The BRICS countries have just as much control over it as their Western counterparts.
I think you meant to write:
The Russia and China don't have the kind of control they want.
I'm curious how the whole "BRICS" alliance is still a thing these days. I don't see where South Africa has much in common with the others. India is more or less in competition with China. China is the 800 lb gorilla in the group. Russia pretty much can't be trusted at all.
Some of the trains/routes don't have wifi and he turns his hotspot on with "Virgin Trains Free Wifi" as the SSID. Then he tries very hard to suppress his own laughter when people start complaining about how the wifi doesn't work.
Data consumption management could be built into any smartphone at the OS and allow all manner of functionality, from data ceilings, rate-limiting and calendar based data quotas.
Any time I see a thing that could be done and isn't done on smartphones, my first reaction is that it must run contrary to what the carriers want. If people could use tools to manage their data consumption easily, there would be no overage fees and fewer people would be moving to higher data tiers.
Smartphone makers see the carriers as nearly co-equal with users as customers, perhaps more so because they have a gatekeeper ability to block these devices from their network.
In both Google and Apple's cases, I'll bet they're also pandering a little to advertisers, too, who wouldn't want to see their data collection or advertising interrupted or crippled.
Those giant executive salaries? We're told the unicorns who make this money do so because their leadership genius is that good and there's so few of them able to do it.
And fuck this "we'll cooperate with management" idea. That is the *same* management that would fuck their employees out of a nickel if they could get away with it.
Does dogs' intelligence drive socialization, or does socialization behavior drive greater intelligence? Or are they coincidental developments?
I'm sure that some working breeds are selectively bred based on their demonstrated working ability, but I think that's probably a fairly recent development. It seems more likely that in the long journey to domestication, compliance with humans was probably just an evolution advantage.
Dogs that were aggressive to humans got driven off or killed, dogs that were compliant and aided human tasks like hunting or herding got preferential treatment. You could define this as "bred for trainability" but I don't think it was actually a deliberate process early in the domestication process. I think it's more likely that it was an organic outcome, and that deliberate breeding didn't happen until much later.
My dad grew up on a farm and he says they usually had a couple of dogs on the farm, but they were generally just strays. The well behaved ones got table scraps and attention, the ones that were a nuisance got shot. I suspect in a lot of rural areas, a lot of dogs were just kind of semi-feral companion animals who bred on their own and lived or died based on their sociability and adaptability.
Dad said that the ones that stuck around the longest ended up being useful, actually learning tasks like herding cattle between pastures. And without explicit training, either. They'd follow him to the pasture and kind of managed to just engage in herding after seeing it happen a couple of times. He said one in particular could move a small herd solo after a while. And these were all just mutts, not specific breeds, either.
I requested G section and when it was granted, G section put me onto training straight away for my new position;
I love it how these economic-sounding pronouncements about worker obsolescence make it sound like merely a bureaucratic operation plus a dash of worker initiative and the jobs problem is solved.
I like economics, but I'm increasingly convinced that economists are mostly the ecclesiastical division of the capitalist class. Their role is to endorse greed and dislocation of workers as necessary and good works and rebuke critics who question the outcome.
The larger problem is that these aren't technical tools for a technical audience anymore, the blindly ignorant masses are 98% of the customer base now and what sells to them is what drives design.
And since they drive the entire product cycle anymore, there's no choices left. Here and there projects pop up which claim to produce a smartphone that does something the market leaders don't, but they always seem to fizzle because of the overhead of an actual new smartphone design.
And in many ways, doesn't the smartphone charging case mostly solve the battery life issue anyway? You wind up with a phone chunkier than a phone designed with a big battery, but usually you get double battery life along with it.
The real problem is that they seem to be caught on this idea of "how people use the computer" and then assuming and corralling users into a single model.
IMHO, the world of computer display technology is expanding faster than the window/display management is evolving to manage it.
As an example, a 43" 4k display can be run at 100% (as in zero) scaling and have the same dot pitch as a typical 1920x1080 display, which means you're left with a single desktop that functions as a stack of 4 of those 1920x1080 displays yet Windows has no method for managing that display space well natively. I use third party software that lets me split the display logically and manage window locations.
