both menaces to themselves and others. However, only the latter group votes. This, I suspect, is why much more scrutiny is given to the former(despite the fact that virtually all of them will become less dangerous as they gain experience), while the latter are substantially 'grandfathered in' by pro-forma renewals of decades-old licenses, despite the fact that they'll keep getting more dangerous until something eventually kills them or makes operating a vehicle physically impossible.
"Africa has some of the poorest soils anywhere on the earth". Such a generic statement about a whole continent which contains huge portions of tropical rainforest and grassland is just wrong.
Rainforests actually have notoriously shit soil(which is one of the big problems when people slash and burn them in the hopes of getting some agriculture done). They have massive amounts of biomass-growing-on-biomass-growing-on-biomass-eating-the-biomass-growing-on-the-biomass; but it's totally standard to discover that much of the nutrient cycling is going on above the dirt, and if you burn off the existing flora and fauna you are rewarded with some rocky, reddish sand.
It also really doesn't help that some substantial percentage of smartphones are, by design, chatting with the mothership...
The more egregious ones(Carrier IQ and friends) are basically rootkits right out of the box, and any unattended auto-update mechanism could, with the vendor's cooperation, replace some security-critical binary with a bugged one.
A much higher bar than the 'just plug it in to the magic box', which likely places it out of the practical reach of customs agents on fishing expeditions, cops who can't get a warrant but can take your phone, but it would be a problem over the longer term.
Android 4.x includes the option to encrypt the filesystem.
For obvious reasons, our goonware friends are a bit vague on how their mechanism works; but encryption only saves you if the attack is unable to get access to the phone as the user(since the filesystem has to be mounted and visible to you and your process as plaintext).
Encryption is excellent against the class of attacks where the attacker attempts to circumvent the OS's access control by obtaining direct access to the block device and using an OS they control to read it out. However, if the attack is directly against the OS's access control, it isn't nearly so useful, since things are usually set up to grant trivial plaintext access to the user.
The good ones are running out; but there still seems to be enough coal, vaguely-bituminous-shale, frackable gas, and assorted other burnables sloshing around, if you are willing to ignore the smell... Which we are.
I apologize for the lack of clarity in my phrasing; but I was suggesting a hypothetical scarcity situation: Were fossil fuels to become scarce, you would see a marked decrease in environmental interest.
At present, such a situation does not exist. If, however, it did, I suspect that you'd find people trampling just about anything in the hunt for new sources.
One convenience of small hydro projects is that(if you are willing to accept lousy efficiency) they can be built with quite minimal technological resources. The hydraulic and mechanical side is classical era stuff and bolting on the electric half is 19th century physics and engineering.
Larger systems demand substantially greater architectural expertise, if you don't want them to collapse a lot...
I suspect that, in a situation where fossil fuels are becoming scarce, you'd quite rapidly see people's interest in the environment shrink to one a simple question about every object around them: "Am I better off eating this or burning this?"
Obviously an authorized copy being made doesn't make something public domain(very few things do make something public domain); but, if a copyright holder uploaded anything to MegaUpload(as the request for an RSS feed intake suggests that they might have done on at least a limited basis), it is entirely possible that the uploader clickwrapped their way through a clause giving megaupload the nonexclusive right to redistribute what was uploaded...
It sounds like some(eg. Disney) were just nibbling, and trying to hammer out an alternate user agreement for themselves that they could accept(which further suggests that the default one may have given megaupload more rights than the studio would prefer...); but that some may have gone further than nibbling, whether head office knew about it or not.
MegaUpload's only generally viable defense, for the substantial amount of what was definitely unauthorized uploading, would be DMCA safe harbor; but it might also, separately, be the case that certain copyright holders granted greater distribution rights than they would now like to admit. Hard for us to say.
The bio-robotics chaps have certainly been nibbling at the notion of sticking in the feeding tubes to grab chemical energy from the host. I believe that it's been made to work in some small-scale demos(blood glucose providing a few milliwatts for implanted sensors in lab animals type of thing); but the generally hairy issues of long-term breaks in the skin and finding somewhere to pull multiple watts without raising some sort of side-effect hell really leaves the window open for the tissue-regeneration team to refine their process first.
These little gems do certainly paint the entertainment industry's hatchetmen in the most mendacious possible light(not that they need the help, or that this was news to anybody); but what I'd be delighted to know is whether they correctly dotted their 'i's and crossed their 't's legally speaking...
