Remember a zillion years ago when it was all Network Solutions and they were still mostly acting in the mode of the original Internet graybeards? Like it was trivial to update name servers, straightforward interfaces and email verification and it just worked? No upsells, no redirection to shopping/buying pages, no nearly-hidden "manage my domain" buttons?
Obviously the email verification thing wasn't a security dream, but I can remember setting up domains and getting them pointed at my name servers with active zone files in a couple of hours at max. Now it takes an act of religious devotion just to find the fucking place to input my name servers without buying 37 years of web and mail hosting.
None of this is hard, or should be. And it's made worse by websites-for-idiots like Wix whose default advice is just to hand over your domain to Wix. I have to fight off these webby app (or is it appy web?) "experts" like this regularly who get hired to "implement" web sites and simply don't know or care their attempt to "publish" their shiny web site the Wix way winds up zeroing a public zone file. I had one of these "designers" try to tell me DNS was only for the web server anyway.
At a minimum they should have some kind of customer service flag pop up for agents when an individual calls about an absurdly high bill that's likely to be some kind of billing or data accounting error and that then routes the call to a team that handles them specifically.
A team dedicated to these could eliminate the usual media clusterfuckery that happens when a carrier blindly tries to enforce not-believable billable and flag that person for the data/billing accounting developers so they could possibly track down an error in the system.
And then waive the bill completely or at least reduce it to whatever last month's was -- that would create word of mouth good will that $1 million in advertising never would.
It would be interesting to see a list of the top 100 consumer data consumers and how much they consumed from all the carriers. I don't doubt there are weird cases where people are perfectly willing to blow a couple of grand a month on data consumption, but it's kind of hard to think of non-business related situations where people would be regularly running up $1000+ monthly tabs for data and not doing anything about it.
About the only case I can think of is someone who does consulting as an individual off their LTE connection and has the ability to bill their clients for all the data they consume. But even then, LTE isn't *that* fast and if you're pulling down a couple hundred gig a month, chances are your opportunity costs are such that you'd seek a faster download path just for the time savings.
But we're not talking about today. If we were having this conversation about aircraft in 1912 you could say exactly the same thing.
But if we were having a conversation TODAY about getting in a 1912 vintage aircraft, it'd be completely valid to have reservations.
This is Slashdot, so I almost never read the linkbait, er, TFS, but my guess is if the researchers had qualified their question with something about autonomous car technology being "fully developed" and "as safe as modern jet travel is today" they would have gotten more answers along the lines of read the paper, do work, watch a movie, etc.
But then they wouldn't have elicited any responses about the perceptions of safety people have now about autonomous cars, and the reality is the average person doesn't know shit about them other than some kind of headline about people dying in self-driving cars. ("Area man dies in self-driving Tesla; acquaintances say arrogant rich fuck got what he long had coming").
Apple is in something of a unique position with this, as they could in theory have a bunch of unique business units across functional areas (iOS, mobile, desktop, MacOS, etc) and internationally that sold/licensed products to each other, creating a real maze of revenue and tax liability.
The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress' subpoena powers are covered by the speech and debate clause of the constitution, making their subpoenas immune from judicial challenge -- "for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place".
This means that under the broad umbrella of congressional speech (which includes issuing subpoenas) they have nearly complete legal immunity, including from judicial intervention.
If Congress were more willing to use the force of constitutional law at their disposal, we might have fewer dipshit bureaucrats acting like they were above the law. You fuck around in a Federal courtroom, and I guarantee you the judge will jail you for contempt so fast it'll make your head swim. Yet Federal officials seem to get away with flipping congress the finger, suppressing documents and dissembling under oath to Congress. Why?
Don't threaten to daydream about thinking about maybe issuing a subpoena.
Issue the fucking subpeona. When he doesn't immediately comply, charge him with inherent contempt of congress and have the sergeant-at-arms drag him forcibly in front of the committee to answer questions and jail him if he doesn't comply.
Congress really ought to build a Plexiglas jail cell in the Capitol visitor center specifically for government officials who refuse to recognize the subpoena authority of congress. Nothing would compel their compliance more than knowing that the alternative outcome may be high visibility detention facility where tourists come to learn about the many powers of the US Congress.
