I'm saying that mini-USB wall warts cost them in terms of purchasing them from a supplier, and cost them in terms of shipping weight, extra assembly steps, and packaging. Those costs are passed on to the end user, but do not make them money because they have to pay for them. The phone would be cheaper to make if they didn't have to include the wall warts, increasing their profit margins.
But because there is no standard for chargers, they are forced to include one with every phone. Customers today would scream bloody murder if they shipped phones without chargers.
If a standard does eventually come around for chargers, some day it may be assumed that every household will already have one or more, so they'll be able to sell phones or other devices without chargers. It's also likely that if that day ever comes they'll keep phone prices the same as they are now, but they'll add a premium for phones that include chargers.
Does that make what I was trying to say any clearer?
Plover, why don't you try your amazing array of Motorola gear with a non-Motorola cable and tell me if it works.
They work just fine. I've never bought or owned an actual Motorola mini-USB cable. I've been using the mini-USB cables that came with other equipment, including a Canon camera cable and a cable that connected a cheap 12-in-one SD/CF card reader. I do use the Motorola wall warts, though, and aftermarket car chargers that specifically said "Motorola" on the package, so I don't know if they'll recharge without a special power supply.
This has been true and has worked for me on each of these phones: RAZR V3, V550, KRZR K1, and ROKR Z6, plus another model I bought for my mom to replace her stolen V550 that I can't remember. (By the way, I thought it obvious that these phones and all that gear are not just for me but for the rest of my family, too. Only two of these were personally mine. I just plug the others into my computer and upload ring tones and pictures for the rest of them, and tweak the occasional SEEMs.:-)
Where I've had no end of problems has been with finding Windows XP drivers, and getting the phone to talk to the computer without the phone crashing and burning. It was really awful for the first year or two, but over time new releases of drivers seem to have improved the stability of the connection. On my Vista machine they seem to work pretty reliably. But I've never blamed the cables, as they work fine on the other peripherals.
Nope. The cell phone industry doesn't make money on wall warts. Only the wall wart industry makes money on wall warts. If the cell phone manufacturers had their way, mini-USB chargers would be so ubiquitous they wouldn't have to include them with the phones, saving them a few dollars per unit in costs and cutting their shipping rates in half.
Anything that a manufacturer has to buy from someone else that they don't make themselves usually costs more than they're worth. They're a necessary evil, not a profit center.
The aftermarket wall wart business is very lucrative, however. Replacement chargers go for stupid high amounts. And they stand to make more profit from a wider variety of chargers. But they are tiny businesses that have no leverage. They have no say in what standards the cell phone manufacturers will use.
I think Motorola made their decision just to keep costs down. If they can include the exact same charger with every item in their product line, their inventory and manufacturing costs for chargers drops significantly. It just happens to work to our benefit, too.
What's that you say? I can't start my own cell phone company unless I pay some cell phone carrier company millions of dollars?
Actually, no, that's not what I say at all, nor is anyone else saying it. I'm not exactly sure what you're trolling for here, but you're perfectly free to manufacture all the cell phones you want. You'll have to pay the government for an FCC certification since you're selling RF transmitters, and you will likely have to license a few patents, but other than that knock yourself out. You can make and sell phones, and the carriers cannot stop people from using them on their networks.
You don't have to pay a cell phone carrier a single dime for the privilege.
However, you might not sell too many if you don't enter into some kind of agreement with a carrier to stock them in their retail stores. But that's a problem common to making any product. For example, you could make completely unlicensed and unregulated leather cell phone pouches, but that doesn't mean AT&T stores are going to carry them in stock without a contract.
No, I agree that it would be bad for a government to regulate this as a standard, because most governments have proven to be spectacularly poor with most standards. Strangely enough, this is a place where the United States actually does OK, I think. Rather than try to create industry standards, they will usually pass standards applicable only on federal government purchased products, such as with Defense department contracts or GAO purchases. If any manufacturer wanting to sell 100,000 phones to Uncle Sam is required to use mini-USB for charging and headphones, the chances are good they'll put mini-USB on their consumer models as well, as a part of the economies of scale.
But I do think this is a case where the free market just isn't working. For example, me. I'm buying Motorola products partly because they follow a useful (to me) standard. That's exactly how the free market is supposed to drive decisions like this.
