Even if we assume that all drug developers are a cartel(rather than a set of entities competing with one another to produce blockbuster drugs; but in agreement that drugs really ought to be expensive), developing a one-time treatment makes total sense if it is sufficiently expensive vs. a maintenance drug.
The net present value of a patient on a maintenance drug is lowered by the fact that future sales to them are time discounted($50 today is better than a promise of $50 a year from now, though exact discount rates vary) and discounted due to uncertainty(the patient could die, recover, become too poor to remain a customer, switch drugs, etc. so, at a population level, the probability that a customer today implies a payout at a given point in the future becomes lower as time goes on). For those reasons, the net present value is substantially lower than $prescription profit/month*months of patient life.
There are also the transaction costs: it isn't free to have the doctor write the script every month or three, and to have the pharmacy stock the stuff and hand it out, and for the customer to drive over and pick it up, and remember to take it every day. All those costs either bite into the producer's profit, or the consumer's willingness to pay.
If you have a one-time cure, on the other hand, its net present value, per patient, is equal to the profit at which you sell it. No discounted future payments, no future uncertainty, cash-in-hand. Plus, the customer is willing to pay more because there is no more daily pill, no more pharmacy pickups, no more doctor to write the script every so often, no feeling like shit if you mess up the logistics and miss a dose.
Consider, by way of analogy, the way that laser eye surgery was not actually crushed by the Glasses Industrial Complex. It is a comparatively 'premium' priced product, compared to a basic pair of glasses every so often(based on breakage or prescription change) for life; but it offers good immediate-cash-in-hand profits for the producer and is valued by consumers for its great longterm convenience.
Given the observed sensitivity, especially but not exclusively neonatal, to environmental influences, and the whole field of epigenetic study, it is neither obvious, nor obviously true, that our genetic make-up determines who we are.
Thanks to twin studies and other convenient test populations, we've been able to determine that some things are extremely heritable; but that others are surprisingly minimally so. There are even a number of factors(mostly metabolic and neurological stuff that is laid down in utero) where the developing embryo takes enough chemical cues from mommy that a practically Lamarkian pattern of 'inheritance' is seen.
Likely depends on whether the effect is continuous, or whether the major difference is made relatively early in development, by pushing the system onto a different trajectory than it otherwise would have followed.
We already have scads of SSRIs that tweak the seretonin system in what is supposed to be a positive direction. Those, as a class, manage to have clinically significant effects in a reasonable percentage of people with major depression; but (despite broad, fairly easy, availability) have attracted pretty much zero interest as recreational mood-enhancers among the population at large.
I assume that there will be some research interest in the long-variant transporter protein as a successor to, or supplement to, SSRIs; and it might end up being a hit in the antidepressant market(if it turns out that regulating membrane transport is an important part of, or better than, futzing with extracellular concentration); but it is hard to imagine it taking the world of either cheap, widely available, socially lubricating, soft drugs(booze, pot) or potentially quite hazardous; but really-grabs-you-right-by-the-pleasure-center hard drugs(amphetamines, coke, etc.) by storm.
EMC doesn't need Dell as much as the reverse; but Dell's generally-aggressive-prices-if-not-exactly-the-IBM-of-yore-reliability-for-near-whitebox-implementations-of-intel-or-AMD-servers business model does go rather well with Vmware deployments.
Since you can migrate VMs in a few hundred milliseconds, the ability to get lots of OK server generally beats the ability to get less ironclad server if you are going to be VM hosting.
If the contract gave exclusive distribution rights to Penguin then the author is in breach of contract. Seems simple to me.
It is extremely common for publishing contracts to feature a reversion clause where, once the book goes out of print(for a generally agreed-upon definition of 'out of print', which, incidentally, is a concept being shaken up a bit by the fact that many of these contracts were written before it was economic to keep a book 'in print' by listing it basically for free in some electronic database at a relatively stiff sticker price and print-on-demand-ing it if anybody actually bites) the rights revert to the author.
For a bunch of short stories, published 20 years ago, and unrelated to the book being written for publication today, it is quite likely that they had reverted, if their had ever been exclusive rights in the first place.
What makes me suspect that one or the other of these is so is that Penguin resorted to indirect threats and retaliation against an unrelated project, rather than just hitting the author for copyright infringement or breach of contract RE: the short story collection. If they actually had a case(either by having purchased the copyright, or by having purchased exclusive right to publication), they would have had very strong ground to crush the author for publishing elsewhere. They didn't...
