What I wanna know is: If saving a few pounds adds up to so much fuel then why aren't they weighing passengers and charging them accordingly? How come an extra bag costs me $50 but the 350lb guy pays the same fare as a 120lb guy?
The paper manuals are not likely to complain, boycott or sue for discrimination. That's why.
Can an author survive (and thrive) self-publishing? Retailers and publishers are certainly important for physical copies of a book; how well can an author do publishing only digitally?
According to Bezos in the Kindle HD presentation, something like a quarter of Kindle top 100 sellers are self published.
Hmm, I wonder how many of the top 100 grossing titles are self published.
Self published titles tend to be very cheaply priced and Amazon frequently has a (virtual) monopoly on the sale of the title. This places them higher on the list of most units sold for the Kindle. Even with that advantage they only occupy a quarter of the list.
Writing a good book is very hard. Editing a book is very demanding as well. Add on top of that the need to market it yourself...
You buy life insurance because your wager is that you're going to die at any moment
Insurance companies wager that you're not going to die for a very long time...or at least long enough to rake in a decent profit.
No, it's not a wager, it's a hedge. You know that you will probably continue on living, but you hedge your bets against the alternative. It is both prudent and sensible (assuming you have a family who depends you) to take out life insurance on those terms.
Of course, one company carried out the design work and the user testing to create a touch based hand-held computing device with broad consumer appeal--something that many companies (including Apple) had tried to do before and failed--and took the tremendous financial risk of introducing such a product into the marketplace in defiance of conventional wisdom.
And in return they got two to three years where they had the 'no-keyboard' smartphone market pretty much to themselves. Even after three years (back in 2010) the iPhone 4 was generally regarded as the best smartphone. It is only now five years in that the competitors have, by and large, caught up (even with the supposed "willful infringement").
I'd say Apple's investment paid off, and handsomely. They do not need any "protection".
The fact is, that this field moves so fast that having the first mover advantage is what is important. Of course competitors should not be able to just clone your product (no-one has accused Samsung of doing that). But preventing competitors from learning anything from your example is ridiculous. That is how we advance.
I like Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller), and I respect his positions and agree with most of what he says, but recently I watched a youtube interview with him and he said something that seemed uncharacteristic and almost naive. He said that he believes that people are generally good. He hasn't personally met very many evil people, you know, the inherently evil people. But I have to disagree. The current political climate and the wholesale slavery that is being attempted by major corporations with the force of law and lack of alternatives is not something inherently good people come up with. Evil is as evil does. The fruits of evil are abundantly clear and all around us.
No, he is right. Most people are, basically, "good". And by "good" I mean they mean well. There is this saying about the road to hell...
Also, most people are greedy. Especially those in positions of power. The greed tends to cloud their judgments. Its not that they become maniacal, cartoon-ish, villains who cackle with glee at the thought of doing their evil deeds. The greed simply causes them to find justifications for why what is good for them is ultimately good for society. It doesn't matter if those justifications are logically unsound (or indeed obvious logical fallacies), they have a vested interest in believing them and will defend them at all costs as otherwise they would have to acknowledge that they aren't "good people". Everyone is the hero in their own story.
This is what makes the corruption so difficult to defeat. The justifications will ensure that there is a steady stream of new supporters (like law makers who receive campaign contributions) to the cause as long as it is profitable. Fighting against it is often not at all profitable on an individual level even though it is in the general interest of the people. That leaves the fight up to idealist who, all too often, are ill equipped for the task.
Why have would-be terrorists resorted to increasingly bizarre and ineffective weapons - the shoe bomb, underwear bomb, and chemical cocktail? If they thought they could, obviously they'd just bring some hand grenades, and you can be darn sure those would work every time.
A lot of TSA criticism comes from people who want stringent security for "those people" but not for "us" - meaning white people, grannies, etc. But if you think about it for a few seconds you know where that leads.
Personally I would scale back the TSA and the nekkid scans, but as a value tradeoff, knowing it would come at some cost to security.
