Drones can currently only operate in theaters where we have complete air superiority. In a theater where the opposing ground forces had effective surface-to-air or air-to-air defenses drones wouldn't be very practical.
There is a push for the development of UCAVs that would be able to carry air-to-air weapons as well as more directly engage surface-to-air targets but there's still limitations like communication lag or communications in general. A stealthy fighter can operate as long as it has fuel and it doesn't really matter if it loses its data link for some portion of a mission. UCAVs don't yet have that ability and any major communication disruption would be a mission or drone ending problem.
That's not to say these problems can't be surmounted or that UCAVs are useless in two-way firefights but it will still be a while until they're as effective as piloted aircraft. So until UCAVs are capable of gaining total air superiority all by themselves (which is difficult but doable) some piloted craft will still be needed. Whether those craft should be F-35s is a totally separate issue.
Complaints about HTML/Web apps not feeling "native" is a canard. Hundreds of millions of people use web pages every single day, from the most technical neckbeards to the least technical AOL grandmas. Now non-technical users probably aren't spending much time on sites with bullshit user experiences but there's a mind boggling number of websites people use daily. Native apps are also rarely bastions of usability and paragons of user experience virtue. Web apps don't need to "feel native" because the appeal of "native" apps doesn't really exist in the minds of actual users. These hundreds of millions of users aren't being held back from anything because they're using web pages instead of native apps.
Users want services and content and they're happy to access them through a web browser. In fact a web browser makes it easier for them in most cases because they don't need any special software before they access said content and services. Whatever device they're using likely has a web browser accessible. If they see a URL they can pop open their laptop or pull out their phone and access it immediately.
When they're on their phone they don't want it to take forever to load when they're stuck in a slow 3G area with no WiFi. They want it to work on the iPhone they just bought as well as their Windows PC back home. If they buy a Mac for their kids they want it to work on that as well.
The major features HTML5 added were ones that help web pages not feel more like native apps but have better interaction with clients. Clients aren't as limited as they were in the past (I remember a time before the <img> tag) and a richer DOM is important for the increased amount of work (Javascript, CSS, etc) being done on the client side.
These people complaining about performance on mobiles is just jackassery. The mobile web experience had the same sort of constraints that native mobile applications have. Mobiles have tiny batteries, often have small screens, are controlled with fingertips rather than mice, and often have slow high latency internet connections. Again it goes back to graceful degradation that users are already expecting. Maybe the mobile version doesn't load the 2MB PNG background and the uncompressed 1MB Javascript from a totally different server (requiring a second set of DNS lookups) out of which you only used two functions. The mobile native app wouldn't have the 1024x1024 icons or the 50MB 1080p intro movie bundled with it either.
HTML5 doesn't need to bring a more desktop-like experience to mobiles. It also doesn't need to make apps that look native. It needs to be used to make web apps functional and do their business with the least cognitive load on users as possible. It should scale well no matter how large the screen is or how shitty the connection speed. Instead of all singing all dancing bullshit I'd much rather see a page load on my phone and then let my fucking CPU go to sleep so I don't waste my battery trying to read a tweet or a Facebook message.
What the fuck does this even mean? People move their Flash app to HTML5 and then the millions upon millions of iPhone and iPad users in addition to the millions upon millions of desktop users get to use it. How is this bad for anyone? Why would anyone need to "make a move"?
There's been no sales figures showing actual installed base of Android devices. There's been some recent quarters where Android devices outsold iPhones. Before that the iPhone handily outsold Android. This means that the installed base of Android phones is unlikely to be larger than that of the iPhone despite the increase in sales over the past year. Quarter over quarter market share figures don't tell you about the number of devices in people's hands.
Remember that iOS runs on iPod touches as well as iPhones. Apple sells about ten million iPods a quarter and their ASP (average sale price) has increased which means the more expensive iPod touch is a larger share of iPod sales than in the past. At the very least iPod touches add a few million iOS devices to the installed base.
Then there's the millions of iPads being sold every quarter. Over 11 million for 2011 as of the last quarterly report. So iOS devices not only outnumber Android devices in quarterly sales but in installed base.
Installed base is the important number for developers and accessory manufacturers. The only numbers we've seen about Android sales have been quarterly market share numbers. Even these numbers have only been slightly higher than iPhone sales. Android phones haven't been leading iPhones long enough to have a larger installed base. Worse for Android is a lot of unit sales aren't really practical to count for the platform since they're single use devices like eBook readers so only phones really expand developers' potential markets.