Other problem(for you) is that, unless you go off the grid entirely, you tend to stick out like a sore thumb among the happy-clicking opt-in consumers...
If you play with a tool like panopticlick you can observe that browsers are surprisingly identifiable by default and, worse, a lot of the tools used to make them less so are quite uncommonly used, which actually makes you stand further out of the crowd.
It isn't clear whether there is money in tracking and attempting to sell to, the vehement refuseniks of the world; but only the sharpest and most dedicated would escape if there were...
I suspect that many of them have a general level of inherent-displeasure-at-privacy-loss much closer to that of Joe Sixpack than to your Slashdot EFF member.
More specifically, though, I think that it is very important to note that, in a great many cases, it isn't the dogfood itself that freaks people out; but the plausible and likely sequelae of the dogfood. A lot of these sequelae are economic, which means that their severity just evaporates as you move up the food chain.
Consider: every time some article comes up on Slashdot about using personalized genome sequencing to predict disease, the following happens:
1. TFA: The Biocorp Sequencotron 5000 can sequence your sequences in only 20 minutes!
2. "Y'know, it actually would be pretty useful to know what I'm predisposed to, and adjust certain medical testing and lifestylefactors accordingly"
3. "And by "adjust", you mean have at least one pre-existing-condition identified and never have health insurance again?
A lot of "slippery slope/plausible near future/etc." "drawbacks" to these technologies just don't apply to the people driving them. Not because the technologies themselves don't; but because the drawbacks only bite under social conditions to which they aren't subject.
Who's going to be on the pointy end of "Verizon WorkForce Information System", which offers to provide location data on where company issued drone-phones are? The board? Not likely. The cube chattel? You betcha.
While, for the reasons you give, a firewall is useless against your ISP, it does have some virtues:
With the 'apps' that all the kids are going on about these days, it is pretty likely that several parties are attempting to 'monetize' everything they can. Your cell carrier has massive built-in advantages(your packets flow through them, they can trivially triangulate your handset per E991 requirements); but this also makes it likely that their dataset will be a premium product(The Feds, and reasonably deep-pocketed advertisers only). The little guys have to make do with whatever information their 'apps' can sneak off your phone; but that information is likely to end up in the worst of bottom-feeding circles. A firewall is a perfectly sensible precaution against questionably trusted, or overtly undesired, network behavior by applications or web page elements.
Second, if you are more serious about keeping Verizon out of your packets, you'll need a VPN to an endpoint controlled by you, ideally on some other ISP entirely. A firewall isn't a bad precaution to ensure that assorted incompetent or malicious local programs aren't ignoring the tun interface and still chatting over the hostile one...
In general, though, trying to fight your ISP is a really questionable idea.
"The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has several requirements applicable to wireless or mobile telephones:[3]
Basic 911: All 911 calls must be relayed to a call center, regardless of whether the mobile phone user is a customer of the network being used.
E911 Phase 1: Wireless network operators must identify the phone number and cell phone tower used by callers, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP.
E911 Phase 2
95% of a network operator's in-service phones must be E911 compliant ("location capable") by December 31, 2005. (Several carriers missed this deadline, and were fined by the FCC.[4])
Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP.[5] Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 (deferred from September 11, 2008).[6]
Location information is not only transmitted to the call center for the purpose of sending emergency services to the scene of the incident, it is used by the wireless network operator to determine to which PSAP to route the call."
The major cut-off is between the handsets that are more or less purely dumb radios and the ones with GPS hardware onboard that can assist you in finding them.
The bigger news, with smartphones and cellular data plans and whatnot, is that wireless carriers are now sufficiently large ISPs that they've seen room for profitable evil in doing ISP stuff.
Since the alternative would involve attempting to make money by releasing a movie about math, I suspect that they'll have limited choice.
You can really only have so many minutes of 'montage of intense-looking-dude scribbling math on stuff' before people lose interest. At that point, you have to split the remaining feature-length-film time between WWII drama and persecution and suicide drama...
As long as the movie is of infinite length, and certain other conditions are observed, shouldn't it be possible for any actor to successfully play Turing, albeit quite possibly requiring impractical amounts of time to do so?
