Something happened. I had a 4 and upgraded to a 4S. I noticed that by lunch, my 4S was down to 66% battery when before the 4 had been in the 80s or low 90s still, depending on how much I had used it for voice/data and how good my signal was (buildings that limit the signal seem to increase battery drain).
I turned off a bunch of apps in notification center and disabled some of the system location services and that seemed to reduce the drain about 75% -- I'm still 5-10% lower than I would have been on the 4, but its much better. The notification center changes seemed to help the most, I'm not sure that the location bug was affecting me, or the improvement is just too small to notice.
I assume based on my experience that maybe apps were being allowed too much or too frequent execution time for notifications, maybe coupled with some kind of location services bug.
It may make some sense, but it strikes me that there's something inherent in marketing or pricing theory that causes businesses to have a large number of apparently superfluous/redundant products and purchasing options.
They almost seem to need to have them to demonstrate that they have the "specific solution for you", as well as to create the complex pricing tiers that makes it difficult for purchases to choose which product suits their needs; inevitably you end up buying too much widget to get a specific feature you need or to ally some other concern.
Dell is a good example -- I seem to recall that it was almost impossible to get the display I wanted in a laptop (the consumer choices seemed better) and the CPU and OS support I needed (business choices). I'd like to believe they do it on purpose, but maybe they don't.
I've just found it to be unable to do what I want it to do. It won't read email and it won't return basic flight information, either.
I've found it's good at speech recognition through the mic, but not very good through my bluetooth handsfree device, which makes it even less useful, because the times I want to interact with it most are when I'm in the car (cf. reading email).
I don't find it helpful for scheduling -- I have two calendars and changes to any one item usually affect multiple items on multiple calendars; it would take a special kind of AI to know what rescheduling can be done.
I've also found that most of the time it just pulls info from Wolfram Alpha, which is occasionally useful but generally kind of lame.
To me, it's overall less useful than the custom vibration feature is. In fact, I think I just plain turned it off.
The problem is that people who are politically bold are usually psychologically risk takers anyway.
I would assume that the claims against Assange are probably true -- he got cozy with some Swedish women and used a little muscle to get more sex, assuming, probably based on past personal experience, that there would be no consequences. (You can insert the long debates surrounding date rape, consent, gender roles, etc. here.).
Unfortunately for Assange, that didn't pan out in Sweden, which while sexually more liberal is also probably more sensitive to women's rights.
Zombie fiction authors needed to invent a reason as to "why" modern munitions weren't effective against zombies and it has become almost a religiously accepted notion that small-caliber aimed projectiles are the only useful tool against a zombie hoard.
None of that seems to make much sense. Exploding shells (whether fired line of sight from a gun, or launched at high angle from mortars or artillery) designed to explode and forcefully project metal shrapnel would seem ideal against large zombie groupings. I'd include cluster munitions in this category as well.
Land mines of the "bouncing betty" type would also be effective, as they shoot into the air before exploding, delivering shrapnel at a median head height.
Automatic weapons fired indiscriminately would be ineffective, but aimed automatic weapons fire sweeping large groups at head height could be very effective, especially with heavy machine gun (12.7mm/.50 cal) rounds that might possibly penetrate multiple zombies. Gattling-type guns that can deliver thousands of rounds per minute could act simply like a firehose of projectiles delivered at approximate head height. Even if fire from these weapons was not perfectly aimed, the physical destruction that would happen to zombie bodies may slow them or immobilize them for more precise aimed fire.
Besides crushing zombies or shooting them with anti-personnel rounds, a tank might even be more useful mounted with a flail de-mining device. Designed to clear minefields, think of a combine, except you have 5 lb steel balls at the end of a chain, desiged to beat a field to set off mines. Raised off the ground a foot or so, such an attachment could simply be driven through a zombie hoard with the flails crushing skulls.
And this is just the start. The zombie narrative seems to thrive on the "last man on earth" concept and the idea that organized defenses aren't useful, but it seems to me that what you'd really end up with in many zombie actions would be a military response that would actually be quite effective.
Once the court and legal system have extracted their pound of flesh, you will more than likely be extorted into a "drug treatment program" which the court liberally and generously will allow you to enter as an alternative to jail.
If you are lucky, your insurance might cover some of this, but you will likely cover most if not all of the cost. Here, you will enter a parallel universe where there is no "normal" consumption of mind altering substances, only "recovery" and varying levels of dependency and abuse.