His point was clearly stated, he made the claim the iPad can't play movies with Handbrake or connect to a TV via HDMI. Both of these are simply ridiculous things to say. Shit, Handbrake has an output preset named iPad.
As for the buying accessories, there's definitely a valid use case for a built-in HDMI port. However with the adapter I bought for my iPad I got a free HDMI output upgrade for my iPhone. There's downsides to adapters but there's also iodized to device ecosystems. The single adapter I bought increased the utility of multiple devices and gives me an extra feature checkbox next time I upgrade one of those devices.
None of the movies I've ripped with Handbrake work on my iPad? Shit I guess the HDMI adapter I just bought doesn't work either! Why didn't you tell me I couldn't do those things before I bought it?
Wait, you're full of shit and I can do all that with my iPad. Does the iPad also take 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file?
Your fantasy user is just about as likely to jump on Amazon's service as they are Apple's. You're describing a trope that doesn't bother upgrading to any new service or really buy any new devices. Why bother spending a whole bunch of money targeting them with there's millions of other users happily spending money on new things?
Granted XP is ancient and not very supported, but its still heavily used.
Supporting older OSes is not free. If iCloud's was Apple's only product this might be a problem but it's a follow on product. People with Windows XP can still spend money on iPods, iPhones, and the iTunes Store. Their iOS devices will get to use iCloud services and when they decide to upgrade their computer (to a PC or Mac) they'll get to use iCloud on there as well.
I'm no fan of Twitter in general as there's an enormous signal to noise ratio but for people that use it it's a convenient service. These astronomers could have set up a network of RSS feeds where events get posted and diligently check them. They could have posted to Usenet and hoped the message propagated fast enough to be useful.
Instead they had Twitter accounts set up so they could send a message by whatever cell phone they had in their pocket at the time and all their followers could pick up on it. They could also just post a message with a hash tag which is a home-grown taxonomy for tweets. Joe Amateurastronomer could have used the #newsupernovas hash tag which professional astronomers might follow. They then turn their nice high powered telescopes and get a spectrum of the event. Astronomers on mountain top observatories with cellular signals but not necessarily reliable internet connections can still receive and send Twitter messages.
The downside to setting up a network of RSS feeds is it's a top-down organization. Astronomers are only going to check the feeds in the "official" list as there's no way Joe Amateurastronomer will get a professional astronomer to look at their feed. With Usenet messages propagate slowly anymore, likely too slow to be useful in this particular situation. That of course assumes astronomers bother to read and post to Usenet groups as so many have been overrun with spam and general crap postings. Few people are willing to run their own network of Usenet servers, they might as well just use more readily (and freely) available web-based systems.
So they are cutting off all international calling as well? They are shooting down satellites? Checking all travelers at borders for any device which might contain data? You could get a lot of tweets on a microsd card.
You're asserting in your original comment that Syria somehow hasn't blocked off access to the outside world because they haven't shot down Inmarsat satellites or that you could shove a MicroSD card up your ass and pretend it's the internet.
Syria can effectively but their population off from the outside world but closing down internet and long distance telephone lines. For the tiny fraction of the population that have satellite transceivers available there's still a link to the outside but for a majority of the population they're entirely cut off. It's also fairly easy for them to clamp down on internal communications as they only need to send a few soldiers with rifles to the handful of television and radio stations that exist in any city. Shutting down phone lines also isn't terribly difficult since they can do the same thing with PSTN switches and endpoints. They exist in buildings and buildings can have their power shut off or their operators arrested.
Just because the Syrian government can't shoot down communication satellites or search everyone's rectum for MicroSD cards doesn't mean that they haven't effectively isolated their population from the rest of the world. I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest, shoving microchips up your ass isn't an effective means of communication. Besides, having people memorize the messages is more effective because memories don't show up on an x-ray.
They can easily do all of those things (save shoot down a satellite). Even with a satellite transceiver unless the average citizen had one before the fighting started along with an active account to be able to use it, most people don't have satellite internet access. Of course someone with such a transceiver could send messages for people but there's a pretty big danger there as the government might not have any qualms about putting a bullet in their forehead if they get caught.
Effective alternate communication systems are often only useful if they're active and in place before shit goes down. Trying to deploy such systems once martial law has been declared and fighting has started is extraordinarily difficult. Foreign nationals like members of the press aren't likely to be willing to smuggle messages out as they'll get shot on charges of espionage if the Syrian government suspects they're doing any smuggling.
