Probably because computers don't bite you in the ass merely because you write about them without knowing about them; while most other computer-related jobs have built-in punishments, exacted somewhat more capriciously but almost as inevitably as a hot surface burning your hand when you touch it, for not knowing what you are doing.
Puking up column-inches to wrap around the ads is pretty safe by comparison.
While the current legislation is dangerously ambiguous, has a strong likelihood of being abused and used for overreaching chilling tactics against non-infringing entities; the Australian court system has the world's most robust and convenient supply of kangaroos, which should ease judicial proceedings under the law considerably.
They are certainly performing above average(if memory serves, escapees who aren't immediately whisked away by their powerful crime family or something are lucky to make 48 hours, and they remain at large at time of writing); but I have to wonder if their impulse control has improved during their incarceration. If your idea of protesting your firing involves dismembering your boss with a hacksaw, you might not be on the cutting edge of interpersonal diplomacy.
The tricky bit is that greenhouse gas emissions are a classic negative externality(arguably even more so than pollution generally, which more often stays comparatively close to the release site, rather than having minimial proximate effect but worldwide cumulative effect).
Negative externalities are not things that people tend to just stand up and volunteer to fix because they are nice guys like that, never mind getting all of them to do so, rather than some doing so and the rest taking advantage of the newly cheaper coal.
Pigovian taxation has the advantage of letting the private sector work out the details of the technology; but unless you internalize the externality you can expect to wait a long, long, time for anything to happen voluntarily.
It's a direct link; but God is the sort of important dude who deals with a lot of Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.
Unless God decides to read the Pope into a given program, it's purely need-to-know. In addition(as is likely in this case) God will sometimes 'preserve the integrity of privileged omniscience capabilities and/or techniques' by providing the data gathered by the non-public method through a 'parallel construction' that offers a plausible but fictitious origin for the information.
Here, investigative theologians and divine conspiracy theorists suggest that God's climate data are probably actually derived from his clandestine monitoring of the position and location of all particles in existence. Since this blatantly violates the reasonable expectations of privacy established for all particles by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this program does not officially exist. So far, none of the heavenly host have been willing to make any public statement on the matter, so it remains speculative.
I agree that moral posturing is a largely sterile exercise; but you are using the (possibly true) equivalent between two stances on 'what other people should do to solve this problem' to advance a false equivalence that those two proposals will work similarly well "no more unreasonable than any of the other proposed ways".
It's nice that there's an encyclical agreeing that listening to the experts on the matter is important, and noting that most predicted effects of climate change will not be blessings upon the already poor is pretty logical pope stuff; but there is a very, very, strong case to be made that the Catholic church is...a poor source of advice... when it comes to either population or to inducing social change.
Even when backed by violence, religious suasion has a lousy track record of keeping people from having sex, regardless of marital status, risk of disease transmission, willingness/unwillingness to deal with possible additional children, etc. It also doesn't have a terribly promising track record on motivating to abstain from various carbon-intensive goods and services if they are available.
We've had much better luck with technological solutions that try to avoid stepping in the quagmire of moral suasion; and simply mitigate some or all of the effects of what people are doing anyway. Whether it's prophylactics or non fossil fuel energy sources, it's always going to be easier to prevent STD spread, or generate electricity without burning dinosaurs than it will be to sell people on celibacy and sitting in the dark.
I agree that the music industry(barring the use of their impressive lobbying clout to simply start raiding the public purse and transferring the contents directly to one of the dreadful royalty collection entities) is pretty seriously screwed. I'm just not sure that Apple is a good company to get in bed with to try to solve that.
I'm thinking back to the sequence of events surrounding the the original ITMS, with track-based sales. Team music was largely enthusiastic, finally somebody actually competent to give those damned pirate kids an easier, relatively palatable, option for being paying customers again. And, in part, it worked. Unfortunately for Team Music, Apple proved to be a bit too competent, 'Playsforsure' and its planned ecosystem of interoperable devices and competing music stores basically crashed and burned, Real did something so pathetic that I'm hard pressed to remember it; and the upshot was that they ended up having to sanction the sale of MP3s through Amazon, often at 20 cents or so less, per track, than ITMS, just to keep Apple from being the ultimate gatekeeper.
