The ISS is in a sufficiently low orbit that it experiences substantial decay(it is 'in space' but only barely, enough that the photovoltaic arrays are re-positioned to reduce drag when not generating power).
Apparently, the UK case hinged on whether the stormtrooper armor was a sculptural work of art(entitled to copyright in hahaha-not-quite-perpetuity) or a merely functional design(15 years). The court decided the latter.
However, as a nerd and pedant in good standing, I cannot allow this ridiculous assertion to go unchallenged: can armor that fails to protect its wearer from being clubbed to death by mere teddy-bears, and reduces the accuracy of the Empire's finest to one notch above slapstick truly be called "functional"? Absurd.
We could also try letting robotic synth-nannies raise our human children.
Soon enough, they would learn to associate unnatural robotic movements with tenderness and nourishment. Or starve. Either way, the effect would eventually be suppressed.
Walmart actually has a pretty substantial datacenter back-end for doing logistics, supply chain, and stocking decisions stuff. They are a touch cagey about just how substantial.
More importantly, though, Walmart's vast physical distribution network makes it one of the major sellers of DVDs, which puts it in a helpful position when negotiating with studios over the price of streaming a given video a given number of times. With their clout in that area, they just have to not be worse than other CDNs(or, if they are, hire one or more CDNs to do it for them) in order to offer a competitive price.
In general, probably not(certainly not on theatre or even DVD release day...) Selectively, in the attempt to assert power over a player they consider dangerous, quite possibly.
Consider the music case: once the labels realized that they had fucked up and let Apple get the upper hand, rather than the other way round, they cut some fairly sweetheart deals on pricing for Amazon in order to try to limit the power of the single middleman.
In the case of video, the pre-existing cable based VOD services mean that Netflix isn't quite as terrifying; but it is definitely conceivable that, in order to assist a competitor, and increase the competitive squeeze among video streaming middlemen, one or more members of Team Content might throw a few exclusive streaming selections to some of the weaker players.
Probably not, given that synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels from virtually anything with available hydrogen and carbon is doable if you merely want energy storage rather than cheap energy. The uphill battle for things like batteries is not merely that they aren't where we want them to be for storage; but the fact that their oil-based competitors provide both storage and cheap energy at the same time.
Unlike scarce elements, like helium, that have unique physical properties, oil isn't especially special chemically except for the fact that centuries or millenia of ancient sunlight conveniently shoved it up the chemical-potential-energy slope for us. If you have energy available by some other means, shoving hydrogen and carbon up the slope yourself in order to store energy in a convenient chemical form is perfectly doable.
It's not a matter of 'sin'(or of being uniquely American, though the American manifestation is the relevant one if you want to talk about Americans...). It's a matter of sloppy thinking leading to lousy conclusions.
If you start by observing that a country is unique in certain(generally positive) ways and from there conclude that it is exceptional, your reasoning is on a fairly firm footing, though your premises may or may not be accurate.
What makes somebody an "exceptionalist" in the perjorative sense is when the start from the premise that their country is exceptional in a positive sense and then conclude that what it actually does must therefore be good and special.
The former belief in exceptionalism is valid and(hopefully, if you've actually being doing a good job) also true.
The latter is dangerous nonsense. "Goodness" or "Exceptionalness" are judgements subsequent to actions, not axioms prior to them...
It's the "losing money" part that shareholders tend not to like... Market share certainly has its uses; but it isn't an end in itself. Some investors are more patient than others; but sooner or later they will demand that either the division stop losing money, demonstrate how its utility to other divisions that aren't losing money makes up for its costs, or be scrapped.
If anything, the fact that Microsoft is the #2 search player, commands almost a third of the market, and still isn't making money at it probably makes people more nervous about them. Losing money temporarily in order to gain enough marketshare for some sort of economies of scale/mindshare breakthrough/whatever pixie dust is floating around is practically a comforting tradition for tech market types. Being an established player and still dragging out each year in the red just makes you unpopular...
A convenient item of trite cynicism; but not actually true.
Force is expensive. States that invest in it in excess collapse under their own weight. Voluntary compliance, whether produced by patriotism, fear of the state, love of order, material benefit, fear of chaos, hatred of some other or other, or some combination of these, is cheap. In addition, you(for the moment) need gunmen to wield the guns for you. At a bare minimum, the gunmen must fear one another more than they hate you, and that isn't all that stable in the long term. To really last, you need enough loyalists(or at least well-paid mercenaries) to induce fear in everybody else. And that is the bare minimum case.
Guns certainly have their uses, in pruning deviants who will not be brought to heel by more delicate means of suasion; but(barring the rise of reasonably strong AIs and robots) simply aren't enough to maintain one's grip. At a bare minimum, the bystanders must be cowed by the fear that the next chap to be shot might be them. More usually, a state whose situation is actually stable will be cheered by the majority as it applies force to deviants.