The bigger problem is I'm backing a dying horse. Motorola has been struggling as a mobile phone maker ever since the RAZR lost its dominant seat. Mini-USB connectors aren't enough when the rest of the features are blown away by the iPhone, Android, or Symbian offering, or by some other manufacturer's lowball pricing. And quite frankly, the Motorola apps are pretty awful (except for the MOTOMAGX linux system, and even that has bugs.) There's a giant pile of competing features and attributes, and connector standardization just isn't going to be the deal breaker for most people.
It is very nice. Motorola standardized on the mini-USB connector back around the time they introduced the RAZR. Every Motorola product I've bought since about 2005 uses a mini-USB jack for power and charging. This includes a Bluetooth stereo adapter, a couple pairs of Bluetooth headphones, a Bluetooth handsfree ear-bud, and at least five different models of cell phones.
And I have never had to buy a separate cable to connect my Motorola phones to my PC when it's time to upload new content. That's not true of my Sony-Ericsson or Nokia phones.
And because they're all the same, I have several identical power bricks, which is ideal for having one at work, a couple in different rooms at home, my wife has one, and our car chargers are all interoperable.
It's one of those levels of convenience that seems stupid and shallow (and probably is), but it definitely drives me back to Motorola as a customer.
My understanding of the PGO process is limited to an explanation of the the Microsoft VC++ compiler and linker. I was told that the profile was used by the linker to arrange memory in the most efficient manner possible, but nothing about how it affected the uninstrumented compilation of the code.
Certainly it could be used to make efficient compiler decisions, and that's probably what is making up the difference in performance the people are seeing on Linux systems with no swap space.
Theoretically it could use profile information to inline certain functions. But as you suggest most optimizers would simply inline everything to the best extent possible, and not worry about whether it gets used frequently or not.
Actually, PGO might help there by identifying the inlines that would be of most benefit. Assuming that an inline function expansion occupies an additional amount of memory, by reducing the executable's footprint in key areas you might reduce swapping of the executable itself.
Oops, sorry, I didn't answer your "why not?" question directly. My guess is that because it takes a fair amount of additional work to create the profile after each build, the step may have been skipped by the Linux build team. As far as I know, profiles are unique to each build: you can't create a profile under the Windows image and reuse it on the Mac or Linux builds.
That's just a guess, though, I could certainly be wrong about that. I'm sure a PGO expert or perhaps a member of the Firefox build team will chime in here soon to correct me if I am.
Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) is where you compile a special "recording" build of a program, then run it just using your core feature set and "ordinary" tasks. You don't perform a full test, or click on all the options or settings, you just go through normal end-user use cases. The special build then records a "profile" of your typical usage. You then feed the source code plus the profile back into the build process to build your production code.
The idea is for the linker to identify the hot spots in memory, and group as many of them together as possible so they live on common pages. This helps keep those pages from being swapped out of memory to disk due to disuse, which greatly reduces the amount of thrashing your end users will see during normal use. Less thrashing == improved performance.
Know anything on the other end of the spectrum? Something less humane?
You want less humane? Glue traps hit the other end of the spectrum. Basically, they're stuck there until one of three things happen:
They stick their nose in the glue to try to chew their legs free and die of suffocation. This doesn't happen as often as you might think.
They die of dehydration over the course of several days. It doesn't get less humane than that!
A human discovers them struggling in the trap and kills them. Not a popular option with many people, who frequently opt to throw the living rat in the garbage can (see #2 above.) If you find one, my best suggestion is to bash their skulls hard and quickly with a blunt instrument. Be decisive, don't just give them a bump on the head and expect them to die. A shovel or ice chopper works, too. Drowning is a very poor choice -- I still feel guilty about that one.:-(
Poison sucks because when they die you've got rotting corpses all over the place.
That's by design. Most modern rat poisons are based on an overdose of warfarin, which is a blood thinner. The idea is that their bodies overheat and that they leave their confined spaces or nests in order to cool off.
They die anyway, but because they are not hidden away in their nests you can find and dispose of their bodies. Otherwise they would stink up the place for months as they decompose, and you would never find them.
It is however a downer for smaller groups or actual singers with decent voices, because they have to compete with an altered (potentially 'perfect-sounding') voice.