None of that is to say information can't leak out from a country like Syria that cuts off the internet and closes their borders but it's not easy. It's also not without its mortal dangers.
Companies like Facebook and Google like the "free service with tracking" model because the only cost to new customers is their privacy which is often charged so subtly they don't notice it's missing. They can also resell their user' information in perpetuity even if they stop using the service since they've got an archive of all their activity. A subscription fee is only usable once but demographic and tracking data can be used forever.
The ultimate advertising service will be one where Google or Facebook can predict with reasonable certainty viewers will buy a service or product giving the advertiser a massive conversion rate. Right now an advertiser can only hope for a fraction of a percent conversion rate (someone buying the advertised thing). Facebook and Google would love to be able to tell advertisers exactly what people will buy and will do just about anything to collect that information.
While a lot of people have HDTVs there remains a massive installed base of SDTVs. When the Wii came out HDTVs had even less market penetration than they do today. From Nintendo's perspective it made little sense to spend more money on a HD capable chipset when a majority of the market wouldn't benefit from the extra power. Both the PS3 and Xbox have suffered from incorporating bleeding edge technology. The Xbox had a phenomenal failure rate for years and the PS3 was ridiculously expensive and still sold at a loss. It's had to drop features to get it's price to reasonable levels.
Nintendo has a very valid strategy, use cheaper technology and focus on getting the most out of it. I think they learned some lessons from the N64. The N64's development frustrated because it was using technologies in previously untried combinations. The N64 was a late arrival compared to the PlayStation and Saturn. The PlayStation particularly succeeded despite using "inferior" technology like a 32bit CPU, less RAM, and a CD-ROM drive.
Chasing the most advanced is rarely the best plan for a console. If the console itself doesn't break even or make a profit then the otherwise lucrative game licenses have to make up the slack. This means your gaming division is losing money until the console can be sold for a profit. Nintendo has chosen to make a profit on their console rather than try to get it to push 1080p video when most customers will never see it.
Adobe's specifications for RTMP that they've released are incomplete at best and incompetent a worst. It's pretty much impossible to implement an RTMP server without a fair amount of reverse engineering effort. Not only does this open the implementer to lawsuits from Adobe but it's also prone to incompatible errors. Because HTTP encapsulation is optional and something that needs to be provided by the server you have to hope whatever implementation you're using is fast and clusters well.
With HTTP Live Streaming the server can be a bog standard HTTP server, streaming logic is in the client and the tool that writes the playlist file. All of the techniques for optimizing HTTP resouces (clustering, etc) work the same for Live Streaming as they would for normal video hosting. You can also dump the source files on whatever CDN you have available rather than requiring it support a custom server package.
By this argument anything that pays for an externality somehow directly funds Planned Parenthood. Your tax or utility payments are paying for trash pickup at Planned Parenthood, as are the other tenants in the strip mall where an office is located. Shit you're paying for a Planned Parenthood abortion right this second because you've paid taxes that paid for the road leading to the strip mall where an office is located. In short you've got a bullshit argument.
Like many non-profit organizations Planned Parenthood maintains sectioned off budgets. The money raised for abortion services (counseling et al) is 100% separate from the rest of their funds. Government subsidies to the organization can never be put into the abortion services fund nor can money from that fund be used to pay their electric bill. If we defund the 97% of the organization that isn't involved with abortion services they can't just shift money from that fund to pay the utility bill, the bill will just go unpaid or the office will close.
It seems obvious that you don't care about poor women since you didn't bother really researching services PP provides. In your mind you've equated the whole organization with abortion and are willing to fuck over millions of women not getting abortions there because of it. Without free condoms from PP there will be more unwanted pregnancies and therebwill be no counsellors available to tell the girls there's options available besides abortions. It's not like back alley abortions won't still occur. Your short-sightedness is actually very dangerous.
Temper tantrum? Not hardly. Your line of thinking suggests I get to bank my free time somewhere so I can withdraw it at a later date. I in fact have no such free time bank, when I have the opportunity for leisure I need to take it or lose it forever.
If it's Sunday afternoon I've got a friend over to watch a movie. If that movie isn't available to watch immediately on either Netflix or iTunes we may not have another chance in a while to watch that movie. When the DVD arrives from Netflix or Amazon on Wednesday my friend isn't at my house any longer. The opportunity to watch a movie together passed by on Sunday while we were sitting around wishing it was on iTunes or Netflix.