Rousseau was absurdly wrong about a lot of things; but his statement that "The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty." hits pretty close to the mark, per unit length.
1. Practical: Network surveillance enjoys enormous economies of scale. The cost, per customer, of some creepy Narus or Sandvine spook shit sitting on the line is fairly small. It is also largely invisible; buried within the more-or-less-arbitrary-and-opaque pricing structure of the ISP. Outside of a fairly small number of NOC jockies, and the feds, nobody has to see it or think about it. Joe Hotspot, on the other hand, faces a proportionally greater compliance burden, so he is likely to just turn the hotspot off. This upsets potential wifi users, and many hotspot operators are small-business types, who will talk with their customers about why there isn't wifi anymore. Incremental and largely invisible price increase vs. substantial decline in open hotspots...
2. Ideological: American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug. By virtue of our status as the Good Guys, what we do is Good until proven evil, and often even Good after being proven evil. The sinister, repressive, communist state of the cunning chinaman, on the other hand...
Given the frequency with which a cracked webmail account or compromised PC with an email client will immediately start spamming its former owner's entire address book, expecting the "people you know" rule to save you is fairly naive...
That leaves me conflicted: On the one hand, this means that money will be leaving the hands of the vile pigfuckers who buy SEO spam. On the other hand, it means that money will be entering the hands of the degenerate subhumans who produce SEO spam....
Didn't you get the memo? Steve Jobs personally invented every aspect of personal computing, 13-proton nuclei, and the physical property of capacitance. HTC, by contrast, is definitionally incapable of doing anything except copying American Innovations...
Given that the color balance on each of the six sub-panels making up the big screen is glaringly different even in that fairly lousy photograph, they can't be too overfunded. It isn't quite as skeezy looking as an old 3-tube rear projection unit that has started to drift out of alignment; but it is still pretty dire.
I'm honestly kind of surprised that a gang of laid-off Sun employees didn't corner him in the parking lot and beat him to death with a SPARCstation for doing that...
There is probably some argument, however tenuous, that merely having Sun's CEO publicly praise the use of basically-java in Android didn't actually constitute implicit permission to use whatever java-related patented techniques are at question.
Even if that side of things pans out, though, it certainly makes it a bit harder to make the argument that Google was willfully infringing(which would potentially up the damages significantly), since that isn't exactly the sound of a CEO who is getting willfully-infringed upon...
The problem, of course, is ensuring that the responsible person is somehow allocated the position of dictator, a fate which befalls those you would want having it with starkly limited frequency...
As for accountability in democracy, the theory is that voters are held accountable by giving them what they asked for. Good and hard.This doesn't help much in the case of majoritarian repression of a minority(which is why absolute democracies along Athenian lines fell out of favor with the Enlightenment set, and we have bills of rights and judiciaries); but the theory is that when the set of people who have power and the set of people they have power over are the same, they are automatically held accountable because they suffer the cruel fate of getting what they ask for rather than what they want...
The exact scope of use is unclear; but both "Magic Lantern" and "CIPAV" would arguably qualify, in terms of FBI-employed, endpoint-installed, surveillance software.
On the network side, there is a whole different set of alphabet codenames and alphabet soup. ECHELON, CALEA, Carnivore, a number of former Information Awareness Office projects(IAO itself managed to creep congress out, and was defunded; but some of its activities survive under other names), virtually anything you can buy from Narus, whatever the NSA is up to in room 641A, DCSNet, IDW, etc, etc.
I've seen a few, mostly when trying out Win7 on ~5year old practically-an-Intel-reference-design-except-for-the-bcm57xx-that-everybody-was-using-in-those-days corporate desktop boxes; but it is rare.
My point was just that, while MS does provide a smattering of common drivers as a convenience feature, they are not your sole, or even primary, source of drivers, nor do they position themselves as such. What you find on the install disk is essentially irrelevant to whether it will end up working or not. With OSX, by contrast, a given install disk should support all non-deprecated mac models that started shipping before the install disk was finalized; but that is your first and last source of driver support(with the exception of 3rd party peripherals, supported by their manufacturers, and Nvidia CUDA drivers). Even when a given chipmaker(intel or broadcom, for instance) almost certainly provided much of the code went into the driver in Apple's OS release, their own driver download pages won't include any OSX drivers. I don't know whether this is a function of vendor indifference or Apple's express preference; but it is the case: even when drivers are available in the kernel.org mainline, or via Windows update, respectively, outfits like intel will still have driver packages for those platforms. For OSX, however, even when a given chip is in one or more generations of macs, there will be no mention of it on vendor support pages.
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What would they do with it?
The ISS is in a sufficiently low orbit that it experiences substantial decay(it is 'in space' but only barely, enough that the photovoltaic arrays are re-positioned to reduce drag when not generating power).