And planes were routinely hijacked with "hand grenades" prior to 9/11??? The simple truth is that pre 9/11 security measures were more than adequate to prevent a hijacker from bringing guns or powerful, easy to use explosives on board a plane. What they could do (and did) was bring smallish cutting implements (e.g. box cutters).
The problem with 9/11 wasn't in what the hijackers brought on board, but that they changed the rules of airplane hijacking. Prior to 9/11, if your plane was hijacked, you cooperated. That was the best way to ensure that you would survive.
The 9/11 hijackers changed the rules, but the passengers couldn't know that. On one of the four flight the passengers did learn this, sadly too late to prevent the takeover of the plane, but they did prevent the hijackers from killing more people on the ground.
An attack like 9/11 could only ever work once. Now we have reinforced cockpit doors and passengers will not cooperate with hijackers. Any attempt to hijack a plane, without using firearms at a minimum, will be stopped by the passengers who will assume that the hijackers mean to crash the plane.
All this means that the myriad of additional security nonsense on the ground is almost entirely security theater. Initially, this was mostly a case of ass covering (something needs to be done, this is something, ergo this must be done) but lately (as with the 'porno' scanners) this seems driven by a desire to line the pockets of private enterprise with taxpayer money.
tl;dr It is possible to scale back the TSA without sacrificing actual security.
How is it different w/ NAT, where the 'marketeers' would know the public IPv4 address and the private IPv4 address? Everytime a connection is initiated, the site being visited knows your address, or how else could it serve up its page on your node?
This is incorrect. The 'marketeers' only know your public IP address. Your NAT is responsible for figuring about the translation between the public and private IP addresses. Basically, it forwards your request, waits for the response, and when the response comes in, redirects it to the correct internal IP address. That is why NAT stands for Network Address Translation.
That is the most likely attack vector. SHA1 attacks are still computationally expensive, but even if we assume that they are able to do it (at least for popular titles they are trying keep off of Bittorrent) it is hardly a difficult software change to move to a more recent hashing algorithm. SHA1 is widely regarded as obsolete as a security mechanism. Newer, better hashing algorithms are available.
As far as I know it is using SHA1, although older systems used MD5 in which case you could fake an info reply with crap data that passes the hash, tricking the client into claiming it is an invalid download. But with SHA1 it doesn't appear to be feasible to do on demand, but I wonder if they are using some sort of massive lookup table to do the same sort of poisoning attack?
Even if it were feasible to attack the SHA1 hashes, SHA1 is hardly the latest and greatest hashing algorithm. It was first published in 1993 and finalized in 1995 making it the better part of 20 years old and it is only now that it is being compromised in a serious manner. There are far more recently developed alternatives that could be used to replace SHA1 and those are unlikely to be compromised before yet other alternatives are developed. This is an arms race that content owners can not win.
Re:Polishing a turd
on
Hacking the Law
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The only way to make the legal system logical would be to throw it out and build another system from scratch.
Yes, because - as every software developer know firsthand - when you throw out an old crufty system and develop a brand, sparkling, new one in its place it is always a smooth process that provides tremendous benefits
Wouldn't it be easier to just set up on the Moon and process it there and then ship it to NASA if they want to pay for it?
The Moon is, itself, a potent gravity well (even if puny by Earth standards). If the objective is to supply material to orbital facilities, using an asteroid makes much more sense, assuming you can get one into the right orbit or Lagrange point.
The cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet but with very dry air from outside. Humidifying the air would require carrying many extra gallons (hundreds?) of fresh water.
As I understand it, the main reason for the dry air is that it reduces metal fatigue (via oxidization). Planes made of carbon fiber (e.g. the 787) should (or at the very least could!) have less dry air.
Programmers don't really understand good design and usability.
