I use TPB only rarely, I used to use it much more. It's been said before that Hulu/Netflix are highly effective at combating piracy, and for me at least, it's very true!
I'm a cord cutter; haven't had cable service in years, even though a few years ago we had the Dish DVR with all the fixin's for $125/month or so. When we moved, I didn't buy cable right away but I did buy Internet right away, and by the time (a few months later) things were settled enough that we could talk about Cable, we'd already latched onto Hulu/Netflix and we've never looked back.
I have other places I could use $1500/year, such as the $96 I give to Netflix, or the $20/year I give to MagicJack for home phone service.
I'd happily pay $8/month to not have to futz with finding torrent files with decent seeds and weed through all the terrible ads and porn spam. Managing torrents is just a hassle.
With Netflix, I pick the show I want, and watch it RIGHT NOW on whatever device I want. (phone / tablet / computer / tv / xbox / PS3 / whatever) I don't mind $2/week at all.
We have no reason to believe that, despite the resources of the NSA, that they are significantly ahead of the public face of encryption technologies. In fact, it has been noted numerous times that cryptographers working for the NSA aren't paid nearly as well as the private sector positions;
The USA health care system has some of the worst possible perverse economic disincentives. At literally no point is there a clear economic incentive for you to be healthy and taken care of.
1) Consumers have no interest in keeping costs down. They pay the same deductible no matter what happens. Unfortunately, this is only up to a point (see #4 below) but that's not going to enter casual consideration.
2) Hospitals have no interest in keeping costs down. They blatantly inflate their costs knowing that the insurance companies will only pay a fraction anyway. They also have no incentive to keep supplies costs down since they are paid "cost +" by insurance companies. They'll tend to buy whatever sponge or soap dispenser is in "the catalog".
3) Providers of supplies to hospitals have no interest in keeping their costs down. Hospitals get paid on a "cost +" basis by the insurance companies so charging $35 for that "medical grade" sponge that cost them $0.35 wholesale has 99% profit margins as its incentive.
4) Insurance companies have some incentive to keep costs down, which they generally do by axing their most expensive customers with any of the myriad of technicalities written into their eye-gouging 10 page contracts full of inverted double negatives and exceptions. A good example is somebody with a job who gets cancer. Sure, he/she may have excellent health insurance, but what about when he/she loses his/her job because they didn't show for four months while undergoing chemo therapy? Even so, the myriad of regulations in place (and a legal department that ensures that one plan can't be compared to another) provides an opaque enough service offering that customers are unable to distinguish which plan is actually "cheaper".
5) Doctors had to just about kill their mother to get through medical school, and are saddled with enough debt to make anybody contract stress-related symptoms. Since they get paid for the work they actually perform, they have every incentive to declare a medical emergency and take you under the knife, regardless of whether or not it's necessary or even beneficial. I'm not saying every doctor will give you heart surgery when you come in with a rash, but I'm not alleging something that doesn't happen. Citation 2.
I'd think that an Android device has a number of excellent sources of randomness: Wifi signal, cell signal, accellerometer inputs, and light sensor light levels in conjunction with the usual *nix generators based on system load variables (memory/cpu/io) should mean that mobile devices should have *excellent* randomness.
The "issue" to be addressed is the need for a way to uniquely identify a device as distinct from other devices. This is accomplished by the use of a number called a MAC address. Because it uniquely identifies a device, it can be used to (gasp!) uniquely identify a device.
That's what Renew (the company in question with the "smart bins") was doing... logging MAC addresses announced by wifi cards as they try to moderate a wifi connection.
Microsoft has a long standing, dominant set of softwares (Windows/Office) that has been its cash cow for longer than many of us have been old enough to vote. It's the classic case for disruptive technologies:
1) The old, highly profitable incumbent using old technology and charging pretty pennies for it.
2) The new upstart technology, able to do similar stuff in a new context and dramatically cheaper.
3) Incumbent tries to mash its old technology into the new context to preserve its margins.
4) Incumbent dies a death of a thousand paper cuts as the new context, typically more nimble and with an entirely new, cheaper cost structure, slowly peck at the old incumbent until it's irrelevant.
Many of us old-timers remember when IBM ruled the roost for the PC. Some of us remember when DEC was the dominant force for mini computers. A few of us remember when IBM ruled the roost for computing mainframes, before the mini computer took sway.
We should give Microsoft lots of credit. Microsoft had a *long* time at the helm. It was able to cash in on the entire PC revolution, and even much of the Internet revolution, until the Mobile revolution, which it foresaw a decade or more in advance and tried hard (but hardly) to embrace.
