The issue is whether the deterrent value of the additional screening justifies the billions of dollars spent on additional equipment, the noticeable reduction in personal privacy (Gee, I can subject myself to questionable radiation doses *AND* have some screener in the side room verify whether I was circumsized, OR I can have them manually check the size of my privates), etc etc.
Many in the field argue that the best improvements in air security have come from the deadbolts on the cockpit door and the attitude change of the passengers from sit-back-and-wait-to-be-ransomed (from the old Havana-hijacking days) to the take-them-down-before-they-get-us seen now.
The current checkpoint system is reactive: Richard Reid had explosives in his shoes, now we take off ours. One group had chemicals they *hoped* to combine on-board to create a bomb, so we have the War on Moisture (despite the evidence it would never have worked). The underwear bomber packed PETN in his BVDs, so now we have virtual strip-searching and groping of grandmothers, toddlers, and ostomy patients.
THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TRY THE SAME THING AGAIN, BECAUSE IT DIDN'T WORK THEN.
Profiling is the best solution (ref: El Al), but the government is too concerned with potential discrimination lawsuits to follow through.
The Ben Franklin quote is over-used but still all too applicable: Those who would trade temporary safety for essential liberty deserve neither.
The difference between the B&N case and the various handset/tablet makers is that the latter can just add the MS danegeld to the consumers' final bill, where for B&N the Nook is simply an 'enabler' for their main business of selling you reading materials. They want to hold down the cost to hook you easier and recoup their costs quicker. Why pay royalties to MS on what B&N sees as basically a digital shopping bag?
Cozying up to the MAFIAA: "all this movie piracy is costing your people trade jobs in set building, craft services, etc etc etc". Just as much BS as they're pushing at Congress, but threatening the "little people" that they're losing work.
>> This changed when firms went public and came to be run by employees rather than partners
Not "by employees", but by the other investment groups (401k's, pension funds, etc), who want their guaranteed quarterly dividends or-else-they'll-throw-the-bums-out, leading to riskier investments in order to placate them. Combine that with situations like the CRA, where the banks are told on the one hand to lend prudently, but on the other told they'll be penalized if they fail to lend enough in depressed areas, by definition a riskier prospect.
Without the work of dmr and the rest of the 1127 group at Bell Labs, the computing landscape we take for granted would be radically different, and many of us would be in other lines of work.
UNIX isn't the perfect OS, but it does better, in more environments, than anything else out there. Jobs and Torvalds would have very different lives if not for the work Ritchie did.
And look at what happened when they busted Ma Bell up, two of the Baby Bells ended up assimilating most of their sibs and the legacy LD landline providers: Bell Atlantic/NYNEX + MCI --> Verizon, Southwest Bell/Pac Bell/Ameritech/Bellsouth + legacy-Ma --> "The New AT&T" (ptui). Mountain Bell, er, US West, was bought up by Qwest during the dot-com bubble, now being acquired by CenturyLink.
There's something to be said for economies of scale, the problem is the laissez-faire regulatory structure that's let them and the cable broadband providers pretty well bend us all over the last 15-20 years as the legacy landline business dries up in favor of mobile and VOIP.
Given the small number of people at the $1M income level, realistically how much money is a surtax going to bring in against the staggering deficit the US has created? Is this an honest effort at increasing revenue or a political effort to point at "Those People Over There Who Aren't Paying Enough" rather than cutting programs like Federal bunny inspectors, etc?
They're a *bookseller*; to riff on the "Gillette strategy", the Nook's the handle and the e-books/e-mags are the consumable blades. That's why they told MS to get stuffed on their patent-troll lawsuit; they want to minimize the cost of the reader to get you hooked, then sell you content. Paying danegeld to Ballmer isn't part of that strategy.
For me, I'm interested in the 7" form factor, but if it's locked to one book source, not so much. A vanilla Android tablet will support the Kindle *AND* Nook apps, Aldiko reader, etc. A hacked Nook Color (giving them points for telling off MS) might be just about right.
The situation you describe is reliance on "herd immunity": if enough of the population is vaccinated that *your* exposure risk is negligible, then yes, there's a slightly higher risk of harm from the actual vaccine than the disease, because there's little-to-no chance of anyone around you can infect you with the disease.
