Rorschach's Journal. October First, 2013: Intellectual property carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This company is milking me. I have seen its true face. The sequels are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scrape bottom, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their exploitation and mediocrity will foam up about their waists and all the producers and hacks will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."
Depending on your insurance, you can also hit a "lifetime cap"(it isn't a 'death panel', because it is privately administered) where the insurer (further) controls their risk by simply halting all payments above a certain cost. These tend to fall in the 1-5million range, so they'll buy you a fair few packets of penicillin and casts for your little-league injuries; but 300k/year + other medical bills could mount rather quickly...
That would seem to depend on how much of the price tag is production costs and how much is "Because we can, would you prefer to suffocate on your own mucus, sickie?"...
Pharmaceutical manufacturers certainly aren't known for their charitable pricing; but the economies of scale for a specialty drug with a few thousand users have got to be pretty lousy.
With the plummeting prices on monitors(at least for those of us blessed enough to have undemanding taste for the finer details of color reproduction and perfectly uniform luminosity, I can't speak for the poor fellows who have to buy the good stuff), I am appreciating the increasing number of video outputs that some of AMD's newer cards offer. When you can get a 1920 x 1080 panel in the 21ish inch range for ~$120, more video outputs means more sweet, sweet, screen area without the hassle of accommodating multiple video cards or the substantial expense and lousy performance of specialty Matrox gear.
My graphical demands go about as far as Oblivion(mid 2006, nothing exciting) at 1920x1080, draw distances maxed; but the fact that I can buy enough monitors to cover central and peripheral vision, and a card to drive them, for what a single top-of-range card would cost, makes day to day computing very much more pleasant(on the minus side, it has utterly spoiled me for mobile computing, as I've become used to having a massive work area; but so it goes...)
In absence of a 'specific law enforcement action', could we at least settle for a CIA drone strike, or extraordinary rendition(how often can you do this before it becomes ordinary rendition?) to a shadowy torture dungeon? Either option should spare the department of justice the painful and tedious necessity of getting involved...
You weren't able to take Apple's "Xserve Transition Guide" seriously when it suggested that you could put two whole Mac Pros on a shelf in only 12Us of space?
Never let it be said that Cupertino lacks a sense of humor...
The trouble with the 'unix and the command line' approach is that it usually falls over in a screaming heap and then punches you in the face the minute you try to do anything that interacts with the OSX-specific Apple stuff running on top of the BSD. If you are really lucky, there'll be some obscure utility(probably a completely different one than in 10.N-1...) hidden away somewhere; but no guarantee, and quite possibly no documentation.
If you just want to open terminal and interact with straight ports of various unix CLI programs, it'll probably work OK(unless you do something that conflicts with the OSes shipping version of something, in which case you have my condolences). If you want to make the GUI layer behave with your bash-fu, things get more exciting....
Inconveniently, SoC GPUs that aren't driven by huge binary blobs appear to be pretty thin on the ground. It makes the PC scene look like a haven of pure openness(in that you can get intel stuff if you don't care much about performance, the AMD stuff will be here one of these days, and nouveau sometimes works on the right Nvidia chips...)
With BCM certainly doesn't have an overly cooperative history; but PowerVR, ARM's own Mali, and the not terribly long list of others are not exactly more helpful when it comes to mobile GPUs.
We'll see how far they take this, but I'm assuming that, in some cases, the retail guys just want different SKUs, not different products.
With contemporary smartphones, you can just photograph the barcode and do an automatic price-comparison with online retailers. Bad for business. Change the SKU, and that stops working. More intensive house branding offers greater potential rewards(and greater potential pitfalls), but simply breaking automated price comparison and price matching doesn't require touching the actual item for good or I'll...
If we are to have a 'war on piracy', I suppose it is only to be expected that we should soon enough have some of what some elegant coiner of dispassion euphemism though to refer to as "collateral damage"...
Selfishly, I'm inclined to be pleased, in a way. As long as it is possible for people to think that it is 'just about the pirates' or 'the innocent have nothing to fear', acquiescence will be the order of the day. Wholesale and flagrant destruction of bystanders' property should provide a valuable example of how false that thinking is.
Perhaps more to the point, it has been abundantly demonstrated that your average user doesn't have the slightest ability to distinguish between a trojan and a legitimate application(to be fair, most 'geeks' aren't too much better off, in terms of technical analysis; but at least they sometimes know where to go for advice).
Court orders are boring and sometimes require public disclosure to get. Spamming the internet with dozens of variants of "PHUCK the MAN Anon-t00lk1t l33t.exe" and "Ultimate untraceable blackhat.iso" bugged to send some of that fancy encrypted traffic straight to the boys in Quantico with the little curly ear-wires is easy...