If there's anything missing from Windows, it's recognizing that we're not in a single screen world or at a single display resolution.
It's absolutely proof that they have run out of ideas and are merely iterating needlessly and calling it "advancement".
Is there anyone out there who feels that the existing "window" paradigm has fundamentally run past its expiration date and that they are not getting anything done because of it? *And* that this somehow is the solution?
I'm kind of inclined to think that some major Microsoft investors should start asking a lot of fucking questions about how much is being wasted in the Windows division of Microsoft's business trying to re-solve what are essentially solved problems. My guess is they could lay off a huge chunk of the staff and greatly improve the quality of the software that is produced by eliminating this redundant churn.
Jesus fucking Christ, the software industry already nearly (or actually) collects fucking rents on their software, why are they wasting their own profits on stupid reinventions of user interfaces every 18 months? They aren't needed and really aren't wanted, either. Lay off most of these people, direct the others to fix the outstanding bugs, bask in the greater profits and user satisfaction from a stable interface.
The guy is named Ajit Pai and has the power to fundamentally alter the nature of the Internet. If there's so much white supremacy in the federal government, who let this non-white guy call the shots?
It seems more likely that abandoned projects would have lost/forgotten passwords, not zero security at all on cloud services.
I get passwords set to "password" or blank for internal-facing only systems, I see that about once in a while when I end up confronting mystery systems at clients. But most of the time the problem is nobody knows what the password is.
They say this and it makes intuitive sense to me (the way a dollar is made up of 100 cents), but if I stop and think about it, it reminds me of currency devaluation as means of solving hyperinflation. You can just move the decimal point and call a $100 bill a $1 bill, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.
They have these retractable rail bogeys for railroad maintenance vehicles that let pickups and larger trucks actually drive on the train tracks.
I'm curious if they could do the same thing for semi-truck trailers and make them into rail cars. It would probably make the most sense if the rail wheels were somehow part of the existing trailer suspension, but I don't know how well that would play with the existing trailer wheel spacing and of course you would need to do something for front bogeys where semi-trailers have nothing but dolly legs, but perhaps these could be morphed into some combination of dolly/bogeys.
Of course they do intermodal now with containers and/or putting entire semi-trailers on flatbed rail cars. But maybe it would ease the automation of intermodal freight if the entire semi-trailer could be moved between track and road.
I'm kind of surprised that there isn't more use of container-style trailers. I would think there would be efficiencies to be gained in building most trailers as containers, even if the box part was made to the typical lightweight standard of over the road freight. That type could be used in a wider array of uses (intermodal, storage, etc) and reduce the number of frame and suspension assemblies needed. A lot of trailers get parked, and it seems like a waste of a lot of materials and resources for an unused trailer to have a complete frame, suspension assembly and tires.
Also, moving goalposts? Man, first black people can't be slaves, then they get to vote, now they expect traffic stops to not end in extrajudicial death sentences. Where oh where will it end? And they just keep voting Democratic!
This is an example of moving the goalposts. The cops stop something like 2 million people per year and the number of "extrajudicial death sentences" is in the single digits per year. Nearly all are litigated by juries and the police found not guilty by juries. The evidence presented have shown the "community narrative" to be factually wrong at best and outright lies at worst.
None of this is to suggest that the police abuse of power isn't happening, but that it's not really a byproduct of racism, it' a byproduct of statutory authority that gives the police broad authority to kill people in ambiguous situations. But because all the outrage and enmity is focused on the racism of the police, we don't really do anything to increase the police criminal liability for shootings because all the energy is focused on the sideshow of racism.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. The local newspaper is prone to running the occasional feature article with essays written by school children in the 1900-1930 era. The ones they run are often written by 7-8th graders and read like they were written by adult college graduates -- language, sentence structure, composition, even the ideas expressed are mature and sophisticated.
I cannot imagine a contemporary student of high school writing these essays, let alone junior high school kids.
I can't decide if its the curriculum, the instruction, the kids, the parents, or some kind of emergent aspect of our culture that's made our kids so less capable than they used to be. I'm kind of inclined to a get off my lawn argument about TV and technology making people distracted and less capable in general literacy, but I think there's room for a sound criticism of our crass, commercial cultural content, too.
it might be more accurate to say there is very little overt racism. The racism is still there, but much diminished and driven underground.
