What law did they break? Please be specific. The law Mr. Auernheimer broke was rather specific, and his punishment was within the precedent of past use of that law.
Sure, you can argue that there should be laws about stewardship of quasi-private information like email addresses, but to this date there are none so it makes it a bit hard to fine them for something.
If a bank didn't have a door on it's vault, or any forms of security whatsoever, would you walk in and take out all the money? Even if you proceeded directly to the local police department to report the security flaw and deliver the unguarded money, you'd find yourself in quite a bit of trouble.
Here's a better analogy: you send the bank self-addressed stamped envelopes, and they willingly send private information about their clients back to you in those envelopes.
If those envelopes were in any way a misrepresentation of your legal desire to communicate with your bank (such as an incorrect identity, overstated request, etc) then you, the sender, are guilty of mail fraud. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The legal system seems to be pretty mysterious to a large part of slashdot...
A bank has a web server that takes person's name and returns that person's SSN. A "hacker" sends your username and gets your SSN. He does that for several people from the phone directory. Hacker goes to prison for the BANK'S FAULT of exposing SSNs.
It's only the bank's fault for breaching a specific law regarding protection of private information by certain security means (strong authentication, encryption, etc) but if the hacker did anything but flip on his computer (such as construct a program, no matter how small or simple, that specifically talks to the open app on the web server) then he too is guilty of misuse of a computer system under current law.
Debate the efficacy of the law, punishment, etc. all you want, but this is how the current law works, there is no room for debate on that.
He didn't "break in". He sent requests to a publicly-accessible web server, and AT&T sent back private information. This wasn't hacking, or even a DOS attack. AT&T is at fault here.
He wasn't just looking to get to his att.com home page and happened upon a list of email addresses. Getting at those addresses took some deliberate work on his part (a big part of the law is not so much about perceptions of ease/publicity, but in perceptions of *intent*). If you leave your windowshades open a little at home, and someone comes along outside and peeps inside to watch you doing [insert something from imagination here] it is the "peeper" who is committing a crime, not the "peep-ee". In this case Mr. Auernheimer did intend to obtain addresses that were *only going to be exposed to someone deliberately looking for them* and therefore he is afoul of the law. Now, the efficacy of this punishment for such a crime is debatable, but you can't use that as an argument that what he did wasn't illegal, or that such a law has no place.
Let's see who gets my karma first, the groupthink gestapo or the 2nd graders who want to laugh at peepee.
I wouldn't bring any of them back. The only services from Google that I really use are Gmail, Maps and the search engine (includes image search).
The thing is: Google is a bit too large imho. Them killing off a product that lots of people used just creates more room on that market, or perhaps it creates a new one altogether. Now, Google Reader competitors don't have to compete with Google Reader anymore, only among each other. Now, other people may be succesful. This idea sounds good to me.
I don't hope that Google ditches all these projects so much, don't get me wrong. I just think there's a nice upside to all of this.:)
This is it right here. If Google decides to leave a market it just removes what was probably a lousy de-facto standard (like Reader, come on, there are a dozen better ways to do RSS now) and forces people to go find the good stuff.
Are you sure that collecting packets and storing them from unsecured WiFi points is legal?
Unless they are covered by some sort of DMCA (or similar) protection, yes it is legal. Remember, this is basically the same thing that goes on when someone "steals" satellite-broadcast TV by tuning in and decrypting it with home-made hardware, and the only reason that is illegal is because of the copyright protection afforded to the content, it has nothing to do with what the actual "thief" is doing.
If we do away with daylight savings, we should shift all the time zones about 7 or 8 degrees farther west longitude. The sun sets too early in the eastern half (near the 'leading edge') of each time zone.
Why aren't we in a post-timezone era anyway? I mean, we all have computers, right? Switch timekeeping to be TRULY sun-based. Your phone knows your location and can tell you exactly what time of the solar day it is , so just let 6pm be sundown and 6am be sunup, no matter where you are or what time of year it is. We know that traffic, business activity, spending, energy use, etc is all centered around the solar day (more people drive/spend when its light out, etc) so let businesses be up from sunup to sundown (or some relative relationship therein). If you work at a company that requires inflexible hours (how industrial revolution, btw, why not find a different job) then let them set the formula for 1/3 of a solar day and let your computing device tell you when to go to work and how long to stay (or you can look at a quaint old timey "clock"). I predict the people stuck on the old model will quickly give it up once they get used to the feeling of waking up with the sun each day (how nice is that, amiright?)