For me, going from Windows Phone 6.1 to Android 2.2 on a Motorola Droid 2 was like going from a rusty riding lawn mower to an LXi Convertible. It's sad, really. Microsoft had its part in the mobile game for several hardware generations, and they were beaten so mightily that they are now basically the upstarts trying to be a halfway, third place contender.
Admire what they've done, but this mobile situation is just sad given how hard they tried.
I'm an ex Verizon customer as well. If they hadn't just made up fees to put on my bill, I'd have happily paid their stiff phone prices. Switched to Metro PCS, saving money to not worry; never going back!
The fact that an airport as busy as SFO doesn't have VASI/PAPI lights strikes me as fundamentally stupid. This is one of the busiest airports in the world. Yes, pilots should be able to land the sucker without lights, but SFO airspace is very busy and very dense. It's silly to think that not providing something as basic as approach lights will have no effect.
A quick google for reveals a cost that might be $50,000 which, for something as busy as SFO, probably compares to the toilet paper budget, or the cost of waxing the floors every week. I've flown (small plane pilot!) in the SFO airspace and ANYTHING you can do to reduce pilot work load is a good thing. Certainly, the cost of fixing the !@#$% lights pales compared to the cost of an emergency response.
All this banter about the NSA = bad or Echelon = bad or the requirement of warrant is entirely missing the point. The truth is that this fundamental lack of privacy is guaranteed to happen. We live in an era when recording data is so cheap and so easy that it's happening accidentally, automatically, as a daily part of living life. Last time I had contact with the police, my phone recorded the entire thing from my pocket. Audio quality was quite good, too. With 32 GB of space on my phone, I could literally record my entire day, every day, and keep days worth of audio on hand in case something "interesting" happened. Oops! What happened to the privacy of those around me?
But, the problem isn't the computers recording your every move, it's the secrecy with which it's being done and the lack of accountability that secrecy gives rise to.
I don't think that cops should have the option of wearing cameras; I think that no arrest should ever be done without them, and simply lacking the arrest footage should be enough to dismiss the case. Any and all public places should be open to be recorded without further notice. And all recordings of public places or of public officers in the performance of their duties should also be public. (with an appropriate time delay)
Some areas are already experimenting with these ideas and the result is nearly 90% reduction in police misconduct complaints. The privacy of our actions is far less important than the abuse of the information collected.
The fact it's working doesn't mean it can't be improved.
The fact that you would even state such abject stupidity means you don't understand the simple, salient point that has long ago been made. You would do well to avail yourself of the reams of tired, boring, and utterly meaningless conversations in the past where I eventually explained the simple point so that a moron like you can stop wasting all our time in the here and now.
If you want "maturity" as defined by some passive aggressive type of niceness that comes when you don't ever say what you are actually thinking, you are in the wrong place. We're here to get something done and you can take your sissy, pandering, liberal business-speak ethos and cram it into some corner that doesn't involve the rest of us who are trying to get something valuable done.
I mean, that's rich, and so's Linus, but you aren't. Rich, that is. Working from home in your bathrobe and getting rich doing it providing something of such valuable that it's used practically everywhere you turn is hardly the hallmark of a loser.
Now, if what he primarily produced was sarcastic Starcraft II commentary videos, that'd be a different story...
An article that decries all the valuable, important stuff that could have been brought up, but then doesn't bother to bring them up and/or discuss them in any detail?
This article was a waste of my time. I wish Slashdot had a thumbs up/down on articles.
Thus far, the suggestions that the NSA has made about crypto standards have been good advice.
In most cases, yes. We *think*. However, there are cases where we're pretty sure that's not the case. As with everything, your mileage may vary, and in crypto, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't actually out to get you.
I have a 7" Android Tablet that I used to use heavily. I had a Moto Droid 2 smartphone that was nice, but the bigger screen of the tablet was enough of a draw that I'd use the tablet a fair amount for personal browsing.
That all changed when I got my new phone, a Moto Razr Maxx HD. The screen is bigger and sharper than the Droid 2, just enough that the relative usability of the tablet almost disappears, and the fact that my phone already has all "my" stuff on it from earlier today is more of a draw.
My 7" tablet has been charged and ready to go for months, but I haven't picked it up even once since.
There's a balance; I think the Galaxy Note is too big, but I think that the Razr Maxx could be just a few bits bigger. If the Galaxy S3/S4 had the battery life of the Razr, I'd probably bite. However, the battery life of the Razr Maxx is so ridiculously awesome, (especially when traveling) I'd never want to give that up!
Using compressed air as a storage medium has a number of problems:
1) Low energy density. Air is very compressible. While that's what makes it usable as power storage in the first place, the amount of energy that can be saved in a gallon-sized container as compressed air pales next to a gallon of gasoline.