Strategically, having somebody like Megaupload as a promotional channel makes a great deal of sense: zero cost(to them) distribution channel used, at least initially, by a highly cost-sensitive(but, if capturable, quite desireable, youth market); but with enough legal and general sleaziness to keep the Disney moms away and offer them a way of squeezing and/or cutting off at a later date(as they appear to be attempting now).
However, as the copyright holders, it is conceivable that they may actually have authorized MegaUpload's activities, at least for some of their material, when they crossed the line from 'merely ignoring' to 'actively aiding and abetting and discussing how to more efficiently upload themselves'. If the person uploading does actually have the power to authorize uses of a copyrighted work, it is conceivable that even those flimsy "Yup, I totally pinkie swear that I'm the copyright holder and this is A-OK" clickwraps that many of the cyberlocker types have you click through could actually end up meaning something... That would be hilarious.
It will, potentially, be rather gruesome to see what happens when they start testing on pregnant mice. Fetuses do differ from cancer in a number of respects(only in certain countries can a tumor max out your credit cards...); but it is a bit hard to be an invasive, rapidly-expanding, mass of semi-foreign tissue without looking just a touch cancerous...
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Did you miss my use of phrases like "well enough" and "less elegant means"?
My whole point is that RIM developed a (to the best of my knowledge) uniquely parsimonious and full featured mechanism for delivering email to power and computationally constrained clients. The battery life and minimal specs of blackberry handsets attests to this.
The problem for them(as it was for Palm) is that it has become possible to just throw power at the problem(in the sense that you can afford the SoC and squeeze just about one waking day out of the battery), which leads to devices that are capable of things that only full mobile computers are capable of and capable of largely adequately emulating the features of more parsimonious devices.
For whatever reason, it has proven to be quite difficult to take the historically platform-constrained system and augment it to take advantage of more powerful hardware(both Palm and RIM tacked on some features to their existing OSes, with limited success; but ended up grabbing an entirely new operating system and attempting to move to that. We now know that Palm did a good job; but not fast enough to save themselves. Jury is still out on RIM); but it is comparatively trivial(although deeply inelegant and wasteful) for a less platform constrained system to brute-force most of the features of a more carefully designed system.
Arguably, RIM's real problem(aside from glacial movement) was that their core specialty, mobile email, was something that could be done 'well enough' by the less elegant means of simply shoving technologies and protocols designed for full computers into smaller devices.(very strong similarity to Palm, here)
Back in the day, when pagers were still pretty hip and running from AAA batteries wasn't yet somewhat deviant for a mobile device, RIM's ability to shove email onto handsets was pretty serious business. Trouble is, as team silicon advanced, the "Um, just run an IMAP or Activesync client, like a real computer, y'know?" solution became viable. Harder on the battery and the data plan; but trivially interoperable with everything already set up for real computers to get email.
Windows Mobile should have been RIM's wake-up call: UX was pretty dismal; but it was a more or less architecturally successful implementation of 'well, just build the computer smaller!' school of mobile design. Once Apple came along and dealt with the UX problem... Game over man, game over.
Palm went down a somewhat similar road: under the assumption that mobile devices would be highly power constrained and very infrequently connected, their 'conduit/sync' system was crazy elegant, and they managed to shove some pretty impressive capability into gizmos with weedy little ColdFire CPUs and absurdly small slices of RAM. Again, though, team silicon marched on, and it became possible to just shove a computer into a smaller box. Microsoft's attempt was a usability disaster, which gave Palm some extra time to live; but their attempts to scale classic PalmOS up to take advantage of more powerful hardware and more frequent connectivity never really came to much.
Also, given the apparent 12% chance of dying horribly, which infants are you volunteering for the surgery?
The one that sat behind me on the last flight, kicking and screaming the whole damn time. In fact, I'm feeling so generous that I'll volunteer the kid's parents too.
Regardless of one's enthusiasm, and preferred metrics, for winnowing the innocent sufferers from the deserving ones, risky, experimental surgery isn't exactly altruistic.