There's little reason to reward Amazon or the movie studio for the studio's decision to keep a movie off Netflix, iTunes, or any other streaming service. Buying the movie in a form that is not convenient tells the movie studio that their current behavior is acceptable and they should not do anything to change. As a customer you get to vote on company's decisions in only one fashion, by providing or withholding your money from them. You can't begrudgingly by their product irrespective of its ability to meet your demands and expect them to respond to your passive aggression.
The huge flaw in your argument about iPods is you are not a prospective customer. You've decided that the iPod is too expensive for your tastes/budget so you'll go elsewhere for a media player. Apple has lost $0 on your choice, they've not gained $250 but they certainly have not lost anything. At no point are you a lost sale, you're simply a non-customer. There's really no such thing as a lost sale since until money has changed hands and the revenue gained by a seller, no sale has occurred.
This is the same logic that the RIAA and such use against piracy. They posit that if you pirate an album rather than buy it than the record company has "lost" a sale. They've lost absolutely nothing. At no point did their capital assets decrease because you chose not to purchase the album. The extension of this goofy logic is every non-customer represents a "lost" sale. That would mean if I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga and never buy any of her music than I have cost the record industry in revenue the total cost of her released album. Non-customers are not lost sales, they are non-customers.
This is not the case for patents submitted to the GSM spec. All companies submitting patents to be used in the GSM spec agreed to offer them under RAND terms.
Research at companies would dry up if they couldn't get some sort of protection for the stuff they come up with. If patent protections were abolished tomorrow you're correct in that hundreds of startups would start making knock-off phones (and whatever else). The problem isn't tomorrow's startups but the drying up of research the following day. Shareholders aren't going to allow millions or billions of dollars to be invested in R&D if a startup is just going to come in and undercut them using all of their own research. Those big companies won't be so big after a few years of being undercut by startups and a freeze in advancement in the market. Without the big companies acting as the startups' R&D departments the market isn't going to advance at all. The little companies will all just go out of business with lots of investment dollars wasted.
Now that isn't to say stupid patents aren't granted and that companies don't abuse the patent system. I'd love to see some reform in the abuse areas but it's really short sighted to complain about patent protection. The market short sighted and often times stupid. It will consume things at lower and lower prices until its saturated. No newcomers will be able to make money at the saturation point once you eliminate strong patent protections because any innovation will just be copied by everyone and no one will be able to differentiate in the market longer than a quarter or two. You end up back at the system you complain about now (which is a bit of hyperbole anyways) with no startups being able to enter the market.
Your comments about "just checking e-mail" is a bit of a canard when discussing CPU power, it no longer means what you imply it to mean. For me "just checking my e-mail" means downloading several megabytes of data from an IMAP server, sorting it into appropriate folders, and then updating some form of in-memory list of messages that my Smart Mailbox rules sort further to display some items on screen. When I select one of those messages a whole window on an accelerated surface is created, sometimes an HTML DOM is parsed paginated and displayed, and the content of the e-mail finally shows up on my screen. All this happens fairly quickly on my hyper-threaded quad-core 2.8GHz CPU with plenty of overhead available for other tasks I'm doing at the same time as "checking my e-mail". My CPU would be doing even more work if I was logged into GMail where my browser is JIT compiling JavaScript and fooling around with an expressive and large HTML DOM on top of communicating back and forth with the server.
It's not the checking e-mail isn't a relatively basic conceptual task it's that the process has expanded to cover a lot of functions that didn't really exist fifteen years ago (a time when e-mail was a new thing to most people). My e-mail client probably does more database style operations than most websites did fifteen years ago. Even the relatively lightweight e-mail client on my iPhone does more work checking my e-mail than what would have been a fully featured e-mail client in 1996. While a low power CPU might be fine if all I did at any given time was check an read e-mail I'd be alright but browsing the modern web, listening to music, and doing other stuff while simultaneously checking e-mail requires a bit more power; especially if I don't want any of those things to stutter or run into other problems.
All Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube posts will do is generate extra hype for the show at no extra cost to the producers. No one is going to watch a shitty YouTube cell phone capture instead of the actual show. Free advertising is always good and word of mouth is extremely valuable. If someone sees a commercial for a TV show they just file that away with all the other advertising they ignore. If they get the pitch from someone they know or better someone with similar interests they're way more likely to pay attention. If I was making a TV show I'd beg my audience to talk about it on every channel they had available.