If it comes to it, you can always get a court order(or a black bag and a charter flight from North Carolina; but if the history of cutekittensand/orporn.jpeg.exe is anything to go by, it will be much, much, easier to just start spreading malware disguised as tools for na'er-do-wells.
Not much to attenuate RF in the near-perfect vacuum of most of space.
Our vapid advertisements and ghastly reality TV dreck will still be cruising the aether long after we are a thin layer of ash in one of the smaller gravity wells surrounding a dying star of no particular distinction...
As a public health measure, we specifically designed our scanners to operate 95% on faith beams and only 5% on ionizing radiation(the fact that this also allowed the sleazy contractor not-at-all-definitely-not connected to our former leader, who definitely isn't a lich save on BOM costs was unconnected with this decision...)
If you allow skeptics to get near the machines, they'll jam the faith rays and force us to either face further terrorist attacks or turn up the radiation!
While I don't have sufficient information about the gadget demographics of the various occupy movements to respond to the truth of your post one way or the other, I'm a bit confused about why that is relevant here.
Although broad and rather amorphous, the major focus(or foci) of 'occupy' seems to have been situations where the non-plutocrat Americans have been stuck playing a rigged game. The immediate flashpoints tend to be areas where it is nakedly obvious that a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" is being played by some sort of besuited gambler who has managed to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of whatever Gordon-Gecko stuff he is engaged in. More broadly, the offshoring of much of the skilled-blue-collar segment certainly hasn't helped the situation; but that seems to have taken something of a back burner, important; but not quite as blatant as the overt taxpayer-dollars-into-finance-sector-coffers schemes...
In terms of offshoring, Apple is pretty much identical to the computer industry as a whole(and their labor practices also aren't much different, they just have more hipster cred, which makes them look dissonant).
While I suspect that, if asked, the 'occupy' demographic would, indeed, be against exploitation of Chinese workers, it is hardly their primary concern, so it seems odd to invoke them. It seems doubly odd because the exploitation of Chinese workers is also the concern(in a slightly different fashion) of people who wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with the hippie liberal scum. The more downmarket parts of the right wing(which is to say an overwhelming majority of its population) have been hit very, very hard by the losses in the American industrial and manufacturing sectors. They may be less likely to have a bleeding-heart concern for what Chinese kids are breathing; but they also have a great deal at stake in the fact that American firms can get workers offshore to work under shit conditions for absolute peanuts. That drags down their employment options and working conditions as well...
Apple's halo among the young and hip certainly isn't deserved on labor relations grounds; but in an industry as ugly as the tech one, they aren't exactly facing stiff competition on that score, so it hasn't really hurt them much. It isn't as though anybody is ignoring a True Blue competitor by buying Apple...
Depends on how broad your definition of "terrorist" stretches...
The real pros, highly unlikely. The unpleasant-but-pathetic wannabes who end up getting sucked into FBI stings where the FBI has to do all the work because the perp is kind of a loser, quite possibly.
Assorted domestic political groups that the FBI wishes to harass or disrupt*cough* COINTELPRO*cough*, Yup, you betcha...
Given their sordid history, I strongly suspect that the FBI is interested in a definition of 'terrorist' that goes well beyond Mr. Ibn Muhumad Jihad al Anthrax and includes a fair number of much more prosaic domestic groups, who are probably twitbooking and facester-ing just as much as everybody else.
So, by "failed pressure tests" they mean "Were found to be infested by mischievous bloggers who just walked casually past the crumbling walls of the launch site and were busy taking pictures inside"...
Honestly, AT&T's threat to raise rates is exactly the sort of thing that confirms that denying them was a good idea. If a company can raise their prices and expect to make more money, rather than lose customers to less petulant firms, they already have dangerously high market power(particularly for something as relatively homogenous as wireless telco services. Certain goods simply don't have much in the way of substitutes).
One could go so far as to say that, as a heuristic, anybody who could make, and make good on, such a threat if they don't get what they want, Should Not be allowed to get what they want...
This doesn't mean that it is a good idea; but I'm pretty sure that sitting around CADing up robots for DARPA would have to be stretched pretty hard to be construed as "conscription or enlistment into the national armed forces" or "participating actively in hostilities".
If anything, it is a substantial step less direct than existing JROTC stuff, or even some of the Boy Scouts-esque programs that maintain a bit of their historical connection to WWI/II-era nationalist enthusiasm for development of the nation's fighting men...
Why use the brilliant minds of our children to merely build drones and robots when we could use the brilliant minds of our children to control drones and robots?