It would be awesome if somebody discovered that removing the headphone jack was a violation of the ADA because it placed an undue burden on handicapped people, and Apple was forced to add the jack back in.
I know, they provide a dongle which adds that functionality back in, and nobody is forced to choose an Apple device without a headphone jack, so it would never hold water, but it'd be hilarious if they had to not only pay taxes but also offer a model with a headphone jack.
Can you actually mix multiple inputs on those headphones, so that you obtain audio from two devices at once?
My experience has always been that while a lot of devices support pairing multiple devices, there is always a manual process to switch between devices you want to get audio from, with "manual process" including either manually selecting the desired paired device or worse, disabling bluetooth on one of the paired devices you wanted to disable. I've never seen a device that allowed for simultaneous audio from multiple sources.
I don't know if this is a limitation of the bluetooth standard or the radios. My guess is that its a standards limitation, since, say a laptop will allow simultaneous use of a mouse and headphones at the same time. But even laptops (with presumably none of the assumed hardware limitations of a bluetooth dongle or headphones) don't seem to allow multiple BT audio devices to be paired to it.
I've long wanted a bluetooth reciever dongle with mixing capabilities, where I could pair with multiple audio sources and control the volume and mute either independently while being able to obtain audio from both devices at the same time. I don't know if this would require multiple radios or just better software in the device.
I have an '07 S80 V8 with adaptive cruise and it's my favorite feature. 2007 was kind of early in the adaptive cruise era but it works well, down to 20 mph but won't do a complete stop, though the collision avoidance system will pre-charge the brake pressure.
The problem with adding the hardware, even with a modern Volvo that offered the feature in the same model as an option is that almost nothing in a Volvo can be added without VIDA installing software. My S80 spent 4 days in the shop when I added the iPod connector because they had to load a custom software patch to make the component work.
I think adaptive cruise would be about the sweet spot as a "tack on" -- simple enough to patch it into the existing cruise control system. But lane control and more advanced autonomous stuff would be a lot of mechanical additions, not counting software or electronics even.
There's a lunatic fringe that will never find an outlet no matter how generous the hegemonic news media is. I'm not sure that failing to air the opinions of a UFO theorist during the timeslot allocated to fairness-style responses counts as an example of censorship.
Even so, in the 1970s it was a fairly common comedy trope to lampoon the "alternative viewpoint" segment many TV stations ran. Saturday Night Live made it a recurring theme in their news segment. It worked as comedy because people recognized it, and people recognized it because they had actually seen it -- TV stations *would* often let zealous people with marginal ideas on the air because it satisfied the fairness doctrine. They didn't get much time nor did they get prime time slots, but they did get air time.
A lot of TV stations also met their fairness doctrine quotas by hosting talk shows. Sure, they were hosted by the weekend traffic reporter and appeared on a Sunday morning at 6:30 AM time slot, but they would trot out all the usual suspects with weird ideas and treat them as if they had something important to say.
And historically, pamphleteers and broadside "bloggers" have been influential. They didn't keep track of photocopiers and mimeograph machines in the Soviet Union because there was a shortage of ink and paper, but because they worried about the influence of opinions that ran against what was showing up in Pravda, even if they lacked the distribution and production quality of a well-funded paper.
That's crazy -- so if you had an awful day, and sold zero for 8 hours you got $80. The next day you sold $80 worth of commission, your net pay for two days is zero?
In many ways that seems worse than straight commission where you make zero unless you sell something. What you described sounds like a way to basically cut the effective commission rate to half or worse.
How many of these things are actually incentives and how many are just outright coercion re-labeled incentives?
I tend to think of an incentive as a motivation to get X+N if I do some extra thing. If I don't do the extra thing, I just get X. But if I say "do the extra thing or you're fired", that seems like coercion. I don't get X+N, I don't even get X if I don't do the extra thing, I get fired.
Holding a gun to someone's head and demanding their wallet and then claiming that staying alive is an incentive to hand over your wallet seems like a perversion of the concept of incentives.