Slashdot Mirror
Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh! I've had nightmares about sentences like this one. I'm going to go have a little cry now. Thanks.
It's a post from timothy, what did you expect?
Drones can currently only operate in theaters where we have complete air superiority. In a theater where the opposing ground forces had effective surface-to-air or air-to-air defenses drones wouldn't be very practical.
There is a push for the development of UCAVs that would be able to carry air-to-air weapons as well as more directly engage surface-to-air targets but there's still limitations like communication lag or communications in general. A stealthy fighter can operate as long as it has fuel and it doesn't really matter if it loses its data link for some portion of a mission. UCAVs don't yet have that ability and any major communication disruption would be a mission or drone ending problem.
That's not to say these problems can't be surmounted or that UCAVs are useless in two-way firefights but it will still be a while until they're as effective as piloted aircraft. So until UCAVs are capable of gaining total air superiority all by themselves (which is difficult but doable) some piloted craft will still be needed. Whether those craft should be F-35s is a totally separate issue.
Complaints about HTML/Web apps not feeling "native" is a canard. Hundreds of millions of people use web pages every single day, from the most technical neckbeards to the least technical AOL grandmas. Now non-technical users probably aren't spending much time on sites with bullshit user experiences but there's a mind boggling number of websites people use daily. Native apps are also rarely bastions of usability and paragons of user experience virtue. Web apps don't need to "feel native" because the appeal of "native" apps doesn't really exist in the minds of actual users. These hundreds of millions of users aren't being held back from anything because they're using web pages instead of native apps.
Users want services and content and they're happy to access them through a web browser. In fact a web browser makes it easier for them in most cases because they don't need any special software before they access said content and services. Whatever device they're using likely has a web browser accessible. If they see a URL they can pop open their laptop or pull out their phone and access it immediately.
When they're on their phone they don't want it to take forever to load when they're stuck in a slow 3G area with no WiFi. They want it to work on the iPhone they just bought as well as their Windows PC back home. If they buy a Mac for their kids they want it to work on that as well.
The major features HTML5 added were ones that help web pages not feel more like native apps but have better interaction with clients. Clients aren't as limited as they were in the past (I remember a time before the <img> tag) and a richer DOM is important for the increased amount of work (Javascript, CSS, etc) being done on the client side.
These people complaining about performance on mobiles is just jackassery. The mobile web experience had the same sort of constraints that native mobile applications have. Mobiles have tiny batteries, often have small screens, are controlled with fingertips rather than mice, and often have slow high latency internet connections. Again it goes back to graceful degradation that users are already expecting. Maybe the mobile version doesn't load the 2MB PNG background and the uncompressed 1MB Javascript from a totally different server (requiring a second set of DNS lookups) out of which you only used two functions. The mobile native app wouldn't have the 1024x1024 icons or the 50MB 1080p intro movie bundled with it either.
HTML5 doesn't need to bring a more desktop-like experience to mobiles. It also doesn't need to make apps that look native. It needs to be used to make web apps functional and do their business with the least cognitive load on users as possible. It should scale well no matter how large the screen is or how shitty the connection speed. Instead of all singing all dancing bullshit I'd much rather see a page load on my phone and then let my fucking CPU go to sleep so I don't waste my battery trying to read a tweet or a Facebook message.
What the fuck does this even mean? People move their Flash app to HTML5 and then the millions upon millions of iPhone and iPad users in addition to the millions upon millions of desktop users get to use it. How is this bad for anyone? Why would anyone need to "make a move"?
There's been no sales figures showing actual installed base of Android devices. There's been some recent quarters where Android devices outsold iPhones. Before that the iPhone handily outsold Android. This means that the installed base of Android phones is unlikely to be larger than that of the iPhone despite the increase in sales over the past year. Quarter over quarter market share figures don't tell you about the number of devices in people's hands.
Remember that iOS runs on iPod touches as well as iPhones. Apple sells about ten million iPods a quarter and their ASP (average sale price) has increased which means the more expensive iPod touch is a larger share of iPod sales than in the past. At the very least iPod touches add a few million iOS devices to the installed base.
Then there's the millions of iPads being sold every quarter. Over 11 million for 2011 as of the last quarterly report. So iOS devices not only outnumber Android devices in quarterly sales but in installed base.
Installed base is the important number for developers and accessory manufacturers. The only numbers we've seen about Android sales have been quarterly market share numbers. Even these numbers have only been slightly higher than iPhone sales. Android phones haven't been leading iPhones long enough to have a larger installed base. Worse for Android is a lot of unit sales aren't really practical to count for the platform since they're single use devices like eBook readers so only phones really expand developers' potential markets.