2) Power loss through thermal contraction.. When you compress air, it heats up. As that heat energy escapes, it effectively takes away a good chunk of the energy you consumed compressing it in the first place. Once the compressed air has cooled, the effective pressure drops. The more air you compress into the same space (See Energy Density above) the worse this effect is.
3) Power loss through leakage Even when available, caves are terrible places to store compressed air. Even if you seal the cave somehow, you then have to deal with seismic shifting, creating leaks and causing your beautiful, N-redundant power source to leak into an underwater stream bed. Lastly, even when sealed properly, air will *still* leak out. Ever wonder why your bike/car tires need to be aired up every so often even when they *aren't leaking?
Air molecules are wily little critters
4) turbine inefficiency The higher the pressure of compressed air, the more the above problems manifest themselves. However, the lower the pressure of compressed air, the less efficient it is to convert the compressed air back to electricity!
Good solutions address the multiple facets of the problem. For example, much of the cost of running a data center is spent on cooling. It might be preferable to store "coolth" in a stone or liquid cooling chamber under the facility than to try to store compressed air. Compressed air can be turned into electricity, which is more flexible, but is also more lossy for the reasons listed above. A combination of technologies will be needed to provide the best answer for redundancy and efficiency.
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Oracle is a flavor of SQL. So is MS SQL Server and PostgreSQL. I'm guessing that you meant MS SQL Server?
I use TPB only rarely, I used to use it much more. It's been said before that Hulu/Netflix are highly effective at combating piracy, and for me at least, it's very true!
I'm a cord cutter; haven't had cable service in years, even though a few years ago we had the Dish DVR with all the fixin's for $125/month or so. When we moved, I didn't buy cable right away but I did buy Internet right away, and by the time (a few months later) things were settled enough that we could talk about Cable, we'd already latched onto Hulu/Netflix and we've never looked back.
I have other places I could use $1500/year, such as the $96 I give to Netflix, or the $20/year I give to MagicJack for home phone service.
I'd happily pay $8/month to not have to futz with finding torrent files with decent seeds and weed through all the terrible ads and porn spam. Managing torrents is just a hassle.
With Netflix, I pick the show I want, and watch it RIGHT NOW on whatever device I want. (phone / tablet / computer / tv / xbox / PS3 / whatever) I don't mind $2/week at all.
We have no reason to believe that, despite the resources of the NSA, that they are significantly ahead of the public face of encryption technologies. In fact, it has been noted numerous times that cryptographers working for the NSA aren't paid nearly as well as the private sector positions;
It's reasonable, then, to assume, that the NSA doesn't have any magic secrets other than gag orders alleged by affected parties.
The USA health care system has some of the worst possible perverse economic disincentives. At literally no point is there a clear economic incentive for you to be healthy and taken care of.
1) Consumers have no interest in keeping costs down. They pay the same deductible no matter what happens. Unfortunately, this is only up to a point (see #4 below) but that's not going to enter casual consideration.
2) Hospitals have no interest in keeping costs down. They blatantly inflate their costs knowing that the insurance companies will only pay a fraction anyway. They also have no incentive to keep supplies costs down since they are paid "cost +" by insurance companies. They'll tend to buy whatever sponge or soap dispenser is in "the catalog".
3) Providers of supplies to hospitals have no interest in keeping their costs down. Hospitals get paid on a "cost +" basis by the insurance companies so charging $35 for that "medical grade" sponge that cost them $0.35 wholesale has 99% profit margins as its incentive.
4) Insurance companies have some incentive to keep costs down, which they generally do by axing their most expensive customers with any of the myriad of technicalities written into their eye-gouging 10 page contracts full of inverted double negatives and exceptions. A good example is somebody with a job who gets cancer. Sure, he/she may have excellent health insurance, but what about when he/she loses his/her job because they didn't show for four months while undergoing chemo therapy? Even so, the myriad of regulations in place (and a legal department that ensures that one plan can't be compared to another) provides an opaque enough service offering that customers are unable to distinguish which plan is actually "cheaper".
5) Doctors had to just about kill their mother to get through medical school, and are saddled with enough debt to make anybody contract stress-related symptoms. Since they get paid for the work they actually perform, they have every incentive to declare a medical emergency and take you under the knife, regardless of whether or not it's necessary or even beneficial. I'm not saying every doctor will give you heart surgery when you come in with a rash, but I'm not alleging something that doesn't happen. Citation 2.