Nonsense. We already went through this in the 1960s and 1970s, with the introduction of synthesizers. I remember a Queen album that featured this comment on the sleeve: NO SYNTHESIZERS. They were proud of their hard work, complex guitar work, and mixing and engineering efforts. So the next authentic singing group comes around an puts NO AUTO-TUNE on their album. Problem solved.
Authenticity becomes a selling point to those who care. Music lovers can trash-talk Britney because she uses AutoTune. Big deal -- they've been trash talking her for her entire career anyway.
I'm sorry, but this an area in which I absolutely do not want innovation. I want votes to be cast the way they always have in this country - on paper and in ink. I, the voter, get NO VALUE from any other system, electronic, mechanical, or colored pebbles in a jar. The media gets to publish electronic voting results earlier -- big deal.
Innovation should never be a part of voting -- every innovative idea brings unknown risks to the accuracy of the system, giving corrupt people the opportunity to find a new way to game the system. Pencil and paper is very well understood. It is also completely understandable by Joe Sixpack and Jane Chainstore, and that's critical to enfranchise everyone in a democracy, where 50% of the voters are of below average intelligence.
I heard a story (supposedly true, but this is the internet, right?) of a military flight simulator based on a game mod. It was being demoed for some Australian military honcho, and he complained that the scenery lacked "realism", really meaning he wanted to see herds of animals. So the developers went back and "skinned" some of the NPCs to look like kangaroos and placed a bunch of them in herds around the airfield. At the next demo, the same honcho did a low flyby over the kangaroo herd, and some of them opened fire with the weapons the developers forgot to disable! Classic.
If you're in the US, use weather.gov It's where weather.com and local broadcasters get their weather data from anyway.
No, they don't. Weather.com, the web presence of "The Weather Channel", has their own forecasters, and they're seldom as accurate as the NOAA. But at least they're not as bad as AccuWeather.com, which is one of the companies that sells forecasts to local TV stations.
weather.gov may not be a pretty site, but it rocks in terms of usability and accuracy of the data. And I already paid for it from my taxes!
Seconded. I turned on the "allow top-level sites by default" as soon as it became available, and my need to whitelist/blacklist has all but vanished. I know I'm taking a bit more of a risk, but it still stops the vast majority of ads and popups, and I suppose it's preventing XSS attacks too. (Although with NoScript I've never seen one, so how would I know what they look like?:-)
If I had a slower machine, I'd probably go back and clean up my old white/black lists because they supposedly hurt performance to some degree. But as of right now, I sure don't notice anything but a rocket boost in page delivery when compared to IE, because Firefox isn't waiting to load all those crappy third party scripts or ads.
I also run Flashblock, and whitelist only a select few sites with it. That way flash ads and intro pages even from the same domain are still suppressed.
And if one more web weenie tells me "but you're missing the rich experience of the web" I'm going to stuff his browser into the orifice that his culture traditionally reserves for stuffing things.
I don't mind blocking ads myself, but I don't agree with the concept of a subscription to a blocking list. If I'm going to shut off my contribution to the revenue stream of a site, I do it deliberately only after they've offended me with annoying ads.
And for the same reason, while I do push Firefox to non-techies, I don't push AdBlock to other people. I shouldn't make the decisions that unwittingly affect other peoples contributions to the financial well-being of a web site.
Of course the real problem is the monopoly that is Doubleclick. I can't really block them from one site without blocking them from all sites. What I think would be useful is a Firefox extension that is an "Ad Diverter": it still downloads the ad, and gives them the impression that some eyeballs saw it, but in reality it ends up in the bit bucket instead of polluting my screen.
First, cell phone tower antennas can be made highly directional, providing coverage over a small arc. It would be a Small Matter Of Engineering to design a series of antennas that would effectively cover a prison and not the surrounding area or even the parking lot.
Extending the idea of directionality further, cell towers today can already provide the location of the phones being used to within a few hundred yards. It should technically be possible to obtain the cooperation of the local cell providers to identify calls emanating from within a certain area, with NO additional investment of hardware. CALEA might even give them the authority to do so with no new statutes.
Next, this could be done selectively. Start with the Federal Supermax prisons. Then extend it to maximum security facilities, then to medium security if required.