The situation *now* is that because so many families have skipped the vaccinations because of the Andrew Wakefields and Jenny McCarthy's of the world raising fears of vaccine-triggered autism that the situation is now reversed: enough of the population around you have *voluntarily* skipped the immunization that you're at greater risk of the disease.
Ye fscking godz: I'm enough of a geez to remember the days of closed pools and iron lungs because of polio risk. The idea that a parent would *voluntarily* put their kid at risk for diseases because of some talking head on the TV infuriates me.
You're off by an order of magnitude: Sun offered Google a license for $100M; Google declined and did a clean-room implementation, Dalvik, which differed from the Sun JVM; *SUN* never complained about patents (in fact Gosling commented after leaving that the Oracle lawyers were all but foaming at the mouth when said patents were discussed during acquisition talks), then *ORACLE* (aka One Raving A*hole Called Larry Ellison) promptly filed suit wanting danegeld from Google for every Android handset/tablet/whatever that went out.
The copyright issues have been dropped, since Google did a clean-room rework, and many of the patents are being reexamined, IIRC some are already being called for obviousness and/or prior art. Oracle is now complaining about staying the case while the re-examination continues because they'd rather get the money now, er, their IP is that valuable. Right.
I think they'll let the hardware companies take the initial charge, and jump in only if it looks like it's hurting overall adoption. The phone & tablet makers are just adding the MS danegeld to the bottom line, and Android takeup doesn't seem to be hurting much for it.
Barnes & Noble, seeing the Nook as their enabler to sell you e-books ("Gillette strategy"), and so wanting to hold down their unit cost, refused to sign Microsoft's NDA, called out the patents in their suit as obvious, and explicitly accused them of trying to strangle Android adoption via patent trolling. I'm tempted to run out and buy a Nook Color just to thank them for flicking off the Monopolist.
Has it already become so obvious to the OEMs that WinTab 8 will be such an mind-boggling disaster that the only way MS can get it out to the marketplace is to make the hardware themselves? At which point aren't the traditional hardware OEMs going to start having second thoughts about supporting Microsoft on their other product lines?
Nokia's already feeling the burn from having joined themselves to the hip with Redmond, seeing their market freeze while consumers wait for whatever hybrid spawn the two produce, or just running to the other mobile platforms (Android/RIM/IOS). I'd have to think tablet makers debating whether to work with Windows are having their minds made up for them.
>> I can't help but wonder if Google isn't providing assistance and moral support to B&N, in the B&N defense of Android.
I'd chalk it up as something simpler: the dead-tree book market is imploding, B&N is trying to compete with Kindle by offering the Nook, and suddenly here comes MS wanting a cut off the top for claimed violations of dubious patents. B&N is refusing to take the hit on their declining bottom line just to satisfy a patent troll.
Of course, MS hasn't shown the spine to date to just go ahead and file against the Googleplex; they're going after the handset/tablet/e-reader makers instead because they figure they'll have a better chance of them rolling over and paying the danegeld. Nice to see B&N refusing to play the game.
Like many here, she was the first Companion I saw, with the Tom Baker episodes from the 70s. Unlike most of them before or since, she held her own with Baker (as I later saw she had with Pertwee). Of all the companions to bring back to the new series, she was the obvious choice, and my grandkids have enjoyed the spin-off Sarah Jane Adventures, which led to them now watching the Tom Baker episodes as well.
She will be missed as much as she was loved by fans worldwide. Requesicat in pace, Elisabeth.
>> It's more akin to Windows NT for MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha chips.
And how long were *those* supported? This will survive only until the sales figures demonstrate the pitiful penetration of Windows in the tablet market vs. iPad and Android, then written off (as were the RISC ports) as a bad investment of time/$$$.
Without major app vendors jumping in with ARM ports of their x86 portfolios, this will be, like WinPhone 7, too-little-too-late.
There's an valid argument to be made that part of Apple's sudden willingness to discuss bringing the iPhone to Verizon was fear of the wildly successful "Droid" branding and being closed out of that market; remember Verizon's base is roughly equivalent to AT&Ts. At this point there can't be much growth left in the AT&T base, and the Android 'swarm' overtook all others in smartphone sales in the past quarter.
At this point, my car radio is only there to push the Sirius signal out to the speakers, and VERY occasionally, a local station for traffic info during rush hour. I have a ton of music stashed on the flash card in my Droid, and I'll use Pandora if I want more, thanks.