The big problem is we use the same semantics to describe a phenomenon that really operates on a spectrum, not a binary value. I don't know that describing a 1935 KKK lynching supporter and some guy who doesn't like contemporary urban black culture as both being "racist" tells us very much about racism.
I also think it sets up a permanent state of racial hostility. At the end of the day, racism is much more about cultural and values conflict than it is about the collection of biological factors we call race. It's perfectly legitimate to dislike elements of cultures different than your own, but if we keep describing personal cultural preferences as "racism" we will always have racism. You can't ever achieve a world where every person accepts every person different than them equally, especially when it involves wide gaps in cultural beliefs and practices.
Do you think that the birther conspiracy theory could ever have thrived for a white president?
John Kennedy was accused of being a papist. It was widely questioned whether Kennedy would uphold the Constitution or whether he would obey edicts from the pope. He gave a major speech to a group of Protestants to defend his personal Catholic faith and stand up for the separation of church and state. I find it very similar to the birther controversy.
The largest problem with racial equality as a whole is that the goalposts are constantly moving and after a while it feel like they're being moved intentionally and cynically to maintain a political coalition, not because there's meaningful racial inequality.
Why don't they make a "reference" AMD laptop that shows how well it can do instead of relying on lame OEMs to make crippled versions?
Back in the day, I used to use Intel motherboards because they were well documented and worked more reliably than OEM motherboards with the same chipset. Google has made their own Android phone to avoid vendor crapware. Hell, even Microsoft feels compelled to make laptops.
And who still puts spinning rust in laptops, anyway? I can't imagine a better way to cripple laptop performance.
LOL, my dad is totally unexceptional. He was good at his sales job, but our home life was totally average middle class at best. We grew up shopping at the original Target stores.
My guess would be someone who's an actual broadcast engineer or in a closely aligned field. They would certainly understand the uplink transmitter technology well and know how to produce the right signal, and probably have sources for the parts and equipment.
My ancestors emigrated (actually escaped, from what my genealogically inclined uncle figured out) from somewhere in German-speaking Europe in the 1830s. But there's no real "accumulated family wealth" -- my dad grew up pretty poor in the Ozarks in a family of 9 kids. For a while in his teens they lived in a house built in the 1880s with no indoor plumbing at all, and this was the early 1940s.
He got drafted into the army in 1953, and after that merely worked his way through a series of sales jobs until he retired. No college education, but he did finish high school.
In theory, if he grew up poor, shouldn't he still be poor? As far as I know, the only low-cost land my ancestors ever had was a farm in eastern Kansas in the 1880s, but that's about 2 generations before my dad was born. The farm is still owned by a relative, but no "land wealth" was ever accrued or given to my dad or his dad.
I'm inclined to believe in the cycle of poverty, but I don't think it's 100% of the story. It's almost like there has to be material poverty, extreme ignorance, and other factors as well. There's too many people like my own relatives who basically grew up with nothing who didn't end up in poverty themselves for just material poverty to be the only explanation.
I think this makes sense as the most likely explanation.
But....where would you get the equipment able to encode and transmit the signal correctly and at enough power to override the studio signal? I'd imagine your theoretical "advanced electronics experimenter" might be able to build something like this, but I'd also guess it wouldn't be a simple project and some key parts would have been expensive. I'd also guess there's probably some encoding/modulation info you'd have to know as well.
And if the studio-transmitter link was microwave, isn't there some direction and aiming dependency? It doesn't seem like you'd be able to aim at it from just anywhere convenient, you'd have to be fairly close to the studio to get the transmitter aimed correctly.
I'm curious what Chicago-area broadcast techs thought about this hack in its era. I'd wager the odds were good it was a short list of people with enough know-how to do it and they might have actually known who in the community was capable of it.
It really is a similar problem. Unfortunately, if and when the iPhone crashes as a device, it will be too late for Apple and they won't be able to suddenly innovate another product like the iPhone. Just like the petrostates won't be able to invent a total new economy, either.