I think most of these companies where Wells Fargo style fraud happens aren't actually operating on incentives, they're operating coercively. People will do all kinds of unethical things if they think the outcome from not doing them will be termination and subsequent financial peril. Wells was probably holding a gun to their head and claiming that continued employment was an incentive.
There is probably also a threshold where the incentive on offer is so lucrative that people are willing to risk unethical activity to achieve it, but then again there should be sufficient checks to make the unethical achievement either impossible or with a penalty that outweighs the value of the incentive. Robbing a bank has a potentially lucrative incentive, but it also carries a penalty that makes a haul of low five figures in cash not work the risk of a 20 year prison sentence.
We have an infrastructure problem- plenty of systems assume that the internet will either always be up, or be up at least, for instance, daily.
And it's getting worse, because the infrastructure that keeps the Internet up is starting to require the Internet actually be up.
A cow-orker installed some Meraki switches this past weekend and they are "cloud" managed. I didn't work on it, but he said you basically needed an active Internet connection to do anything with them because there was no local management at all. And of course the switches themselves had problems, cutting off Internet access until physically rebooted at least once.
Off the top of my head, I can only really see this being even sane if you had a dedicated management network with Internet access not dependent on the switching you needed to manage, but this mostly runs counter to much of the idea behind a management network (ie, a closed network with access limited to protect management interfaces).
But there seems to be an increasing number of things that just don't work without Internet access, and often not because the manufacturer cheaped out and pushed intelligence to the cloud and cut the system specs, but because of licensing, DRM or because some asshat in marketing wanted to guaran-damn-tee that they got phone home data, so the device just doesn't work unless it can phone home.
Assuming you have a technology so good that it really could allow trucks to run on the highway while the driver slept, it would take at least 5 years to align all the state laws regulating truck highway traffic, change federal regulations regarding the number of hours drivers could be on the road without mandatory stops.
And that's just regulations, even if by magic such an automated truck was available *tomorrow*, you have a capital base of billions of dollars worth of trucks already out there which can't do this. And these trucks are, for the most part, built for extreme long-term durability with useful lifespans of at least a decade. It would take 10-20 years for such an automated truck to replace the existing base of trucks.
I don't doubt such a transformation will happen, but its decades away, not 5 years by any stretch of the imagination. And none of this factors in other potential transformations which might be more appealing, such as hybrid powertrains or even other forms of efficiency replacing long-haul trucking, like further growth of intermodal transportation or other large-scale logistical changes which would compete with automated trucking.
TV & Radio were heavily regulated and we even had the Fairness Doctrine which *required* media companies to broadcast contrasting viewpoints. In the Fairness Doctrine era, the vast majority of top 25 TV markets had maybe 5 commercial television stations.
So even though the television stations played games with timeslots and formats, they did give up air time to competing views, and it's kind of astonishing to think that in a given broadcast area a competing view being aired on one station literally represented 20-25% of the area's television broadcasting.
Print publishing has always been a fairly democratic technology, since literally anyone can own a press of some kind and presses scale down in cost faster than they scale down in capacity -- printing copies isn't the issue as much as distribution, and cities often supported multiple newspapers, even in the commercial era of large newspapers.
The movement to private spaces (physically, like shopping malls) or completely private communications networks and social media networks has eliminated many options for communicating to the public or even peacefully protesting.
No one owes you an engaged audience, but it's hard to see how democracy and free communication persists in a totally walled environment controlled by corporations. That's freedom for their owners, but not for anyone else. Dissent somehow becomes twisted into violating the owner's property rights.
These days when I go down to the public square to stand on my soap box and make my voice heard, the public square is empty.
The public, which used to mostly be reachable via the public sphere, has all moved into spaces which are privately owned and publicly accessible for commerce, but not publicly accessible for free speech.
This is the problem with the "go somewhere else" argument. There is nowhere else.
The idea of a parallel internet run by BRICs? Who is going to buy into and provide services to it? Who is going to trust a group of the most authoritarian and/or corrupt and/or inefficient governments to manage such a network?