Consider this bit from TFA:
"An ex-drug-dealer (now a video game industry powerbrain) once told me that he doesn’t understand why people buy heroin. The heroin peddler isn’t even doing heroin. Like him or not, when you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about Gears of War, he sounds — in a good way — like a weed dealer. He sounds like he endorses what he is selling. When you’re in a room with social games guys, the “I never touch the stuff” attitude is so thick you’ll need a box cutter to breathe properly."
With the traditional, boxed lump-'o-retail game, there was a certain necessary straightforwardness, possibly even honesty about the thing: You make the game and either get my $50 or not. Even if you are merely calculating, you still want to make a fun game, because you need me to buy it. If you are genuinely enthusiastic about games, you also want to make a fun game.
Once you get into the world of DLC and MMORPGs and such, you are in a sort of intermediate position: There is still the upfront purchase; but you have a constant nagging incentive to see what you can get away with in terms of sucking me in for another month's grind, or making some downloaded component semi-obligatory.
Once you get to "freemium", our interests are more or less at odds: I'm a net loss to you as long as I play for free, so you have an incentive to try every dirty trick in the book to 'monetize' me, and create a game that induces payment without ever overtly demanding it.
It's ironic, actually, that the "casual" games would be the ones where this rather ugly dynamic is strongest. The stereotype(not 100% without supporting anecdotes, but rather overplayed) is that the 'serious' gamers are the ones where the hardcore addictions are; but that is the area where the publisher's incentive to create addictive gameplay is weakest: You already have my $60, you want me to enjoy myself so I'll buy the sequel; but you gain nothing from sucking away my life. On the casual side, you start with nothing from me, and you have to scrape it out one microtransaction at a time...
A story(CNET; but enough company names to fire up google).
The technology is actually damn clever, ultrasonic emitter with carefully tuned wave interaction creating audible sounds only at a specific point, total sci-fi stuff; but using it to beam ghostly whispers into pedestrian's heads was pretty tactless of them.
Given that he voted "yea" on H.R. 5304, the delightful FISA retroactive-immunity-for-any-illegal-spying-the-telcos-certainly-didn't-engage-in-but-if-they-did-it-is-now-legal act, I have a few proctological suggestions about where he can shove is alleged concern for internet privacy...
Let's be clear here, this 'silk' is, indeed, an almost cartoonishly invasive technology, enabled b default, on what is likely to be a very popular consumer device(yes, Opera mini/opera turbo, and various dialup "accelerator" proxy services have been doing similar things, so it isn't really new; but 'Silk' is the boldest and highest profile); but Mr. Barton can be judged only to be crying crocodile tears, given his record.
Pro surveillance, anti state records transparency, pro "PATRIOT" act, etc, etc.
I suspect that certain characteristics of the "Professional" market(notably the ones where it overlaps most strongly with the "IT" market) are a poor fit for Apple, so they will, indeed, be very temped to ditch them as time goes on.
The high end of the "Pro" market is touchy because they tend to depend on fairly large tangles of interconnected products: If asked "what do you use?" they might say "Final Cut"; but they actually mean "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools...".
One of Apple's strengths, particularly of late, has bee their ability(and willingness) to just pick up and say "fuck everybody who thinks some legacy feature/interface/API is good enough. As of today, it is the new shiny or nothing!"(see ADB, Adobe/64-bit Carbon, Final Cut Pro, etc.). Combined with some good taste, this has worked very well in the consumer and low-end "prosumer" markets. By largely ignoring legacy issues and expecting people to keep up or suck it up, they've been able to maintain a pretty aggressive release schedule for new and interesting features with a comparatively small engineering team. However, that is absolutely incompatible with the requirements of more esoteric professional environments(along with institutional IT, their less colorful but considerably larger counterparts). You just can't keep a spaghetti ecosystem of critical 3rd party hardware and software moving that fast, at least not at a price anybody is willing to pay.(Even fairly basic things, like supporting pro-level video cards, can be pretty dire, despite the fact that Mac Pro is more PC-like than it has ever been. The default options suck to an almost comical degree, and driver support for anything else is atrocious.)
For consumer and prosumer requirements, where it is much more likely that the integrated hardware and a small number of common software packages are enough, Apple's approach works just fine. It seems unlikely, though, that they can reconcile that with the requirements of the more specialized users. And, now that they have a big, lucrative, consumer market, their incentive to try isn't what it once might have been.