You will admit your abuse and dependence. Depending on your court sentence, you may even "agree" in a legally binding way to everything the treatment center wants, including followup drug tests and counseling to ensure you remain "in recovery". This is on your dime and is open-ended -- you don't EVER "recover" or become a "former" addict, you are perpetually in recovery.
Meanwhile, the Treatment Industry serves as the soft-edged propaganda wing for the war on drugs, serving up "education" on alcohol, marijuana and other mind altering substances. The message is always the same -- there is no legitimate use of mind altering substances, only abuse and dependency.
It seems that more and more, cell phones are being used as triggers for bombs. They are cheap, easily obtained and because the cell network is ubiquitous, the bombs can be detonated outside of line of sight or the range of other cheap radio transmitters (garage door openers, etc). The network also acts almost as a stegonographic mask, as there's no "unusual" radio signature and the spectrum is already flooded with active traffic.
A device that could override and masquerade as the public cell network could keep all unauthorized cell phones off the network within range of a motorcade or other "secure" area, preventing detonation signaling as well as providing intelligence logging of calling attempted on the fake cell site.
I know they have used portable jammers for this purpose before, but this might prove more subtle.
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
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The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
I wonder if you could have just called up M&Ms and gotten just brown ones orderd. Get a 10 lb sack of them.
You can do it now, but back then maybe not.
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
on
The RMS Tour Rider
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· Score: 1
Considering the amount of pussy that Van Halen probably went through, my sense is that the relative cleanliness of their M&M stash wasn't real high on the list.
We had pretty decent common sense and didn't participate, but I did feel like a chump for about 4 years because EVERYONE around me seemed to be upgrading some aspect of their lives -- cars, houses, amenities (pools, etc).
Looking at my finances sensibly, all of those things seemed out of reach to me and I couldn't figure out why -- I had a good consulting job, my wife had an even more lucrative job as a marketing executive and yet driving two late-model Hondas and living in a 2000 sq ft house seemed to be all we could sensibly afford without risking out ability to sock away cash, pay down our mortgage principal and take a couple of decent vacations a year, all on a pay-as-you-go basis.
It never occurred to me that people were living off voodoo economics and "free" money and that had they stayed within their means, they would have been living the same lifestyle I was.
Yeah, S&P cut the Treasury's bond rating and what happened? Price went up and the yield dropped due to increased demand. Yawn.
Europe? Still fretting on how to bail out Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain without destroying the Euro, losing their entire banking sector, etc.
Merkel trying to decide if they will hang her from the Reichstag or merely vote her out of office if she makes Germans pay for Greek, Portuguese and Italian corruption and profligacy and poor French banking.
Sarkozy trying desperately to keep France relevant by getting Societe General, Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas bailed out with maybe only a 25% haircut -- and on Merkel's dime. He's also desperate to get re-elected, despite framing DSK right out of the election and forcing the Socialists to nominate a jerkwater bureaucrat as a replacement, he's worried that he might get shown up by Marine LePen.
So, right, tell me about the current European success story.
Netflix weak streaming content is the source of all their problems.
If there was some critical mass of streaming content that overlapped with DVD, (ie, all new releases, 75% of DVDs and growing) then I don't think Netflix would have had any problems with most of what they did.
The price hike would have had the effect of moving all the DVD users to streaming and would have pushed most of them to stop DVD service; users with DVDs who couldn't or didn't want streaming (rural areas, poor internet service, etc) would have dropped streaming.
This would have given Netflix what I think they wanted -- most people moving to the higher margin streaming service and a clear delineation of the customer base between streaming users and DVD users.
At this point, the Qwikster split makes sense. Streaming users for the most part wouldn't care -- they would have done the "smart" thing and dumped DVDs for the cheaper streaming only option. Some DVD users might howl, but it would have been too small of a minority to matter.
They can start closing DVD service centers and cut costs enough to make the system more profitable, because its overall a smaller business, perhaps one that can be sold to a competitor or some hedge fund that could run it for what it is -- a DVD rental shop with the deepest selection ever.
The problem was, streaming isn't viable on its own, IMHO, unless you're an addict of bad action movies and TV shows, some of which are pretty crappy unless you're a die-hard scifi fan.
So the price hike was just a price hike for no real improvement, since you need both systems -- stream what you can, and DVDs for what won't stream. The split with Qwikster was just a sharp stick in the eye that just seemed like another phase of a plan gone seriously awry.