Also note, the cell towers could be functional, yet still record conversations and ESNs and IMEI numbers. That would permit their use in emergencies or by visitors, all of whom could be notified of the monitoring by signs as they enter the prison. It would be important for lawyers to understand that client-attorney privilege would not exist over their cell phones within the vicinity of such a prison. Or perhaps they could go so far as to require registration of IMEI numbers by all visitors/employees and block calls from unidentified phones, or from phones where the visitor has left. Tracing the phones back to the guards or visitors who provide them would provide incentive to block their entry in the first place.
Yes, jamming would be cheaper, but could really cause problems in a true emergency.
The real problem was the only Americans they could find wanted to give out loans to unqualified applicants, and they already had enough of those idiots in-house.
Yeah, I gotta call BS on this one. The lawyers "agreed she had a valid claim", but it would cost her $50,000 in legal fees so it wasn't worth it? For $2,000,000? Let's see, $50K from $2 mil leaves... 1.95 MILLION DOLLARS! I guess the lawyers didn't want the money either? Give me a break.
What the poster didn't tell us is that she used to work for the Undersecretary of the Oil Ministry of Nigeria, and she was to be given the options for her assistance in helping move TWO MILLION DOLLARS overseas, for which she merely had to advance the small sum of $50,000.
It was all legal, of course, as long as it remained in strictest confidence.
One good fix for much of this is the appointment of a CISO. By having someone who "gets it" at the top level, with a budget and a staff and the authority to wield them. It's also critical to have someone who can tell the other CxOs "the policy applies to everyone starting with us, because it won't work if we don't set the example. A failure of security at our level could cost us $x million per day."
I work for a $LARGE_US_CORPORATION and our CEO has to swipe his badge to get into the buildings, same as the rest of us. That's probably because the $10/hr rent-a-cops at the desk wouldn't recognize him if he threw a chair at them (no, not him.) Even if he's just playing along for show, I think it's important for the rest of us to see that he doesn't get a free pass.
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Sorry, I thought it was obvious that I was implying the free market isn't working "to create a standard."
I'll go pray 10 "Hail Ayn Rand, full of Objectivism"s now. Will that make it better?
I'm saying that mini-USB wall warts cost them in terms of purchasing them from a supplier, and cost them in terms of shipping weight, extra assembly steps, and packaging. Those costs are passed on to the end user, but do not make them money because they have to pay for them. The phone would be cheaper to make if they didn't have to include the wall warts, increasing their profit margins.
But because there is no standard for chargers, they are forced to include one with every phone. Customers today would scream bloody murder if they shipped phones without chargers.
If a standard does eventually come around for chargers, some day it may be assumed that every household will already have one or more, so they'll be able to sell phones or other devices without chargers. It's also likely that if that day ever comes they'll keep phone prices the same as they are now, but they'll add a premium for phones that include chargers.
Does that make what I was trying to say any clearer?
Plover, why don't you try your amazing array of Motorola gear with a non-Motorola cable and tell me if it works.
They work just fine. I've never bought or owned an actual Motorola mini-USB cable. I've been using the mini-USB cables that came with other equipment, including a Canon camera cable and a cable that connected a cheap 12-in-one SD/CF card reader. I do use the Motorola wall warts, though, and aftermarket car chargers that specifically said "Motorola" on the package, so I don't know if they'll recharge without a special power supply.
This has been true and has worked for me on each of these phones: RAZR V3, V550, KRZR K1, and ROKR Z6, plus another model I bought for my mom to replace her stolen V550 that I can't remember. (By the way, I thought it obvious that these phones and all that gear are not just for me but for the rest of my family, too. Only two of these were personally mine. I just plug the others into my computer and upload ring tones and pictures for the rest of them, and tweak the occasional SEEMs. :-)
Where I've had no end of problems has been with finding Windows XP drivers, and getting the phone to talk to the computer without the phone crashing and burning. It was really awful for the first year or two, but over time new releases of drivers seem to have improved the stability of the connection. On my Vista machine they seem to work pretty reliably. But I've never blamed the cables, as they work fine on the other peripherals.