While sometimes true, it is far more commonly a failure to understand the user. The ability to evaluate the usability of an interface, not just based on how it fits your needs, but on how it would fit someone else's needs is rare and requires a good bit of cultivating. Of course everyone thinks this is easy because they know what is wrong, but it is really the same as with the programmers, you just know what works for you. So you might reword that statement as "People don't really understand good design and usability."
And to bring this back on topic, artists and editors are (on balance) no better at usability than programmers. They do however have significant domain-specific insights into how to present readable text and that should not be discarded. You should however also bring in usability experts to help design the interactive aspects of your e-book experience.
Why should society grant you special tax breaks just because you've decided to have a large family?
Because western countries are facing severe issues with aging populations due to people having fewer and fewer kids. It is in societies' best interest to encourage largish families (i.e. more than 1-2 kids) with reasonable tax incentives.
And for the record I do not have any children. I still support such tax incentives as I will (indirectly) benefit from them in my old age if there are still plenty of young people in the workforce.
Almost all multiplexes will show both 2D and 3D versions and YOU get to choose which one you want to pay for.
If only that were true everywhere. Where I live, if the movie is available (from the studio) in 3D it is ONLY shown in 3D. This is barely tolerable for movies shot in 3D, for movies post converted into 3D this is painful and I refuse to waste money going to see them.
There's a bit of a difference when you lose your own production version phone vs. an unreleased version of an upcoming phone the company you work for is going to be marketing/selling in the near future. It makes me wonder just how many drunken clumsy incompetent idiots work in the iPhone department at Apple.
If you only had smart, responsible people testing the phones in the field, you wouldn't have any clear idea if the product is reasonably rugged or not.
You're free because you can effect social change. Tell me with a straight face that there is a wide gulf between Iran and the West in that respect, and I shall laugh at you.
It is difficult to effect social change in the west because most of us are, on the whole, content with things as they are. Sure, there is room for improvement, but (a few fringe groups aside) few of us want radical change. This is the essence of democracy.
In Iran it is difficult to effect social change because if you seem even remotely likely to succeed in undermining the government they will crack down on you hard.
Of course, democracy is somewhat flawed in that it involves giving people what they want and what people want isn't necessarily what is good for the whole (or even themselves). ("People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.") But that is completely different from an autocratic rule that puts the welfare of its citizens behind all concerns of the ruling elite.
Democracy isn't perfect (and as practiced in the USA, could be improved notably), but it is still the best system we've got. Or to borrow a quote
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
I believe that Churchill was onto something there.
For $85 million — or whatever Mozilla decides to charge, because it could charge almost anything — Bing could bolster its global share to 10, 15, or maybe 20%.
What absolute nonsense. Bing is already the default search engine on IE and only a fraction of IE users are using Bing. To assume that all Firefox users would meekly follow Mozilla's direction to use Bing is absurd.
My wife just loves John Mayer's music. We but it, she puts a copy on her iPod ( which she uses while bike riding and at the gym) through iTunes, we burn a copy of the CD and put on in the CD changer in the car and the original gets put into the CD collection. Guess what, the EVIL record companies don;t give a shit about that.
Of course the give a 'shit' about that, it is just unfortunate (from their perspective) that the CD specification was finalized long before DRM became an issue. They would love nothing more than to be able to sell you a separate copy for your iPod, car and home stereo. Indeed, Sonly tried very hard to 'fix' CDs so that you couldn't rip them!
Meanwhile video content is still DRM infested and digital books seem headed in that direction as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Scotland is hoping to be the first country to become independent without a drop of blood being spilt.
You are at least 68 years too late on that count. Iceland won its independence from Denmark with zero bloodshed.
There are three professions where being untruthful is the key to success: Lawyers, salespeople, and advertising.
Salespeople and advertising are two sides of the same coin. On the other hand you left out politicians.
What I wanna know is: If saving a few pounds adds up to so much fuel then why aren't they weighing passengers and charging them accordingly? How come an extra bag costs me $50 but the 350lb guy pays the same fare as a 120lb guy?
The paper manuals are not likely to complain, boycott or sue for discrimination. That's why.