It's clearly a conspiracy on the part of executives to break the law and obtain illegal profits.
Let's seize all the personal assets of these executives, fine them a few million dollars personally and throw them in jail.
When "aggressive billing practices" starts becoming a significant risk of loss of personal fortunes and extensive jail time, then you'll see greater caution.
It's probably paranoid, but I keep thinking that in 50 years it will be leaked out that the "great downturn of 2007-201x" was actually the result of a global financial war fought by Anglo-American banking interests on one side and a Sino-Arab consortium on the other side.
The US government & Federal Reserve backed the banks not because they were too big to fail but because of the national security implications of losing control over world financial markets.
The housing and stock bubbles were failed attempts by the banking cartels to create wealth to keep up with the growth of the Chinese economy and the spiraling income of oil producers in the face of stagnant wage growth and industry within the US and the UK.
The war in Iraq wasn't about terrorism but about creating chaos in the center of Arabian Asia to disrupt OPEC.
I'm making all this up, but it seems to have a strange believability to it.
This is Slashdot, not a PhD thesis. I don't remember the source, it was an article about tuition costs increasing at multiples of the CPI over the last 30 years and attempting to understand why tuition costs rose so much faster than the rate of inflation. Feel free to Google this if you don't believe this is happening.
Anyway, one of the major explanations was that expansion of student loan programs made it easy for colleges to jack up tuition -- the more money that became available for loans, the more money they could charge. Basically universities were squeezing students for all they could borrow.
I don't know that I agree with Ron Paul's solution completely, but I also don't think that everyone belongs in college, which I think is part of the problem.
College has become some kind of universal ritual that does not produce undergraduates literate in culture and philosophy, with usable vocational skills or with any real social mobility, especially when they leave with $50-100,000 in debt.
Colleges, of course, benefit from this, as it increases grad school ranks as undergrads realize they need "more" education to achieve their economic and social goals. Thus, more loans, more tuition and a wide and shallow pool of people with master's degrees.
Maybe there will be a new class of "Licensed & Bonded Reference Photographers" who work independent of any single entity and whose only job is to produce reference photographs which are cryptographically signed by the camera and the photographer at the time they are taken.
The "client" gets a copy of the photo and the cryptographic signature which they can use to verify that the photo is the "original" and not an altered version.
The cameras would have to be smart, perhaps with the photographer's public key burned into ROM when the camera is bought and the cameras serial numbers and signatures tracked by the manufacturer so that there is some kind of chain of trust that is traceable and more difficult to fake or change.
Having the camera and not just the photographer's cryptographic signature is important to prevent the photo from being altered and then re-signed by the photographer. It might also be necessary to embed a watermark so that altered photos couldn't be re-shot (and thus resigned) -- the camera would refuse to take a picture of a photo with a watermark.
I have read that college tuition tracks almost perfectly with student loan amounts. As more money becomes available for student loans, college tuition increases.
A similar argument has been made with vouchers for elementary and secondary schools -- if the government issues school vouchers for $1000, then private school tuition will magically go up by $1000 and vouchers then become valuable at the low end only, which is usually religious schools.
I don't think "non-profit schools" helps. When I look at my alma mater, University of Minnesota, I'm dumbfounded by the number of new buildings (never knew there was a need for a city-block sized Tennis Center in the 1980s), especially those for disciplines or sports that previously shared space. At the time, we were already one of the largest public colleges in the US -- 40,000+ undergrads.
There's a huge appetite for growth in any bureaucracy. Program heads want their own departments, department heads want their own buildings, division heads want their own college within the University and every athletic program aspires to have what the football, basketball or hockey teams have -- dedicated training facilities, practice facilities, scholarships and ultimately their own stadium.
University Presidents have a relatively short tenure, and like CEOs they focus on short-term deliverables -- new buildings, expanded programs, increased staff and increased budgets. They then move along to another school, touting their legacy and success.
They make the argument, though, that this kind of expansion scales performance along with capacity, as the data gets striped over multiple units, increasing IOP capacity and distributing network load over more network ports.
Disk additions would be nice, but from what I've seen, you can quickly overwhelm network capacity, although if you started with 10 gig ethernet it might be less of an issue.
Sounds good, I know, but I've never seen it in action, even though I work for a reseller, as our deployments tend to be in the 16-24 TB range and we haven't had anyone max one out enough.