Nope. The cell phone industry doesn't make money on wall warts. Only the wall wart industry makes money on wall warts. If the cell phone manufacturers had their way, mini-USB chargers would be so ubiquitous they wouldn't have to include them with the phones, saving them a few dollars per unit in costs and cutting their shipping rates in half.
Anything that a manufacturer has to buy from someone else that they don't make themselves usually costs more than they're worth. They're a necessary evil, not a profit center.
The aftermarket wall wart business is very lucrative, however. Replacement chargers go for stupid high amounts. And they stand to make more profit from a wider variety of chargers. But they are tiny businesses that have no leverage. They have no say in what standards the cell phone manufacturers will use.
I think Motorola made their decision just to keep costs down. If they can include the exact same charger with every item in their product line, their inventory and manufacturing costs for chargers drops significantly. It just happens to work to our benefit, too.
What's that you say? I can't start my own cell phone company unless I pay some cell phone carrier company millions of dollars?
Actually, no, that's not what I say at all, nor is anyone else saying it. I'm not exactly sure what you're trolling for here, but you're perfectly free to manufacture all the cell phones you want. You'll have to pay the government for an FCC certification since you're selling RF transmitters, and you will likely have to license a few patents, but other than that knock yourself out. You can make and sell phones, and the carriers cannot stop people from using them on their networks.
You don't have to pay a cell phone carrier a single dime for the privilege.
However, you might not sell too many if you don't enter into some kind of agreement with a carrier to stock them in their retail stores. But that's a problem common to making any product. For example, you could make completely unlicensed and unregulated leather cell phone pouches, but that doesn't mean AT&T stores are going to carry them in stock without a contract.
No, I agree that it would be bad for a government to regulate this as a standard, because most governments have proven to be spectacularly poor with most standards. Strangely enough, this is a place where the United States actually does OK, I think. Rather than try to create industry standards, they will usually pass standards applicable only on federal government purchased products, such as with Defense department contracts or GAO purchases. If any manufacturer wanting to sell 100,000 phones to Uncle Sam is required to use mini-USB for charging and headphones, the chances are good they'll put mini-USB on their consumer models as well, as a part of the economies of scale.
But I do think this is a case where the free market just isn't working. For example, me. I'm buying Motorola products partly because they follow a useful (to me) standard. That's exactly how the free market is supposed to drive decisions like this.
The bigger problem is I'm backing a dying horse. Motorola has been struggling as a mobile phone maker ever since the RAZR lost its dominant seat. Mini-USB connectors aren't enough when the rest of the features are blown away by the iPhone, Android, or Symbian offering, or by some other manufacturer's lowball pricing. And quite frankly, the Motorola apps are pretty awful (except for the MOTOMAGX linux system, and even that has bugs.) There's a giant pile of competing features and attributes, and connector standardization just isn't going to be the deal breaker for most people.
It is very nice. Motorola standardized on the mini-USB connector back around the time they introduced the RAZR. Every Motorola product I've bought since about 2005 uses a mini-USB jack for power and charging. This includes a Bluetooth stereo adapter, a couple pairs of Bluetooth headphones, a Bluetooth handsfree ear-bud, and at least five different models of cell phones.
And I have never had to buy a separate cable to connect my Motorola phones to my PC when it's time to upload new content. That's not true of my Sony-Ericsson or Nokia phones.
And because they're all the same, I have several identical power bricks, which is ideal for having one at work, a couple in different rooms at home, my wife has one, and our car chargers are all interoperable.
It's one of those levels of convenience that seems stupid and shallow (and probably is), but it definitely drives me back to Motorola as a customer.
My understanding of the PGO process is limited to an explanation of the the Microsoft VC++ compiler and linker. I was told that the profile was used by the linker to arrange memory in the most efficient manner possible, but nothing about how it affected the uninstrumented compilation of the code.
The person who told me about it also recorded a video interview explaining the front end / back end interaction in their compiler, and you can view it at http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Louis-Lafreniere-VC-backend-compiler/ (I haven't seen it yet, but I assume he's saying the same things he told me.)
Certainly it could be used to make efficient compiler decisions, and that's probably what is making up the difference in performance the people are seeing on Linux systems with no swap space.
Theoretically it could use profile information to inline certain functions. But as you suggest most optimizers would simply inline everything to the best extent possible, and not worry about whether it gets used frequently or not.