Can an author survive (and thrive) self-publishing? Retailers and publishers are certainly important for physical copies of a book; how well can an author do publishing only digitally?
According to Bezos in the Kindle HD presentation, something like a quarter of Kindle top 100 sellers are self published.
Hmm, I wonder how many of the top 100 grossing titles are self published.
Self published titles tend to be very cheaply priced and Amazon frequently has a (virtual) monopoly on the sale of the title. This places them higher on the list of most units sold for the Kindle. Even with that advantage they only occupy a quarter of the list.
Writing a good book is very hard. Editing a book is very demanding as well. Add on top of that the need to market it yourself ...
Just being a good writer is hard enough.
bet against yourself?
This is the entire crux of life insurance anyway.
You buy life insurance because your wager is that you're going to die at any moment
Insurance companies wager that you're not going to die for a very long time...or at least long enough to rake in a decent profit.
No, it's not a wager, it's a hedge. You know that you will probably continue on living, but you hedge your bets against the alternative. It is both prudent and sensible (assuming you have a family who depends you) to take out life insurance on those terms.
Of course, one company carried out the design work and the user testing to create a touch based hand-held computing device with broad consumer appeal--something that many companies (including Apple) had tried to do before and failed--and took the tremendous financial risk of introducing such a product into the marketplace in defiance of conventional wisdom .
And in return they got two to three years where they had the 'no-keyboard' smartphone market pretty much to themselves. Even after three years (back in 2010) the iPhone 4 was generally regarded as the best smartphone. It is only now five years in that the competitors have, by and large, caught up (even with the supposed "willful infringement").
I'd say Apple's investment paid off, and handsomely. They do not need any "protection".
The fact is, that this field moves so fast that having the first mover advantage is what is important. Of course competitors should not be able to just clone your product (no-one has accused Samsung of doing that). But preventing competitors from learning anything from your example is ridiculous. That is how we advance.
I like Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller), and I respect his positions and agree with most of what he says, but recently I watched a youtube interview with him and he said something that seemed uncharacteristic and almost naive. He said that he believes that people are generally good. He hasn't personally met very many evil people, you know, the inherently evil people. But I have to disagree. The current political climate and the wholesale slavery that is being attempted by major corporations with the force of law and lack of alternatives is not something inherently good people come up with. Evil is as evil does. The fruits of evil are abundantly clear and all around us.
No, he is right. Most people are, basically, "good". And by "good" I mean they mean well. There is this saying about the road to hell...
Also, most people are greedy. Especially those in positions of power. The greed tends to cloud their judgments. Its not that they become maniacal, cartoon-ish, villains who cackle with glee at the thought of doing their evil deeds. The greed simply causes them to find justifications for why what is good for them is ultimately good for society. It doesn't matter if those justifications are logically unsound (or indeed obvious logical fallacies), they have a vested interest in believing them and will defend them at all costs as otherwise they would have to acknowledge that they aren't "good people". Everyone is the hero in their own story.
This is what makes the corruption so difficult to defeat. The justifications will ensure that there is a steady stream of new supporters (like law makers who receive campaign contributions) to the cause as long as it is profitable. Fighting against it is often not at all profitable on an individual level even though it is in the general interest of the people. That leaves the fight up to idealist who, all too often, are ill equipped for the task.
You are wrong. The whole point of databases is to handle such data intensive workloads.
Why have would-be terrorists resorted to increasingly bizarre and ineffective weapons - the shoe bomb, underwear bomb, and chemical cocktail? If they thought they could, obviously they'd just bring some hand grenades, and you can be darn sure those would work every time.
A lot of TSA criticism comes from people who want stringent security for "those people" but not for "us" - meaning white people, grannies, etc. But if you think about it for a few seconds you know where that leads.
Personally I would scale back the TSA and the nekkid scans, but as a value tradeoff, knowing it would come at some cost to security.