There was a time when it was very, very dark at night, and it made sense to adjust the schedule so you could actually see.
But with electric lighting, it's pretty much never dark in areas where people live and work. The benefit to daylight savings is much less than it was 100 years ago.
This is the exact reason it is still around; more natural light during the peak active time of day means less energy consumption. And, since we can't get many people to do away with incandescent bulbs, there is a lot of energy to be saved by way of DST. In addition, there is a measurable decrease in traffic fatalities when evening rush-hour takes place during daylight instead of darkness. Electric lights, after all, are no replacement for the sun.
That assumes that this is the end of the story, and not just the tip of the iceberg. Do you really think the fact that you received those six strikes is not getting recorded in preparation to be used as evidence against you in a future lawsuit? And correct me if I'm wrong, but are they really even right now supposedly stopping after the 6th strike? Or do you get the "6th strike" penalty for strike 7, 8, 9 and so on?
Furthermore, these will no doubt become part of the standard usage agreement for online services, allowing immediate termination (without refund). You know what costs more money than pirates? Bandwidth hogs! Providers would LOVE a free-and-clear excuse to kick off the top 1% of users that consume far far far more than 1% of the network resources (and just happen to almost all be bittorrenters), it would improve the service for the other 99% and allow even more over-subscription so they could run their infrastructure closer to the margin, saving them a TON of money. Ignoring this is really not a good idea, providers will eat it up.
100Gbit doesn't sound that fast for a datacenter interconnect.
Not everyone can afford those super fancy Chinese 2 Tbit fiber links. These (obviously) aren't tier 1 markets either, so they should be fine with petty 100 Gig links. If you can find other data centers across central PA that are better connected, do share.
I spend over $50 per month for what is considered the standard offering...15M down, 1M up. I could spend $50 more to get 50/5, but it really isn't worth it. So, yeah, what she says is probably correct - "We're in the business of delivering what consumers want". Translation: Not too many people are willing to pay twice as much for our fastest offering....but at least it isn't capped
The bottom line is that, for the average user, how many simultaneous netflix streams do you need to be able to watch? I have 6 mbit service and as long as browsing is smooth, and netflix/hulu/whatever streams OK, I could care less if it's rated at 6 mbit, 15 mbit, or 500 mbit. It works for the current use case, so why pay any more? When streaming media is affordable (without pirating it) that requires more than 3-5 mbit to watch, maybe consumers will start to see the benefit of faster services.
her response was something like, "I don't think this should exist, but I'm taking what's mine."
And with that one sentence she undid every single argument she stood behind. Had she truly held those beliefs, she would have proclaimed "i won't take SS because it's not mine, it is someone elses and they should be able to keep it". Instead, she responded "i will take SS because as long as someone else can get something for nothing, why the fuck shouldn't I?"
If you don't like it, then build your own fucking network. I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee.
Here let me fix that for you
I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee based on advertising claiming they have unlimited access.
The standard/. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
The car analogy is apt: You bought a car you can drive any time you want 24x7x365 but you also bought a car that was *not* designed to actually be DRIVEN 24x7x365. Try driving it non-stop for a few days and see how well it holds up! You can probably count on spending 2 weeks of every month in the repair shop, if you are determined to keep the car in motion non-stop.
Not to mention the *literal* car analogy: the car lease. You paid a lease so you could "have" a car for 3 years' time. But the fine print (hopefully you read) actually states that if you drive your car more than about 1000 miles/month (32 miles a day, something not hard to do) you will be paying very steep penalties at the end of your use of that car. This is what broadband is doing, except instead of a dollar penalty there is a performance penalty.
This is why roofers are responsible for the orderly arrangement of asphalt squares and not something delicate and precise like nailing two pieces of wood together...
AFAIC there are plenty of inventions, most people aren't noticing them because these things today are much more specialised in nature. What they are really looking for and can't find is huge, gigantic breakthroughs, an antigravity device or perpetuum mobile of some sort. They can't see what is not immediately obvious, and what is not immediately obvious does not become a stand alone product in its own right.