And the money and mindshare has a center of gravity heavily biased towards EU/US/Japan/ANZ economies. There's money to be made in BRICs, but so much less relative to the effort of running a large-scale network. It's like Windows Phone -- by all accounts, a decent platform but the income and desirable demographics and numbers are all biased to other platforms, so nobody bothers.
China only manages to halfway get away with this because of authoritarian political control, not because the Chinese want it and nobody is asking to be brought into the Chinese internet when they have the free and open internet as an alternative.
I see zero chance of these countries breaking off into their own networks.
What if it was theirs -- ie, they contracted with a bell manufacturer to create a set of bells with some kind of unique sound (ie, not bell #345 from the catalog), they attached them to a ringer mechanism and recorded the sound of *their* bells ringing.
I wonder if that would pass muster, or if the idea of a mechanical bell ringing (ie, a brass hemisphere getting hit by a little hammer) is so common that not even a custom bell with a non-standard tone could count, as mechanical ringers are so ubiquitous (or at least were...) that no modification of tone/timbre/pitch of a mechanical ring can be said to be unique.
It also makes me wonder if the common "ringing phone" ringtones were recorded from old Western Electric models and if they would have a claim on copyright to those sounds.
I'm thinking a combo of Surface Pro and a Phablet. The Phablet holds enough flash for a decent Windows environment (say, 512GB at least) and can slot into the Surface which provides the larger screen, x64 CPU and additional connectivity for video and USB.
The phablet can run ARM Windows and be a standalone phone device, while slotted into the Surface it provides radios for connectivity and calls during a desktop type computing session.
The trouble is, Microsoft has always refused to make normal Windows installable and bootable from USB, even though USB3 would be more than adequate for normal desktop work. The carry-your-OS-around thing would only be truly useful if you could boot any desktop with it.
But there is that strand of liberal Judaism that's more or less opposed to Israeli militarism and in favor of concessions to the Palestinians.
Although I grant you, it must be kind of awkward to be Jewish and influential and then have the Israeli government come calling. How can you win without making a major deal out of it? Either they beat you up for not being Jewish enough or for being too Jewish.
I was thinking mostly along the lines of connectivity -- you can't plug very much stuff into the Lightning port on an iPhone or iPad, but why not? Much of the ecosystem that the PC world represents is built around connecting stuff. Hell, you can't even connect a mouse via Bluetooth to an iPad.
I think there's a lot of courage-related things they could do with iPhone or iPad that would make them useful in more places or in more ways if other devices could be connected, but it would require relinquishing some level of control over them and stop seeing them merely as licensing/profit opportunities.
It seems really odd to me that they've come up with a really usable small computer but they have all these weird restrictions on what you can use them for. I'm sure most of it is about not getting caught in a backwards compatibility trap or retaining the ability to pursue a long roadmap of tiny incremental changes as a way to guarantee long term revenue.
But part of it seems like a self-imposed limitation of design thinking, like somehow above all else some small set of physical design principals must prevail.
I think the whole tax shelter thing really represents a lack of imagination on Apple's part, both in terms of lobbying and in terms of business management.
I think they're caught in a profit trap, where they're so profitable they can't justify expanding their business, since almost anything they do is likely to be less profitable (if not money losing) than doing nothing.
Without business expansion, they don't have any good place to put their profits and they (at least in terms of fiduciary responsibility) fear repatriating profits due to taxation.
I think what they *should* have done all along was lobby Congress for a tax exemption or significant rate cut on repatriated profits funneled into R&D efforts. This would have allowed them to both come up with ways to dig out of the profit trap the iPhone put them in *and* significantly cut their tax burden at the same time, all the while wrapping themselves in the flag saying how they're spending all this money here in the US, hiring US workers, etc.
Even if they didn't create a new profitable business line, they would have been able to cut their tax burden and gain some good will, and the costs associated with a new widget would have been greatly reduced.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember a zillion years ago when it was all Network Solutions and they were still mostly acting in the mode of the original Internet graybeards? Like it was trivial to update name servers, straightforward interfaces and email verification and it just worked? No upsells, no redirection to shopping/buying pages, no nearly-hidden "manage my domain" buttons?