His point was clearly stated, he made the claim the iPad can't play movies with Handbrake or connect to a TV via HDMI. Both of these are simply ridiculous things to say. Shit, Handbrake has an output preset named iPad.
As for the buying accessories, there's definitely a valid use case for a built-in HDMI port. However with the adapter I bought for my iPad I got a free HDMI output upgrade for my iPhone. There's downsides to adapters but there's also iodized to device ecosystems. The single adapter I bought increased the utility of multiple devices and gives me an extra feature checkbox next time I upgrade one of those devices.
None of the movies I've ripped with Handbrake work on my iPad? Shit I guess the HDMI adapter I just bought doesn't work either! Why didn't you tell me I couldn't do those things before I bought it?
Wait, you're full of shit and I can do all that with my iPad. Does the iPad also take 20 minutes to copy a 17MB file?
Your fantasy user is just about as likely to jump on Amazon's service as they are Apple's. You're describing a trope that doesn't bother upgrading to any new service or really buy any new devices. Why bother spending a whole bunch of money targeting them with there's millions of other users happily spending money on new things?
Supporting older OSes is not free. If iCloud's was Apple's only product this might be a problem but it's a follow on product. People with Windows XP can still spend money on iPods, iPhones, and the iTunes Store. Their iOS devices will get to use iCloud services and when they decide to upgrade their computer (to a PC or Mac) they'll get to use iCloud on there as well.
I'm no fan of Twitter in general as there's an enormous signal to noise ratio but for people that use it it's a convenient service. These astronomers could have set up a network of RSS feeds where events get posted and diligently check them. They could have posted to Usenet and hoped the message propagated fast enough to be useful.
Instead they had Twitter accounts set up so they could send a message by whatever cell phone they had in their pocket at the time and all their followers could pick up on it. They could also just post a message with a hash tag which is a home-grown taxonomy for tweets. Joe Amateurastronomer could have used the #newsupernovas hash tag which professional astronomers might follow. They then turn their nice high powered telescopes and get a spectrum of the event. Astronomers on mountain top observatories with cellular signals but not necessarily reliable internet connections can still receive and send Twitter messages.
The downside to setting up a network of RSS feeds is it's a top-down organization. Astronomers are only going to check the feeds in the "official" list as there's no way Joe Amateurastronomer will get a professional astronomer to look at their feed. With Usenet messages propagate slowly anymore, likely too slow to be useful in this particular situation. That of course assumes astronomers bother to read and post to Usenet groups as so many have been overrun with spam and general crap postings. Few people are willing to run their own network of Usenet servers, they might as well just use more readily (and freely) available web-based systems.
Wolfenstein 3-D used ray casting which is a bit different than ray tracing.
You're asserting in your original comment that Syria somehow hasn't blocked off access to the outside world because they haven't shot down Inmarsat satellites or that you could shove a MicroSD card up your ass and pretend it's the internet.
Syria can effectively but their population off from the outside world but closing down internet and long distance telephone lines. For the tiny fraction of the population that have satellite transceivers available there's still a link to the outside but for a majority of the population they're entirely cut off. It's also fairly easy for them to clamp down on internal communications as they only need to send a few soldiers with rifles to the handful of television and radio stations that exist in any city. Shutting down phone lines also isn't terribly difficult since they can do the same thing with PSTN switches and endpoints. They exist in buildings and buildings can have their power shut off or their operators arrested.
Just because the Syrian government can't shoot down communication satellites or search everyone's rectum for MicroSD cards doesn't mean that they haven't effectively isolated their population from the rest of the world. I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest, shoving microchips up your ass isn't an effective means of communication. Besides, having people memorize the messages is more effective because memories don't show up on an x-ray.
They can easily do all of those things (save shoot down a satellite). Even with a satellite transceiver unless the average citizen had one before the fighting started along with an active account to be able to use it, most people don't have satellite internet access. Of course someone with such a transceiver could send messages for people but there's a pretty big danger there as the government might not have any qualms about putting a bullet in their forehead if they get caught.
Effective alternate communication systems are often only useful if they're active and in place before shit goes down. Trying to deploy such systems once martial law has been declared and fighting has started is extraordinarily difficult. Foreign nationals like members of the press aren't likely to be willing to smuggle messages out as they'll get shot on charges of espionage if the Syrian government suspects they're doing any smuggling.