With streaming services, I suspect that Apple will again be the competent guys(even if they are no more competent than their competitors, they have integration with ITMS billing, and a giant pile of customers with credit card information already punched in, and they have privileged access to iOS, so anything their streaming app needs to be better than everyone else's streaming app(whether it be more lenient treatment of the process when running in the background, special RIAA-and-major-studios-blessed 'secure' local storage for 'predictive caching' when bandwidth is cheap and abundant(ie. on wifi, also handy because Apple easily has enough reach and clout to realistically push some CDN/caching hardware to retail partners if that makes economic sense: Starbucks, say, already has some interaction with Apple in selling music, they'd probably be willing to plug some suitably-modified Time Capsule based local cache into their network, assuming Apple made it low hassle enough); as well as the general competence of Apple's consumer software development.
Given that the streaming market already doesn't pay worth a damn, even with multiple competing entities who are trivial to switch between, all pretty similar to use, and live and die by their catalogs; I can't imagine that their cut of the action will get better if Apple comes in and crushes Pandora and friends and is now in position to dictate terms(extra fun if Apple decides that promotional visibility, and/or the privilege of being sold in the ITMS at all, will now be predicated on how cooperative you are with their streaming plans, and any other future developments).
Given that piracy is always attractively priced, and often surprisingly user friendly(sure, sleazytorrent.ru has more ads for sex chats and korean dating services; but 'click "Artist_Name_Complete_Discography_FLAC.torrent", receive complete discography of chosen artist' is pretty frictionless; team music can't afford to entirely spurn the more competent outfits looking to sell music; but if I were them I'd be very, very, nervous about Apple both being a bit too competent, and (since Apple makes basically zero on music sales; but uses them to enhance the value of the products that they do make money on) a 'partner' who really doesn't share your goals.
Companies that want to make money selling music, or access to music, will haggle with the artists and labels over the cut that goes to the artist and the cut that goes to them; but they are fundamentally interested, just like the artists, in the public spending more money on music. Apple or Microsoft or Google? They have the virtue of being able to build slicker-than-piracy products, since they all know something about UI/UX, and have privileged positions on the world's desktops, consoles, and mobiles; but none of them have any obvious reason to want increased public spending on music. Indeed, all of them have va
I certainly wouldn't fancy their odds over the medium to long term(it isn't exactly getting easier, for anyone, to conduct most aspects of modern life without leaving a handy trail through a variety of databases; and explaining gaps in your employment history is enough fun if you actually were ill/unemployed/etc rather than 'in prison for murder' so your future options are kind of limited); but these two have done much better than average, especially when you consider that they apparently had to work without a getaway driver.
Upstate NY is fairly big, and has some heavily wooded and otherwise potentially helpful terrain; but they started with quite limited resources and a modest head start; while the authorities have numbers, hardware, and the likely cooperation of most of the residents of the area; this isn't exactly Robin Hood hiding out from the king's men.
On the other hand, if streaming is such a low-value activity for the artists streamed; and Apple is likely to view it more or less as a roughly revenue neutral promotion for their hardware and software; that is arguably an excellent incentive for artists to not play along.
Some of them dislike streaming services period, because of the very low pay and perceived reduction in music purchase by their users; even if they are willing to work with streaming services, they'll have a much better negotiating position when dealing with Pandora, Spotify, etc. who have no other lines of business and no special level of integration with people's devices or other advantages that keep them from being largely interchangeable.
Apple makes a lousy partner because their service almost certainly will be architecturally favored on the most common and lucrative mobile devices, making it harder to convince users to just move if the library is better elsewhere; but their primary interest will always be in maximizing the profit of their entire lineup, and treating the streaming service as something as close to 'iDevices come with free music' as they can manage.
The artists' position might actually be best if Apple's service dies; because it is the streaming service with by far the strongest negotiating position, and likely the greatest ability to replace music purchase.
Apple doesn't do anything to their suppliers just because it's nice; but it is honestly a bit surprising to see them taking the gamble of attempting to shove all 100% of lost royalties onto the artist and/or their rightsholder overlord. If any significant number of artists say no, or offer only back-catalog stuff, there are going to be a lot of people spending their three month free trial learning that "Oh, Apple streaming is the one that doesn't have the songs I want." It will likely be the streaming service most conveniently integrated into your iDevice; but if the library sucks, that will only carry it so far.
Eating the cost of the royalties during the trial period would be costly; but it would also have made cooperation from anyone not specifically pledged to exclusivity somewhere else pretty much assured. Failing to do that(or even to offer partial payment) makes their ability to deliver a decent library on launch a great deal less certain.
