Tributyltin and some of its organometallic friends have taken a fairly good stab at the problem, probably too good, and even they need to be re-applied from time to time...
We were just investigating claims that the house was haunted.
By looking at the trajectory of the projectile between the entry hole in the house and the entry hole in the car, along with the complete lack of ballistic ectoplasm at the scene, I think we can conclude that myth to be busted, either by the scientific method or extreme prejudice, we aren't quite certain...
They could just be suckers(or playing the investors for suckers); but it could also be that, while most of the rough geometry-level stuff has been obvious for some time, advances in materials will make the thing work better in practice...
Moving parts + marine environment = endless well of maintenance and sorrow. It wouldn't too much surprise me if a dash of some of the cooler fluorocarbon polymers and elastomers could add years to the service life of something that would otherwise be spending more time in the shop than in the chop...
Don't be such a cynic: All we have to do is turn our simmering cloak-and-dagger back and forth into a nail-biting tower defense flash game. The internet kiddies love that stuff.
We'll get whoever did Plants vs. Zombies to provide a strategic, but visually lighthearted, take on current events with "MQ-9 Tower Defense". As long as nobody finds out that anybody who achieves a High Score has their location forwarded to Mossad for a special prize ceremony, it'll be heartwarmingly popular!
As the great Tom Lehrer noted, speaking of the assorted benighted non-Americans of the world: "They've got to be protected, all their rights respected, 'till somebody we like can be elected!"*
* Availability of protection, respect, rights, and even the pretense of an election, at participating franchises only. Individual results may vary. Terms and conditions apply; Geneva convention may not.
Inconveniently, tiny networks are dubiously useful for most of the purposes to which people put facebook, network effects and all that.
It's not my cup of tea; but the notion that one could usefully improve one's security by simply replacing facebook with a personally implemented private network is roughly similar to the notion that one can usefully improve one's security by severing one's LAN from the internet.
Both are true; but not terribly useful for most users.
Cloud computing is all the rage these days. All proactive managers are moving their egregious vulnerabilities into the cloud, so it is only fair that tech journalism follow suit...
In terms of preferred names of tools, groups, individuals, etc. the jailbreaking scene, whatever license they happen to release their software under, really seems to resemble the warez release guys more than OSS. The latter certainly have more than their share of ill-polished nerd jokes, and generally tend not to take marketing's advice on strategic blandness very seriously; but the former intentionally seek out and adopt directly offensive, tasteless, or vaguely threatening names for things.
I'm told that its a job that actually burns you out, curb-stomps your soul, and then just keeps going until you eventually crack and quit.
Censorship is a pure cost center, and(once you get down to the level of pressing the "wicked"/"Not Wicked" buttons in response to an image series) pretty low skill, so there is absolutely no incentive to refrain from pushing you as hard and fast as they can and treating you with all the tender loving care usually reserved for retail peons.
Plus, and I can't stress this enough, You don't get to look at the porn you want, you get to look at the porn the internet wants.
Given that a fair few slightly bigger named vendors(like the oh-so-adaptive-to-the-times Kodak; though hardly them alone) are selling mere digital photo frames, often with screens of only 7-10 inches(not infrequently of really shoddy pixel density) for 30-60 dollars, a fully functional small computer for $100 has all sorts of potentially interesting uses.
Heck, the 7inch USB display/touchscreen units from MIMO, which contain only enough logic to serve as a displaylink video device, go for north of $100...
That seems plausible. I suspect, though, that it is counterbalanced by the need on Google's part to avoid antitrust flack and the need to be able to promote their webapp stuff as "multiplatform" or "platform-neutral" with a reasonably straight face. Given that HTML/JS is not exactly the most compelling development toolkit around, compared to mature native toolkits, except for the ubiquity of platform suport and the ease of updating... If Google decides to focus only on supporting their own browser, they do make their life easier; but they also become the least-competent entrant in the field of companies who write software targeted at their platform and a platform targeted at their software:
If using Google webapps requires running the 'Google Chrome HTML5 runtime', that basically just makes them a platform vendor somewhere behind Adobe in terms of popularity and power, never mind Microsoft and Apple, who've been polishing their proprietary native development toolkits for ages...