This is it exactly. One of the recent (and yes, hyped) inventions that sprang to mind was the Segway. Was it a really novel combination of a number of advanced technologies (batteries, gyros, sensors, etc.)? Yes, to me that qualifies as the very definition of invention; taking advanced discoveries and combining them in a unique way. Did it change many lives? Probably not (unless you are in the guided tour business.) The simple fact is that we in the developed world have it pretty damn good. We don't "need" any more inventions to make our lives easier, we have plentiful food, water, shelter, and entertainment available to even the lower classes. Sure, we want cool new inventions, and there is probably even a place where they are "needed", but the "age of invention" in the early 20th century happened because life was shitty.
In recent years white LEDs have appeared in more and more places. After early red and even earlier weak blue LEDs, in quite a short time we went from green to blue to white indicator LEDs, and now the white ones are getting ever better.
They're really a pretty miraculous technology: they're at least partially replacing everything from real candles to filament lamps to gas discharge lamps. They're about to unseat low pressure sodium lights as the most efficient streetlights, if they haven't already done so. Meanwhile they can still turn on and off faster than other lamps, and contain smaller amounts of toxic substances than most alternatives. They're a very science fictioney technology happening right here in real life.
There's nothing I like more than a nice white indicator LED to give me a good sense of... Meh. It's just so perfectly balanced between red-for-bad and green-for-good, that its presence is changing our world. Even the ever-affable blue led can't compare.
But seriously, at least we are seeing white now instead of ever increasing intensities of blue. I am tired of covering up blue LEDs with tape so they don't blind me with glare.
How is a billion dollar fine fair when somebody doesn't willfully infringe?
Because it's not three billion dollars? But yes, it would seem that the jury struck the value so ridiculously high (even by the admission of the jury foreman) as punitive damages for willful infringement. The only thing more woefully inadequate as the patent system, at this point, is the court system that is doing all this in the name of upholding the law.
Why wage a war of destruction when 20k$ in equipment and a guy with a biochem degree are sufficient to constantly harrass them and potentially hurt their economy? Make it part of a larget harrassment plan and you might even raise panic levels. Hell, just imagine what the media would do if they heard that AQ successfully deployed a "weaponized" flu strain in the USA.
Well, put this in perspective; we (the USA) have gone to war over *supposed* weapons of mass destruction, and certainly if someone were successfully brewing virulent, unique strains of influenza that would qualify as an *actual* WMD (and be relatively easy to detect and trace) they would bring the wrath of a vengeful god down on their heads.
It's not clear why so many people assume bio weapons are hard to uniquely identify; we are pretty awesome at genomics these days, we would have no problem figuring out how/why a new strain of flu got into circulation without advanced warning (studies are already done annually to determine what vaccines to manufacture) and start pinpointing and black-bagging anyone with the resources to make it, until we find the culprit. They would be summarily gitmo'd for the rest of their life, while their supporters were either directly or financially mutilated. Is that enough deterrent? Probably not, but then again it hasn't happened and supposedly this has been "Easy" since 1998...
The value of everything is purely subjective not just precious metals. The specific value (Price/weight) is what is high compared to other things because of many factors rarity being one of them. But you are right if tons are brought back it will lower the price. This happened many times in history during gold and silver rushes. Pretty soon the market adjusts to the new supply.
Salt is an even more interesting story. For a large part of human history, it was more valued than gold or any other metal. Now, we sprinkle it on our roads because we don't want our hunks of iron and plastic to slide around.
Sure there are lots of resources just floating around out there.
Please explain a safe way to get them down here in any sort of quantity and usable form.
**footfall**
Right idea, wrong question. Getting material back down to the Earth's surface might not be the foremost goal, but getting it close enough to manipulate IS. The thing we need to be wary of is an asteroid mining operation that tries to adjust the orbit of the prospect, with the intent of bringing it close enough to mine for specific materials.
Wealth based on what? Real estate, or other things that are both durable and widely used? Nope. Precious metals. But, what good is gold or platinum if everyone has a brick or two of it lying around? Some things will become more affordable (meaning the wealth of everyone will go up) because once-precious metals will find their way into products in ways that actually improve them, but overall not much will change even if we manage to start bringing home tons and tons of some metal that is only valued because it's rare.
restricting yourself to only open source for fear of abandonment is a little bit like a single guy staying away from all girls because one dumped him once.
This is slashdot, jeez. Car metaphor (simile) please.