Why break it when you can install a 'multi-stakeholder-management module' to enable complimentary offsite telemetry monitoring and(only if necessary, of course) failover control from a US satellite management solutions provider?
That's the sort of gold-plated support your vendor would charge you through the nose for, provided free as a gesture of goodwill by your friends in McLean, VA!
Plus, unlike an anti-satellite weapon, this is a purely peaceful infrastructure maintenance system; which should make it squeaky clean in terms of relevant treaties on militarization of space!
The technology to safely capture and repair a satellite that may not be in a position to help you(no fuel, engines offline, software issues, etc.) presumably doesn't differ so very much from that required to capture and modify somebody else's satellite, unless it is in the position to evade you with some enthusiasm, or otherwise make a nuisance of itself.
It would be a tad tricky to snag somebody else's satellite without ground control noticing that something is amiss; but the first time a satellite gets snagged 'on humanitarian grounds', purely to safeguard its orbit from possible debris of course, I predict some exiting diplomatic fun.
There are presumably people who use 'ethical' as a scam, by just claiming to be, charging more, and sourcing straight from the same sweatshops as everybody else, then pocketing the difference; but why are you so baffled by the idea that 'ethical' would cost more?
A wide variety of cost-minimization strategies involve doing things that most non-randroids, if pressed on the matter, would concede are 'unethical'. Assorted strategies for flogging more work out of the peons, various schemes for misrepresenting the actual wage being offered, or simply withholding what you can get away with withholding. Cutting corners on tedious and productivity sapping 'occupational safety' nonsense, cheap 'n cheerful disposal of waste products, etc.
If you are going to forbid yourself the unethical; but effective, cost reduction strategies, what exactly do you think is going to happen?
If we are really lucky, these intrepid pioneers of science will conduct their next study in a bar; hopefully providing sound scientific validation for the short term psychologically therapeutic effects of drowning your sorrows.
It is encouraging to see the occasional radical, original, and highly controversial theory end up being validated by the data. Really, who ever would have thought that people consume feel-good videos of cute animals to numb the psychological pain of their actual lives?
While London is nice, it's also a somewhat strange "Oh, so much better than ghastly Silicon Valley" choice because it's extraordinarily expensive.
Silicon valley certainly has a (well earned) reputation for high costs of living and/or painfully long commutes; but it has those in very large part because it has the features that are directly attractive and useful for tech workers and startups.
London is both more expensive and more expensive in large part because of demand from non-tech industries and people for various virtues important to them; but not terribly helpful for tech. If you think getting gentrified by Google's code monkeys is a problem, you'll love competing for real estate with City traders.
If you are willing to skip the specific advantages of Silicon Valley, there are plenty of options that aren't hideous cultural wastelands or still-smouldering post-apocalyptic sacrifice zones; but are also comparatively cheap, have great location and a lot of open space, or whatever your taste may run toward.
I know that parts of the government do; while the OPM apparently runs on a system so dubiously competent that I'm surprised it experienced enough uptime for the attackers to infiltrate it and then exfiltrate the good stuff. I don't know if they are simply underfunded, enjoy sufficient incompetence to squander adequate funding, or both; but the OPM is clearly a 'just kill it with fire' IT situation at this point. I have no interest in trying to argue otherwise; because it just isn't so.
My attempt was just to examine the logic behind belaboring the 'encryption would have been futile' point during congressional testimony; my suspicion being that 'encryption' is currently something that congress has mostly heard of because the FBI fears its terrible power to protect data, not because they know anything about how it fits into an overall coherent IT security arrangement.
Hell, given the clearances and such that various congresspeople have, a lot of them probably possess government issued 2 factor cryptographic tokens(CAC or PIV or both); but may not realize that those are connected to this 'encryption' that they now want to know why the OPM didn't use.
This is what baffles me about the zillions of scam calls, and the feeble 'well, the FTC announced a cute little prize for anyone who can do something about it' twitches of response: If I get a call, that's because one of a relatively small number of telco companies patched it through to me. And none of them are running a charity, being able to bill for service, on a very granular basis, is a feature that was baked into the system quite early and thoroughly.
So what's the deal? Does '862 million phone scam calls delivered each month' mean '862 million calls per month are being made, for free, by parties unknown and the nations telcos apparently don't give a damn about this theft of service'? Does it mean that 862 million scam attempts per month are being aided and abetted by the nation's telcos because 'pink contract' customers are customers too? A mixture of both? Why is it that Ma Bell's various misbegotten children aren't either baying for the blood of the people stealing their service(and pissing off their paying customers, sometimes to the point where they just give up); or getting taken out and shot for their complicity?