I have been generally happy with their reliability and ease of use (almost always with VMware).
I think their replication blows, though. It seems like you have to buy double the disk space you plan to use to buffer replication, which means a 4x overall overspend (2x on each end).
I'd also like to see a "mirrored" replication mode with block level mirroring at the LUN level with some kind of snapshot/buffering system on the target end that would allow you to go back in time with more granularity for recovery.
So which lowers birth rates, increased economic standards of living or relief from the disease pressure of malaria? I also don't see where preventing malaria increases education, women's or anyone else's, or reduces poverty by any direct means.
I think this is great for people who live in malarial areas as a means to reduce misery, but I think there's a lot of weak conclusions drawn about the larger impact of reducing malaria, especially in the face of endemic poverty, political instability, political repression and in many cases, rampant tribalism.
I'm not sure it will greatly increase population pressures, but I also don't think it will do much to help them and overpopulation (7 Billion and counting) is a real problem.
...has an Apple store and a Microsoft store very nearly across the same hallway from each other.
I can't stand the Mall of America but on every compulsory trip I've taken there, the Microsoft store is nearly empty. A few people (my 7 year old included) are goofing with a Kinect up front, a few losers are using the demo PCs for Facebook updates and that's it.
The Apple store on the other side of the hallway is packed, with nary a demo iPad or Mac unattended. Lots of people in the store.
In neither case did I count who walked out with stuff, but the interest level in the Apple store was high.
I thought the Microsoft store was generally attractive, but the whole idea seems unfocused. There's Microsoft products like Xbox and Zune (well, not anymore), the phone and then there's...PCs. Laptops, desktops, but they're not really selling them, well, maybe they are. You can't tell.
It felt like they were pushing the whole PC "experience" and not just the Microsoft vision of it, which even Microsoft didn't seem they could explain very well.
For full disclosure, I build my own Windows PCs but have owned more iPods and iPhones than I'd care to admit (every iPhone model from the 3G to the 4S).
Until the local warlord/cop/strongman figures out who the stupid white kid with all the cash is and what he's running from.
Then they will come asking for larger and larger bribes to keep quiet. Refuse? Why, they might just take it from you, throw you in the local jail with some unpleasant locals, or drop a dime on you to the embassy/consulate of the country looking for you.
Either way, it's an unhappy ending for you, your fortune and your freedom.
I think you're better off getting an ocean-capable boat, finding some archipelago or river system you can get lost in for about 5 years. That way you're always on the move, you're seen as just another tourist/traveler, and you might just find a port of call you can settle down into without looking like you don't belong.
I wanna bet that a person on a deep-water capable cabin cruiser or a houseboat in the US with access to the Mississippi could keep moving at such a low profile that he might never be found. Between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the Gulf Coast intracoastal waterway and the Florida intracoastal waterways there are nearly 15,000 miles to get lost in.
And that doesn't include probably another couple thousand miles of tributaries that are recreationally navigable as well. And much of all of it has plenty of secluded semi-wilderness areas to stay off the grid.
Think of it as "ethical chemotherapy" -- the "patient", the business that is getting ripped off initially, still suffers at first, but ultimately you kill off the "disease" (the reshipping scam) because it stops being worthwhile as the losses are too great.
I always wondered why someone wasn't capitalizing on ripping off the credit card fraud guys this way.
AFAIK, the "reshipping jobs" are always setup so that the "reshipper" is kept at an arm's length from the people committing the fraud, so that when the reshipper is ultimately caught, he has no idea who hired him.
At this point, why not rip them off? If you were careful about keeping your anonymity (internet accounts, phone numbers, drop address), the built-in arm's length nature of the transaction works in your favor.
Personally I wouldn't keep the goods, I'd unload them on Craigslist, perhaps in a city a few hours away, or very quietly through less visible means.
Long, long-term you might get caught, but I'm thinking it would be nearly impossible because it would require them to actually monitor the drop location physically and intercept you face-face, which is the kind of exposure they avoid.
The only thing I can think is that they must send you cheap stuff first to "test" your reliability, or somehow get you financially invested in the process enough that you keep doing to not lose some kind of investment or payoff.
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Something happened. I had a 4 and upgraded to a 4S. I noticed that by lunch, my 4S was down to 66% battery when before the 4 had been in the 80s or low 90s still, depending on how much I had used it for voice/data and how good my signal was (buildings that limit the signal seem to increase battery drain).