Obviously the email verification thing wasn't a security dream, but I can remember setting up domains and getting them pointed at my name servers with active zone files in a couple of hours at max. Now it takes an act of religious devotion just to find the fucking place to input my name servers without buying 37 years of web and mail hosting.
None of this is hard, or should be. And it's made worse by websites-for-idiots like Wix whose default advice is just to hand over your domain to Wix. I have to fight off these webby app (or is it appy web?) "experts" like this regularly who get hired to "implement" web sites and simply don't know or care their attempt to "publish" their shiny web site the Wix way winds up zeroing a public zone file. I had one of these "designers" try to tell me DNS was only for the web server anyway.
The government does that job because the last time we used a private contractor, he stole all the children.
At a minimum they should have some kind of customer service flag pop up for agents when an individual calls about an absurdly high bill that's likely to be some kind of billing or data accounting error and that then routes the call to a team that handles them specifically.
A team dedicated to these could eliminate the usual media clusterfuckery that happens when a carrier blindly tries to enforce not-believable billable and flag that person for the data/billing accounting developers so they could possibly track down an error in the system.
And then waive the bill completely or at least reduce it to whatever last month's was -- that would create word of mouth good will that $1 million in advertising never would.
It would be interesting to see a list of the top 100 consumer data consumers and how much they consumed from all the carriers. I don't doubt there are weird cases where people are perfectly willing to blow a couple of grand a month on data consumption, but it's kind of hard to think of non-business related situations where people would be regularly running up $1000+ monthly tabs for data and not doing anything about it.
About the only case I can think of is someone who does consulting as an individual off their LTE connection and has the ability to bill their clients for all the data they consume. But even then, LTE isn't *that* fast and if you're pulling down a couple hundred gig a month, chances are your opportunity costs are such that you'd seek a faster download path just for the time savings.
But we're not talking about today. If we were having this conversation about aircraft in 1912 you could say exactly the same thing.
But if we were having a conversation TODAY about getting in a 1912 vintage aircraft, it'd be completely valid to have reservations.
This is Slashdot, so I almost never read the linkbait, er, TFS, but my guess is if the researchers had qualified their question with something about autonomous car technology being "fully developed" and "as safe as modern jet travel is today" they would have gotten more answers along the lines of read the paper, do work, watch a movie, etc.
But then they wouldn't have elicited any responses about the perceptions of safety people have now about autonomous cars, and the reality is the average person doesn't know shit about them other than some kind of headline about people dying in self-driving cars. ("Area man dies in self-driving Tesla; acquaintances say arrogant rich fuck got what he long had coming").
Apple is in something of a unique position with this, as they could in theory have a bunch of unique business units across functional areas (iOS, mobile, desktop, MacOS, etc) and internationally that sold/licensed products to each other, creating a real maze of revenue and tax liability.
The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress' subpoena powers are covered by the speech and debate clause of the constitution, making their subpoenas immune from judicial challenge -- "for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place".
This means that under the broad umbrella of congressional speech (which includes issuing subpoenas) they have nearly complete legal immunity, including from judicial intervention.
If Congress were more willing to use the force of constitutional law at their disposal, we might have fewer dipshit bureaucrats acting like they were above the law. You fuck around in a Federal courtroom, and I guarantee you the judge will jail you for contempt so fast it'll make your head swim. Yet Federal officials seem to get away with flipping congress the finger, suppressing documents and dissembling under oath to Congress. Why?
Don't threaten to daydream about thinking about maybe issuing a subpoena.
Issue the fucking subpeona. When he doesn't immediately comply, charge him with inherent contempt of congress and have the sergeant-at-arms drag him forcibly in front of the committee to answer questions and jail him if he doesn't comply.
Congress really ought to build a Plexiglas jail cell in the Capitol visitor center specifically for government officials who refuse to recognize the subpoena authority of congress. Nothing would compel their compliance more than knowing that the alternative outcome may be high visibility detention facility where tourists come to learn about the many powers of the US Congress.