IMHO, a couple of years ago Tim Cook should have convinced shareholders that either a major new product initiative was necessary even if it sucked 20% profits.
It's unfortunate that they turned away from any kind of business or scientific computing (other than what you can do on a desktop) years ago. I think there might have been a real business niche in there for them which could have expanded into the cloud space, maybe even before "the cloud' was thing. I think networked computing could have used their user interface expertise.
I honestly don't know where they go from the smartphone. The consumer electronics space is otherwise too crowded. A film studio? Maybe the car should still be considered a reasonable idea? Something even higher-end, like a plane or some kind of air transport? Luxury housing?
Apple make so much money from the iPhone that they don't really have a strong incentive to execute any new or innovative products. This makes it easy to waste money on side efforts like this, because, well, why bother?
And they also get caught up in wanting it to seem "special" and not another me-too product, when, actually it really is a me-too product. Sure they can make it with Beats(tm) bass or some kind of super-duper audio which might make it seem more interesting, but that's not really particularly compelling when their customer base is already using headphones.
Until iPhone sales start slipping badly, I don't see Apple having the motivation to do much more than bounce their profits among tax havens. Any *real* risk-taking might actually fail and thus royally piss off shareholders when it becomes a $20 billion write-off. Pissing away a half-billion or so noodling with projects like this seems like all they really need to do at this point.
Is cloud pricing complex because it has to be -- so many options and permutations of configuration that it addresses a market need for flexibility?
Or is it done because of economic viability? In other words, if there was just some standard monthly rate for a VM regardless of utilization the price would end up being so high that it would be non-competitive? I accept that even in this situation there would be some variability -- maybe CPU count, memory quantity, disk consumption, but more or less flat rate for those quantities.
Or is it a case of deliberately opaque pricing -- make it seem cheap ("only $0.75 per minute, it's like free!") and very difficult to calculate what it would actually cost to run workloads on it? The enterprise sales gimmick of never making it possible to make
I'm sure its a combination of all 3, but I'm inclined to think that there's a strong combination of lack of economic viability and deliberate opacity.
Slashdot Mirror
The BRICS countries have just as much control over it as their Western counterparts.
I think you meant to write:
The Russia and China don't have the kind of control they want.
I'm curious how the whole "BRICS" alliance is still a thing these days. I don't see where South Africa has much in common with the others. India is more or less in competition with China. China is the 800 lb gorilla in the group. Russia pretty much can't be trusted at all.
Some of the trains/routes don't have wifi and he turns his hotspot on with "Virgin Trains Free Wifi" as the SSID. Then he tries very hard to suppress his own laughter when people start complaining about how the wifi doesn't work.
Data consumption management could be built into any smartphone at the OS and allow all manner of functionality, from data ceilings, rate-limiting and calendar based data quotas.
Any time I see a thing that could be done and isn't done on smartphones, my first reaction is that it must run contrary to what the carriers want. If people could use tools to manage their data consumption easily, there would be no overage fees and fewer people would be moving to higher data tiers.
Smartphone makers see the carriers as nearly co-equal with users as customers, perhaps more so because they have a gatekeeper ability to block these devices from their network.
In both Google and Apple's cases, I'll bet they're also pandering a little to advertisers, too, who wouldn't want to see their data collection or advertising interrupted or crippled.
Those giant executive salaries? We're told the unicorns who make this money do so because their leadership genius is that good and there's so few of them able to do it.
And fuck this "we'll cooperate with management" idea. That is the *same* management that would fuck their employees out of a nickel if they could get away with it.
I'm often surprised at how severe the moderation is in some subs. Very rules and power oriented.
Does dogs' intelligence drive socialization, or does socialization behavior drive greater intelligence? Or are they coincidental developments?
I'm sure that some working breeds are selectively bred based on their demonstrated working ability, but I think that's probably a fairly recent development. It seems more likely that in the long journey to domestication, compliance with humans was probably just an evolution advantage.
Dogs that were aggressive to humans got driven off or killed, dogs that were compliant and aided human tasks like hunting or herding got preferential treatment. You could define this as "bred for trainability" but I don't think it was actually a deliberate process early in the domestication process. I think it's more likely that it was an organic outcome, and that deliberate breeding didn't happen until much later.