Inconveniently(but understandably) the population available for research tends to skew very heavily toward the sorts of psychopaths whose behavior gets them sent to prison for violent crimes.
There is abundant reason to suspect that a fair few somewhat smarter ones, who exhibit many of the same undesirable traits but know that overt violent crime usually isn't the best way to get what you want, walk among us; but locating them and convincing them to sit down for some research is tricky. The ones doing time for murder, on the other hand, aren't going anywhere and are conveniently concentrated.
It's a very unfortunate sampling bias, because the ones you can't study are exactly the ones it would be most useful to know more about. While dangerous, people prone to impulsive violence tend get weeded out by police or internecine violence comparatively quickly. The ones that are less overtly dangerous, and/or prefer legal hobbies, are not so convenient.
I find two things very curious about the 'confusion' surrounding, and some of the reactions to, the protesters:
1. The 'confusion': Ignoring the stuff manufactured purely for rhetorical effect("Those crazy kids are just lazy communist anarchists who don't even know what they want!"), you don't really have to be able to trace every detail of exactly how American financial and labor systems have evolved to produce a practically banana-republic wealth distribution in order to take a look at the numbers and see that they, however the details work, definitely have. This is basic "black box" analysis here, the sort of thing that you use (formally or informally) all the time when dealing with complex situations. I don't understand why some people suddenly fall flat on that.
2. The "53%"-er response, and its ilk: Yes, everybody realizes that is, in fact, possible to make money and survive in the US without being a member in good standing of the plutocracy. Were that not the case, things would be a little noisier. That is orthogonal to the displeasure people feel at having to work increasingly hard for a steadily dwindling slice of the pie and no chance of the handy state handouts received by the people who need them least. This school of response isn't false, per se, it's just an enormous non-sequitor.
Honestly, that's the consistent thread with these clergy abuse cases that really makes it a matter of gross institutional rot, rather than an unfortunate but statistically inevitable consequence of having lots and lots of employees in contact with children.
Overwhelmingly, each organizational layer has shown itself more concerned with coverup than with cleanup, and the church management still seems to be fighting their medieval battle to assert that their club's rules trump civil law... What is even more vexing is that they seem largely to be getting away with it. Some civil payouts, a few old men whose statue of limitations hasn't quite run out; but the leadership has been absolutely teflon throughout the whole affair.
"This means IBM and any other Apache OpenOffice.org project member can innovate the OpenOffice.org source code for their own purposes and not be obligated to give back to the mainline OpenOffice.org code, since the ASL is a non-copyleft license. IBM and other OpenOffice.org contributors will also be able to re-license OpenOffice.org code under any license they want, including a proprietary license, should they wish."
TFA's analyst appears to be under the impression that IBM would see this as a good thing, and would therefore be more likely to want to support OO.org. I'm not sure that makes much sense.
Aside from the horribly mangled use of "innovate", the ability to take code proprietary is only sometimes valuable. It can be valuable if you have the sole right to do it(ie. in the case where it is mostly your project, and you have a copyright assignment policy for contributors, which gives you the option to maintain a proprietary commercial version with some additional features or whatever without any significant forking from the public version). It can also be valuable if you have a different product, 100% proprietary, that needs some feature available in the non-copyleft code, which you can just incorporate. If neither of those is true, though, the ability becomes rather less valuable, possibly even of negative value, in practice.(observe, for instance, the places where Linux ends up in products vs. the ones where BSD does)
Given that the business of trying to make money from the direct sale of office suites that aren't Office is something of an uphill battle, the right of all and sundry to throw their slightly differentiated proprieterized forks into the ring is likely to be of negligible commercial value. If(as I strongly suspect is IBM's case) your real interest is in a combination of selling server/groupware stuff and attempting to prevent MS from using desktop software as a beachhead to sell their server/groupware stuff, the largely theoretical ability to make money from selling shrinkwrapped proprietary spins of Apache licensed code is far less valuable than throwing your lot in with whatever branch of ODF-supporting software sucks least and shows the greatest promise of surviving long enough for ODF to evolve into a real format, rather than a snapshot of OO.org's behavior with aspirations to openness.
Slashdot Mirror
The Core value of the Modern Republican is try to keep things the way they use to be.
What decade do you live in?
Research suggests that pentecostalism, or "Episodic Parham's Aphasia", is environmentally induced, rather than genetic...