It would be awesome if somebody discovered that removing the headphone jack was a violation of the ADA because it placed an undue burden on handicapped people, and Apple was forced to add the jack back in.
I know, they provide a dongle which adds that functionality back in, and nobody is forced to choose an Apple device without a headphone jack, so it would never hold water, but it'd be hilarious if they had to not only pay taxes but also offer a model with a headphone jack.
Can you actually mix multiple inputs on those headphones, so that you obtain audio from two devices at once?
My experience has always been that while a lot of devices support pairing multiple devices, there is always a manual process to switch between devices you want to get audio from, with "manual process" including either manually selecting the desired paired device or worse, disabling bluetooth on one of the paired devices you wanted to disable. I've never seen a device that allowed for simultaneous audio from multiple sources.
I don't know if this is a limitation of the bluetooth standard or the radios. My guess is that its a standards limitation, since, say a laptop will allow simultaneous use of a mouse and headphones at the same time. But even laptops (with presumably none of the assumed hardware limitations of a bluetooth dongle or headphones) don't seem to allow multiple BT audio devices to be paired to it.
I've long wanted a bluetooth reciever dongle with mixing capabilities, where I could pair with multiple audio sources and control the volume and mute either independently while being able to obtain audio from both devices at the same time. I don't know if this would require multiple radios or just better software in the device.
That's a moral judgement, not really a description of the terms of employment.
It's used by employers who try to goad employees for doing more work than the job description requires.
I have an '07 S80 V8 with adaptive cruise and it's my favorite feature. 2007 was kind of early in the adaptive cruise era but it works well, down to 20 mph but won't do a complete stop, though the collision avoidance system will pre-charge the brake pressure.
The problem with adding the hardware, even with a modern Volvo that offered the feature in the same model as an option is that almost nothing in a Volvo can be added without VIDA installing software. My S80 spent 4 days in the shop when I added the iPod connector because they had to load a custom software patch to make the component work.
I think adaptive cruise would be about the sweet spot as a "tack on" -- simple enough to patch it into the existing cruise control system. But lane control and more advanced autonomous stuff would be a lot of mechanical additions, not counting software or electronics even.
There's a lunatic fringe that will never find an outlet no matter how generous the hegemonic news media is. I'm not sure that failing to air the opinions of a UFO theorist during the timeslot allocated to fairness-style responses counts as an example of censorship.
Even so, in the 1970s it was a fairly common comedy trope to lampoon the "alternative viewpoint" segment many TV stations ran. Saturday Night Live made it a recurring theme in their news segment. It worked as comedy because people recognized it, and people recognized it because they had actually seen it -- TV stations *would* often let zealous people with marginal ideas on the air because it satisfied the fairness doctrine. They didn't get much time nor did they get prime time slots, but they did get air time.
A lot of TV stations also met their fairness doctrine quotas by hosting talk shows. Sure, they were hosted by the weekend traffic reporter and appeared on a Sunday morning at 6:30 AM time slot, but they would trot out all the usual suspects with weird ideas and treat them as if they had something important to say.
And historically, pamphleteers and broadside "bloggers" have been influential. They didn't keep track of photocopiers and mimeograph machines in the Soviet Union because there was a shortage of ink and paper, but because they worried about the influence of opinions that ran against what was showing up in Pravda, even if they lacked the distribution and production quality of a well-funded paper.
That's crazy -- so if you had an awful day, and sold zero for 8 hours you got $80. The next day you sold $80 worth of commission, your net pay for two days is zero?
In many ways that seems worse than straight commission where you make zero unless you sell something. What you described sounds like a way to basically cut the effective commission rate to half or worse.
How many of these things are actually incentives and how many are just outright coercion re-labeled incentives?
I tend to think of an incentive as a motivation to get X+N if I do some extra thing. If I don't do the extra thing, I just get X. But if I say "do the extra thing or you're fired", that seems like coercion. I don't get X+N, I don't even get X if I don't do the extra thing, I get fired.
Holding a gun to someone's head and demanding their wallet and then claiming that staying alive is an incentive to hand over your wallet seems like a perversion of the concept of incentives.