The majority of bankruptcies in the United States are for medical reasons, and the majority of *those* are by people who had health insurance at the time they got sick. Anybody who says this ridiculous would-be-laughable-if-it-wasn't-true system is lying or misinformed.
I'd think that an Android device has a number of excellent sources of randomness: Wifi signal, cell signal, accellerometer inputs, and light sensor light levels in conjunction with the usual *nix generators based on system load variables (memory/cpu/io) should mean that mobile devices should have *excellent* randomness.
Wow. Talk about ignorance aloud. And on Slashdot!
The "issue" to be addressed is the need for a way to uniquely identify a device as distinct from other devices. This is accomplished by the use of a number called a MAC address. Because it uniquely identifies a device, it can be used to (gasp!) uniquely identify a device.
That's what Renew (the company in question with the "smart bins") was doing... logging MAC addresses announced by wifi cards as they try to moderate a wifi connection.
That's why DRM created more copyright infringements than anything else.
Really?
Tell that to Netflix? It's all 100% DRM and at $8/month is demonstrably reducing the piracy rate.
Microsoft has a long standing, dominant set of softwares (Windows/Office) that has been its cash cow for longer than many of us have been old enough to vote. It's the classic case for disruptive technologies:
1) The old, highly profitable incumbent using old technology and charging pretty pennies for it.
2) The new upstart technology, able to do similar stuff in a new context and dramatically cheaper.
3) Incumbent tries to mash its old technology into the new context to preserve its margins.
4) Incumbent dies a death of a thousand paper cuts as the new context, typically more nimble and with an entirely new, cheaper cost structure, slowly peck at the old incumbent until it's irrelevant.
Many of us old-timers remember when IBM ruled the roost for the PC. Some of us remember when DEC was the dominant force for mini computers. A few of us remember when IBM ruled the roost for computing mainframes, before the mini computer took sway.
We should give Microsoft lots of credit. Microsoft had a *long* time at the helm. It was able to cash in on the entire PC revolution, and even much of the Internet revolution, until the Mobile revolution, which it foresaw a decade or more in advance and tried hard (but hardly) to embrace.
For me, going from Windows Phone 6.1 to Android 2.2 on a Motorola Droid 2 was like going from a rusty riding lawn mower to an LXi Convertible. It's sad, really. Microsoft had its part in the mobile game for several hardware generations, and they were beaten so mightily that they are now basically the upstarts trying to be a halfway, third place contender.
Admire what they've done, but this mobile situation is just sad given how hard they tried.
How is a "mesh network" (which is typically high latency) going to help latency when local bandwidth is seldom a problem?
This is drivel, makes no sense, and is just a bunch of buzz words thrown together by somebody who has no clue.
I'm an ex Verizon customer as well. If they hadn't just made up fees to put on my bill, I'd have happily paid their stiff phone prices. Switched to Metro PCS, saving money to not worry; never going back!
The fact that an airport as busy as SFO doesn't have VASI/PAPI lights strikes me as fundamentally stupid. This is one of the busiest airports in the world. Yes, pilots should be able to land the sucker without lights, but SFO airspace is very busy and very dense. It's silly to think that not providing something as basic as approach lights will have no effect.
A quick google for reveals a cost that might be $50,000 which, for something as busy as SFO, probably compares to the toilet paper budget, or the cost of waxing the floors every week. I've flown (small plane pilot!) in the SFO airspace and ANYTHING you can do to reduce pilot work load is a good thing. Certainly, the cost of fixing the !@#$% lights pales compared to the cost of an emergency response.
Oh, but we have figured out how to create a sustainable self-enclosed biome. Running for over 50 years, it's one of the Science community's longest running experiments... .
OMG! Crazy conspiracy theorists can build bad guns with printers!
BOLLOCKS
Anybody can go to their local hardware store and build a zip gun for as little as $10.
Quote: Keep in mind this should only be used in extreme situations, survival situations, or simply having fun. This homemade 12 guage is simply awesome!
Dunno if you ever noticed, but the "let there be light" happened *before* the sun, stars and planets were created...
Where did that light come from?
All this banter about the NSA = bad or Echelon = bad or the requirement of warrant is entirely missing the point. The truth is that this fundamental lack of privacy is guaranteed to happen. We live in an era when recording data is so cheap and so easy that it's happening accidentally, automatically, as a daily part of living life. Last time I had contact with the police, my phone recorded the entire thing from my pocket. Audio quality was quite good, too. With 32 GB of space on my phone, I could literally record my entire day, every day, and keep days worth of audio on hand in case something "interesting" happened. Oops! What happened to the privacy of those around me?
But, the problem isn't the computers recording your every move, it's the secrecy with which it's being done and the lack of accountability that secrecy gives rise to.