I just don't understand. With email, everyone knows that the system is just too open to be un-broken, the providers and the customers are mostly in it together, in terms of trying to mitigate what they can; but short of walled-gardening SMTP, that's just the nature of the beast.
With voice, though, you've got a much, much, more closed environment(there are a lot of corners of the world; but telephone traffic isn't nearly as international as packet traffic); and the providers mostly don't seem to give a damn(caller ID is a pitiful farce, by design, getting a number blocked, even if known, is like pulling teeth); and it's the case that either the providers are also being massively ripped off or they are massively complicit; and yet nothing seems to happen. Why?
Well. The most charitable possible explanation I can give is that this DHS 'cybersecurity' guy realizes that congress as been getting non-stop "zOMG 'encryption' will cause all the pedophiles and every terrorist to 'go dark' and become impossible to catch; and only by mandating magical Clipper 2.0 backdoors can we possibly save America from this impenetrable code wall!" bullshit from the DHS, FBI, and various other spook flacks for weeks on end at this point(they've pretty much been flipping out about it since Apple first considered making it a default, if not earlier).
Because of that, the primitive herd mind now presumably believes that 'encryption' is a magic data-protection sauce that can be added to any IT system just by swiping at a touchscreen for a minute or two without too much drooling. This will...not...aid their comprehension of what went wrong, or the coherence(if any) of their demands that Something Be Done. So he has the unenviable task of trying to explain that no, actually, 'encryption' is pretty tricky to get right; and needs to be part of an overall system that isn't completely fucked if it's supposed to work, and so on.
The effect on high-skill jobs(tech and others) will presumably also depend fairly heavily on the indirect effects of the displacements elsewhere in the labor market; as well as any direct automation of former jobs.
Even if, for simplicity, we assume zero replacement of programmers and EEs and such by robots and expert systems, we still have the question of 'what will all the incrementally less skilled workers(and those who would have trained to become their successors) do because robots threaten their jobs?'
When nobody needs screwdriver monkeys, because all consumer hardware is assembled by robots and thrown away when broken; and all enterprise hardware is assembled by robots, installed in the datacenter by robots, and thrown away when broken; the screwdriver monkeys will be forced to either leave the market or break into doing software support, low level desktop admin, or the like. If 'cloud' and/or well sandboxed devices that can be wiped if anything unexpected happens and re-provisioned just by bumping them against an employee's RFID badge kill off the low end admins and the support people, they'll be forced to either leave or start knocking higher up the food chain. And so on, all the way up.
Obviously, some people are where they are because they've already hit the limits of their competence or the education they are in a position to accrue. What will happen to them is...unclear...but they won't be moving up. Anyone who was merely unambitious, or otherwise has a shot at moving up will take it; because that's now their only option. This will obviously have an effect on those already further up the chain. Unless they are, in fact, just that amazing; their wages and/or working conditions are going to reflect the number of hungry candidates coming from below(if any advances come along that happen to make their jobs somewhat easier; but not automate them, this effect will be even more pronounced).
My understanding is that Japan's real interest in robotic workers is driven by how top-heavy their age distribution is.
If you have a relatively low birthrate(and Japan very much does, even by the standards of the developed world generally), you pretty much have the option of learning to like at least one flavor of immigrant from a country you can afford, or building a robot capable of wiping your ass and flipping you over often enough to prevent bedsores; because the day is approaching where you won't be able to do either of those things for yourself; and your death is going to be slightly sooner and a lot less fun if nobody is around to do that.
If you have a more even age distribution, or a fairly high fertility rate and a bottom-heavy demographic, there still may be an economic case for robots; but it's a much more purely economic matter.
In the sense that both 'the internet of things' and 'passwords' can be described as "an egregiously maldesigned and actively user-hostile security clusterfuck; typically bodged together by people who don't know, don't care, or both", I suppose that 'IoT' would be a worthy successor.
In all other respects, what a load of tedious, meandering, bullshit to arrive at some vacuous generalities about a vaguely described non-solution.
It is sort of amazing that the US managed to get involved in FIFA. You'd think that a secretive organization based in Switzerland, of all places, could handle a little slush money without passing through US jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because computers don't bite you in the ass merely because you write about them without knowing about them; while most other computer-related jobs have built-in punishments, exacted somewhat more capriciously but almost as inevitably as a hot surface burning your hand when you touch it, for not knowing what you are doing.