While Google, as Firefox's sugar daddy and major technical competitor, could put the hurt on FF, I just don't see the logic behind their doing so:
FF still has a pretty significant chunk of marketshare, so being the default search engine is still valuable; plus they are likely a convenient PR antidote to Google's ongoing issues with venturing into being-accused-of-monopoly-abuse territory: they are an independent 3rd party, developing a competing product with competitive marketshare(Hey FCC, look at that, see that robust competition?); but(unlike say Microsoft) they have neither a search product worthy of note or a non HTML5/JS development environment worthy of note(I've seen a few XUL-based tech demos; but that ranks well behind Silverlight, much less Win32, as anything resembling a threat...)
They just seem more valuable alive than dead, to Google. Unlike some of the other competitors, even a sudden surge of unmitigated dominance, with the Gecko slaughtering all before it, would pretty much just require Google to switch from webkit to Gecko and feel absolutely no pain in the areas where it actually makes money. As it is, they have the convenient property of being 'independent and competitive'; but also sharing basically all of Google's goals for web-based applications and the general advancement of web stuff not tied to a specific platform. Why mess with such a convenient 3rd party?
I think the difference is that US rural subsidies(at least in intent, I don't know if they work or not) are built around the notion that some sort of actual stable, reasonably organic, social fabric, with towns and families and continuity and stuff is supposed to exist in the low-density zones.
As the extraction industries of the world have shown, anything sufficiently valuable can be mined/blasted/harvested/whatever under arbitrarily horrid conditions; by shipping in more or less temporary infrastructure, a bunch of adventurous kids who have no commitments and like paychecks, and then just circulating them out from time to time to make up for the fact that they are in the middle of nowhere(empirically speaking, the inevitable presence of a more-or-less-tolerated prostitution sector and some heavy drinking also keeps morale up).
If you aren't picky about the existence of the rural US as a place where somebody might actually live and do various things-that-people-do-during-the-course-of-life, and go to school, and spawn, and eat at the town diner and whatnot, just cutting the low density regions loose, having the extraction corporations buy 'em out for pennies on the dollar, and providing the urban areas with resources that way would work well enough. I just don't see team "Small town values" and "Real America"(and their two senators per practically empty state) standing for that...
(All joking aside, sealing wax is one of those things that I suspect, unless yours is impregnated with a dispersion of certified-unique-per-instance coded microdots or something[incidentally, given the demand for supply-chain verification in pharmaceutics and the like, you could probably actually add those to sealing wax pretty cheaply...] a professional could get past surprisingly quickly and quietly; but is sufficiently rare and idiosyncratic that it would drive up the human labor requirements of widespread mail-tapping. That's the tricky thing with physical mail: almost anybody who cares to can invent a (probably weak; but has to be broken manually) ad-hoc sealing scheme comparatively easily. If there were thousands of homebrew crypto systems(mostly bad; but sufficiently weird that you'd need to call an analyst over for 10 minutes to think about them a bit) floating around in common use, cracking packets open would be similarly annoying...)
Yeah. I don't know exactly when they changed the language(probably not long after the filing, if not before); but apparently the previous wording asserted that various charges were actually correlated with various costs(notably 3rd party ones, like a UPS shipping upgrade or a venue charge), rather than just being a somewhat curious itemization of "Because we can".
If memory serves, there was a similar suit against one or more of the big telcos a while back, the telco had been padding bills with fees named to look like FCC service charges or government imposed taxes of some sort that were simply sneaky additions to the base price of the line. They got smacked down. Nothing illegal about charging a price that includes profit; but charging a price that claims to be cost recovery; but is actually something else, is simple fraud.
The amount of delicacy required goes down substantially when you don't operate under any pesky theory that the rule of law requires that you not be tampering with envelopes...
Your point is valid, in that machinery can be used to speed up letter processing; but covert letter processing, in a legal climate where you theoretically aren't supposed to be doing that, is a harder problem, and requires more subtlety, than in an environment where somebody would be insane to question you about what may or may not have been done to the letter in transit.
It probably doesn't serve your sense of victimhood as well; but if you take a look at the complaint you'll notice that something rather different is the case:
Specifically, TicketMaster (falsely) declared that a given charge covered the cost of a specific processing option, when in fact it was simply added to improve the margin on the transaction. Making false claims about goods or services involved in a transaction is, y'know, "fraud"(which, incidentally, is in large part why our financial system is in ruins)... Had they simply not engaged in fraud, and not misrepresented the nature of the fee, they would have been free and clear...