My dad grew up on a farm and he says they usually had a couple of dogs on the farm, but they were generally just strays. The well behaved ones got table scraps and attention, the ones that were a nuisance got shot. I suspect in a lot of rural areas, a lot of dogs were just kind of semi-feral companion animals who bred on their own and lived or died based on their sociability and adaptability.
Dad said that the ones that stuck around the longest ended up being useful, actually learning tasks like herding cattle between pastures. And without explicit training, either. They'd follow him to the pasture and kind of managed to just engage in herding after seeing it happen a couple of times. He said one in particular could move a small herd solo after a while. And these were all just mutts, not specific breeds, either.
I requested G section and when it was granted, G section put me onto training straight away for my new position;
I love it how these economic-sounding pronouncements about worker obsolescence make it sound like merely a bureaucratic operation plus a dash of worker initiative and the jobs problem is solved.
I like economics, but I'm increasingly convinced that economists are mostly the ecclesiastical division of the capitalist class. Their role is to endorse greed and dislocation of workers as necessary and good works and rebuke critics who question the outcome.
The larger problem is that these aren't technical tools for a technical audience anymore, the blindly ignorant masses are 98% of the customer base now and what sells to them is what drives design.
And since they drive the entire product cycle anymore, there's no choices left. Here and there projects pop up which claim to produce a smartphone that does something the market leaders don't, but they always seem to fizzle because of the overhead of an actual new smartphone design.
And in many ways, doesn't the smartphone charging case mostly solve the battery life issue anyway? You wind up with a phone chunkier than a phone designed with a big battery, but usually you get double battery life along with it.
The real problem is that they seem to be caught on this idea of "how people use the computer" and then assuming and corralling users into a single model.
IMHO, the world of computer display technology is expanding faster than the window/display management is evolving to manage it.
As an example, a 43" 4k display can be run at 100% (as in zero) scaling and have the same dot pitch as a typical 1920x1080 display, which means you're left with a single desktop that functions as a stack of 4 of those 1920x1080 displays yet Windows has no method for managing that display space well natively. I use third party software that lets me split the display logically and manage window locations.
If there's anything missing from Windows, it's recognizing that we're not in a single screen world or at a single display resolution.
It's absolutely proof that they have run out of ideas and are merely iterating needlessly and calling it "advancement".
Is there anyone out there who feels that the existing "window" paradigm has fundamentally run past its expiration date and that they are not getting anything done because of it? *And* that this somehow is the solution?
I'm kind of inclined to think that some major Microsoft investors should start asking a lot of fucking questions about how much is being wasted in the Windows division of Microsoft's business trying to re-solve what are essentially solved problems. My guess is they could lay off a huge chunk of the staff and greatly improve the quality of the software that is produced by eliminating this redundant churn.
Jesus fucking Christ, the software industry already nearly (or actually) collects fucking rents on their software, why are they wasting their own profits on stupid reinventions of user interfaces every 18 months? They aren't needed and really aren't wanted, either. Lay off most of these people, direct the others to fix the outstanding bugs, bask in the greater profits and user satisfaction from a stable interface.
The guy is named Ajit Pai and has the power to fundamentally alter the nature of the Internet. If there's so much white supremacy in the federal government, who let this non-white guy call the shots?
It seems more likely that abandoned projects would have lost/forgotten passwords, not zero security at all on cloud services.
I get passwords set to "password" or blank for internal-facing only systems, I see that about once in a while when I end up confronting mystery systems at clients. But most of the time the problem is nobody knows what the password is.
They say this and it makes intuitive sense to me (the way a dollar is made up of 100 cents), but if I stop and think about it, it reminds me of currency devaluation as means of solving hyperinflation. You can just move the decimal point and call a $100 bill a $1 bill, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.
They have these retractable rail bogeys for railroad maintenance vehicles that let pickups and larger trucks actually drive on the train tracks.
I'm curious if they could do the same thing for semi-truck trailers and make them into rail cars. It would probably make the most sense if the rail wheels were somehow part of the existing trailer suspension, but I don't know how well that would play with the existing trailer wheel spacing and of course you would need to do something for front bogeys where semi-trailers have nothing but dolly legs, but perhaps these could be morphed into some combination of dolly/bogeys.