Its a "new device" problem. So you get a new device and you want to re-install XYZ, but the dev discontinued it and pulled it from the marketplace. Works fine, just got pulled / sold / merged into something you don't want / whatever.
If its OS I think you can assume it'll be downloadable forever as a.apk from "somewhere" perhaps your own desktop if nowhere else. May never be updated, but who cares if it works.
This raises (for me at least) the interesting question of what causes an app to be pulled from the marketplace... Seems that since there is no cost to leaving it there, that it will stay forever unless the developer is just tired of getting emails about how old\/buggy it is. There are plenty of apps in plain sight in the play store that are years old.
I do think Google could do a better job at inspiring/enforcing open source licenses, given that they have the means to repo the source code quite easily and could probably even go as far as to detect suspected GPL-based tools that are required to share their source. But then again, they are really just in it to make money.
But while net neutrality doesn't allow them to charge for "Netflix" (which is as it should be), there is nothing stopping them from charging extra for the awesome bandwidth that will get to the customers, and to use that extra charge to pay for the infrastructure upgrades. These upgrades during low-Netflix-use times may benefit others.
Their point is that, from a market perspective, a service provider "buying in" to a service like this through upgrades exclusive to Netflix (probably in the way of CDN servers/bandwidth) don't pass that cost on to just the consumers using Netflix. And while there might be some benefit to increased bandwith between you and the CDN hub, there is no guarantee that it will do you any good should you be interested in content that isn't on that CDN. The internet isn't a flat ocean of content that you pay for a little pipe full of, placement matters bigtime when it comes to overall throughput and latency.
Not too long ago Netflix showed a discrepancy between ISPs breaking down somewhere at the 1.8/2.0 megabit realm. Despite service providers almost univerally offering faster "guaranteed" rates than that (3 MBit to 6Mbit, which can be demonstrated with a *regional* bandwidth test) the bandwidth to the Netflix content was markedly lower. Why? Not all 3Mbit/6Mbit/25Mbit pipes are created equal.
Slashdot Mirror
What did AT&T get fined?
What law did they break? Please be specific. The law Mr. Auernheimer broke was rather specific, and his punishment was within the precedent of past use of that law.
Sure, you can argue that there should be laws about stewardship of quasi-private information like email addresses, but to this date there are none so it makes it a bit hard to fine them for something.
Meatspace analogy :
If a bank didn't have a door on it's vault, or any forms of security whatsoever, would you walk in and take out all the money? Even if you proceeded directly to the local police department to report the security flaw and deliver the unguarded money, you'd find yourself in quite a bit of trouble.
Here's a better analogy: you send the bank self-addressed stamped envelopes, and they willingly send private information about their clients back to you in those envelopes.
If those envelopes were in any way a misrepresentation of your legal desire to communicate with your bank (such as an incorrect identity, overstated request, etc) then you, the sender, are guilty of mail fraud. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. The legal system seems to be pretty mysterious to a large part of slashdot...
A better analogy:
A bank has a web server that takes person's name and returns that person's SSN. A "hacker" sends your username and gets your SSN. He does that for several people from the phone directory. Hacker goes to prison for the BANK'S FAULT of exposing SSNs.
It's only the bank's fault for breaching a specific law regarding protection of private information by certain security means (strong authentication, encryption, etc) but if the hacker did anything but flip on his computer (such as construct a program, no matter how small or simple, that specifically talks to the open app on the web server) then he too is guilty of misuse of a computer system under current law.
Debate the efficacy of the law, punishment, etc. all you want, but this is how the current law works, there is no room for debate on that.
He didn't "break in". He sent requests to a publicly-accessible web server, and AT&T sent back private information. This wasn't hacking, or even a DOS attack. AT&T is at fault here.
He wasn't just looking to get to his att.com home page and happened upon a list of email addresses. Getting at those addresses took some deliberate work on his part (a big part of the law is not so much about perceptions of ease/publicity, but in perceptions of *intent*). If you leave your windowshades open a little at home, and someone comes along outside and peeps inside to watch you doing [insert something from imagination here] it is the "peeper" who is committing a crime, not the "peep-ee". In this case Mr. Auernheimer did intend to obtain addresses that were *only going to be exposed to someone deliberately looking for them* and therefore he is afoul of the law. Now, the efficacy of this punishment for such a crime is debatable, but you can't use that as an argument that what he did wasn't illegal, or that such a law has no place.