We at Ticketmaster would like to remind everyone, during this difficult time, that the reason that their payout is so tiny and late is not that the penalties for audacious fraud on a grand scale are pitifully small; but that trial lawyers are evil and greedy.
Had we embraced the glorious truths of tort reform, you could have been spared having to receive such an insultingly small offer at all, and we could have gotten away with the entire thing.
Unless you use a fairly paranoid design(eg. an envelope chemically treated so that it will freak out in some obvious way if the adhesive is tampered with, or a residue-free volatile fluid is used to render the paper temporarily transparent) opening a letter isn't rocket surgery. If the feds are on your back, you probably have a problem. If somebody sends you cash, that particular envelope may just 'get shredded in a mechanical malfunction' and never arrive.
However, tampering with letters would be a pretty ugly process to scale up(machines would be unlikely to be able to do it delicately enough, and 20,000 human tamperers are going to talk...) Tampering with packets requires actual geek skills; but once you have the capability, doing it to 100 million people differs from doing it to 100 only in how large a check you need to cut your vendor...
I doubt that cutting the peripheral zones off the grid would be an intractable problem(the labor requirements of agriculture, forestry, and mining have all been dropping for decades, and as things like some of the more isolated oil extraction sites show, a helicopters-and-satellite-uplinks model isn't impossible, just expensive)...
The effects would probably be pretty unpleasant, with the replacement of much of the present rural population by a mixture of heavily mechanized extraction operations, vacation zones in the more scenic areas, and a thin scattering of isolationists, amish hardliners, and others who consider the lack of grid to be a positive thing...
As for that actually happening, though, subsidizing rural areas(rural electrification, FCC rural telco charges, USPS) has been a pretty consistent federal policy for decades, so it seems unlikely(the fact that Senators are allocated per state, rather than per-population, likely ensures it in perpetuity).
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Tributyltin and some of its organometallic friends have taken a fairly good stab at the problem, probably too good, and even they need to be re-applied from time to time...
Fucking Magnetic Field Structures of the Galaxy; how do they work?
We were just investigating claims that the house was haunted.
By looking at the trajectory of the projectile between the entry hole in the house and the entry hole in the car, along with the complete lack of ballistic ectoplasm at the scene, I think we can conclude that myth to be busted, either by the scientific method or extreme prejudice, we aren't quite certain...
They could just be suckers(or playing the investors for suckers); but it could also be that, while most of the rough geometry-level stuff has been obvious for some time, advances in materials will make the thing work better in practice...
Moving parts + marine environment = endless well of maintenance and sorrow. It wouldn't too much surprise me if a dash of some of the cooler fluorocarbon polymers and elastomers could add years to the service life of something that would otherwise be spending more time in the shop than in the chop...
You can pretty well set your watch by adobe exploits. Get it together, guys...
You actually have several options: If you want it to run fast, set by exploits. If you want it to run slow, set by fixes.
Don't be such a cynic: All we have to do is turn our simmering cloak-and-dagger back and forth into a nail-biting tower defense flash game. The internet kiddies love that stuff.
We'll get whoever did Plants vs. Zombies to provide a strategic, but visually lighthearted, take on current events with "MQ-9 Tower Defense". As long as nobody finds out that anybody who achieves a High Score has their location forwarded to Mossad for a special prize ceremony, it'll be heartwarmingly popular!
As the great Tom Lehrer noted, speaking of the assorted benighted non-Americans of the world: "They've got to be protected, all their rights respected, 'till somebody we like can be elected!"*
* Availability of protection, respect, rights, and even the pretense of an election, at participating franchises only. Individual results may vary. Terms and conditions apply; Geneva convention may not.
Inconveniently, tiny networks are dubiously useful for most of the purposes to which people put facebook, network effects and all that.
It's not my cup of tea; but the notion that one could usefully improve one's security by simply replacing facebook with a personally implemented private network is roughly similar to the notion that one can usefully improve one's security by severing one's LAN from the internet.
Both are true; but not terribly useful for most users.
Cloud computing is all the rage these days. All proactive managers are moving their egregious vulnerabilities into the cloud, so it is only fair that tech journalism follow suit...
Unless I've missed something ghastly by not visiting urbandictionary at work, it seems pretty harmless:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEET "Not in Education, Employment, or Training".