None of that is to say information can't leak out from a country like Syria that cuts off the internet and closes their borders but it's not easy. It's also not without its mortal dangers.
Companies like Facebook and Google like the "free service with tracking" model because the only cost to new customers is their privacy which is often charged so subtly they don't notice it's missing. They can also resell their user' information in perpetuity even if they stop using the service since they've got an archive of all their activity. A subscription fee is only usable once but demographic and tracking data can be used forever.
The ultimate advertising service will be one where Google or Facebook can predict with reasonable certainty viewers will buy a service or product giving the advertiser a massive conversion rate. Right now an advertiser can only hope for a fraction of a percent conversion rate (someone buying the advertised thing). Facebook and Google would love to be able to tell advertisers exactly what people will buy and will do just about anything to collect that information.
While a lot of people have HDTVs there remains a massive installed base of SDTVs. When the Wii came out HDTVs had even less market penetration than they do today. From Nintendo's perspective it made little sense to spend more money on a HD capable chipset when a majority of the market wouldn't benefit from the extra power. Both the PS3 and Xbox have suffered from incorporating bleeding edge technology. The Xbox had a phenomenal failure rate for years and the PS3 was ridiculously expensive and still sold at a loss. It's had to drop features to get it's price to reasonable levels.
Nintendo has a very valid strategy, use cheaper technology and focus on getting the most out of it. I think they learned some lessons from the N64. The N64's development frustrated because it was using technologies in previously untried combinations. The N64 was a late arrival compared to the PlayStation and Saturn. The PlayStation particularly succeeded despite using "inferior" technology like a 32bit CPU, less RAM, and a CD-ROM drive.
Chasing the most advanced is rarely the best plan for a console. If the console itself doesn't break even or make a profit then the otherwise lucrative game licenses have to make up the slack. This means your gaming division is losing money until the console can be sold for a profit. Nintendo has chosen to make a profit on their console rather than try to get it to push 1080p video when most customers will never see it.
Adobe's specifications for RTMP that they've released are incomplete at best and incompetent a worst. It's pretty much impossible to implement an RTMP server without a fair amount of reverse engineering effort. Not only does this open the implementer to lawsuits from Adobe but it's also prone to incompatible errors. Because HTTP encapsulation is optional and something that needs to be provided by the server you have to hope whatever implementation you're using is fast and clusters well.
With HTTP Live Streaming the server can be a bog standard HTTP server, streaming logic is in the client and the tool that writes the playlist file. All of the techniques for optimizing HTTP resouces (clustering, etc) work the same for Live Streaming as they would for normal video hosting. You can also dump the source files on whatever CDN you have available rather than requiring it support a custom server package.
By this argument anything that pays for an externality somehow directly funds Planned Parenthood. Your tax or utility payments are paying for trash pickup at Planned Parenthood, as are the other tenants in the strip mall where an office is located. Shit you're paying for a Planned Parenthood abortion right this second because you've paid taxes that paid for the road leading to the strip mall where an office is located. In short you've got a bullshit argument.
Like many non-profit organizations Planned Parenthood maintains sectioned off budgets. The money raised for abortion services (counseling et al) is 100% separate from the rest of their funds. Government subsidies to the organization can never be put into the abortion services fund nor can money from that fund be used to pay their electric bill. If we defund the 97% of the organization that isn't involved with abortion services they can't just shift money from that fund to pay the utility bill, the bill will just go unpaid or the office will close.
It seems obvious that you don't care about poor women since you didn't bother really researching services PP provides. In your mind you've equated the whole organization with abortion and are willing to fuck over millions of women not getting abortions there because of it. Without free condoms from PP there will be more unwanted pregnancies and therebwill be no counsellors available to tell the girls there's options available besides abortions. It's not like back alley abortions won't still occur. Your short-sightedness is actually very dangerous.
Temper tantrum? Not hardly. Your line of thinking suggests I get to bank my free time somewhere so I can withdraw it at a later date. I in fact have no such free time bank, when I have the opportunity for leisure I need to take it or lose it forever.
If it's Sunday afternoon I've got a friend over to watch a movie. If that movie isn't available to watch immediately on either Netflix or iTunes we may not have another chance in a while to watch that movie. When the DVD arrives from Netflix or Amazon on Wednesday my friend isn't at my house any longer. The opportunity to watch a movie together passed by on Sunday while we were sitting around wishing it was on iTunes or Netflix.