The MAFIAA probably wants the FM chips in there because they already have the royalty deal worked out with the broadcasters and it saves them another legal fight to leech onto the wallets of someone new.
Having left Netscape just before Sun and AOL carved it up between them, I have a certain fondness for what's now the "Sun Java Server..." products, what's left of the old Netscape server suite.
My personal bet on their long-term survival post-Oracle are, sadly, poor. Oracle already has a ton of products in the middleware space, all DB dependent. The likelihood they'll keep any of the legacy-Sun stuff around when it doesn't prop up the database: are you kidding?
Comcast exec's are on the record as having proposed "double-dipping" with their ISP service: charge the users for Internet access, then turn around and charge major websites a premium for access to Comcast subscribers or face throttling, regardless that said sites are already paying a bandwidth provider for their own access.
The issue isn't being able to buy bandwidth for your site, it's about having to get past a potential paywall put up by consumer ISPs for access to their customers.
IBM's legal fees no doubt dwarf any possible judgment they'll ever receive from the SCOundrels in Utah, but failing to litigate would only encourage other failing software companies to go after Big Blue's deep pockets. The PR value of defending Linux from a would-be IP troll is also not to be ignored.
Don't watch much TV, so I was well behind the curve when I finally spent on an HD flatscreen last fall. When I called up Comcast to find out what the upcharge for HD was, DirectTV was running a special. I now have an rooftop dish, HD DVR and SD box for the kids' room for about half what I was paying Comcast for two SD set-top boxes before. The "rain fade" issue has hit us exactly twice for under 5 minutes total since November. If AT&T would get me full 6 Mb service (just far enough from the CO they're only offering 3 Mb at my place) I'd tell Comcast off completely.
Because the studios execs are scared crapless at the prospect of putting buckets of money into a movie and see it tank. They'd much rather "reboot"/"re-imagine"/rehash old plotlines that sold before than actually take a risk.
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The issue is whether the deterrent value of the additional screening justifies the billions of dollars spent on additional equipment, the noticeable reduction in personal privacy (Gee, I can subject myself to questionable radiation doses *AND* have some screener in the side room verify whether I was circumsized, OR I can have them manually check the size of my privates), etc etc.
Many in the field argue that the best improvements in air security have come from the deadbolts on the cockpit door and the attitude change of the passengers from sit-back-and-wait-to-be-ransomed (from the old Havana-hijacking days) to the take-them-down-before-they-get-us seen now.
The current checkpoint system is reactive: Richard Reid had explosives in his shoes, now we take off ours. One group had chemicals they *hoped* to combine on-board to create a bomb, so we have the War on Moisture (despite the evidence it would never have worked). The underwear bomber packed PETN in his BVDs, so now we have virtual strip-searching and groping of grandmothers, toddlers, and ostomy patients.
THEY'RE NOT GOING TO TRY THE SAME THING AGAIN, BECAUSE IT DIDN'T WORK THEN.
Profiling is the best solution (ref: El Al), but the government is too concerned with potential discrimination lawsuits to follow through.
The Ben Franklin quote is over-used but still all too applicable: Those who would trade temporary safety for essential liberty deserve neither.
The difference between the B&N case and the various handset/tablet makers is that the latter can just add the MS danegeld to the consumers' final bill, where for B&N the Nook is simply an 'enabler' for their main business of selling you reading materials. They want to hold down the cost to hook you easier and recoup their costs quicker. Why pay royalties to MS on what B&N sees as basically a digital shopping bag?
>> Why the hell is AFL-CIO for SOPA?
Cozying up to the MAFIAA: "all this movie piracy is costing your people trade jobs in set building, craft services, etc etc etc". Just as much BS as they're pushing at Congress, but threatening the "little people" that they're losing work.
>> This changed when firms went public and came to be run by employees rather than partners
Not "by employees", but by the other investment groups (401k's, pension funds, etc), who want their guaranteed quarterly dividends or-else-they'll-throw-the-bums-out, leading to riskier investments in order to placate them. Combine that with situations like the CRA, where the banks are told on the one hand to lend prudently, but on the other told they'll be penalized if they fail to lend enough in depressed areas, by definition a riskier prospect.
Without the work of dmr and the rest of the 1127 group at Bell Labs, the computing landscape we take for granted would be radically different, and many of us would be in other lines of work.