I turned off a bunch of apps in notification center and disabled some of the system location services and that seemed to reduce the drain about 75% -- I'm still 5-10% lower than I would have been on the 4, but its much better. The notification center changes seemed to help the most, I'm not sure that the location bug was affecting me, or the improvement is just too small to notice.
I assume based on my experience that maybe apps were being allowed too much or too frequent execution time for notifications, maybe coupled with some kind of location services bug.
It may make some sense, but it strikes me that there's something inherent in marketing or pricing theory that causes businesses to have a large number of apparently superfluous/redundant products and purchasing options.
They almost seem to need to have them to demonstrate that they have the "specific solution for you", as well as to create the complex pricing tiers that makes it difficult for purchases to choose which product suits their needs; inevitably you end up buying too much widget to get a specific feature you need or to ally some other concern.
Dell is a good example -- I seem to recall that it was almost impossible to get the display I wanted in a laptop (the consumer choices seemed better) and the CPU and OS support I needed (business choices). I'd like to believe they do it on purpose, but maybe they don't.
I've just found it to be unable to do what I want it to do. It won't read email and it won't return basic flight information, either.
I've found it's good at speech recognition through the mic, but not very good through my bluetooth handsfree device, which makes it even less useful, because the times I want to interact with it most are when I'm in the car (cf. reading email).
I don't find it helpful for scheduling -- I have two calendars and changes to any one item usually affect multiple items on multiple calendars; it would take a special kind of AI to know what rescheduling can be done.
I've also found that most of the time it just pulls info from Wolfram Alpha, which is occasionally useful but generally kind of lame.
To me, it's overall less useful than the custom vibration feature is. In fact, I think I just plain turned it off.
The problem is that people who are politically bold are usually psychologically risk takers anyway.
I would assume that the claims against Assange are probably true -- he got cozy with some Swedish women and used a little muscle to get more sex, assuming, probably based on past personal experience, that there would be no consequences. (You can insert the long debates surrounding date rape, consent, gender roles, etc. here.).
Unfortunately for Assange, that didn't pan out in Sweden, which while sexually more liberal is also probably more sensitive to women's rights.
Zombie fiction authors needed to invent a reason as to "why" modern munitions weren't effective against zombies and it has become almost a religiously accepted notion that small-caliber aimed projectiles are the only useful tool against a zombie hoard.
None of that seems to make much sense. Exploding shells (whether fired line of sight from a gun, or launched at high angle from mortars or artillery) designed to explode and forcefully project metal shrapnel would seem ideal against large zombie groupings. I'd include cluster munitions in this category as well.
Land mines of the "bouncing betty" type would also be effective, as they shoot into the air before exploding, delivering shrapnel at a median head height.
Automatic weapons fired indiscriminately would be ineffective, but aimed automatic weapons fire sweeping large groups at head height could be very effective, especially with heavy machine gun (12.7mm/.50 cal) rounds that might possibly penetrate multiple zombies. Gattling-type guns that can deliver thousands of rounds per minute could act simply like a firehose of projectiles delivered at approximate head height. Even if fire from these weapons was not perfectly aimed, the physical destruction that would happen to zombie bodies may slow them or immobilize them for more precise aimed fire.
Besides crushing zombies or shooting them with anti-personnel rounds, a tank might even be more useful mounted with a flail de-mining device. Designed to clear minefields, think of a combine, except you have 5 lb steel balls at the end of a chain, desiged to beat a field to set off mines. Raised off the ground a foot or so, such an attachment could simply be driven through a zombie hoard with the flails crushing skulls.
And this is just the start. The zombie narrative seems to thrive on the "last man on earth" concept and the idea that organized defenses aren't useful, but it seems to me that what you'd really end up with in many zombie actions would be a military response that would actually be quite effective.
Don't forget the vast Treatment Industry.
Once the court and legal system have extracted their pound of flesh, you will more than likely be extorted into a "drug treatment program" which the court liberally and generously will allow you to enter as an alternative to jail.
If you are lucky, your insurance might cover some of this, but you will likely cover most if not all of the cost. Here, you will enter a parallel universe where there is no "normal" consumption of mind altering substances, only "recovery" and varying levels of dependency and abuse.
You will admit your abuse and dependence. Depending on your court sentence, you may even "agree" in a legally binding way to everything the treatment center wants, including followup drug tests and counseling to ensure you remain "in recovery". This is on your dime and is open-ended -- you don't EVER "recover" or become a "former" addict, you are perpetually in recovery.