Even if we assume that all drug developers are a cartel(rather than a set of entities competing with one another to produce blockbuster drugs; but in agreement that drugs really ought to be expensive), developing a one-time treatment makes total sense if it is sufficiently expensive vs. a maintenance drug.
The net present value of a patient on a maintenance drug is lowered by the fact that future sales to them are time discounted($50 today is better than a promise of $50 a year from now, though exact discount rates vary) and discounted due to uncertainty(the patient could die, recover, become too poor to remain a customer, switch drugs, etc. so, at a population level, the probability that a customer today implies a payout at a given point in the future becomes lower as time goes on). For those reasons, the net present value is substantially lower than $prescription profit/month*months of patient life.
There are also the transaction costs: it isn't free to have the doctor write the script every month or three, and to have the pharmacy stock the stuff and hand it out, and for the customer to drive over and pick it up, and remember to take it every day. All those costs either bite into the producer's profit, or the consumer's willingness to pay.
If you have a one-time cure, on the other hand, its net present value, per patient, is equal to the profit at which you sell it. No discounted future payments, no future uncertainty, cash-in-hand. Plus, the customer is willing to pay more because there is no more daily pill, no more pharmacy pickups, no more doctor to write the script every so often, no feeling like shit if you mess up the logistics and miss a dose.
Consider, by way of analogy, the way that laser eye surgery was not actually crushed by the Glasses Industrial Complex. It is a comparatively 'premium' priced product, compared to a basic pair of glasses every so often(based on breakage or prescription change) for life; but it offers good immediate-cash-in-hand profits for the producer and is valued by consumers for its great longterm convenience.
Given the observed sensitivity, especially but not exclusively neonatal, to environmental influences, and the whole field of epigenetic study, it is neither obvious, nor obviously true, that our genetic make-up determines who we are.
Thanks to twin studies and other convenient test populations, we've been able to determine that some things are extremely heritable; but that others are surprisingly minimally so. There are even a number of factors(mostly metabolic and neurological stuff that is laid down in utero) where the developing embryo takes enough chemical cues from mommy that a practically Lamarkian pattern of 'inheritance' is seen.
Likely depends on whether the effect is continuous, or whether the major difference is made relatively early in development, by pushing the system onto a different trajectory than it otherwise would have followed.
We already have scads of SSRIs that tweak the seretonin system in what is supposed to be a positive direction. Those, as a class, manage to have clinically significant effects in a reasonable percentage of people with major depression; but (despite broad, fairly easy, availability) have attracted pretty much zero interest as recreational mood-enhancers among the population at large.
I assume that there will be some research interest in the long-variant transporter protein as a successor to, or supplement to, SSRIs; and it might end up being a hit in the antidepressant market(if it turns out that regulating membrane transport is an important part of, or better than, futzing with extracellular concentration); but it is hard to imagine it taking the world of either cheap, widely available, socially lubricating, soft drugs(booze, pot) or potentially quite hazardous; but really-grabs-you-right-by-the-pleasure-center hard drugs(amphetamines, coke, etc.) by storm.
EMC doesn't need Dell as much as the reverse; but Dell's generally-aggressive-prices-if-not-exactly-the-IBM-of-yore-reliability-for-near-whitebox-implementations-of-intel-or-AMD-servers business model does go rather well with Vmware deployments.
Since you can migrate VMs in a few hundred milliseconds, the ability to get lots of OK server generally beats the ability to get less ironclad server if you are going to be VM hosting.
It is my duty to point out that "Taliban" is Persian for "Students".
If the contract gave exclusive distribution rights to Penguin then the author is in breach of contract. Seems simple to me.
It is extremely common for publishing contracts to feature a reversion clause where, once the book goes out of print(for a generally agreed-upon definition of 'out of print', which, incidentally, is a concept being shaken up a bit by the fact that many of these contracts were written before it was economic to keep a book 'in print' by listing it basically for free in some electronic database at a relatively stiff sticker price and print-on-demand-ing it if anybody actually bites) the rights revert to the author.
For a bunch of short stories, published 20 years ago, and unrelated to the book being written for publication today, it is quite likely that they had reverted, if their had ever been exclusive rights in the first place.
What makes me suspect that one or the other of these is so is that Penguin resorted to indirect threats and retaliation against an unrelated project, rather than just hitting the author for copyright infringement or breach of contract RE: the short story collection. If they actually had a case(either by having purchased the copyright, or by having purchased exclusive right to publication), they would have had very strong ground to crush the author for publishing elsewhere. They didn't...