This was predicted years and years ago and the brilliant, understandable answer to avoid abuse is simple: transparency .
I don't think that cops should have the option of wearing cameras; I think that no arrest should ever be done without them, and simply lacking the arrest footage should be enough to dismiss the case. Any and all public places should be open to be recorded without further notice. And all recordings of public places or of public officers in the performance of their duties should also be public. (with an appropriate time delay)
Some areas are already experimenting with these ideas and the result is nearly 90% reduction in police misconduct complaints. The privacy of our actions is far less important than the abuse of the information collected.
Because it's highly relevant: Good morning Baltimore!
Isn't it sad that somebody thought about putting javascript into PDF and concluded that it was a "good idea"?
The fact it's working doesn't mean it can't be improved.
The fact that you would even state such abject stupidity means you don't understand the simple, salient point that has long ago been made. You would do well to avail yourself of the reams of tired, boring, and utterly meaningless conversations in the past where I eventually explained the simple point so that a moron like you can stop wasting all our time in the here and now.
If you want "maturity" as defined by some passive aggressive type of niceness that comes when you don't ever say what you are actually thinking, you are in the wrong place. We're here to get something done and you can take your sissy, pandering, liberal business-speak ethos and cram it into some corner that doesn't involve the rest of us who are trying to get something valuable done.
Ha ha! That's rich!
I mean, that's rich, and so's Linus, but you aren't. Rich, that is. Working from home in your bathrobe and getting rich doing it providing something of such valuable that it's used practically everywhere you turn is hardly the hallmark of a loser.
Now, if what he primarily produced was sarcastic Starcraft II commentary videos, that'd be a different story...
An article that decries all the valuable, important stuff that could have been brought up, but then doesn't bother to bring them up and/or discuss them in any detail?
This article was a waste of my time. I wish Slashdot had a thumbs up/down on articles.
Thus far, the suggestions that the NSA has made about crypto standards have been good advice.
In most cases, yes. We *think*. However, there are cases where we're pretty sure that's not the case. As with everything, your mileage may vary, and in crypto, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't actually out to get you.
I have a 7" Android Tablet that I used to use heavily. I had a Moto Droid 2 smartphone that was nice, but the bigger screen of the tablet was enough of a draw that I'd use the tablet a fair amount for personal browsing.
That all changed when I got my new phone, a Moto Razr Maxx HD. The screen is bigger and sharper than the Droid 2, just enough that the relative usability of the tablet almost disappears, and the fact that my phone already has all "my" stuff on it from earlier today is more of a draw.
My 7" tablet has been charged and ready to go for months, but I haven't picked it up even once since.
There's a balance; I think the Galaxy Note is too big, but I think that the Razr Maxx could be just a few bits bigger. If the Galaxy S3/S4 had the battery life of the Razr, I'd probably bite. However, the battery life of the Razr Maxx is so ridiculously awesome, (especially when traveling) I'd never want to give that up!
Didn't you get the news? Fully 10 people have now adopted Windows 8 tablets, 100% growth!
But Poe's law predicted a long time ago, that such detection is, in many cases, actually impossible to accomplish.
Using compressed air as a storage medium has a number of problems:
1) Low energy density. Air is very compressible. While that's what makes it usable as power storage in the first place, the amount of energy that can be saved in a gallon-sized container as compressed air pales next to a gallon of gasoline.
2) Power loss through thermal contraction.. When you compress air, it heats up. As that heat energy escapes, it effectively takes away a good chunk of the energy you consumed compressing it in the first place. Once the compressed air has cooled, the effective pressure drops. The more air you compress into the same space (See Energy Density above) the worse this effect is.
3) Power loss through leakage Even when available, caves are terrible places to store compressed air. Even if you seal the cave somehow, you then have to deal with seismic shifting, creating leaks and causing your beautiful, N-redundant power source to leak into an underwater stream bed. Lastly, even when sealed properly, air will *still* leak out. Ever wonder why your bike/car tires need to be aired up every so often even when they *aren't leaking?
Air molecules are wily little critters
4) turbine inefficiency The higher the pressure of compressed air, the more the above problems manifest themselves. However, the lower the pressure of compressed air, the less efficient it is to convert the compressed air back to electricity!
Good solutions address the multiple facets of the problem. For example, much of the cost of running a data center is spent on cooling. It might be preferable to store "coolth" in a stone or liquid cooling chamber under the facility than to try to store compressed air. Compressed air can be turned into electricity, which is more flexible, but is also more lossy for the reasons listed above. A combination of technologies will be needed to provide the best answer for redundancy and efficiency.