For ethical reasons, of course, it is considered good taste to restrict it to consenting patients, and if it works you don't generally see the surgical team frowning seriously about the moral hazard of helping people who deserve to suffer; but the point is research. With an 88% survival rate and the complications likely to follow from the use of immunosuppresent anti-rejection therapy, it isn't even a sure thing that you could get an IRB to sign off on doing a face transplant on a baby. Maimed adults, on the other hand, can consent and provide a useful research population.
It's all very simple, really.
'Consumers' is just a code-word used by deep cover leftists to disguise the fact that they are really talking about "the masses", just like commies. Thus, the only way to Preserve Freedom is to avoid aiding these so-called 'consumers' in any way. Since, by definition, it's only oppression when the state does it, any bad things that should happen to happen to them during interactions with corporations are 100% non-oppressive.
What I find impressive about Redhat is not Linux volume per se(woah, you mean that a world with a zillion cheap webservers wants an x86 unix for free? I never would have guessed); but that they've continued to sustain demand for paid offerings in the face of free-if-you-bring-your-own-expert stuff(which is unattractive at a small scale; but becomes economic if you are big enough) and various 'appliance-ized' Redhat clones put out by the vendors of the software designed to run on top of them(eg. Oracle's database + I can't believe it's not Redhat offering)...
It seems totally unsurprising that much of the internet hosting going on today wouldn't even be economically possible if they were paying a tithe to Redmond, and it is similarly unsurprising that vendors of expensive applications would really rather that you pay for their software, not for the OS it happens to run on. Much more interesting that there is a place for Redhat in all this...
The safeword is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, right?
The google car not only knows to slow down, it displays a tasteful unobtrusive contextual advertisement, based on the type of play being conducted, to the kid as it drives past...
They probably also do a lot of their R&D on private courses/test tracks.
Unless I'm much mistaken, you don't need jack in terms of license, registration(except for tax purposes in some jurisdictions), insurance, road-worthiness, or much of anything else if you want to do questionably sensible things away from public roads. If you fuck up and somebody dies, the situation may get a good deal less convivial; and you won't gain magic immunity from lawsuits; but most of that is there to insure some vague minimum of operator skill and ability to pay to have the guy you just hit scraped off the road and stitched up, and doesn't apply at a closed, private, facility.
I'm not sure what the exact cutoff is(probably varies by state); but they do do some eye testing during the licensing process and you can lose your license for doing sufficiently dreadfully on the test. There are also certain conditions, it is my understanding, that can trigger a compulsory re-test.
Trouble is, the licensing tests are quite infrequent and people can go rather rapidly downhill between them(and, in much of the country, once you are too old to drive, you might as well go to the nursing home to die; because you are now about as independent as you were at 14...) The amount of risk that they pose to others is pretty selfish; but not having a license is Serious Shit in large areas of the US, in addition to the direct inconveniences of aging, so it is entirely understandable that people keep doing it for years after it stops being a good idea.
It is probably also the case that voting patterns really don't help: very young and very old drivers are both menaces to themselves and others. However, only the latter group votes. This, I suspect, is why much more scrutiny is given to the former(despite the fact that virtually all of them will become less dangerous as they gain experience), while the latter are substantially 'grandfathered in' by pro-forma renewals of decades-old licenses, despite the fact that they'll keep getting more dangerous until something eventually kills them or makes operating a vehicle physically impossible.
Not to worry, Delta City will be open for business soon.
"Africa has some of the poorest soils anywhere on the earth". Such a generic statement about a whole continent which contains huge portions of tropical rainforest and grassland is just wrong.
Rainforests actually have notoriously shit soil(which is one of the big problems when people slash and burn them in the hopes of getting some agriculture done). They have massive amounts of biomass-growing-on-biomass-growing-on-biomass-eating-the-biomass-growing-on-the-biomass; but it's totally standard to discover that much of the nutrient cycling is going on above the dirt, and if you burn off the existing flora and fauna you are rewarded with some rocky, reddish sand.
It's not a ballgag, it's a rights-management appliance.
It also really doesn't help that some substantial percentage of smartphones are, by design, chatting with the mothership...
The more egregious ones(Carrier IQ and friends) are basically rootkits right out of the box, and any unattended auto-update mechanism could, with the vendor's cooperation, replace some security-critical binary with a bugged one.
A much higher bar than the 'just plug it in to the magic box', which likely places it out of the practical reach of customs agents on fishing expeditions, cops who can't get a warrant but can take your phone, but it would be a problem over the longer term.