UNIX isn't the perfect OS, but it does better, in more environments, than anything else out there. Jobs and Torvalds would have very different lives if not for the work Ritchie did.
Requiescat in pace, dmr.
And look at what happened when they busted Ma Bell up, two of the Baby Bells ended up assimilating most of their sibs and the legacy LD landline providers: Bell Atlantic/NYNEX + MCI --> Verizon, Southwest Bell/Pac Bell/Ameritech/Bellsouth + legacy-Ma --> "The New AT&T" (ptui). Mountain Bell, er, US West, was bought up by Qwest during the dot-com bubble, now being acquired by CenturyLink.
There's something to be said for economies of scale, the problem is the laissez-faire regulatory structure that's let them and the cable broadband providers pretty well bend us all over the last 15-20 years as the legacy landline business dries up in favor of mobile and VOIP.
Given the small number of people at the $1M income level, realistically how much money is a surtax going to bring in against the staggering deficit the US has created? Is this an honest effort at increasing revenue or a political effort to point at "Those People Over There Who Aren't Paying Enough" rather than cutting programs like Federal bunny inspectors, etc?
They're a *bookseller*; to riff on the "Gillette strategy", the Nook's the handle and the e-books/e-mags are the consumable blades. That's why they told MS to get stuffed on their patent-troll lawsuit; they want to minimize the cost of the reader to get you hooked, then sell you content. Paying danegeld to Ballmer isn't part of that strategy.
For me, I'm interested in the 7" form factor, but if it's locked to one book source, not so much. A vanilla Android tablet will support the Kindle *AND* Nook apps, Aldiko reader, etc. A hacked Nook Color (giving them points for telling off MS) might be just about right.
The situation you describe is reliance on "herd immunity": if enough of the population is vaccinated that *your* exposure risk is negligible, then yes, there's a slightly higher risk of harm from the actual vaccine than the disease, because there's little-to-no chance of anyone around you can infect you with the disease.
The situation *now* is that because so many families have skipped the vaccinations because of the Andrew Wakefields and Jenny McCarthy's of the world raising fears of vaccine-triggered autism that the situation is now reversed: enough of the population around you have *voluntarily* skipped the immunization that you're at greater risk of the disease.
Ye fscking godz: I'm enough of a geez to remember the days of closed pools and iron lungs because of polio risk. The idea that a parent would *voluntarily* put their kid at risk for diseases because of some talking head on the TV infuriates me.
You're off by an order of magnitude: Sun offered Google a license for $100M; Google declined and did a clean-room implementation, Dalvik, which differed from the Sun JVM; *SUN* never complained about patents (in fact Gosling commented after leaving that the Oracle lawyers were all but foaming at the mouth when said patents were discussed during acquisition talks), then *ORACLE* (aka One Raving A*hole Called Larry Ellison) promptly filed suit wanting danegeld from Google for every Android handset/tablet/whatever that went out.
The copyright issues have been dropped, since Google did a clean-room rework, and many of the patents are being reexamined, IIRC some are already being called for obviousness and/or prior art. Oracle is now complaining about staying the case while the re-examination continues because they'd rather get the money now, er, their IP is that valuable. Right.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
I think they'll let the hardware companies take the initial charge, and jump in only if it looks like it's hurting overall adoption. The phone & tablet makers are just adding the MS danegeld to the bottom line, and Android takeup doesn't seem to be hurting much for it.
Barnes & Noble, seeing the Nook as their enabler to sell you e-books ("Gillette strategy"), and so wanting to hold down their unit cost, refused to sign Microsoft's NDA, called out the patents in their suit as obvious, and explicitly accused them of trying to strangle Android adoption via patent trolling. I'm tempted to run out and buy a Nook Color just to thank them for flicking off the Monopolist.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
>> What if the Sheriff's office got to keep all the funds that it confiscated? No doubt there'd be a lot more arrests and confiscated funds.
Look up "civil forfeiture" then come back.....
Has it already become so obvious to the OEMs that WinTab 8 will be such an mind-boggling disaster that the only way MS can get it out to the marketplace is to make the hardware themselves? At which point aren't the traditional hardware OEMs going to start having second thoughts about supporting Microsoft on their other product lines?