Other problem(for you) is that, unless you go off the grid entirely, you tend to stick out like a sore thumb among the happy-clicking opt-in consumers...
If you play with a tool like panopticlick you can observe that browsers are surprisingly identifiable by default and, worse, a lot of the tools used to make them less so are quite uncommonly used, which actually makes you stand further out of the crowd.
It isn't clear whether there is money in tracking and attempting to sell to, the vehement refuseniks of the world; but only the sharpest and most dedicated would escape if there were...
I suspect that many of them have a general level of inherent-displeasure-at-privacy-loss much closer to that of Joe Sixpack than to your Slashdot EFF member.
More specifically, though, I think that it is very important to note that, in a great many cases, it isn't the dogfood itself that freaks people out; but the plausible and likely sequelae of the dogfood. A lot of these sequelae are economic, which means that their severity just evaporates as you move up the food chain.
Consider: every time some article comes up on Slashdot about using personalized genome sequencing to predict disease, the following happens:
1. TFA: The Biocorp Sequencotron 5000 can sequence your sequences in only 20 minutes!
2. "Y'know, it actually would be pretty useful to know what I'm predisposed to, and adjust certain medical testing and lifestylefactors accordingly"
3. "And by "adjust", you mean have at least one pre-existing-condition identified and never have health insurance again?
A lot of "slippery slope/plausible near future/etc." "drawbacks" to these technologies just don't apply to the people driving them. Not because the technologies themselves don't; but because the drawbacks only bite under social conditions to which they aren't subject.
Who's going to be on the pointy end of "Verizon WorkForce Information System", which offers to provide location data on where company issued drone-phones are? The board? Not likely. The cube chattel? You betcha.
While, for the reasons you give, a firewall is useless against your ISP, it does have some virtues:
With the 'apps' that all the kids are going on about these days, it is pretty likely that several parties are attempting to 'monetize' everything they can. Your cell carrier has massive built-in advantages(your packets flow through them, they can trivially triangulate your handset per E991 requirements); but this also makes it likely that their dataset will be a premium product(The Feds, and reasonably deep-pocketed advertisers only). The little guys have to make do with whatever information their 'apps' can sneak off your phone; but that information is likely to end up in the worst of bottom-feeding circles. A firewall is a perfectly sensible precaution against questionably trusted, or overtly undesired, network behavior by applications or web page elements.
Second, if you are more serious about keeping Verizon out of your packets, you'll need a VPN to an endpoint controlled by you, ideally on some other ISP entirely. A firewall isn't a bad precaution to ensure that assorted incompetent or malicious local programs aren't ignoring the tun interface and still chatting over the hostile one...
In general, though, trying to fight your ISP is a really questionable idea.
From the telco's perspective, not really.
"The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has several requirements applicable to wireless or mobile telephones:[3] Basic 911: All 911 calls must be relayed to a call center, regardless of whether the mobile phone user is a customer of the network being used. E911 Phase 1: Wireless network operators must identify the phone number and cell phone tower used by callers, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP. E911 Phase 2 95% of a network operator's in-service phones must be E911 compliant ("location capable") by December 31, 2005. (Several carriers missed this deadline, and were fined by the FCC.[4]) Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP.[5] Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 (deferred from September 11, 2008).[6] Location information is not only transmitted to the call center for the purpose of sending emergency services to the scene of the incident, it is used by the wireless network operator to determine to which PSAP to route the call."
The major cut-off is between the handsets that are more or less purely dumb radios and the ones with GPS hardware onboard that can assist you in finding them.
The bigger news, with smartphones and cellular data plans and whatnot, is that wireless carriers are now sufficiently large ISPs that they've seen room for profitable evil in doing ISP stuff.
Since the alternative would involve attempting to make money by releasing a movie about math, I suspect that they'll have limited choice.
You can really only have so many minutes of 'montage of intense-looking-dude scribbling math on stuff' before people lose interest. At that point, you have to split the remaining feature-length-film time between WWII drama and persecution and suicide drama...
Must we not now become video games ourselves, if only to seem worthy of it?
As long as the movie is of infinite length, and certain other conditions are observed, shouldn't it be possible for any actor to successfully play Turing, albeit quite possibly requiring impractical amounts of time to do so?
