Personally I would prefer my car being stolen while I'm not using it than me not being able to use when I really need it.
Winner, winner! That's exactly why I have insurance on my vehicles. I'm paying someone else to accept the risk of theft. And they're gambling that I won't be a victim.
Sure, I don't want my nice new car stolen, nor even my old truck. I take sensible precautions, such as protecting my keys and always locking the vehicles when I leave them, no matter what. But if despite my best efforts, they are stolen, hey, there's some measure of reimbursement. Will I be happy? No. Will the reimbursement get me the same vehicle? Probably not. But will I be without a vehicle for too long? No, the insurance company is well-paid to get me back into a similar vehicle.
Might the insurance company decide to offer me a discount should I wear this stupid hat? They offer discounts for LoJack systems and other anti-theft measures, so they might offer one for a brain-scanning helmet. Will they someday require them? Probably not unless people really like and accept them.
Of course you "could" write a touch-friendly application in VB6 - and I did, back in about 1996. The concern is if the app written in 1996 for use on a desktop will be usable on a tablet today. Was it written with little tiny mouse-only sized buttons? That's touch-screen failure.
Doesn't matter if it's portable to a tablet if it's not usable on a tablet.
Perhaps we should all wish Linus is given a ride in a gilded carriage drawn by unicorns to Soft Kitten Land, where kindergarten teachers repeat the Golden Rule to him.
Closing your website as a form of protest simply accomplishes the goals of the administration. If they can prevent your servicing a hundred other bad guys, they may happily choose to sacrifice chasing the one bad guy through your system. (Besides, it's not like there aren't other clues or trails out there.)
Of course, such an act is visible, noble, and it gets people talking; and you're seen as a good person for doing so. But those effects are all transient, and little more than a flap in today's breeze. The administration knows the negativity will fade over time. So over the long term, the closings provide the chilling effect the administration desires.
all that mattered was that they violated the letter of the law and needed to be sorry for doing so.
Close. All that mattered was that they were hunted to the ends of the earth and punished mercilessly as an example to any other would-be whistleblowers.
Price, price, price. If I'm buying 15,000 of them for video signs, kiosk usage, mounted-on-wall building controllers, or other non-handheld-tablet usage, you better believe there's a difference between a $179 bid and a $159 bid - and that difference will be a lot more important to me than access speed, G-force protection, or even potential multiple uses.
The thickness of the disk may or may not be important to my use, but if I can get large quantities of standard tablets that don't have to have their cases re-engineered to house thicker disks, they remain cheaper.
Not everybody needs a human friendly portable tablet. Some people just need the tablet form-factor at a certain price point - and they need a lot of them.
Regardless of the price, it doesn't make the iPhone an "investment". It's an expense, because the value of the phone has almost no chance to rise over time. If you're restricting the conversation to people who can ill afford them, that makes it a really foolish expense - but it's still not an investment.
How is this different from homomorphism? The thing is that it's not intended to keep secrets. Correlations might still exist that could give basic traffic kinds of data away. Have they figured ways to prevent those secrets from leaking?
Actually, an "additional security measure" often hurts in unexpected ways. Allowing two different ways into a system allows an attacker to choose the easier of the two. Sometimes, the interaction between the two can reveal secrets, or allow novel attacks. And if the fingerprint reader isn't perfectly secured, it might be possible to extract information from it that could be used to attack a different fingerprint system.
why would anyone let aged technologies play an important role in new devices?
Cost and capabilities. Spinny disks will be a lot cheaper, and hold a lot more data. If that's what you need, and aren't as concerned about shocks, durability, longevity, or access speed, then 'yay disks'.
Places where these might come in useful: Low end larger-screen digital media players. Kiosks (think of the tap-your-phone-number-at-checkout loyalty programs.) Smaller shelf signs and advertising in stores, where unit cost is the limiting factor.
Don't get too hung up in the idea that "tablet" means the same thing to everyone. It doesn't have to mean "usage model". Sometimes it can just mean "useful shape".
First, an iPhone is unlikely to be on the bleeding edge of anything. The OS is version 7 (nothing more than a UI refinement of OS version 6, and it's already appearing on today's iPhones.) The hardware won't represent any great leaps in processor or battery technology. As a matter of fact, the only new aspect will be the slightly larger screen. It won't be anything unexpected for its new users.
Next, a phone is hardly what many people would classify as either "considerable" or even an "investment". It's only a few hundred dollars - less in America, where cellular companies subsidize the bulk of the cost of the phone. Being the first on your block to own one isn't exactly placing most owners at financial risk. And cell phones don't even qualify as an "investment", as they never deliver value in the form of money growth over time. In the best case you can get a small fraction of their purchase price from a reseller after a year or so.