Quoth young Skywalker: "I can't see a thing in this helmet."
So it is written.
Apparently, the UK case hinged on whether the stormtrooper armor was a sculptural work of art(entitled to copyright in hahaha-not-quite-perpetuity) or a merely functional design(15 years). The court decided the latter.
However, as a nerd and pedant in good standing, I cannot allow this ridiculous assertion to go unchallenged: can armor that fails to protect its wearer from being clubbed to death by mere teddy-bears, and reduces the accuracy of the Empire's finest to one notch above slapstick truly be called "functional"? Absurd.
We could also try letting robotic synth-nannies raise our human children.
Soon enough, they would learn to associate unnatural robotic movements with tenderness and nourishment. Or starve. Either way, the effect would eventually be suppressed.
Walmart actually has a pretty substantial datacenter back-end for doing logistics, supply chain, and stocking decisions stuff. They are a touch cagey about just how substantial.
More importantly, though, Walmart's vast physical distribution network makes it one of the major sellers of DVDs, which puts it in a helpful position when negotiating with studios over the price of streaming a given video a given number of times. With their clout in that area, they just have to not be worse than other CDNs(or, if they are, hire one or more CDNs to do it for them) in order to offer a competitive price.
In general, probably not(certainly not on theatre or even DVD release day...) Selectively, in the attempt to assert power over a player they consider dangerous, quite possibly.
Consider the music case: once the labels realized that they had fucked up and let Apple get the upper hand, rather than the other way round, they cut some fairly sweetheart deals on pricing for Amazon in order to try to limit the power of the single middleman.
In the case of video, the pre-existing cable based VOD services mean that Netflix isn't quite as terrifying; but it is definitely conceivable that, in order to assist a competitor, and increase the competitive squeeze among video streaming middlemen, one or more members of Team Content might throw a few exclusive streaming selections to some of the weaker players.
'Very complicated' = "Now, don't you go worrying your pretty little heads about that."
Probably not, given that synthesizing hydrocarbon fuels from virtually anything with available hydrogen and carbon is doable if you merely want energy storage rather than cheap energy. The uphill battle for things like batteries is not merely that they aren't where we want them to be for storage; but the fact that their oil-based competitors provide both storage and cheap energy at the same time.
Unlike scarce elements, like helium, that have unique physical properties, oil isn't especially special chemically except for the fact that centuries or millenia of ancient sunlight conveniently shoved it up the chemical-potential-energy slope for us. If you have energy available by some other means, shoving hydrogen and carbon up the slope yourself in order to store energy in a convenient chemical form is perfectly doable.
It's not a matter of 'sin'(or of being uniquely American, though the American manifestation is the relevant one if you want to talk about Americans...). It's a matter of sloppy thinking leading to lousy conclusions.
If you start by observing that a country is unique in certain(generally positive) ways and from there conclude that it is exceptional, your reasoning is on a fairly firm footing, though your premises may or may not be accurate.
What makes somebody an "exceptionalist" in the perjorative sense is when the start from the premise that their country is exceptional in a positive sense and then conclude that what it actually does must therefore be good and special.
The former belief in exceptionalism is valid and(hopefully, if you've actually being doing a good job) also true.
The latter is dangerous nonsense. "Goodness" or "Exceptionalness" are judgements subsequent to actions, not axioms prior to them...
Are you sure that subluxations aren't somehow involved? You remind me of somebody...
It's the "losing money" part that shareholders tend not to like... Market share certainly has its uses; but it isn't an end in itself. Some investors are more patient than others; but sooner or later they will demand that either the division stop losing money, demonstrate how its utility to other divisions that aren't losing money makes up for its costs, or be scrapped.
If anything, the fact that Microsoft is the #2 search player, commands almost a third of the market, and still isn't making money at it probably makes people more nervous about them. Losing money temporarily in order to gain enough marketshare for some sort of economies of scale/mindshare breakthrough/whatever pixie dust is floating around is practically a comforting tradition for tech market types. Being an established player and still dragging out each year in the red just makes you unpopular...
A convenient item of trite cynicism; but not actually true.
Force is expensive. States that invest in it in excess collapse under their own weight. Voluntary compliance, whether produced by patriotism, fear of the state, love of order, material benefit, fear of chaos, hatred of some other or other, or some combination of these, is cheap. In addition, you(for the moment) need gunmen to wield the guns for you. At a bare minimum, the gunmen must fear one another more than they hate you, and that isn't all that stable in the long term. To really last, you need enough loyalists(or at least well-paid mercenaries) to induce fear in everybody else. And that is the bare minimum case.
Guns certainly have their uses, in pruning deviants who will not be brought to heel by more delicate means of suasion; but(barring the rise of reasonably strong AIs and robots) simply aren't enough to maintain one's grip. At a bare minimum, the bystanders must be cowed by the fear that the next chap to be shot might be them. More usually, a state whose situation is actually stable will be cheered by the majority as it applies force to deviants.