I think most of these companies where Wells Fargo style fraud happens aren't actually operating on incentives, they're operating coercively. People will do all kinds of unethical things if they think the outcome from not doing them will be termination and subsequent financial peril. Wells was probably holding a gun to their head and claiming that continued employment was an incentive.
There is probably also a threshold where the incentive on offer is so lucrative that people are willing to risk unethical activity to achieve it, but then again there should be sufficient checks to make the unethical achievement either impossible or with a penalty that outweighs the value of the incentive. Robbing a bank has a potentially lucrative incentive, but it also carries a penalty that makes a haul of low five figures in cash not work the risk of a 20 year prison sentence.
We have an infrastructure problem- plenty of systems assume that the internet will either always be up, or be up at least, for instance, daily.
And it's getting worse, because the infrastructure that keeps the Internet up is starting to require the Internet actually be up.
A cow-orker installed some Meraki switches this past weekend and they are "cloud" managed. I didn't work on it, but he said you basically needed an active Internet connection to do anything with them because there was no local management at all. And of course the switches themselves had problems, cutting off Internet access until physically rebooted at least once.
Off the top of my head, I can only really see this being even sane if you had a dedicated management network with Internet access not dependent on the switching you needed to manage, but this mostly runs counter to much of the idea behind a management network (ie, a closed network with access limited to protect management interfaces).
But there seems to be an increasing number of things that just don't work without Internet access, and often not because the manufacturer cheaped out and pushed intelligence to the cloud and cut the system specs, but because of licensing, DRM or because some asshat in marketing wanted to guaran-damn-tee that they got phone home data, so the device just doesn't work unless it can phone home.
So if only run of the mill malfeasance is found it's OK, nothing to see here, move along?
Nothing less than validating every paranoid conspiracy theory counts as a meaningful disclosure?
Assuming you have a technology so good that it really could allow trucks to run on the highway while the driver slept, it would take at least 5 years to align all the state laws regulating truck highway traffic, change federal regulations regarding the number of hours drivers could be on the road without mandatory stops.
And that's just regulations, even if by magic such an automated truck was available *tomorrow*, you have a capital base of billions of dollars worth of trucks already out there which can't do this. And these trucks are, for the most part, built for extreme long-term durability with useful lifespans of at least a decade. It would take 10-20 years for such an automated truck to replace the existing base of trucks.
I don't doubt such a transformation will happen, but its decades away, not 5 years by any stretch of the imagination. And none of this factors in other potential transformations which might be more appealing, such as hybrid powertrains or even other forms of efficiency replacing long-haul trucking, like further growth of intermodal transportation or other large-scale logistical changes which would compete with automated trucking.
TV & Radio were heavily regulated and we even had the Fairness Doctrine which *required* media companies to broadcast contrasting viewpoints. In the Fairness Doctrine era, the vast majority of top 25 TV markets had maybe 5 commercial television stations.
So even though the television stations played games with timeslots and formats, they did give up air time to competing views, and it's kind of astonishing to think that in a given broadcast area a competing view being aired on one station literally represented 20-25% of the area's television broadcasting.
Print publishing has always been a fairly democratic technology, since literally anyone can own a press of some kind and presses scale down in cost faster than they scale down in capacity -- printing copies isn't the issue as much as distribution, and cities often supported multiple newspapers, even in the commercial era of large newspapers.
The movement to private spaces (physically, like shopping malls) or completely private communications networks and social media networks has eliminated many options for communicating to the public or even peacefully protesting.
No one owes you an engaged audience, but it's hard to see how democracy and free communication persists in a totally walled environment controlled by corporations. That's freedom for their owners, but not for anyone else. Dissent somehow becomes twisted into violating the owner's property rights.
These days when I go down to the public square to stand on my soap box and make my voice heard, the public square is empty.
The public, which used to mostly be reachable via the public sphere, has all moved into spaces which are privately owned and publicly accessible for commerce, but not publicly accessible for free speech.
This is the problem with the "go somewhere else" argument. There is nowhere else.
This is simply laughable.