More subtle than that, arguably.
Consider this bit from TFA:
"An ex-drug-dealer (now a video game industry powerbrain) once told me that he doesn’t understand why people buy heroin. The heroin peddler isn’t even doing heroin. Like him or not, when you hear Cliff Bleszinski talk about Gears of War, he sounds — in a good way — like a weed dealer. He sounds like he endorses what he is selling. When you’re in a room with social games guys, the “I never touch the stuff” attitude is so thick you’ll need a box cutter to breathe properly."
With the traditional, boxed lump-'o-retail game, there was a certain necessary straightforwardness, possibly even honesty about the thing: You make the game and either get my $50 or not. Even if you are merely calculating, you still want to make a fun game, because you need me to buy it. If you are genuinely enthusiastic about games, you also want to make a fun game.
Once you get into the world of DLC and MMORPGs and such, you are in a sort of intermediate position: There is still the upfront purchase; but you have a constant nagging incentive to see what you can get away with in terms of sucking me in for another month's grind, or making some downloaded component semi-obligatory.
Once you get to "freemium", our interests are more or less at odds: I'm a net loss to you as long as I play for free, so you have an incentive to try every dirty trick in the book to 'monetize' me, and create a game that induces payment without ever overtly demanding it.
It's ironic, actually, that the "casual" games would be the ones where this rather ugly dynamic is strongest. The stereotype(not 100% without supporting anecdotes, but rather overplayed) is that the 'serious' gamers are the ones where the hardcore addictions are; but that is the area where the publisher's incentive to create addictive gameplay is weakest: You already have my $60, you want me to enjoy myself so I'll buy the sequel; but you gain nothing from sucking away my life. On the casual side, you start with nothing from me, and you have to scrape it out one microtransaction at a time...
A story(CNET; but enough company names to fire up google).
The technology is actually damn clever, ultrasonic emitter with carefully tuned wave interaction creating audible sounds only at a specific point, total sci-fi stuff; but using it to beam ghostly whispers into pedestrian's heads was pretty tactless of them.
Given that he voted "yea" on H.R. 5304, the delightful FISA retroactive-immunity-for-any-illegal-spying-the-telcos-certainly-didn't-engage-in-but-if-they-did-it-is-now-legal act, I have a few proctological suggestions about where he can shove is alleged concern for internet privacy...
Let's be clear here, this 'silk' is, indeed, an almost cartoonishly invasive technology, enabled b default, on what is likely to be a very popular consumer device(yes, Opera mini/opera turbo, and various dialup "accelerator" proxy services have been doing similar things, so it isn't really new; but 'Silk' is the boldest and highest profile); but Mr. Barton can be judged only to be crying crocodile tears, given his record.
Pro surveillance, anti state records transparency, pro "PATRIOT" act, etc, etc.
I suspect that certain characteristics of the "Professional" market(notably the ones where it overlaps most strongly with the "IT" market) are a poor fit for Apple, so they will, indeed, be very temped to ditch them as time goes on.
The high end of the "Pro" market is touchy because they tend to depend on fairly large tangles of interconnected products: If asked "what do you use?" they might say "Final Cut"; but they actually mean "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools...".
One of Apple's strengths, particularly of late, has bee their ability(and willingness) to just pick up and say "fuck everybody who thinks some legacy feature/interface/API is good enough. As of today, it is the new shiny or nothing!"(see ADB, Adobe/64-bit Carbon, Final Cut Pro, etc.). Combined with some good taste, this has worked very well in the consumer and low-end "prosumer" markets. By largely ignoring legacy issues and expecting people to keep up or suck it up, they've been able to maintain a pretty aggressive release schedule for new and interesting features with a comparatively small engineering team. However, that is absolutely incompatible with the requirements of more esoteric professional environments(along with institutional IT, their less colorful but considerably larger counterparts). You just can't keep a spaghetti ecosystem of critical 3rd party hardware and software moving that fast, at least not at a price anybody is willing to pay.(Even fairly basic things, like supporting pro-level video cards, can be pretty dire, despite the fact that Mac Pro is more PC-like than it has ever been. The default options suck to an almost comical degree, and driver support for anything else is atrocious.)
For consumer and prosumer requirements, where it is much more likely that the integrated hardware and a small number of common software packages are enough, Apple's approach works just fine. It seems unlikely, though, that they can reconcile that with the requirements of the more specialized users. And, now that they have a big, lucrative, consumer market, their incentive to try isn't what it once might have been.