Nokia's already feeling the burn from having joined themselves to the hip with Redmond, seeing their market freeze while consumers wait for whatever hybrid spawn the two produce, or just running to the other mobile platforms (Android/RIM/IOS). I'd have to think tablet makers debating whether to work with Windows are having their minds made up for them.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
>> I can't help but wonder if Google isn't providing assistance and moral support to B&N, in the B&N defense of Android.
I'd chalk it up as something simpler: the dead-tree book market is imploding, B&N is trying to compete with Kindle by offering the Nook, and suddenly here comes MS wanting a cut off the top for claimed violations of dubious patents. B&N is refusing to take the hit on their declining bottom line just to satisfy a patent troll.
Of course, MS hasn't shown the spine to date to just go ahead and file against the Googleplex; they're going after the handset/tablet/e-reader makers instead because they figure they'll have a better chance of them rolling over and paying the danegeld. Nice to see B&N refusing to play the game.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Like many here, she was the first Companion I saw, with the Tom Baker episodes from the 70s. Unlike most of them before or since, she held her own with Baker (as I later saw she had with Pertwee). Of all the companions to bring back to the new series, she was the obvious choice, and my grandkids have enjoyed the spin-off Sarah Jane Adventures, which led to them now watching the Tom Baker episodes as well.
She will be missed as much as she was loved by fans worldwide. Requesicat in pace, Elisabeth.
You and a few thousand other Whovians, friend, myself included.....
>> It's more akin to Windows NT for MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha chips.
And how long were *those* supported? This will survive only until the sales figures demonstrate the pitiful penetration of Windows in the tablet market vs. iPad and Android, then written off (as were the RISC ports) as a bad investment of time/$$$.
Without major app vendors jumping in with ARM ports of their x86 portfolios, this will be, like WinPhone 7, too-little-too-late.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
There's an valid argument to be made that part of Apple's sudden willingness to discuss bringing the iPhone to Verizon was fear of the wildly successful "Droid" branding and being closed out of that market; remember Verizon's base is roughly equivalent to AT&Ts. At this point there can't be much growth left in the AT&T base, and the Android 'swarm' overtook all others in smartphone sales in the past quarter.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
At this point, my car radio is only there to push the Sirius signal out to the speakers, and VERY occasionally, a local station for traffic info during rush hour. I have a ton of music stashed on the flash card in my Droid, and I'll use Pandora if I want more, thanks.
The MAFIAA probably wants the FM chips in there because they already have the royalty deal worked out with the broadcasters and it saves them another legal fight to leech onto the wallets of someone new.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Having left Netscape just before Sun and AOL carved it up between them, I have a certain fondness for what's now the "Sun Java Server ..." products, what's left of the old Netscape server suite.
My personal bet on their long-term survival post-Oracle are, sadly, poor. Oracle already has a ton of products in the middleware space, all DB dependent. The likelihood they'll keep any of the legacy-Sun stuff around when it doesn't prop up the database: are you kidding?
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Comcast exec's are on the record as having proposed "double-dipping" with their ISP service: charge the users for Internet access, then turn around and charge major websites a premium for access to Comcast subscribers or face throttling, regardless that said sites are already paying a bandwidth provider for their own access.
The issue isn't being able to buy bandwidth for your site, it's about having to get past a potential paywall put up by consumer ISPs for access to their customers.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
IBM's legal fees no doubt dwarf any possible judgment they'll ever receive from the SCOundrels in Utah, but failing to litigate would only encourage other failing software companies to go after Big Blue's deep pockets. The PR value of defending Linux from a would-be IP troll is also not to be ignored.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!
Don't watch much TV, so I was well behind the curve when I finally spent on an HD flatscreen last fall. When I called up Comcast to find out what the upcharge for HD was, DirectTV was running a special. I now have an rooftop dish, HD DVR and SD box for the kids' room for about half what I was paying Comcast for two SD set-top boxes before. The "rain fade" issue has hit us exactly twice for under 5 minutes total since November. If AT&T would get me full 6 Mb service (just far enough from the CO they're only offering 3 Mb at my place) I'd tell Comcast off completely.
The NYT review at the time had it right: "Sorry Uma, there's only ONE Emma..."
Because the studios execs are scared crapless at the prospect of putting buckets of money into a movie and see it tank. They'd much rather "reboot"/"re-imagine"/rehash old plotlines that sold before than actually take a risk.
SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!