As a bold step down our path toward becoming a computerized, transhuman dystopia, I suggest, nay, Demand, the following proposal be enacted:
All the nation's youth shall compete in brutally demanding cyber-athletics championships. Every year, the most superb competitors will be selected for the Ceremony of Transcendence. After a celebration of their excellence, their brain-meats shall be harvested and join the honored ranks of the Bottled Warriors, fully modular brain support and interface tanks suitable for high-density containerized installation for remote control of America's drone assets, or direct incorporation into locally controlled robotic weapons platforms.
There would be a minor downside, in that the battlefields of the future would start to sound like the hell-world of Xbox live, as LRAD units with the minds of 14 year old gamer kiddies scream "NOOBFAGGOTHACKER!" loud enough to turn a man into gooey paste; but our combination of mindblowing immaturity and stonehearted resolve would terrify our foes into submission...
In a certain sense, that's actually the alarming thing.
The historical American press neutralization strategy rested largely on a mixture of drowning out the information with expertly crafted 'infotainment' and ensuring that the bulk of the journalists owed their paychecks and their 'access'(and often sympathized with personally) the people they were supposed to be writing about.
Not good for highest quality journalism; but all very soft-power. Overt suppression by assorted 'security forces', of varying levels of shadiness, is quite a different strategy...
You sound more informed in the area than I: Have any vehicle manufacturers taken to using emissions regulations to add legal teeth to their DRM, in the way that Lexmark tried with printer cartridges and the DMCA, or a fair number of wireless device vendors use FCC regulations to justify a binary regulatory firmware?
Re:nothing of value was gained
on
Pac-Man Is NP-Hard
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It would actually be somewhat surprising(especially with games where the twitch factor keeps the player from strategizing too deeply) if you could discern the computational complexity of a game just by playing it....
Naively, I'd imagine that a human player most closely resembles a stochastic hill-climbing agent, providing the input at each tick that seems most likely to improve their situation in the relatively short term. That would make them brutally efficient at some problems, miserably hung up on local maxima or discontinuities in others; but not necessarily provide much correlation between difficulty of play and difficulty of problem.
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Rorschach's Journal. October First, 2013: Intellectual property carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This company is milking me. I have seen its true face. The sequels are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scrape bottom, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their exploitation and mediocrity will foam up about their waists and all the producers and hacks will look up and shout "Save us!"... and I'll whisper "no."
Depending on your insurance, you can also hit a "lifetime cap"(it isn't a 'death panel', because it is privately administered) where the insurer (further) controls their risk by simply halting all payments above a certain cost. These tend to fall in the 1-5million range, so they'll buy you a fair few packets of penicillin and casts for your little-league injuries; but 300k/year + other medical bills could mount rather quickly...
That would seem to depend on how much of the price tag is production costs and how much is "Because we can, would you prefer to suffocate on your own mucus, sickie?"...
Pharmaceutical manufacturers certainly aren't known for their charitable pricing; but the economies of scale for a specialty drug with a few thousand users have got to be pretty lousy.
I believe you mean to say that lolcats are in ur standardz, occupyin ur code-points; but not necessarily prescribing ur particular choice of glyph...
With the plummeting prices on monitors(at least for those of us blessed enough to have undemanding taste for the finer details of color reproduction and perfectly uniform luminosity, I can't speak for the poor fellows who have to buy the good stuff), I am appreciating the increasing number of video outputs that some of AMD's newer cards offer. When you can get a 1920 x 1080 panel in the 21ish inch range for ~$120, more video outputs means more sweet, sweet, screen area without the hassle of accommodating multiple video cards or the substantial expense and lousy performance of specialty Matrox gear.
My graphical demands go about as far as Oblivion(mid 2006, nothing exciting) at 1920x1080, draw distances maxed; but the fact that I can buy enough monitors to cover central and peripheral vision, and a card to drive them, for what a single top-of-range card would cost, makes day to day computing very much more pleasant(on the minus side, it has utterly spoiled me for mobile computing, as I've become used to having a massive work area; but so it goes...)
In absence of a 'specific law enforcement action', could we at least settle for a CIA drone strike, or extraordinary rendition(how often can you do this before it becomes ordinary rendition?) to a shadowy torture dungeon? Either option should spare the department of justice the painful and tedious necessity of getting involved...
You weren't able to take Apple's "Xserve Transition Guide" seriously when it suggested that you could put two whole Mac Pros on a shelf in only 12Us of space?
Never let it be said that Cupertino lacks a sense of humor...