Each one will be issued a heavy-duty electric razor and a bottle of SPF-50 sunscreen, along with an umbrella in one of five ridiculous novelty prints.
In terms of preferred names of tools, groups, individuals, etc. the jailbreaking scene, whatever license they happen to release their software under, really seems to resemble the warez release guys more than OSS. The latter certainly have more than their share of ill-polished nerd jokes, and generally tend not to take marketing's advice on strategic blandness very seriously; but the former intentionally seek out and adopt directly offensive, tasteless, or vaguely threatening names for things.
I'm told that its a job that actually burns you out, curb-stomps your soul, and then just keeps going until you eventually crack and quit.
Censorship is a pure cost center, and(once you get down to the level of pressing the "wicked"/"Not Wicked" buttons in response to an image series) pretty low skill, so there is absolutely no incentive to refrain from pushing you as hard and fast as they can and treating you with all the tender loving care usually reserved for retail peons.
Plus, and I can't stress this enough, You don't get to look at the porn you want, you get to look at the porn the internet wants.
Given that a fair few slightly bigger named vendors(like the oh-so-adaptive-to-the-times Kodak; though hardly them alone) are selling mere digital photo frames, often with screens of only 7-10 inches(not infrequently of really shoddy pixel density) for 30-60 dollars, a fully functional small computer for $100 has all sorts of potentially interesting uses.
Heck, the 7inch USB display/touchscreen units from MIMO, which contain only enough logic to serve as a displaylink video device, go for north of $100...
That seems plausible. I suspect, though, that it is counterbalanced by the need on Google's part to avoid antitrust flack and the need to be able to promote their webapp stuff as "multiplatform" or "platform-neutral" with a reasonably straight face. Given that HTML/JS is not exactly the most compelling development toolkit around, compared to mature native toolkits, except for the ubiquity of platform suport and the ease of updating... If Google decides to focus only on supporting their own browser, they do make their life easier; but they also become the least-competent entrant in the field of companies who write software targeted at their platform and a platform targeted at their software:
If using Google webapps requires running the 'Google Chrome HTML5 runtime', that basically just makes them a platform vendor somewhere behind Adobe in terms of popularity and power, never mind Microsoft and Apple, who've been polishing their proprietary native development toolkits for ages...
While Google, as Firefox's sugar daddy and major technical competitor, could put the hurt on FF, I just don't see the logic behind their doing so:
FF still has a pretty significant chunk of marketshare, so being the default search engine is still valuable; plus they are likely a convenient PR antidote to Google's ongoing issues with venturing into being-accused-of-monopoly-abuse territory: they are an independent 3rd party, developing a competing product with competitive marketshare(Hey FCC, look at that, see that robust competition?); but(unlike say Microsoft) they have neither a search product worthy of note or a non HTML5/JS development environment worthy of note(I've seen a few XUL-based tech demos; but that ranks well behind Silverlight, much less Win32, as anything resembling a threat...)
They just seem more valuable alive than dead, to Google. Unlike some of the other competitors, even a sudden surge of unmitigated dominance, with the Gecko slaughtering all before it, would pretty much just require Google to switch from webkit to Gecko and feel absolutely no pain in the areas where it actually makes money. As it is, they have the convenient property of being 'independent and competitive'; but also sharing basically all of Google's goals for web-based applications and the general advancement of web stuff not tied to a specific platform. Why mess with such a convenient 3rd party?
Indeed.
I think the difference is that US rural subsidies(at least in intent, I don't know if they work or not) are built around the notion that some sort of actual stable, reasonably organic, social fabric, with towns and families and continuity and stuff is supposed to exist in the low-density zones.
As the extraction industries of the world have shown, anything sufficiently valuable can be mined/blasted/harvested/whatever under arbitrarily horrid conditions; by shipping in more or less temporary infrastructure, a bunch of adventurous kids who have no commitments and like paychecks, and then just circulating them out from time to time to make up for the fact that they are in the middle of nowhere(empirically speaking, the inevitable presence of a more-or-less-tolerated prostitution sector and some heavy drinking also keeps morale up).
If you aren't picky about the existence of the rural US as a place where somebody might actually live and do various things-that-people-do-during-the-course-of-life, and go to school, and spawn, and eat at the town diner and whatnot, just cutting the low density regions loose, having the extraction corporations buy 'em out for pennies on the dollar, and providing the urban areas with resources that way would work well enough. I just don't see team "Small town values" and "Real America"(and their two senators per practically empty state) standing for that...