Puking up column-inches to wrap around the ads is pretty safe by comparison.
While the current legislation is dangerously ambiguous, has a strong likelihood of being abused and used for overreaching chilling tactics against non-infringing entities; the Australian court system has the world's most robust and convenient supply of kangaroos, which should ease judicial proceedings under the law considerably.
They are certainly performing above average(if memory serves, escapees who aren't immediately whisked away by their powerful crime family or something are lucky to make 48 hours, and they remain at large at time of writing); but I have to wonder if their impulse control has improved during their incarceration. If your idea of protesting your firing involves dismembering your boss with a hacksaw, you might not be on the cutting edge of interpersonal diplomacy.
The tricky bit is that greenhouse gas emissions are a classic negative externality(arguably even more so than pollution generally, which more often stays comparatively close to the release site, rather than having minimial proximate effect but worldwide cumulative effect).
Negative externalities are not things that people tend to just stand up and volunteer to fix because they are nice guys like that, never mind getting all of them to do so, rather than some doing so and the rest taking advantage of the newly cheaper coal.
Pigovian taxation has the advantage of letting the private sector work out the details of the technology; but unless you internalize the externality you can expect to wait a long, long, time for anything to happen voluntarily.
It's a direct link; but God is the sort of important dude who deals with a lot of Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.
Unless God decides to read the Pope into a given program, it's purely need-to-know. In addition(as is likely in this case) God will sometimes 'preserve the integrity of privileged omniscience capabilities and/or techniques' by providing the data gathered by the non-public method through a 'parallel construction' that offers a plausible but fictitious origin for the information.
Here, investigative theologians and divine conspiracy theorists suggest that God's climate data are probably actually derived from his clandestine monitoring of the position and location of all particles in existence. Since this blatantly violates the reasonable expectations of privacy established for all particles by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this program does not officially exist. So far, none of the heavenly host have been willing to make any public statement on the matter, so it remains speculative.
I agree that moral posturing is a largely sterile exercise; but you are using the (possibly true) equivalent between two stances on 'what other people should do to solve this problem' to advance a false equivalence that those two proposals will work similarly well "no more unreasonable than any of the other proposed ways".
It's nice that there's an encyclical agreeing that listening to the experts on the matter is important, and noting that most predicted effects of climate change will not be blessings upon the already poor is pretty logical pope stuff; but there is a very, very, strong case to be made that the Catholic church is...a poor source of advice... when it comes to either population or to inducing social change.
Even when backed by violence, religious suasion has a lousy track record of keeping people from having sex, regardless of marital status, risk of disease transmission, willingness/unwillingness to deal with possible additional children, etc. It also doesn't have a terribly promising track record on motivating to abstain from various carbon-intensive goods and services if they are available.
We've had much better luck with technological solutions that try to avoid stepping in the quagmire of moral suasion; and simply mitigate some or all of the effects of what people are doing anyway. Whether it's prophylactics or non fossil fuel energy sources, it's always going to be easier to prevent STD spread, or generate electricity without burning dinosaurs than it will be to sell people on celibacy and sitting in the dark.
I agree that the music industry(barring the use of their impressive lobbying clout to simply start raiding the public purse and transferring the contents directly to one of the dreadful royalty collection entities) is pretty seriously screwed. I'm just not sure that Apple is a good company to get in bed with to try to solve that.
I'm thinking back to the sequence of events surrounding the the original ITMS, with track-based sales. Team music was largely enthusiastic, finally somebody actually competent to give those damned pirate kids an easier, relatively palatable, option for being paying customers again. And, in part, it worked. Unfortunately for Team Music, Apple proved to be a bit too competent, 'Playsforsure' and its planned ecosystem of interoperable devices and competing music stores basically crashed and burned, Real did something so pathetic that I'm hard pressed to remember it; and the upshot was that they ended up having to sanction the sale of MP3s through Amazon, often at 20 cents or so less, per track, than ITMS, just to keep Apple from being the ultimate gatekeeper.