Inconveniently(but understandably) the population available for research tends to skew very heavily toward the sorts of psychopaths whose behavior gets them sent to prison for violent crimes.
There is abundant reason to suspect that a fair few somewhat smarter ones, who exhibit many of the same undesirable traits but know that overt violent crime usually isn't the best way to get what you want, walk among us; but locating them and convincing them to sit down for some research is tricky. The ones doing time for murder, on the other hand, aren't going anywhere and are conveniently concentrated.
It's a very unfortunate sampling bias, because the ones you can't study are exactly the ones it would be most useful to know more about. While dangerous, people prone to impulsive violence tend get weeded out by police or internecine violence comparatively quickly. The ones that are less overtly dangerous, and/or prefer legal hobbies, are not so convenient.
I find two things very curious about the 'confusion' surrounding, and some of the reactions to, the protesters:
1. The 'confusion': Ignoring the stuff manufactured purely for rhetorical effect("Those crazy kids are just lazy communist anarchists who don't even know what they want!"), you don't really have to be able to trace every detail of exactly how American financial and labor systems have evolved to produce a practically banana-republic wealth distribution in order to take a look at the numbers and see that they, however the details work, definitely have. This is basic "black box" analysis here, the sort of thing that you use (formally or informally) all the time when dealing with complex situations. I don't understand why some people suddenly fall flat on that.
2. The "53%"-er response, and its ilk: Yes, everybody realizes that is, in fact, possible to make money and survive in the US without being a member in good standing of the plutocracy. Were that not the case, things would be a little noisier. That is orthogonal to the displeasure people feel at having to work increasingly hard for a steadily dwindling slice of the pie and no chance of the handy state handouts received by the people who need them least. This school of response isn't false, per se, it's just an enormous non-sequitor.
Honestly, that's the consistent thread with these clergy abuse cases that really makes it a matter of gross institutional rot, rather than an unfortunate but statistically inevitable consequence of having lots and lots of employees in contact with children.
Overwhelmingly, each organizational layer has shown itself more concerned with coverup than with cleanup, and the church management still seems to be fighting their medieval battle to assert that their club's rules trump civil law... What is even more vexing is that they seem largely to be getting away with it. Some civil payouts, a few old men whose statue of limitations hasn't quite run out; but the leadership has been absolutely teflon throughout the whole affair.
Said ancestors also had reactionaries telling them to shut up and like the status quo....
Sectoids did it.
"This means IBM and any other Apache OpenOffice.org project member can innovate the OpenOffice.org source code for their own purposes and not be obligated to give back to the mainline OpenOffice.org code, since the ASL is a non-copyleft license. IBM and other OpenOffice.org contributors will also be able to re-license OpenOffice.org code under any license they want, including a proprietary license, should they wish."
TFA's analyst appears to be under the impression that IBM would see this as a good thing, and would therefore be more likely to want to support OO.org. I'm not sure that makes much sense.
Aside from the horribly mangled use of "innovate", the ability to take code proprietary is only sometimes valuable. It can be valuable if you have the sole right to do it(ie. in the case where it is mostly your project, and you have a copyright assignment policy for contributors, which gives you the option to maintain a proprietary commercial version with some additional features or whatever without any significant forking from the public version). It can also be valuable if you have a different product, 100% proprietary, that needs some feature available in the non-copyleft code, which you can just incorporate. If neither of those is true, though, the ability becomes rather less valuable, possibly even of negative value, in practice.(observe, for instance, the places where Linux ends up in products vs. the ones where BSD does)
Given that the business of trying to make money from the direct sale of office suites that aren't Office is something of an uphill battle, the right of all and sundry to throw their slightly differentiated proprieterized forks into the ring is likely to be of negligible commercial value. If(as I strongly suspect is IBM's case) your real interest is in a combination of selling server/groupware stuff and attempting to prevent MS from using desktop software as a beachhead to sell their server/groupware stuff, the largely theoretical ability to make money from selling shrinkwrapped proprietary spins of Apache licensed code is far less valuable than throwing your lot in with whatever branch of ODF-supporting software sucks least and shows the greatest promise of surviving long enough for ODF to evolve into a real format, rather than a snapshot of OO.org's behavior with aspirations to openness.