And planes were routinely hijacked with "hand grenades" prior to 9/11??? The simple truth is that pre 9/11 security measures were more than adequate to prevent a hijacker from bringing guns or powerful, easy to use explosives on board a plane. What they could do (and did) was bring smallish cutting implements (e.g. box cutters).
The problem with 9/11 wasn't in what the hijackers brought on board, but that they changed the rules of airplane hijacking. Prior to 9/11, if your plane was hijacked, you cooperated. That was the best way to ensure that you would survive.
The 9/11 hijackers changed the rules, but the passengers couldn't know that. On one of the four flight the passengers did learn this, sadly too late to prevent the takeover of the plane, but they did prevent the hijackers from killing more people on the ground.
An attack like 9/11 could only ever work once. Now we have reinforced cockpit doors and passengers will not cooperate with hijackers. Any attempt to hijack a plane, without using firearms at a minimum, will be stopped by the passengers who will assume that the hijackers mean to crash the plane.
All this means that the myriad of additional security nonsense on the ground is almost entirely security theater. Initially, this was mostly a case of ass covering (something needs to be done, this is something, ergo this must be done) but lately (as with the 'porno' scanners) this seems driven by a desire to line the pockets of private enterprise with taxpayer money.
tl;dr It is possible to scale back the TSA without sacrificing actual security.
How is it different w/ NAT, where the 'marketeers' would know the public IPv4 address and the private IPv4 address? Everytime a connection is initiated, the site being visited knows your address, or how else could it serve up its page on your node?
This is incorrect. The 'marketeers' only know your public IP address. Your NAT is responsible for figuring about the translation between the public and private IP addresses. Basically, it forwards your request, waits for the response, and when the response comes in, redirects it to the correct internal IP address. That is why NAT stands for Network Address Translation.
That is the most likely attack vector. SHA1 attacks are still computationally expensive, but even if we assume that they are able to do it (at least for popular titles they are trying keep off of Bittorrent) it is hardly a difficult software change to move to a more recent hashing algorithm. SHA1 is widely regarded as obsolete as a security mechanism. Newer, better hashing algorithms are available.
As far as I know it is using SHA1, although older systems used MD5 in which case you could fake an info reply with crap data that passes the hash, tricking the client into claiming it is an invalid download. But with SHA1 it doesn't appear to be feasible to do on demand, but I wonder if they are using some sort of massive lookup table to do the same sort of poisoning attack?
Even if it were feasible to attack the SHA1 hashes, SHA1 is hardly the latest and greatest hashing algorithm. It was first published in 1993 and finalized in 1995 making it the better part of 20 years old and it is only now that it is being compromised in a serious manner. There are far more recently developed alternatives that could be used to replace SHA1 and those are unlikely to be compromised before yet other alternatives are developed. This is an arms race that content owners can not win.
The only way to make the legal system logical would be to throw it out and build another system from scratch.
Yes, because - as every software developer know firsthand - when you throw out an old crufty system and develop a brand, sparkling, new one in its place it is always a smooth process that provides tremendous benefits
</sarcasm>
We already know where there is ice on the Moon.
Wouldn't it be easier to just set up on the Moon and process it there and then ship it to NASA if they want to pay for it?
The Moon is, itself, a potent gravity well (even if puny by Earth standards). If the objective is to supply material to orbital facilities, using an asteroid makes much more sense, assuming you can get one into the right orbit or Lagrange point.
The cabin is pressurized to 8,000 feet but with very dry air from outside. Humidifying the air would require carrying many extra gallons (hundreds?) of fresh water.
As I understand it, the main reason for the dry air is that it reduces metal fatigue (via oxidization). Planes made of carbon fiber (e.g. the 787) should (or at the very least could!) have less dry air.
Programmers don't really understand good design and usability.
While sometimes true, it is far more commonly a failure to understand the user. The ability to evaluate the usability of an interface, not just based on how it fits your needs, but on how it would fit someone else's needs is rare and requires a good bit of cultivating. Of course everyone thinks this is easy because they know what is wrong, but it is really the same as with the programmers, you just know what works for you. So you might reword that statement as "People don't really understand good design and usability."