Actually, PGO might help there by identifying the inlines that would be of most benefit. Assuming that an inline function expansion occupies an additional amount of memory, by reducing the executable's footprint in key areas you might reduce swapping of the executable itself.
Oops, sorry, I didn't answer your "why not?" question directly. My guess is that because it takes a fair amount of additional work to create the profile after each build, the step may have been skipped by the Linux build team. As far as I know, profiles are unique to each build: you can't create a profile under the Windows image and reuse it on the Mac or Linux builds.
That's just a guess, though, I could certainly be wrong about that. I'm sure a PGO expert or perhaps a member of the Firefox build team will chime in here soon to correct me if I am.
Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) is where you compile a special "recording" build of a program, then run it just using your core feature set and "ordinary" tasks. You don't perform a full test, or click on all the options or settings, you just go through normal end-user use cases. The special build then records a "profile" of your typical usage. You then feed the source code plus the profile back into the build process to build your production code.
The idea is for the linker to identify the hot spots in memory, and group as many of them together as possible so they live on common pages. This helps keep those pages from being swapped out of memory to disk due to disuse, which greatly reduces the amount of thrashing your end users will see during normal use. Less thrashing == improved performance.
Know anything on the other end of the spectrum? Something less humane?
You want less humane? Glue traps hit the other end of the spectrum. Basically, they're stuck there until one of three things happen:
Poison sucks because when they die you've got rotting corpses all over the place.
That's by design. Most modern rat poisons are based on an overdose of warfarin, which is a blood thinner. The idea is that their bodies overheat and that they leave their confined spaces or nests in order to cool off.
They die anyway, but because they are not hidden away in their nests you can find and dispose of their bodies. Otherwise they would stink up the place for months as they decompose, and you would never find them.
I refuse to recognize Hip-Hop as music. I mean sure, it's got a beat and you can kill cops to it, but it's still lacking something.
Just remember: "You can't have 'crap' without 'rap'."
It is however a downer for smaller groups or actual singers with decent voices, because they have to compete with an altered (potentially 'perfect-sounding') voice.
Nonsense. We already went through this in the 1960s and 1970s, with the introduction of synthesizers. I remember a Queen album that featured this comment on the sleeve: NO SYNTHESIZERS. They were proud of their hard work, complex guitar work, and mixing and engineering efforts. So the next authentic singing group comes around an puts NO AUTO-TUNE on their album. Problem solved.
Authenticity becomes a selling point to those who care. Music lovers can trash-talk Britney because she uses AutoTune. Big deal -- they've been trash talking her for her entire career anyway.
AutoTune changes nothing.
I'm sorry, but this an area in which I absolutely do not want innovation. I want votes to be cast the way they always have in this country - on paper and in ink. I, the voter, get NO VALUE from any other system, electronic, mechanical, or colored pebbles in a jar. The media gets to publish electronic voting results earlier -- big deal.
Innovation should never be a part of voting -- every innovative idea brings unknown risks to the accuracy of the system, giving corrupt people the opportunity to find a new way to game the system. Pencil and paper is very well understood. It is also completely understandable by Joe Sixpack and Jane Chainstore, and that's critical to enfranchise everyone in a democracy, where 50% of the voters are of below average intelligence.
I heard a story (supposedly true, but this is the internet, right?) of a military flight simulator based on a game mod. It was being demoed for some Australian military honcho, and he complained that the scenery lacked "realism", really meaning he wanted to see herds of animals. So the developers went back and "skinned" some of the NPCs to look like kangaroos and placed a bunch of them in herds around the airfield. At the next demo, the same honcho did a low flyby over the kangaroo herd, and some of them opened fire with the weapons the developers forgot to disable! Classic.
Popups are why I hesitate to go to weather.com
If you're in the US, use weather.gov It's where weather.com and local broadcasters get their weather data from anyway.
No, they don't. Weather.com, the web presence of "The Weather Channel", has their own forecasters, and they're seldom as accurate as the NOAA. But at least they're not as bad as AccuWeather.com, which is one of the companies that sells forecasts to local TV stations.
weather.gov may not be a pretty site, but it rocks in terms of usability and accuracy of the data. And I already paid for it from my taxes!