Meanwhile, the Treatment Industry serves as the soft-edged propaganda wing for the war on drugs, serving up "education" on alcohol, marijuana and other mind altering substances. The message is always the same -- there is no legitimate use of mind altering substances, only abuse and dependency.
Could this be used to prevent bombings?
It seems that more and more, cell phones are being used as triggers for bombs. They are cheap, easily obtained and because the cell network is ubiquitous, the bombs can be detonated outside of line of sight or the range of other cheap radio transmitters (garage door openers, etc). The network also acts almost as a stegonographic mask, as there's no "unusual" radio signature and the spectrum is already flooded with active traffic.
A device that could override and masquerade as the public cell network could keep all unauthorized cell phones off the network within range of a motorcade or other "secure" area, preventing detonation signaling as well as providing intelligence logging of calling attempted on the fake cell site.
I know they have used portable jammers for this purpose before, but this might prove more subtle.
I wonder if you could have just called up M&Ms and gotten just brown ones orderd. Get a 10 lb sack of them.
You can do it now, but back then maybe not.
Considering the amount of pussy that Van Halen probably went through, my sense is that the relative cleanliness of their M&M stash wasn't real high on the list.
We had pretty decent common sense and didn't participate, but I did feel like a chump for about 4 years because EVERYONE around me seemed to be upgrading some aspect of their lives -- cars, houses, amenities (pools, etc).
Looking at my finances sensibly, all of those things seemed out of reach to me and I couldn't figure out why -- I had a good consulting job, my wife had an even more lucrative job as a marketing executive and yet driving two late-model Hondas and living in a 2000 sq ft house seemed to be all we could sensibly afford without risking out ability to sock away cash, pay down our mortgage principal and take a couple of decent vacations a year, all on a pay-as-you-go basis.
It never occurred to me that people were living off voodoo economics and "free" money and that had they stayed within their means, they would have been living the same lifestyle I was.
Yeah, S&P cut the Treasury's bond rating and what happened? Price went up and the yield dropped due to increased demand. Yawn.
Europe? Still fretting on how to bail out Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain without destroying the Euro, losing their entire banking sector, etc.
Merkel trying to decide if they will hang her from the Reichstag or merely vote her out of office if she makes Germans pay for Greek, Portuguese and Italian corruption and profligacy and poor French banking.
Sarkozy trying desperately to keep France relevant by getting Societe General, Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas bailed out with maybe only a 25% haircut -- and on Merkel's dime. He's also desperate to get re-elected, despite framing DSK right out of the election and forcing the Socialists to nominate a jerkwater bureaucrat as a replacement, he's worried that he might get shown up by Marine LePen.
So, right, tell me about the current European success story.
Netflix weak streaming content is the source of all their problems.
If there was some critical mass of streaming content that overlapped with DVD, (ie, all new releases, 75% of DVDs and growing) then I don't think Netflix would have had any problems with most of what they did.
The price hike would have had the effect of moving all the DVD users to streaming and would have pushed most of them to stop DVD service; users with DVDs who couldn't or didn't want streaming (rural areas, poor internet service, etc) would have dropped streaming.
This would have given Netflix what I think they wanted -- most people moving to the higher margin streaming service and a clear delineation of the customer base between streaming users and DVD users.
At this point, the Qwikster split makes sense. Streaming users for the most part wouldn't care -- they would have done the "smart" thing and dumped DVDs for the cheaper streaming only option. Some DVD users might howl, but it would have been too small of a minority to matter.
They can start closing DVD service centers and cut costs enough to make the system more profitable, because its overall a smaller business, perhaps one that can be sold to a competitor or some hedge fund that could run it for what it is -- a DVD rental shop with the deepest selection ever.
The problem was, streaming isn't viable on its own, IMHO, unless you're an addict of bad action movies and TV shows, some of which are pretty crappy unless you're a die-hard scifi fan.
So the price hike was just a price hike for no real improvement, since you need both systems -- stream what you can, and DVDs for what won't stream. The split with Qwikster was just a sharp stick in the eye that just seemed like another phase of a plan gone seriously awry.
Why not a RICO prosecution?
It's clearly a conspiracy on the part of executives to break the law and obtain illegal profits.
Let's seize all the personal assets of these executives, fine them a few million dollars personally and throw them in jail.