The trouble with the 'unix and the command line' approach is that it usually falls over in a screaming heap and then punches you in the face the minute you try to do anything that interacts with the OSX-specific Apple stuff running on top of the BSD. If you are really lucky, there'll be some obscure utility(probably a completely different one than in 10.N-1...) hidden away somewhere; but no guarantee, and quite possibly no documentation.
If you just want to open terminal and interact with straight ports of various unix CLI programs, it'll probably work OK(unless you do something that conflicts with the OSes shipping version of something, in which case you have my condolences). If you want to make the GUI layer behave with your bash-fu, things get more exciting....
Inconveniently, SoC GPUs that aren't driven by huge binary blobs appear to be pretty thin on the ground. It makes the PC scene look like a haven of pure openness(in that you can get intel stuff if you don't care much about performance, the AMD stuff will be here one of these days, and nouveau sometimes works on the right Nvidia chips...)
With BCM certainly doesn't have an overly cooperative history; but PowerVR, ARM's own Mali, and the not terribly long list of others are not exactly more helpful when it comes to mobile GPUs.
We'll see how far they take this, but I'm assuming that, in some cases, the retail guys just want different SKUs, not different products. With contemporary smartphones, you can just photograph the barcode and do an automatic price-comparison with online retailers. Bad for business. Change the SKU, and that stops working. More intensive house branding offers greater potential rewards(and greater potential pitfalls), but simply breaking automated price comparison and price matching doesn't require touching the actual item for good or I'll...
If we are to have a 'war on piracy', I suppose it is only to be expected that we should soon enough have some of what some elegant coiner of dispassion euphemism though to refer to as "collateral damage"...
Selfishly, I'm inclined to be pleased, in a way. As long as it is possible for people to think that it is 'just about the pirates' or 'the innocent have nothing to fear', acquiescence will be the order of the day. Wholesale and flagrant destruction of bystanders' property should provide a valuable example of how false that thinking is.
Perhaps more to the point, it has been abundantly demonstrated that your average user doesn't have the slightest ability to distinguish between a trojan and a legitimate application(to be fair, most 'geeks' aren't too much better off, in terms of technical analysis; but at least they sometimes know where to go for advice).
Court orders are boring and sometimes require public disclosure to get. Spamming the internet with dozens of variants of "PHUCK the MAN Anon-t00lk1t l33t.exe" and "Ultimate untraceable blackhat.iso" bugged to send some of that fancy encrypted traffic straight to the boys in Quantico with the little curly ear-wires is easy...
If it comes to it, you can always get a court order(or a black bag and a charter flight from North Carolina; but if the history of cutekittensand/orporn.jpeg.exe is anything to go by, it will be much, much, easier to just start spreading malware disguised as tools for na'er-do-wells.
Unfortunately, Thermodynamic Free Energy is not similarly durable...
Not much to attenuate RF in the near-perfect vacuum of most of space.
Our vapid advertisements and ghastly reality TV dreck will still be cruising the aether long after we are a thin layer of ash in one of the smaller gravity wells surrounding a dying star of no particular distinction...
You sound like an enemy of shareholder value. And America.
As a public health measure, we specifically designed our scanners to operate 95% on faith beams and only 5% on ionizing radiation(the fact that this also allowed the sleazy contractor not-at-all-definitely-not connected to our former leader, who definitely isn't a lich save on BOM costs was unconnected with this decision...)
If you allow skeptics to get near the machines, they'll jam the faith rays and force us to either face further terrorist attacks or turn up the radiation!
While I don't have sufficient information about the gadget demographics of the various occupy movements to respond to the truth of your post one way or the other, I'm a bit confused about why that is relevant here.
Although broad and rather amorphous, the major focus(or foci) of 'occupy' seems to have been situations where the non-plutocrat Americans have been stuck playing a rigged game. The immediate flashpoints tend to be areas where it is nakedly obvious that a game of "heads I win, tails you lose" is being played by some sort of besuited gambler who has managed to privatize the gains and socialize the losses of whatever Gordon-Gecko stuff he is engaged in. More broadly, the offshoring of much of the skilled-blue-collar segment certainly hasn't helped the situation; but that seems to have taken something of a back burner, important; but not quite as blatant as the overt taxpayer-dollars-into-finance-sector-coffers schemes...
In terms of offshoring, Apple is pretty much identical to the computer industry as a whole(and their labor practices also aren't much different, they just have more hipster cred, which makes them look dissonant).