Seconded. I turned on the "allow top-level sites by default" as soon as it became available, and my need to whitelist/blacklist has all but vanished. I know I'm taking a bit more of a risk, but it still stops the vast majority of ads and popups, and I suppose it's preventing XSS attacks too. (Although with NoScript I've never seen one, so how would I know what they look like? :-)
If I had a slower machine, I'd probably go back and clean up my old white/black lists because they supposedly hurt performance to some degree. But as of right now, I sure don't notice anything but a rocket boost in page delivery when compared to IE, because Firefox isn't waiting to load all those crappy third party scripts or ads.
I also run Flashblock, and whitelist only a select few sites with it. That way flash ads and intro pages even from the same domain are still suppressed.
And if one more web weenie tells me "but you're missing the rich experience of the web" I'm going to stuff his browser into the orifice that his culture traditionally reserves for stuffing things.
Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!
I don't mind blocking ads myself, but I don't agree with the concept of a subscription to a blocking list. If I'm going to shut off my contribution to the revenue stream of a site, I do it deliberately only after they've offended me with annoying ads.
And for the same reason, while I do push Firefox to non-techies, I don't push AdBlock to other people. I shouldn't make the decisions that unwittingly affect other peoples contributions to the financial well-being of a web site.
Of course the real problem is the monopoly that is Doubleclick. I can't really block them from one site without blocking them from all sites. What I think would be useful is a Firefox extension that is an "Ad Diverter": it still downloads the ad, and gives them the impression that some eyeballs saw it, but in reality it ends up in the bit bucket instead of polluting my screen.
First, cell phone tower antennas can be made highly directional, providing coverage over a small arc. It would be a Small Matter Of Engineering to design a series of antennas that would effectively cover a prison and not the surrounding area or even the parking lot.
Extending the idea of directionality further, cell towers today can already provide the location of the phones being used to within a few hundred yards. It should technically be possible to obtain the cooperation of the local cell providers to identify calls emanating from within a certain area, with NO additional investment of hardware. CALEA might even give them the authority to do so with no new statutes.
Next, this could be done selectively. Start with the Federal Supermax prisons. Then extend it to maximum security facilities, then to medium security if required.
Also note, the cell towers could be functional, yet still record conversations and ESNs and IMEI numbers. That would permit their use in emergencies or by visitors, all of whom could be notified of the monitoring by signs as they enter the prison. It would be important for lawyers to understand that client-attorney privilege would not exist over their cell phones within the vicinity of such a prison. Or perhaps they could go so far as to require registration of IMEI numbers by all visitors/employees and block calls from unidentified phones, or from phones where the visitor has left. Tracing the phones back to the guards or visitors who provide them would provide incentive to block their entry in the first place.
Yes, jamming would be cheaper, but could really cause problems in a true emergency.
The real problem was the only Americans they could find wanted to give out loans to unqualified applicants, and they already had enough of those idiots in-house.
Yeah, I gotta call BS on this one. The lawyers "agreed she had a valid claim", but it would cost her $50,000 in legal fees so it wasn't worth it? For $2,000,000? Let's see, $50K from $2 mil leaves... 1.95 MILLION DOLLARS! I guess the lawyers didn't want the money either? Give me a break.
What the poster didn't tell us is that she used to work for the Undersecretary of the Oil Ministry of Nigeria, and she was to be given the options for her assistance in helping move TWO MILLION DOLLARS overseas, for which she merely had to advance the small sum of $50,000.
It was all legal, of course, as long as it remained in strictest confidence.
The RIAA seem to have spotted a new idea: if you want to be e.g. a bank robber or a burglar, become a lawyer.
That's not exactly a new idea!
One good fix for much of this is the appointment of a CISO. By having someone who "gets it" at the top level, with a budget and a staff and the authority to wield them. It's also critical to have someone who can tell the other CxOs "the policy applies to everyone starting with us, because it won't work if we don't set the example. A failure of security at our level could cost us $x million per day."
I work for a $LARGE_US_CORPORATION and our CEO has to swipe his badge to get into the buildings, same as the rest of us. That's probably because the $10/hr rent-a-cops at the desk wouldn't recognize him if he threw a chair at them (no, not him.) Even if he's just playing along for show, I think it's important for the rest of us to see that he doesn't get a free pass.