When "aggressive billing practices" starts becoming a significant risk of loss of personal fortunes and extensive jail time, then you'll see greater caution.
It's probably paranoid, but I keep thinking that in 50 years it will be leaked out that the "great downturn of 2007-201x" was actually the result of a global financial war fought by Anglo-American banking interests on one side and a Sino-Arab consortium on the other side.
The US government & Federal Reserve backed the banks not because they were too big to fail but because of the national security implications of losing control over world financial markets.
The housing and stock bubbles were failed attempts by the banking cartels to create wealth to keep up with the growth of the Chinese economy and the spiraling income of oil producers in the face of stagnant wage growth and industry within the US and the UK.
The war in Iraq wasn't about terrorism but about creating chaos in the center of Arabian Asia to disrupt OPEC.
I'm making all this up, but it seems to have a strange believability to it.
This is Slashdot, not a PhD thesis. I don't remember the source, it was an article about tuition costs increasing at multiples of the CPI over the last 30 years and attempting to understand why tuition costs rose so much faster than the rate of inflation. Feel free to Google this if you don't believe this is happening.
Anyway, one of the major explanations was that expansion of student loan programs made it easy for colleges to jack up tuition -- the more money that became available for loans, the more money they could charge. Basically universities were squeezing students for all they could borrow.
I don't know that I agree with Ron Paul's solution completely, but I also don't think that everyone belongs in college, which I think is part of the problem.
College has become some kind of universal ritual that does not produce undergraduates literate in culture and philosophy, with usable vocational skills or with any real social mobility, especially when they leave with $50-100,000 in debt.
Colleges, of course, benefit from this, as it increases grad school ranks as undergrads realize they need "more" education to achieve their economic and social goals. Thus, more loans, more tuition and a wide and shallow pool of people with master's degrees.
Maybe there will be a new class of "Licensed & Bonded Reference Photographers" who work independent of any single entity and whose only job is to produce reference photographs which are cryptographically signed by the camera and the photographer at the time they are taken.
The "client" gets a copy of the photo and the cryptographic signature which they can use to verify that the photo is the "original" and not an altered version.
The cameras would have to be smart, perhaps with the photographer's public key burned into ROM when the camera is bought and the cameras serial numbers and signatures tracked by the manufacturer so that there is some kind of chain of trust that is traceable and more difficult to fake or change.
Having the camera and not just the photographer's cryptographic signature is important to prevent the photo from being altered and then re-signed by the photographer. It might also be necessary to embed a watermark so that altered photos couldn't be re-shot (and thus resigned) -- the camera would refuse to take a picture of a photo with a watermark.
I have read that college tuition tracks almost perfectly with student loan amounts. As more money becomes available for student loans, college tuition increases.
A similar argument has been made with vouchers for elementary and secondary schools -- if the government issues school vouchers for $1000, then private school tuition will magically go up by $1000 and vouchers then become valuable at the low end only, which is usually religious schools.
I don't think "non-profit schools" helps. When I look at my alma mater, University of Minnesota, I'm dumbfounded by the number of new buildings (never knew there was a need for a city-block sized Tennis Center in the 1980s), especially those for disciplines or sports that previously shared space. At the time, we were already one of the largest public colleges in the US -- 40,000+ undergrads.
There's a huge appetite for growth in any bureaucracy. Program heads want their own departments, department heads want their own buildings, division heads want their own college within the University and every athletic program aspires to have what the football, basketball or hockey teams have -- dedicated training facilities, practice facilities, scholarships and ultimately their own stadium.
University Presidents have a relatively short tenure, and like CEOs they focus on short-term deliverables -- new buildings, expanded programs, increased staff and increased budgets. They then move along to another school, touting their legacy and success.
They make the argument, though, that this kind of expansion scales performance along with capacity, as the data gets striped over multiple units, increasing IOP capacity and distributing network load over more network ports.
Disk additions would be nice, but from what I've seen, you can quickly overwhelm network capacity, although if you started with 10 gig ethernet it might be less of an issue.
Sounds good, I know, but I've never seen it in action, even though I work for a reseller, as our deployments tend to be in the 16-24 TB range and we haven't had anyone max one out enough.
I have been generally happy with their reliability and ease of use (almost always with VMware).
I think their replication blows, though. It seems like you have to buy double the disk space you plan to use to buffer replication, which means a 4x overall overspend (2x on each end).