There's little reason to reward Amazon or the movie studio for the studio's decision to keep a movie off Netflix, iTunes, or any other streaming service. Buying the movie in a form that is not convenient tells the movie studio that their current behavior is acceptable and they should not do anything to change. As a customer you get to vote on company's decisions in only one fashion, by providing or withholding your money from them. You can't begrudgingly by their product irrespective of its ability to meet your demands and expect them to respond to your passive aggression.
The huge flaw in your argument about iPods is you are not a prospective customer. You've decided that the iPod is too expensive for your tastes/budget so you'll go elsewhere for a media player. Apple has lost $0 on your choice, they've not gained $250 but they certainly have not lost anything. At no point are you a lost sale, you're simply a non-customer. There's really no such thing as a lost sale since until money has changed hands and the revenue gained by a seller, no sale has occurred.
This is the same logic that the RIAA and such use against piracy. They posit that if you pirate an album rather than buy it than the record company has "lost" a sale. They've lost absolutely nothing. At no point did their capital assets decrease because you chose not to purchase the album. The extension of this goofy logic is every non-customer represents a "lost" sale. That would mean if I'm not a fan of Lady Gaga and never buy any of her music than I have cost the record industry in revenue the total cost of her released album. Non-customers are not lost sales, they are non-customers.
This is not the case for patents submitted to the GSM spec. All companies submitting patents to be used in the GSM spec agreed to offer them under RAND terms.
Research at companies would dry up if they couldn't get some sort of protection for the stuff they come up with. If patent protections were abolished tomorrow you're correct in that hundreds of startups would start making knock-off phones (and whatever else). The problem isn't tomorrow's startups but the drying up of research the following day. Shareholders aren't going to allow millions or billions of dollars to be invested in R&D if a startup is just going to come in and undercut them using all of their own research. Those big companies won't be so big after a few years of being undercut by startups and a freeze in advancement in the market. Without the big companies acting as the startups' R&D departments the market isn't going to advance at all. The little companies will all just go out of business with lots of investment dollars wasted.
Now that isn't to say stupid patents aren't granted and that companies don't abuse the patent system. I'd love to see some reform in the abuse areas but it's really short sighted to complain about patent protection. The market short sighted and often times stupid. It will consume things at lower and lower prices until its saturated. No newcomers will be able to make money at the saturation point once you eliminate strong patent protections because any innovation will just be copied by everyone and no one will be able to differentiate in the market longer than a quarter or two. You end up back at the system you complain about now (which is a bit of hyperbole anyways) with no startups being able to enter the market.
[citation needed]
Your comments about "just checking e-mail" is a bit of a canard when discussing CPU power, it no longer means what you imply it to mean. For me "just checking my e-mail" means downloading several megabytes of data from an IMAP server, sorting it into appropriate folders, and then updating some form of in-memory list of messages that my Smart Mailbox rules sort further to display some items on screen. When I select one of those messages a whole window on an accelerated surface is created, sometimes an HTML DOM is parsed paginated and displayed, and the content of the e-mail finally shows up on my screen. All this happens fairly quickly on my hyper-threaded quad-core 2.8GHz CPU with plenty of overhead available for other tasks I'm doing at the same time as "checking my e-mail". My CPU would be doing even more work if I was logged into GMail where my browser is JIT compiling JavaScript and fooling around with an expressive and large HTML DOM on top of communicating back and forth with the server.
It's not the checking e-mail isn't a relatively basic conceptual task it's that the process has expanded to cover a lot of functions that didn't really exist fifteen years ago (a time when e-mail was a new thing to most people). My e-mail client probably does more database style operations than most websites did fifteen years ago. Even the relatively lightweight e-mail client on my iPhone does more work checking my e-mail than what would have been a fully featured e-mail client in 1996. While a low power CPU might be fine if all I did at any given time was check an read e-mail I'd be alright but browsing the modern web, listening to music, and doing other stuff while simultaneously checking e-mail requires a bit more power; especially if I don't want any of those things to stutter or run into other problems.
All Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube posts will do is generate extra hype for the show at no extra cost to the producers. No one is going to watch a shitty YouTube cell phone capture instead of the actual show. Free advertising is always good and word of mouth is extremely valuable. If someone sees a commercial for a TV show they just file that away with all the other advertising they ignore. If they get the pitch from someone they know or better someone with similar interests they're way more likely to pay attention. If I was making a TV show I'd beg my audience to talk about it on every channel they had available.