Let's see who gets my karma first, the groupthink gestapo or the 2nd graders who want to laugh at peepee.
I wouldn't bring any of them back. The only services from Google that I really use are Gmail, Maps and the search engine (includes image search).
The thing is: Google is a bit too large imho. Them killing off a product that lots of people used just creates more room on that market, or perhaps it creates a new one altogether. Now, Google Reader competitors don't have to compete with Google Reader anymore, only among each other. Now, other people may be succesful. This idea sounds good to me.
I don't hope that Google ditches all these projects so much, don't get me wrong. I just think there's a nice upside to all of this. :)
This is it right here. If Google decides to leave a market it just removes what was probably a lousy de-facto standard (like Reader, come on, there are a dozen better ways to do RSS now) and forces people to go find the good stuff.
Are you sure that collecting packets and storing them from unsecured WiFi points is legal?
Unless they are covered by some sort of DMCA (or similar) protection, yes it is legal. Remember, this is basically the same thing that goes on when someone "steals" satellite-broadcast TV by tuning in and decrypting it with home-made hardware, and the only reason that is illegal is because of the copyright protection afforded to the content, it has nothing to do with what the actual "thief" is doing.
If we do away with daylight savings, we should shift all the time zones about 7 or 8 degrees farther west longitude. The sun sets too early in the eastern half (near the 'leading edge') of each time zone.
Why aren't we in a post-timezone era anyway? I mean, we all have computers, right? Switch timekeeping to be TRULY sun-based. Your phone knows your location and can tell you exactly what time of the solar day it is , so just let 6pm be sundown and 6am be sunup, no matter where you are or what time of year it is. We know that traffic, business activity, spending, energy use, etc is all centered around the solar day (more people drive/spend when its light out, etc) so let businesses be up from sunup to sundown (or some relative relationship therein). If you work at a company that requires inflexible hours (how industrial revolution, btw, why not find a different job) then let them set the formula for 1/3 of a solar day and let your computing device tell you when to go to work and how long to stay (or you can look at a quaint old timey "clock"). I predict the people stuck on the old model will quickly give it up once they get used to the feeling of waking up with the sun each day (how nice is that, amiright?)
There was a time when it was very, very dark at night, and it made sense to adjust the schedule so you could actually see.
But with electric lighting, it's pretty much never dark in areas where people live and work. The benefit to daylight savings is much less than it was 100 years ago.
This is the exact reason it is still around; more natural light during the peak active time of day means less energy consumption. And, since we can't get many people to do away with incandescent bulbs, there is a lot of energy to be saved by way of DST. In addition, there is a measurable decrease in traffic fatalities when evening rush-hour takes place during daylight instead of darkness. Electric lights, after all, are no replacement for the sun.
Do you want to be the guy responsible for 500GB of syslog messages about every flight? Talk about making your eyes bleed...
Mar 07 04:08:02.040 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.5 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.050 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.6 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.060 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.7 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.070 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.6 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.080 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.5 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.090 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.6 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.100 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.7 feet
Mar 07 04:08:02.110 UA565 altimeter: altitude 36455.6 feet
That assumes that this is the end of the story, and not just the tip of the iceberg. Do you really think the fact that you received those six strikes is not getting recorded in preparation to be used as evidence against you in a future lawsuit? And correct me if I'm wrong, but are they really even right now supposedly stopping after the 6th strike? Or do you get the "6th strike" penalty for strike 7, 8, 9 and so on?
Furthermore, these will no doubt become part of the standard usage agreement for online services, allowing immediate termination (without refund). You know what costs more money than pirates? Bandwidth hogs! Providers would LOVE a free-and-clear excuse to kick off the top 1% of users that consume far far far more than 1% of the network resources (and just happen to almost all be bittorrenters), it would improve the service for the other 99% and allow even more over-subscription so they could run their infrastructure closer to the margin, saving them a TON of money. Ignoring this is really not a good idea, providers will eat it up.
100Gbit doesn't sound that fast for a datacenter interconnect.
Not everyone can afford those super fancy Chinese 2 Tbit fiber links. These (obviously) aren't tier 1 markets either, so they should be fine with petty 100 Gig links. If you can find other data centers across central PA that are better connected, do share.