Rousseau was absurdly wrong about a lot of things; but his statement that "The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty." hits pretty close to the mark, per unit length.
I suspect that there are two factors:
1. Practical: Network surveillance enjoys enormous economies of scale. The cost, per customer, of some creepy Narus or Sandvine spook shit sitting on the line is fairly small. It is also largely invisible; buried within the more-or-less-arbitrary-and-opaque pricing structure of the ISP. Outside of a fairly small number of NOC jockies, and the feds, nobody has to see it or think about it. Joe Hotspot, on the other hand, faces a proportionally greater compliance burden, so he is likely to just turn the hotspot off. This upsets potential wifi users, and many hotspot operators are small-business types, who will talk with their customers about why there isn't wifi anymore. Incremental and largely invisible price increase vs. substantial decline in open hotspots...
2. Ideological: American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug. By virtue of our status as the Good Guys, what we do is Good until proven evil, and often even Good after being proven evil. The sinister, repressive, communist state of the cunning chinaman, on the other hand...
Given the frequency with which a cracked webmail account or compromised PC with an email client will immediately start spamming its former owner's entire address book, expecting the "people you know" rule to save you is fairly naive...
That leaves me conflicted: On the one hand, this means that money will be leaving the hands of the vile pigfuckers who buy SEO spam. On the other hand, it means that money will be entering the hands of the degenerate subhumans who produce SEO spam....
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, dude.
-Marcus Antonius
I can only hope that you find yourself facing the pointy end of a majority at some time...
Didn't you get the memo? Steve Jobs personally invented every aspect of personal computing, 13-proton nuclei, and the physical property of capacitance. HTC, by contrast, is definitionally incapable of doing anything except copying American Innovations...
Given that the color balance on each of the six sub-panels making up the big screen is glaringly different even in that fairly lousy photograph, they can't be too overfunded. It isn't quite as skeezy looking as an old 3-tube rear projection unit that has started to drift out of alignment; but it is still pretty dire.
I'm honestly kind of surprised that a gang of laid-off Sun employees didn't corner him in the parking lot and beat him to death with a SPARCstation for doing that...
There is probably some argument, however tenuous, that merely having Sun's CEO publicly praise the use of basically-java in Android didn't actually constitute implicit permission to use whatever java-related patented techniques are at question.
Even if that side of things pans out, though, it certainly makes it a bit harder to make the argument that Google was willfully infringing(which would potentially up the damages significantly), since that isn't exactly the sound of a CEO who is getting willfully-infringed upon...
The problem, of course, is ensuring that the responsible person is somehow allocated the position of dictator, a fate which befalls those you would want having it with starkly limited frequency...
As for accountability in democracy, the theory is that voters are held accountable by giving them what they asked for. Good and hard.This doesn't help much in the case of majoritarian repression of a minority(which is why absolute democracies along Athenian lines fell out of favor with the Enlightenment set, and we have bills of rights and judiciaries); but the theory is that when the set of people who have power and the set of people they have power over are the same, they are automatically held accountable because they suffer the cruel fate of getting what they ask for rather than what they want...
The exact scope of use is unclear; but both "Magic Lantern" and "CIPAV" would arguably qualify, in terms of FBI-employed, endpoint-installed, surveillance software.
On the network side, there is a whole different set of alphabet codenames and alphabet soup. ECHELON, CALEA, Carnivore, a number of former Information Awareness Office projects(IAO itself managed to creep congress out, and was defunded; but some of its activities survive under other names), virtually anything you can buy from Narus, whatever the NSA is up to in room 641A, DCSNet, IDW, etc, etc.
A wealth of choices, really...
I've seen a few, mostly when trying out Win7 on ~5year old practically-an-Intel-reference-design-except-for-the-bcm57xx-that-everybody-was-using-in-those-days corporate desktop boxes; but it is rare.
My point was just that, while MS does provide a smattering of common drivers as a convenience feature, they are not your sole, or even primary, source of drivers, nor do they position themselves as such. What you find on the install disk is essentially irrelevant to whether it will end up working or not. With OSX, by contrast, a given install disk should support all non-deprecated mac models that started shipping before the install disk was finalized; but that is your first and last source of driver support(with the exception of 3rd party peripherals, supported by their manufacturers, and Nvidia CUDA drivers). Even when a given chipmaker(intel or broadcom, for instance) almost certainly provided much of the code went into the driver in Apple's OS release, their own driver download pages won't include any OSX drivers. I don't know whether this is a function of vendor indifference or Apple's express preference; but it is the case: even when drivers are available in the kernel.org mainline, or via Windows update, respectively, outfits like intel will still have driver packages for those platforms. For OSX, however, even when a given chip is in one or more generations of macs, there will be no mention of it on vendor support pages.