With streaming services, I suspect that Apple will again be the competent guys(even if they are no more competent than their competitors, they have integration with ITMS billing, and a giant pile of customers with credit card information already punched in, and they have privileged access to iOS, so anything their streaming app needs to be better than everyone else's streaming app(whether it be more lenient treatment of the process when running in the background, special RIAA-and-major-studios-blessed 'secure' local storage for 'predictive caching' when bandwidth is cheap and abundant(ie. on wifi, also handy because Apple easily has enough reach and clout to realistically push some CDN/caching hardware to retail partners if that makes economic sense: Starbucks, say, already has some interaction with Apple in selling music, they'd probably be willing to plug some suitably-modified Time Capsule based local cache into their network, assuming Apple made it low hassle enough); as well as the general competence of Apple's consumer software development.
Given that the streaming market already doesn't pay worth a damn, even with multiple competing entities who are trivial to switch between, all pretty similar to use, and live and die by their catalogs; I can't imagine that their cut of the action will get better if Apple comes in and crushes Pandora and friends and is now in position to dictate terms(extra fun if Apple decides that promotional visibility, and/or the privilege of being sold in the ITMS at all, will now be predicated on how cooperative you are with their streaming plans, and any other future developments).
Given that piracy is always attractively priced, and often surprisingly user friendly(sure, sleazytorrent.ru has more ads for sex chats and korean dating services; but 'click "Artist_Name_Complete_Discography_FLAC.torrent", receive complete discography of chosen artist' is pretty frictionless; team music can't afford to entirely spurn the more competent outfits looking to sell music; but if I were them I'd be very, very, nervous about Apple both being a bit too competent, and (since Apple makes basically zero on music sales; but uses them to enhance the value of the products that they do make money on) a 'partner' who really doesn't share your goals.
Companies that want to make money selling music, or access to music, will haggle with the artists and labels over the cut that goes to the artist and the cut that goes to them; but they are fundamentally interested, just like the artists, in the public spending more money on music. Apple or Microsoft or Google? They have the virtue of being able to build slicker-than-piracy products, since they all know something about UI/UX, and have privileged positions on the world's desktops, consoles, and mobiles; but none of them have any obvious reason to want increased public spending on music. Indeed, all of them have va
I certainly wouldn't fancy their odds over the medium to long term(it isn't exactly getting easier, for anyone, to conduct most aspects of modern life without leaving a handy trail through a variety of databases; and explaining gaps in your employment history is enough fun if you actually were ill/unemployed/etc rather than 'in prison for murder' so your future options are kind of limited); but these two have done much better than average, especially when you consider that they apparently had to work without a getaway driver.
Upstate NY is fairly big, and has some heavily wooded and otherwise potentially helpful terrain; but they started with quite limited resources and a modest head start; while the authorities have numbers, hardware, and the likely cooperation of most of the residents of the area; this isn't exactly Robin Hood hiding out from the king's men.
On the other hand, if streaming is such a low-value activity for the artists streamed; and Apple is likely to view it more or less as a roughly revenue neutral promotion for their hardware and software; that is arguably an excellent incentive for artists to not play along.
Some of them dislike streaming services period, because of the very low pay and perceived reduction in music purchase by their users; even if they are willing to work with streaming services, they'll have a much better negotiating position when dealing with Pandora, Spotify, etc. who have no other lines of business and no special level of integration with people's devices or other advantages that keep them from being largely interchangeable.
Apple makes a lousy partner because their service almost certainly will be architecturally favored on the most common and lucrative mobile devices, making it harder to convince users to just move if the library is better elsewhere; but their primary interest will always be in maximizing the profit of their entire lineup, and treating the streaming service as something as close to 'iDevices come with free music' as they can manage.
The artists' position might actually be best if Apple's service dies; because it is the streaming service with by far the strongest negotiating position, and likely the greatest ability to replace music purchase.
Apple doesn't do anything to their suppliers just because it's nice; but it is honestly a bit surprising to see them taking the gamble of attempting to shove all 100% of lost royalties onto the artist and/or their rightsholder overlord. If any significant number of artists say no, or offer only back-catalog stuff, there are going to be a lot of people spending their three month free trial learning that "Oh, Apple streaming is the one that doesn't have the songs I want." It will likely be the streaming service most conveniently integrated into your iDevice; but if the library sucks, that will only carry it so far.
Eating the cost of the royalties during the trial period would be costly; but it would also have made cooperation from anyone not specifically pledged to exclusivity somewhere else pretty much assured. Failing to do that(or even to offer partial payment) makes their ability to deliver a decent library on launch a great deal less certain.