I spend over $50 per month for what is considered the standard offering...15M down, 1M up. I could spend $50 more to get 50/5, but it really isn't worth it. So, yeah, what she says is probably correct - "We're in the business of delivering what consumers want". Translation: Not too many people are willing to pay twice as much for our fastest offering. ...but at least it isn't capped
The bottom line is that, for the average user, how many simultaneous netflix streams do you need to be able to watch? I have 6 mbit service and as long as browsing is smooth, and netflix/hulu/whatever streams OK, I could care less if it's rated at 6 mbit, 15 mbit, or 500 mbit. It works for the current use case, so why pay any more? When streaming media is affordable (without pirating it) that requires more than 3-5 mbit to watch, maybe consumers will start to see the benefit of faster services.
her response was something like, "I don't think this should exist, but I'm taking what's mine."
And with that one sentence she undid every single argument she stood behind. Had she truly held those beliefs, she would have proclaimed "i won't take SS because it's not mine, it is someone elses and they should be able to keep it". Instead, she responded "i will take SS because as long as someone else can get something for nothing, why the fuck shouldn't I?"
If you don't like it, then build your own fucking network. I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee.
Here let me fix that for you
I hate people that think they are entitled to full utilization of a network they don't own just because they pay a monthly fee based on advertising claiming they have unlimited access.
The standard /. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
The car analogy is apt: You bought a car you can drive any time you want 24x7x365 but you also bought a car that was *not* designed to actually be DRIVEN 24x7x365. Try driving it non-stop for a few days and see how well it holds up! You can probably count on spending 2 weeks of every month in the repair shop, if you are determined to keep the car in motion non-stop.
Not to mention the *literal* car analogy: the car lease. You paid a lease so you could "have" a car for 3 years' time. But the fine print (hopefully you read) actually states that if you drive your car more than about 1000 miles/month (32 miles a day, something not hard to do) you will be paying very steep penalties at the end of your use of that car. This is what broadband is doing, except instead of a dollar penalty there is a performance penalty.
This is why roofers are responsible for the orderly arrangement of asphalt squares and not something delicate and precise like nailing two pieces of wood together...
AFAIC there are plenty of inventions, most people aren't noticing them because these things today are much more specialised in nature. What they are really looking for and can't find is huge, gigantic breakthroughs, an antigravity device or perpetuum mobile of some sort. They can't see what is not immediately obvious, and what is not immediately obvious does not become a stand alone product in its own right.
This is it exactly. One of the recent (and yes, hyped) inventions that sprang to mind was the Segway. Was it a really novel combination of a number of advanced technologies (batteries, gyros, sensors, etc.)? Yes, to me that qualifies as the very definition of invention; taking advanced discoveries and combining them in a unique way. Did it change many lives? Probably not (unless you are in the guided tour business.) The simple fact is that we in the developed world have it pretty damn good. We don't "need" any more inventions to make our lives easier, we have plentiful food, water, shelter, and entertainment available to even the lower classes. Sure, we want cool new inventions, and there is probably even a place where they are "needed", but the "age of invention" in the early 20th century happened because life was shitty.
In recent years white LEDs have appeared in more and more places. After early red and even earlier weak blue LEDs, in quite a short time we went from green to blue to white indicator LEDs, and now the white ones are getting ever better.
They're really a pretty miraculous technology: they're at least partially replacing everything from real candles to filament lamps to gas discharge lamps. They're about to unseat low pressure sodium lights as the most efficient streetlights, if they haven't already done so. Meanwhile they can still turn on and off faster than other lamps, and contain smaller amounts of toxic substances than most alternatives. They're a very science fictioney technology happening right here in real life.
There's nothing I like more than a nice white indicator LED to give me a good sense of... Meh. It's just so perfectly balanced between red-for-bad and green-for-good, that its presence is changing our world. Even the ever-affable blue led can't compare.
But seriously, at least we are seeing white now instead of ever increasing intensities of blue. I am tired of covering up blue LEDs with tape so they don't blind me with glare.
How is a billion dollar fine fair when somebody doesn't willfully infringe?
Because it's not three billion dollars? But yes, it would seem that the jury struck the value so ridiculously high (even by the admission of the jury foreman) as punitive damages for willful infringement. The only thing more woefully inadequate as the patent system, at this point, is the court system that is doing all this in the name of upholding the law.
Why wage a war of destruction when 20k$ in equipment and a guy with a biochem degree are sufficient to constantly harrass them and potentially hurt their economy? Make it part of a larget harrassment plan and you might even raise panic levels. Hell, just imagine what the media would do if they heard that AQ successfully deployed a "weaponized" flu strain in the USA.