Android 4.x includes the option to encrypt the filesystem.
For obvious reasons, our goonware friends are a bit vague on how their mechanism works; but encryption only saves you if the attack is unable to get access to the phone as the user(since the filesystem has to be mounted and visible to you and your process as plaintext).
Encryption is excellent against the class of attacks where the attacker attempts to circumvent the OS's access control by obtaining direct access to the block device and using an OS they control to read it out. However, if the attack is directly against the OS's access control, it isn't nearly so useful, since things are usually set up to grant trivial plaintext access to the user.
The good ones are running out; but there still seems to be enough coal, vaguely-bituminous-shale, frackable gas, and assorted other burnables sloshing around, if you are willing to ignore the smell... Which we are.
I apologize for the lack of clarity in my phrasing; but I was suggesting a hypothetical scarcity situation: Were fossil fuels to become scarce, you would see a marked decrease in environmental interest.
At present, such a situation does not exist. If, however, it did, I suspect that you'd find people trampling just about anything in the hunt for new sources.
One convenience of small hydro projects is that(if you are willing to accept lousy efficiency) they can be built with quite minimal technological resources. The hydraulic and mechanical side is classical era stuff and bolting on the electric half is 19th century physics and engineering.
Larger systems demand substantially greater architectural expertise, if you don't want them to collapse a lot...
...and their environmental effect.
I suspect that, in a situation where fossil fuels are becoming scarce, you'd quite rapidly see people's interest in the environment shrink to one a simple question about every object around them: "Am I better off eating this or burning this?"
Obviously an authorized copy being made doesn't make something public domain(very few things do make something public domain); but, if a copyright holder uploaded anything to MegaUpload(as the request for an RSS feed intake suggests that they might have done on at least a limited basis), it is entirely possible that the uploader clickwrapped their way through a clause giving megaupload the nonexclusive right to redistribute what was uploaded...
It sounds like some(eg. Disney) were just nibbling, and trying to hammer out an alternate user agreement for themselves that they could accept(which further suggests that the default one may have given megaupload more rights than the studio would prefer...); but that some may have gone further than nibbling, whether head office knew about it or not.
MegaUpload's only generally viable defense, for the substantial amount of what was definitely unauthorized uploading, would be DMCA safe harbor; but it might also, separately, be the case that certain copyright holders granted greater distribution rights than they would now like to admit. Hard for us to say.
The bio-robotics chaps have certainly been nibbling at the notion of sticking in the feeding tubes to grab chemical energy from the host. I believe that it's been made to work in some small-scale demos(blood glucose providing a few milliwatts for implanted sensors in lab animals type of thing); but the generally hairy issues of long-term breaks in the skin and finding somewhere to pull multiple watts without raising some sort of side-effect hell really leaves the window open for the tissue-regeneration team to refine their process first.
These little gems do certainly paint the entertainment industry's hatchetmen in the most mendacious possible light(not that they need the help, or that this was news to anybody); but what I'd be delighted to know is whether they correctly dotted their 'i's and crossed their 't's legally speaking...
Strategically, having somebody like Megaupload as a promotional channel makes a great deal of sense: zero cost(to them) distribution channel used, at least initially, by a highly cost-sensitive(but, if capturable, quite desireable, youth market); but with enough legal and general sleaziness to keep the Disney moms away and offer them a way of squeezing and/or cutting off at a later date(as they appear to be attempting now).
However, as the copyright holders, it is conceivable that they may actually have authorized MegaUpload's activities, at least for some of their material, when they crossed the line from 'merely ignoring' to 'actively aiding and abetting and discussing how to more efficiently upload themselves'. If the person uploading does actually have the power to authorize uses of a copyrighted work, it is conceivable that even those flimsy "Yup, I totally pinkie swear that I'm the copyright holder and this is A-OK" clickwraps that many of the cyberlocker types have you click through could actually end up meaning something... That would be hilarious.
Will he have to? It's never lupus.
It will, potentially, be rather gruesome to see what happens when they start testing on pregnant mice. Fetuses do differ from cancer in a number of respects(only in certain countries can a tumor max out your credit cards...); but it is a bit hard to be an invasive, rapidly-expanding, mass of semi-foreign tissue without looking just a touch cancerous...
If they wanted active limbs they'd pull themselves up by their remaining bootstrap.