Of course they do intermodal now with containers and/or putting entire semi-trailers on flatbed rail cars. But maybe it would ease the automation of intermodal freight if the entire semi-trailer could be moved between track and road.
I'm kind of surprised that there isn't more use of container-style trailers. I would think there would be efficiencies to be gained in building most trailers as containers, even if the box part was made to the typical lightweight standard of over the road freight. That type could be used in a wider array of uses (intermodal, storage, etc) and reduce the number of frame and suspension assemblies needed. A lot of trailers get parked, and it seems like a waste of a lot of materials and resources for an unused trailer to have a complete frame, suspension assembly and tires.
Also, moving goalposts? Man, first black people can't be slaves, then they get to vote, now they expect traffic stops to not end in extrajudicial death sentences. Where oh where will it end? And they just keep voting Democratic!
This is an example of moving the goalposts. The cops stop something like 2 million people per year and the number of "extrajudicial death sentences" is in the single digits per year. Nearly all are litigated by juries and the police found not guilty by juries. The evidence presented have shown the "community narrative" to be factually wrong at best and outright lies at worst.
None of this is to suggest that the police abuse of power isn't happening, but that it's not really a byproduct of racism, it' a byproduct of statutory authority that gives the police broad authority to kill people in ambiguous situations. But because all the outrage and enmity is focused on the racism of the police, we don't really do anything to increase the police criminal liability for shootings because all the energy is focused on the sideshow of racism.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. The local newspaper is prone to running the occasional feature article with essays written by school children in the 1900-1930 era. The ones they run are often written by 7-8th graders and read like they were written by adult college graduates -- language, sentence structure, composition, even the ideas expressed are mature and sophisticated.
I cannot imagine a contemporary student of high school writing these essays, let alone junior high school kids.
I can't decide if its the curriculum, the instruction, the kids, the parents, or some kind of emergent aspect of our culture that's made our kids so less capable than they used to be. I'm kind of inclined to a get off my lawn argument about TV and technology making people distracted and less capable in general literacy, but I think there's room for a sound criticism of our crass, commercial cultural content, too.
it might be more accurate to say there is very little overt racism. The racism is still there, but much diminished and driven underground.
The big problem is we use the same semantics to describe a phenomenon that really operates on a spectrum, not a binary value. I don't know that describing a 1935 KKK lynching supporter and some guy who doesn't like contemporary urban black culture as both being "racist" tells us very much about racism.
I also think it sets up a permanent state of racial hostility. At the end of the day, racism is much more about cultural and values conflict than it is about the collection of biological factors we call race. It's perfectly legitimate to dislike elements of cultures different than your own, but if we keep describing personal cultural preferences as "racism" we will always have racism. You can't ever achieve a world where every person accepts every person different than them equally, especially when it involves wide gaps in cultural beliefs and practices.
Do you think that the birther conspiracy theory could ever have thrived for a white president?
John Kennedy was accused of being a papist. It was widely questioned whether Kennedy would uphold the Constitution or whether he would obey edicts from the pope. He gave a major speech to a group of Protestants to defend his personal Catholic faith and stand up for the separation of church and state. I find it very similar to the birther controversy.
The largest problem with racial equality as a whole is that the goalposts are constantly moving and after a while it feel like they're being moved intentionally and cynically to maintain a political coalition, not because there's meaningful racial inequality.
Why don't they make a "reference" AMD laptop that shows how well it can do instead of relying on lame OEMs to make crippled versions?
Back in the day, I used to use Intel motherboards because they were well documented and worked more reliably than OEM motherboards with the same chipset. Google has made their own Android phone to avoid vendor crapware. Hell, even Microsoft feels compelled to make laptops.
And who still puts spinning rust in laptops, anyway? I can't imagine a better way to cripple laptop performance.
LOL, my dad is totally unexceptional. He was good at his sales job, but our home life was totally average middle class at best. We grew up shopping at the original Target stores.
My guess would be someone who's an actual broadcast engineer or in a closely aligned field. They would certainly understand the uplink transmitter technology well and know how to produce the right signal, and probably have sources for the parts and equipment.