(All joking aside, sealing wax is one of those things that I suspect, unless yours is impregnated with a dispersion of certified-unique-per-instance coded microdots or something[incidentally, given the demand for supply-chain verification in pharmaceutics and the like, you could probably actually add those to sealing wax pretty cheaply...] a professional could get past surprisingly quickly and quietly; but is sufficiently rare and idiosyncratic that it would drive up the human labor requirements of widespread mail-tapping. That's the tricky thing with physical mail: almost anybody who cares to can invent a (probably weak; but has to be broken manually) ad-hoc sealing scheme comparatively easily. If there were thousands of homebrew crypto systems(mostly bad; but sufficiently weird that you'd need to call an analyst over for 10 minutes to think about them a bit) floating around in common use, cracking packets open would be similarly annoying...)
Forsooth, man, cans't not your trusty vassal deliver a simple epistle without knavish tampering?
Yeah. I don't know exactly when they changed the language(probably not long after the filing, if not before); but apparently the previous wording asserted that various charges were actually correlated with various costs(notably 3rd party ones, like a UPS shipping upgrade or a venue charge), rather than just being a somewhat curious itemization of "Because we can".
If memory serves, there was a similar suit against one or more of the big telcos a while back, the telco had been padding bills with fees named to look like FCC service charges or government imposed taxes of some sort that were simply sneaky additions to the base price of the line. They got smacked down. Nothing illegal about charging a price that includes profit; but charging a price that claims to be cost recovery; but is actually something else, is simple fraud.
The amount of delicacy required goes down substantially when you don't operate under any pesky theory that the rule of law requires that you not be tampering with envelopes...
Your point is valid, in that machinery can be used to speed up letter processing; but covert letter processing, in a legal climate where you theoretically aren't supposed to be doing that, is a harder problem, and requires more subtlety, than in an environment where somebody would be insane to question you about what may or may not have been done to the letter in transit.
It probably doesn't serve your sense of victimhood as well; but if you take a look at the complaint you'll notice that something rather different is the case:
Specifically, TicketMaster (falsely) declared that a given charge covered the cost of a specific processing option, when in fact it was simply added to improve the margin on the transaction. Making false claims about goods or services involved in a transaction is, y'know, "fraud"(which, incidentally, is in large part why our financial system is in ruins)... Had they simply not engaged in fraud, and not misrepresented the nature of the fee, they would have been free and clear...
We at Ticketmaster would like to remind everyone, during this difficult time, that the reason that their payout is so tiny and late is not that the penalties for audacious fraud on a grand scale are pitifully small; but that trial lawyers are evil and greedy.
Had we embraced the glorious truths of tort reform, you could have been spared having to receive such an insultingly small offer at all, and we could have gotten away with the entire thing.
Unless you use a fairly paranoid design(eg. an envelope chemically treated so that it will freak out in some obvious way if the adhesive is tampered with, or a residue-free volatile fluid is used to render the paper temporarily transparent) opening a letter isn't rocket surgery. If the feds are on your back, you probably have a problem. If somebody sends you cash, that particular envelope may just 'get shredded in a mechanical malfunction' and never arrive.
However, tampering with letters would be a pretty ugly process to scale up(machines would be unlikely to be able to do it delicately enough, and 20,000 human tamperers are going to talk...) Tampering with packets requires actual geek skills; but once you have the capability, doing it to 100 million people differs from doing it to 100 only in how large a check you need to cut your vendor...
I doubt that cutting the peripheral zones off the grid would be an intractable problem(the labor requirements of agriculture, forestry, and mining have all been dropping for decades, and as things like some of the more isolated oil extraction sites show, a helicopters-and-satellite-uplinks model isn't impossible, just expensive)...
The effects would probably be pretty unpleasant, with the replacement of much of the present rural population by a mixture of heavily mechanized extraction operations, vacation zones in the more scenic areas, and a thin scattering of isolationists, amish hardliners, and others who consider the lack of grid to be a positive thing...
As for that actually happening, though, subsidizing rural areas(rural electrification, FCC rural telco charges, USPS) has been a pretty consistent federal policy for decades, so it seems unlikely(the fact that Senators are allocated per state, rather than per-population, likely ensures it in perpetuity).