Well, put this in perspective; we (the USA) have gone to war over *supposed* weapons of mass destruction, and certainly if someone were successfully brewing virulent, unique strains of influenza that would qualify as an *actual* WMD (and be relatively easy to detect and trace) they would bring the wrath of a vengeful god down on their heads.
It's not clear why so many people assume bio weapons are hard to uniquely identify; we are pretty awesome at genomics these days, we would have no problem figuring out how/why a new strain of flu got into circulation without advanced warning (studies are already done annually to determine what vaccines to manufacture) and start pinpointing and black-bagging anyone with the resources to make it, until we find the culprit. They would be summarily gitmo'd for the rest of their life, while their supporters were either directly or financially mutilated. Is that enough deterrent? Probably not, but then again it hasn't happened and supposedly this has been "Easy" since 1998...
The value of everything is purely subjective not just precious metals. The specific value (Price/weight) is what is high compared to other things because of many factors rarity being one of them. But you are right if tons are brought back it will lower the price. This happened many times in history during gold and silver rushes. Pretty soon the market adjusts to the new supply.
Salt is an even more interesting story. For a large part of human history, it was more valued than gold or any other metal. Now, we sprinkle it on our roads because we don't want our hunks of iron and plastic to slide around.
Sure there are lots of resources just floating around out there.
Please explain a safe way to get them down here in any sort of quantity and usable form.
**footfall**
Right idea, wrong question. Getting material back down to the Earth's surface might not be the foremost goal, but getting it close enough to manipulate IS. The thing we need to be wary of is an asteroid mining operation that tries to adjust the orbit of the prospect, with the intent of bringing it close enough to mine for specific materials.
Wealth based on what? Real estate, or other things that are both durable and widely used? Nope. Precious metals. But, what good is gold or platinum if everyone has a brick or two of it lying around? Some things will become more affordable (meaning the wealth of everyone will go up) because once-precious metals will find their way into products in ways that actually improve them, but overall not much will change even if we manage to start bringing home tons and tons of some metal that is only valued because it's rare.
restricting yourself to only open source for fear of abandonment is a little bit like a single guy staying away from all girls because one dumped him once.
This is slashdot, jeez. Car metaphor (simile) please.
Its a "new device" problem. So you get a new device and you want to re-install XYZ, but the dev discontinued it and pulled it from the marketplace. Works fine, just got pulled / sold / merged into something you don't want / whatever.
If its OS I think you can assume it'll be downloadable forever as a .apk from "somewhere" perhaps your own desktop if nowhere else. May never be updated, but who cares if it works.
This raises (for me at least) the interesting question of what causes an app to be pulled from the marketplace... Seems that since there is no cost to leaving it there, that it will stay forever unless the developer is just tired of getting emails about how old\/buggy it is. There are plenty of apps in plain sight in the play store that are years old.
I do think Google could do a better job at inspiring/enforcing open source licenses, given that they have the means to repo the source code quite easily and could probably even go as far as to detect suspected GPL-based tools that are required to share their source. But then again, they are really just in it to make money.
But while net neutrality doesn't allow them to charge for "Netflix" (which is as it should be), there is nothing stopping them from charging extra for the awesome bandwidth that will get to the customers, and to use that extra charge to pay for the infrastructure upgrades. These upgrades during low-Netflix-use times may benefit others.
Their point is that, from a market perspective, a service provider "buying in" to a service like this through upgrades exclusive to Netflix (probably in the way of CDN servers/bandwidth) don't pass that cost on to just the consumers using Netflix. And while there might be some benefit to increased bandwith between you and the CDN hub, there is no guarantee that it will do you any good should you be interested in content that isn't on that CDN. The internet isn't a flat ocean of content that you pay for a little pipe full of, placement matters bigtime when it comes to overall throughput and latency.
Not too long ago Netflix showed a discrepancy between ISPs breaking down somewhere at the 1.8/2.0 megabit realm. Despite service providers almost univerally offering faster "guaranteed" rates than that (3 MBit to 6Mbit, which can be demonstrated with a *regional* bandwidth test) the bandwidth to the Netflix content was markedly lower. Why? Not all 3Mbit/6Mbit/25Mbit pipes are created equal.