Why break it when you can install a 'multi-stakeholder-management module' to enable complimentary offsite telemetry monitoring and(only if necessary, of course) failover control from a US satellite management solutions provider?
That's the sort of gold-plated support your vendor would charge you through the nose for, provided free as a gesture of goodwill by your friends in McLean, VA!
Plus, unlike an anti-satellite weapon, this is a purely peaceful infrastructure maintenance system; which should make it squeaky clean in terms of relevant treaties on militarization of space!
The technology to safely capture and repair a satellite that may not be in a position to help you(no fuel, engines offline, software issues, etc.) presumably doesn't differ so very much from that required to capture and modify somebody else's satellite, unless it is in the position to evade you with some enthusiasm, or otherwise make a nuisance of itself.
It would be a tad tricky to snag somebody else's satellite without ground control noticing that something is amiss; but the first time a satellite gets snagged 'on humanitarian grounds', purely to safeguard its orbit from possible debris of course, I predict some exiting diplomatic fun.
There are presumably people who use 'ethical' as a scam, by just claiming to be, charging more, and sourcing straight from the same sweatshops as everybody else, then pocketing the difference; but why are you so baffled by the idea that 'ethical' would cost more?
A wide variety of cost-minimization strategies involve doing things that most non-randroids, if pressed on the matter, would concede are 'unethical'. Assorted strategies for flogging more work out of the peons, various schemes for misrepresenting the actual wage being offered, or simply withholding what you can get away with withholding. Cutting corners on tedious and productivity sapping 'occupational safety' nonsense, cheap 'n cheerful disposal of waste products, etc.
If you are going to forbid yourself the unethical; but effective, cost reduction strategies, what exactly do you think is going to happen?
If we are really lucky, these intrepid pioneers of science will conduct their next study in a bar; hopefully providing sound scientific validation for the short term psychologically therapeutic effects of drowning your sorrows.
It is encouraging to see the occasional radical, original, and highly controversial theory end up being validated by the data. Really, who ever would have thought that people consume feel-good videos of cute animals to numb the psychological pain of their actual lives?
While London is nice, it's also a somewhat strange "Oh, so much better than ghastly Silicon Valley" choice because it's extraordinarily expensive.
Silicon valley certainly has a (well earned) reputation for high costs of living and/or painfully long commutes; but it has those in very large part because it has the features that are directly attractive and useful for tech workers and startups.
London is both more expensive and more expensive in large part because of demand from non-tech industries and people for various virtues important to them; but not terribly helpful for tech. If you think getting gentrified by Google's code monkeys is a problem, you'll love competing for real estate with City traders.
If you are willing to skip the specific advantages of Silicon Valley, there are plenty of options that aren't hideous cultural wastelands or still-smouldering post-apocalyptic sacrifice zones; but are also comparatively cheap, have great location and a lot of open space, or whatever your taste may run toward.
I know that parts of the government do; while the OPM apparently runs on a system so dubiously competent that I'm surprised it experienced enough uptime for the attackers to infiltrate it and then exfiltrate the good stuff. I don't know if they are simply underfunded, enjoy sufficient incompetence to squander adequate funding, or both; but the OPM is clearly a 'just kill it with fire' IT situation at this point. I have no interest in trying to argue otherwise; because it just isn't so.
My attempt was just to examine the logic behind belaboring the 'encryption would have been futile' point during congressional testimony; my suspicion being that 'encryption' is currently something that congress has mostly heard of because the FBI fears its terrible power to protect data, not because they know anything about how it fits into an overall coherent IT security arrangement.
Hell, given the clearances and such that various congresspeople have, a lot of them probably possess government issued 2 factor cryptographic tokens(CAC or PIV or both); but may not realize that those are connected to this 'encryption' that they now want to know why the OPM didn't use.
This is what baffles me about the zillions of scam calls, and the feeble 'well, the FTC announced a cute little prize for anyone who can do something about it' twitches of response: If I get a call, that's because one of a relatively small number of telco companies patched it through to me. And none of them are running a charity, being able to bill for service, on a very granular basis, is a feature that was baked into the system quite early and thoroughly.
So what's the deal? Does '862 million phone scam calls delivered each month' mean '862 million calls per month are being made, for free, by parties unknown and the nations telcos apparently don't give a damn about this theft of service'? Does it mean that 862 million scam attempts per month are being aided and abetted by the nation's telcos because 'pink contract' customers are customers too? A mixture of both? Why is it that Ma Bell's various misbegotten children aren't either baying for the blood of the people stealing their service(and pissing off their paying customers, sometimes to the point where they just give up); or getting taken out and shot for their complicity?