And to bring this back on topic, artists and editors are (on balance) no better at usability than programmers. They do however have significant domain-specific insights into how to present readable text and that should not be discarded. You should however also bring in usability experts to help design the interactive aspects of your e-book experience.
Why should society grant you special tax breaks just because you've decided to have a large family?
Because western countries are facing severe issues with aging populations due to people having fewer and fewer kids. It is in societies' best interest to encourage largish families (i.e. more than 1-2 kids) with reasonable tax incentives.
And for the record I do not have any children. I still support such tax incentives as I will (indirectly) benefit from them in my old age if there are still plenty of young people in the workforce.
Almost all multiplexes will show both 2D and 3D versions and YOU get to choose which one you want to pay for.
If only that were true everywhere. Where I live, if the movie is available (from the studio) in 3D it is ONLY shown in 3D. This is barely tolerable for movies shot in 3D, for movies post converted into 3D this is painful and I refuse to waste money going to see them.
There's a bit of a difference when you lose your own production version phone vs. an unreleased version of an upcoming phone the company you work for is going to be marketing/selling in the near future. It makes me wonder just how many drunken clumsy incompetent idiots work in the iPhone department at Apple.
If you only had smart, responsible people testing the phones in the field, you wouldn't have any clear idea if the product is reasonably rugged or not.
You're free because you can effect social change. Tell me with a straight face that there is a wide gulf between Iran and the West in that respect, and I shall laugh at you.
It is difficult to effect social change in the west because most of us are, on the whole, content with things as they are. Sure, there is room for improvement, but (a few fringe groups aside) few of us want radical change. This is the essence of democracy.
In Iran it is difficult to effect social change because if you seem even remotely likely to succeed in undermining the government they will crack down on you hard.
Of course, democracy is somewhat flawed in that it involves giving people what they want and what people want isn't necessarily what is good for the whole (or even themselves). ("People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.") But that is completely different from an autocratic rule that puts the welfare of its citizens behind all concerns of the ruling elite.
Democracy isn't perfect (and as practiced in the USA, could be improved notably), but it is still the best system we've got. Or to borrow a quote
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
I believe that Churchill was onto something there.
In this case, if you put some material in the soles to gather mechanical energy it's just going to make your feet a little more tired.
Or more accurately you will need to burn a few extra calories, which, in the western world, is a good thing!
If there is a surplus of energy that can be tapped that will otherwise go to waste, why not use it.
For $85 million — or whatever Mozilla decides to charge, because it could charge almost anything — Bing could bolster its global share to 10, 15, or maybe 20%.
What absolute nonsense. Bing is already the default search engine on IE and only a fraction of IE users are using Bing. To assume that all Firefox users would meekly follow Mozilla's direction to use Bing is absurd.
My wife just loves John Mayer's music. We but it, she puts a copy on her iPod ( which she uses while bike riding and at the gym) through iTunes, we burn a copy of the CD and put on in the CD changer in the car and the original gets put into the CD collection. Guess what, the EVIL record companies don;t give a shit about that.
Of course the give a 'shit' about that, it is just unfortunate (from their perspective) that the CD specification was finalized long before DRM became an issue. They would love nothing more than to be able to sell you a separate copy for your iPod, car and home stereo. Indeed, Sonly tried very hard to 'fix' CDs so that you couldn't rip them!
Meanwhile video content is still DRM infested and digital books seem headed in that direction as well.
I don't care what the "reasoning" is - this is just ridiculous versioning. At this rate in 2020, we'll be using Firefox 153. .
No, if they do it correctly (as Google already is doing it with Chrome), by 2020 you'll just be using Firefox, version numbers will be irrelevant.
Then what in the world is such a big deal about a stupid cell phone? If it does what you want and you can afford it, buy it.
That is exactly it, the iPhone isn't a cell phone! It is an ultra portable computer that just happens to also place voice calls.