My ancestors emigrated (actually escaped, from what my genealogically inclined uncle figured out) from somewhere in German-speaking Europe in the 1830s. But there's no real "accumulated family wealth" -- my dad grew up pretty poor in the Ozarks in a family of 9 kids. For a while in his teens they lived in a house built in the 1880s with no indoor plumbing at all, and this was the early 1940s.
He got drafted into the army in 1953, and after that merely worked his way through a series of sales jobs until he retired. No college education, but he did finish high school.
In theory, if he grew up poor, shouldn't he still be poor? As far as I know, the only low-cost land my ancestors ever had was a farm in eastern Kansas in the 1880s, but that's about 2 generations before my dad was born. The farm is still owned by a relative, but no "land wealth" was ever accrued or given to my dad or his dad.
I'm inclined to believe in the cycle of poverty, but I don't think it's 100% of the story. It's almost like there has to be material poverty, extreme ignorance, and other factors as well. There's too many people like my own relatives who basically grew up with nothing who didn't end up in poverty themselves for just material poverty to be the only explanation.
I think this makes sense as the most likely explanation.
But....where would you get the equipment able to encode and transmit the signal correctly and at enough power to override the studio signal? I'd imagine your theoretical "advanced electronics experimenter" might be able to build something like this, but I'd also guess it wouldn't be a simple project and some key parts would have been expensive. I'd also guess there's probably some encoding/modulation info you'd have to know as well.
And if the studio-transmitter link was microwave, isn't there some direction and aiming dependency? It doesn't seem like you'd be able to aim at it from just anywhere convenient, you'd have to be fairly close to the studio to get the transmitter aimed correctly.
I'm curious what Chicago-area broadcast techs thought about this hack in its era. I'd wager the odds were good it was a short list of people with enough know-how to do it and they might have actually known who in the community was capable of it.
It really is a similar problem. Unfortunately, if and when the iPhone crashes as a device, it will be too late for Apple and they won't be able to suddenly innovate another product like the iPhone. Just like the petrostates won't be able to invent a total new economy, either.
IMHO, a couple of years ago Tim Cook should have convinced shareholders that either a major new product initiative was necessary even if it sucked 20% profits.
It's unfortunate that they turned away from any kind of business or scientific computing (other than what you can do on a desktop) years ago. I think there might have been a real business niche in there for them which could have expanded into the cloud space, maybe even before "the cloud' was thing. I think networked computing could have used their user interface expertise.
I honestly don't know where they go from the smartphone. The consumer electronics space is otherwise too crowded. A film studio? Maybe the car should still be considered a reasonable idea? Something even higher-end, like a plane or some kind of air transport? Luxury housing?
Apple make so much money from the iPhone that they don't really have a strong incentive to execute any new or innovative products. This makes it easy to waste money on side efforts like this, because, well, why bother?
And they also get caught up in wanting it to seem "special" and not another me-too product, when, actually it really is a me-too product. Sure they can make it with Beats(tm) bass or some kind of super-duper audio which might make it seem more interesting, but that's not really particularly compelling when their customer base is already using headphones.
Until iPhone sales start slipping badly, I don't see Apple having the motivation to do much more than bounce their profits among tax havens. Any *real* risk-taking might actually fail and thus royally piss off shareholders when it becomes a $20 billion write-off. Pissing away a half-billion or so noodling with projects like this seems like all they really need to do at this point.
Is cloud pricing complex because it has to be -- so many options and permutations of configuration that it addresses a market need for flexibility?
Or is it done because of economic viability? In other words, if there was just some standard monthly rate for a VM regardless of utilization the price would end up being so high that it would be non-competitive? I accept that even in this situation there would be some variability -- maybe CPU count, memory quantity, disk consumption, but more or less flat rate for those quantities.
Or is it a case of deliberately opaque pricing -- make it seem cheap ("only $0.75 per minute, it's like free!") and very difficult to calculate what it would actually cost to run workloads on it? The enterprise sales gimmick of never making it possible to make
I'm sure its a combination of all 3, but I'm inclined to think that there's a strong combination of lack of economic viability and deliberate opacity.