I just don't understand. With email, everyone knows that the system is just too open to be un-broken, the providers and the customers are mostly in it together, in terms of trying to mitigate what they can; but short of walled-gardening SMTP, that's just the nature of the beast.
With voice, though, you've got a much, much, more closed environment(there are a lot of corners of the world; but telephone traffic isn't nearly as international as packet traffic); and the providers mostly don't seem to give a damn(caller ID is a pitiful farce, by design, getting a number blocked, even if known, is like pulling teeth); and it's the case that either the providers are also being massively ripped off or they are massively complicit; and yet nothing seems to happen. Why?
Well. The most charitable possible explanation I can give is that this DHS 'cybersecurity' guy realizes that congress as been getting non-stop "zOMG 'encryption' will cause all the pedophiles and every terrorist to 'go dark' and become impossible to catch; and only by mandating magical Clipper 2.0 backdoors can we possibly save America from this impenetrable code wall!" bullshit from the DHS, FBI, and various other spook flacks for weeks on end at this point(they've pretty much been flipping out about it since Apple first considered making it a default, if not earlier).
Because of that, the primitive herd mind now presumably believes that 'encryption' is a magic data-protection sauce that can be added to any IT system just by swiping at a touchscreen for a minute or two without too much drooling. This will...not...aid their comprehension of what went wrong, or the coherence(if any) of their demands that Something Be Done. So he has the unenviable task of trying to explain that no, actually, 'encryption' is pretty tricky to get right; and needs to be part of an overall system that isn't completely fucked if it's supposed to work, and so on.
The effect on high-skill jobs(tech and others) will presumably also depend fairly heavily on the indirect effects of the displacements elsewhere in the labor market; as well as any direct automation of former jobs.
Even if, for simplicity, we assume zero replacement of programmers and EEs and such by robots and expert systems, we still have the question of 'what will all the incrementally less skilled workers(and those who would have trained to become their successors) do because robots threaten their jobs?'
When nobody needs screwdriver monkeys, because all consumer hardware is assembled by robots and thrown away when broken; and all enterprise hardware is assembled by robots, installed in the datacenter by robots, and thrown away when broken; the screwdriver monkeys will be forced to either leave the market or break into doing software support, low level desktop admin, or the like. If 'cloud' and/or well sandboxed devices that can be wiped if anything unexpected happens and re-provisioned just by bumping them against an employee's RFID badge kill off the low end admins and the support people, they'll be forced to either leave or start knocking higher up the food chain. And so on, all the way up.
Obviously, some people are where they are because they've already hit the limits of their competence or the education they are in a position to accrue. What will happen to them is...unclear...but they won't be moving up. Anyone who was merely unambitious, or otherwise has a shot at moving up will take it; because that's now their only option. This will obviously have an effect on those already further up the chain. Unless they are, in fact, just that amazing; their wages and/or working conditions are going to reflect the number of hungry candidates coming from below(if any advances come along that happen to make their jobs somewhat easier; but not automate them, this effect will be even more pronounced).
My understanding is that Japan's real interest in robotic workers is driven by how top-heavy their age distribution is.
If you have a relatively low birthrate(and Japan very much does, even by the standards of the developed world generally), you pretty much have the option of learning to like at least one flavor of immigrant from a country you can afford, or building a robot capable of wiping your ass and flipping you over often enough to prevent bedsores; because the day is approaching where you won't be able to do either of those things for yourself; and your death is going to be slightly sooner and a lot less fun if nobody is around to do that.
If you have a more even age distribution, or a fairly high fertility rate and a bottom-heavy demographic, there still may be an economic case for robots; but it's a much more purely economic matter.
Must be a "Basic Pleasure Model". Very popular on the offworld colonies.
In the sense that both 'the internet of things' and 'passwords' can be described as "an egregiously maldesigned and actively user-hostile security clusterfuck; typically bodged together by people who don't know, don't care, or both", I suppose that 'IoT' would be a worthy successor.
In all other respects, what a load of tedious, meandering, bullshit to arrive at some vacuous generalities about a vaguely described non-solution.
It is sort of amazing that the US managed to get involved in FIFA. You'd think that a secretive organization based in Switzerland, of all places, could handle a little slush money without passing through US jurisdiction.
Seems like sloppy work, to me.