The idea of a parallel internet run by BRICs? Who is going to buy into and provide services to it? Who is going to trust a group of the most authoritarian and/or corrupt and/or inefficient governments to manage such a network?
And the money and mindshare has a center of gravity heavily biased towards EU/US/Japan/ANZ economies. There's money to be made in BRICs, but so much less relative to the effort of running a large-scale network. It's like Windows Phone -- by all accounts, a decent platform but the income and desirable demographics and numbers are all biased to other platforms, so nobody bothers.
China only manages to halfway get away with this because of authoritarian political control, not because the Chinese want it and nobody is asking to be brought into the Chinese internet when they have the free and open internet as an alternative.
I see zero chance of these countries breaking off into their own networks.
What if it was theirs -- ie, they contracted with a bell manufacturer to create a set of bells with some kind of unique sound (ie, not bell #345 from the catalog), they attached them to a ringer mechanism and recorded the sound of *their* bells ringing.
I wonder if that would pass muster, or if the idea of a mechanical bell ringing (ie, a brass hemisphere getting hit by a little hammer) is so common that not even a custom bell with a non-standard tone could count, as mechanical ringers are so ubiquitous (or at least were...) that no modification of tone/timbre/pitch of a mechanical ring can be said to be unique.
It also makes me wonder if the common "ringing phone" ringtones were recorded from old Western Electric models and if they would have a claim on copyright to those sounds.
I'm thinking a combo of Surface Pro and a Phablet. The Phablet holds enough flash for a decent Windows environment (say, 512GB at least) and can slot into the Surface which provides the larger screen, x64 CPU and additional connectivity for video and USB.
The phablet can run ARM Windows and be a standalone phone device, while slotted into the Surface it provides radios for connectivity and calls during a desktop type computing session.
The trouble is, Microsoft has always refused to make normal Windows installable and bootable from USB, even though USB3 would be more than adequate for normal desktop work. The carry-your-OS-around thing would only be truly useful if you could boot any desktop with it.
But there is that strand of liberal Judaism that's more or less opposed to Israeli militarism and in favor of concessions to the Palestinians.
Although I grant you, it must be kind of awkward to be Jewish and influential and then have the Israeli government come calling. How can you win without making a major deal out of it? Either they beat you up for not being Jewish enough or for being too Jewish.
I was thinking mostly along the lines of connectivity -- you can't plug very much stuff into the Lightning port on an iPhone or iPad, but why not? Much of the ecosystem that the PC world represents is built around connecting stuff. Hell, you can't even connect a mouse via Bluetooth to an iPad.
I think there's a lot of courage-related things they could do with iPhone or iPad that would make them useful in more places or in more ways if other devices could be connected, but it would require relinquishing some level of control over them and stop seeing them merely as licensing/profit opportunities.
It seems really odd to me that they've come up with a really usable small computer but they have all these weird restrictions on what you can use them for. I'm sure most of it is about not getting caught in a backwards compatibility trap or retaining the ability to pursue a long roadmap of tiny incremental changes as a way to guarantee long term revenue.
But part of it seems like a self-imposed limitation of design thinking, like somehow above all else some small set of physical design principals must prevail.
I think the whole tax shelter thing really represents a lack of imagination on Apple's part, both in terms of lobbying and in terms of business management.
I think they're caught in a profit trap, where they're so profitable they can't justify expanding their business, since almost anything they do is likely to be less profitable (if not money losing) than doing nothing.
Without business expansion, they don't have any good place to put their profits and they (at least in terms of fiduciary responsibility) fear repatriating profits due to taxation.
I think what they *should* have done all along was lobby Congress for a tax exemption or significant rate cut on repatriated profits funneled into R&D efforts. This would have allowed them to both come up with ways to dig out of the profit trap the iPhone put them in *and* significantly cut their tax burden at the same time, all the while wrapping themselves in the flag saying how they're spending all this money here in the US, hiring US workers, etc.
Even if they didn't create a new profitable business line, they would have been able to cut their tax burden and gain some good will, and the costs associated with a new widget would have been greatly reduced.