I'd also like to see a "mirrored" replication mode with block level mirroring at the LUN level with some kind of snapshot/buffering system on the target end that would allow you to go back in time with more granularity for recovery.
So which lowers birth rates, increased economic standards of living or relief from the disease pressure of malaria? I also don't see where preventing malaria increases education, women's or anyone else's, or reduces poverty by any direct means.
I think this is great for people who live in malarial areas as a means to reduce misery, but I think there's a lot of weak conclusions drawn about the larger impact of reducing malaria, especially in the face of endemic poverty, political instability, political repression and in many cases, rampant tribalism.
I'm not sure it will greatly increase population pressures, but I also don't think it will do much to help them and overpopulation (7 Billion and counting) is a real problem.
Out of curiosity, what makes Equallogic expensive to scale?
Because scaling means adding a complete additional member?
...has an Apple store and a Microsoft store very nearly across the same hallway from each other.
I can't stand the Mall of America but on every compulsory trip I've taken there, the Microsoft store is nearly empty. A few people (my 7 year old included) are goofing with a Kinect up front, a few losers are using the demo PCs for Facebook updates and that's it.
The Apple store on the other side of the hallway is packed, with nary a demo iPad or Mac unattended. Lots of people in the store.
In neither case did I count who walked out with stuff, but the interest level in the Apple store was high.
I thought the Microsoft store was generally attractive, but the whole idea seems unfocused. There's Microsoft products like Xbox and Zune (well, not anymore), the phone and then there's...PCs. Laptops, desktops, but they're not really selling them, well, maybe they are. You can't tell.
It felt like they were pushing the whole PC "experience" and not just the Microsoft vision of it, which even Microsoft didn't seem they could explain very well.
For full disclosure, I build my own Windows PCs but have owned more iPods and iPhones than I'd care to admit (every iPhone model from the 3G to the 4S).
Until the local warlord/cop/strongman figures out who the stupid white kid with all the cash is and what he's running from.
Then they will come asking for larger and larger bribes to keep quiet. Refuse? Why, they might just take it from you, throw you in the local jail with some unpleasant locals, or drop a dime on you to the embassy/consulate of the country looking for you.
Either way, it's an unhappy ending for you, your fortune and your freedom.
I think you're better off getting an ocean-capable boat, finding some archipelago or river system you can get lost in for about 5 years. That way you're always on the move, you're seen as just another tourist/traveler, and you might just find a port of call you can settle down into without looking like you don't belong.
I wanna bet that a person on a deep-water capable cabin cruiser or a houseboat in the US with access to the Mississippi could keep moving at such a low profile that he might never be found. Between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the Gulf Coast intracoastal waterway and the Florida intracoastal waterways there are nearly 15,000 miles to get lost in.
And that doesn't include probably another couple thousand miles of tributaries that are recreationally navigable as well. And much of all of it has plenty of secluded semi-wilderness areas to stay off the grid.
Think of it as "ethical chemotherapy" -- the "patient", the business that is getting ripped off initially, still suffers at first, but ultimately you kill off the "disease" (the reshipping scam) because it stops being worthwhile as the losses are too great.
I always wondered why someone wasn't capitalizing on ripping off the credit card fraud guys this way.
AFAIK, the "reshipping jobs" are always setup so that the "reshipper" is kept at an arm's length from the people committing the fraud, so that when the reshipper is ultimately caught, he has no idea who hired him.
At this point, why not rip them off? If you were careful about keeping your anonymity (internet accounts, phone numbers, drop address), the built-in arm's length nature of the transaction works in your favor.
Personally I wouldn't keep the goods, I'd unload them on Craigslist, perhaps in a city a few hours away, or very quietly through less visible means.
Long, long-term you might get caught, but I'm thinking it would be nearly impossible because it would require them to actually monitor the drop location physically and intercept you face-face, which is the kind of exposure they avoid.
The only thing I can think is that they must send you cheap stuff first to "test" your reliability, or somehow get you financially invested in the process enough that you keep doing to not lose some kind of investment or payoff.
For larger storage sizes, SugarSync is cheaper than drop box and has some deeper sync options, IMHO.
I went with SugarSync for 100GB for a lot less than DropBox had.
I've noticed a couple of apps with DropBox support and without SugarSync support, but mostly it's both, and EverNote and a few others.
It was never about features or quality, had DropBox been cheaper I probably would have used that instead.