While I suspect that, if asked, the 'occupy' demographic would, indeed, be against exploitation of Chinese workers, it is hardly their primary concern, so it seems odd to invoke them. It seems doubly odd because the exploitation of Chinese workers is also the concern(in a slightly different fashion) of people who wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with the hippie liberal scum. The more downmarket parts of the right wing(which is to say an overwhelming majority of its population) have been hit very, very hard by the losses in the American industrial and manufacturing sectors. They may be less likely to have a bleeding-heart concern for what Chinese kids are breathing; but they also have a great deal at stake in the fact that American firms can get workers offshore to work under shit conditions for absolute peanuts. That drags down their employment options and working conditions as well...
Apple's halo among the young and hip certainly isn't deserved on labor relations grounds; but in an industry as ugly as the tech one, they aren't exactly facing stiff competition on that score, so it hasn't really hurt them much. It isn't as though anybody is ignoring a True Blue competitor by buying Apple...
Depends on how broad your definition of "terrorist" stretches...
The real pros, highly unlikely. The unpleasant-but-pathetic wannabes who end up getting sucked into FBI stings where the FBI has to do all the work because the perp is kind of a loser, quite possibly.
Assorted domestic political groups that the FBI wishes to harass or disrupt*cough* COINTELPRO*cough*, Yup, you betcha...
Given their sordid history, I strongly suspect that the FBI is interested in a definition of 'terrorist' that goes well beyond Mr. Ibn Muhumad Jihad al Anthrax and includes a fair number of much more prosaic domestic groups, who are probably twitbooking and facester-ing just as much as everybody else.
So, by "failed pressure tests" they mean "Were found to be infested by mischievous bloggers who just walked casually past the crumbling walls of the launch site and were busy taking pictures inside"...
Honestly, AT&T's threat to raise rates is exactly the sort of thing that confirms that denying them was a good idea. If a company can raise their prices and expect to make more money, rather than lose customers to less petulant firms, they already have dangerously high market power(particularly for something as relatively homogenous as wireless telco services. Certain goods simply don't have much in the way of substitutes).
One could go so far as to say that, as a heuristic, anybody who could make, and make good on, such a threat if they don't get what they want, Should Not be allowed to get what they want...
This doesn't mean that it is a good idea; but I'm pretty sure that sitting around CADing up robots for DARPA would have to be stretched pretty hard to be construed as "conscription or enlistment into the national armed forces" or "participating actively in hostilities".
If anything, it is a substantial step less direct than existing JROTC stuff, or even some of the Boy Scouts-esque programs that maintain a bit of their historical connection to WWI/II-era nationalist enthusiasm for development of the nation's fighting men...
Why use the brilliant minds of our children to merely build drones and robots when we could use the brilliant minds of our children to control drones and robots?
As a bold step down our path toward becoming a computerized, transhuman dystopia, I suggest, nay, Demand, the following proposal be enacted:
All the nation's youth shall compete in brutally demanding cyber-athletics championships. Every year, the most superb competitors will be selected for the Ceremony of Transcendence. After a celebration of their excellence, their brain-meats shall be harvested and join the honored ranks of the Bottled Warriors, fully modular brain support and interface tanks suitable for high-density containerized installation for remote control of America's drone assets, or direct incorporation into locally controlled robotic weapons platforms.
There would be a minor downside, in that the battlefields of the future would start to sound like the hell-world of Xbox live, as LRAD units with the minds of 14 year old gamer kiddies scream "NOOBFAGGOTHACKER!" loud enough to turn a man into gooey paste; but our combination of mindblowing immaturity and stonehearted resolve would terrify our foes into submission...
In a certain sense, that's actually the alarming thing.
The historical American press neutralization strategy rested largely on a mixture of drowning out the information with expertly crafted 'infotainment' and ensuring that the bulk of the journalists owed their paychecks and their 'access'(and often sympathized with personally) the people they were supposed to be writing about.
Not good for highest quality journalism; but all very soft-power. Overt suppression by assorted 'security forces', of varying levels of shadiness, is quite a different strategy...
You sound more informed in the area than I: Have any vehicle manufacturers taken to using emissions regulations to add legal teeth to their DRM, in the way that Lexmark tried with printer cartridges and the DMCA, or a fair number of wireless device vendors use FCC regulations to justify a binary regulatory firmware?
It would actually be somewhat surprising(especially with games where the twitch factor keeps the player from strategizing too deeply) if you could discern the computational complexity of a game just by playing it....
Naively, I'd imagine that a human player most closely resembles a stochastic hill-climbing agent, providing the input at each tick that seems most likely to improve their situation in the relatively short term. That would make them brutally efficient at some problems, miserably hung up on local maxima or discontinuities in others; but not necessarily provide much correlation between difficulty of play and difficulty of problem.