The risks you experienced with your car purchase are substantially higher than these new customers will realize. Engineering changes to cars are a lot more complex than laying out a new circuit board for a phone.
But I think we'd both agree the completely silly thing is squandering a fraction of your life standing in line for one.
It may be a rant, but it's about the most balanced statement on the problem I've read here. Thanks for it.
Let's inventory the players, and see what we have to work with. The people who produce energy are willing to damage anything to dig it up and sell it, they have a lot of money, and can afford to fund enough AGW deniers to mess with the political equation. Their customers are people who are addicted to energy and aren't willing to change much or give up their more energy consuming habits, and they are the voters - but they're not all that bright, and the majority are easily swayed by money that defends their energy-consuming stance. The people who are in a position to implement the proposed solutions (cap and trade, smart grids, efficient appliances and vehicles, non-carbon power generation) are also the ones who stand to profit from the solutions, and they have economic incentive to steer them in the direction of maximum gain for themselves instead of to actually correct the problems. And the people (environmentalists) who know the science and are proposing the solutions have no economic power, and modest political power.
So how does it lead us to solutions? The environmentalists need to keep fighting, but that's hard for them to keep going when they never seem to make actual progress. The real answer is it might take a dozen Hurricane Sandys and Katrinas. It might take some kind of global disruption (wars, floods, disasters) causing a permanent rise in the cost of fuel. It might take a five meter rise in sea levels, and the changes in insurance costs that will result. Nothing else has changed much, so far.
In Washington, it actually led to an extremely high voter turnout (pun fully intended). Apparently that's the kind of thing that leads people to actually care about politics.
It only means they cared about politics exactly once. Now that they've passed it... uhh... they, um, are going to... dude, do you have any more of those Fritos? I mean they are sooo good.
What do you mean we were supposed to vote yesterday?
RTFS. The researcher didn't know any of those details. She was given only a Btc address, and she discovered the rest. The reporter who made the buy was able to confirm that she correctly identified those facts. ( I assume it was a test buy, and the materials turned over to the proper authorities.)
The materials were not turned over to authorities, but were thoroughly destroyed. I believe the method used was "a series of small fires".
RTFS. The researcher didn't know any of those details. She was given only a Btc address, and she discovered the rest. The reporter who made the buy was able to confirm that she correctly identified those facts. ( I assume it was a test buy, and the materials turned over to the proper authorities.)
I don't know if her methods would stand up in a courtroom. They would, however, be enough to put John Law on someone's trail, and possibly enough to seek a warrant.
What's wrong with a Segway? Self-balancing, 12 MPH, silent, small, compatible with people, and fun to ride?
It's not a dumb idea. Some of the grand visions aren't likely to come to pass, like cities designing themselves around Segways, but the ideas were never dumb.
The point of an art project is to get other people to recognize the problem. Ordinary people don't know they're buying DRM. They just think they're "buying e-books", but they have no understanding what that means. Their only experience with DRM is when they think about sharing the book with someone else, and then they only dimly realize the problem when they can't find a menu option labeled "make a copy for my friend".
This puts a clumsy bunch of Lego out there, making motor noises, and getting people thinking "why is he doing all that crap?"
So assuming the Star Trek communicators inspired flip phones, carry that one out the rest of the way. They made us think of communication systems with tiny electronics and no wires. Those are still the identifying characteristics of cell phones regardless of the form factor. Uhura had her non-Bluetooth earpiece, and now we have Jawbones. Yeoman Rand had Kirk signing a tablet, and while William Shatner could have signed on a Palm Pilot fifteen years ago, you can do even better on your iPad Mini or your Kindle HD today.
So here we are, still 250 years away from the future portrayed in the show (and 46 years after the sci-fi tech was shown), and we already have fourth or fifth generations of some of their tools. I am not disappointed that someone obsessed on achieving those technologies exactly - I celebrate that we've surpassed them.
What we really need are more inventors inspired by the science fiction writers, and more science fiction writers creating more ideas. It's even OK if we try to turn them all into reality, yet chase down a lot of dead ends. Most are no doubt doomed to languish forever on untended wiki pages, while others will be destined to become the ubiquitous tech of tomorrow.
Anyone else take a look at those renders for Ellington Airport? I just love how the roads and platforms make no engineering sense whatsoever.
Well, you need customers at your spaceport, so therefore you need roads. If you build them, they will fly. Obviously, you'll have full commuter ships leaving for space every 30 minutes, so you'll need four lanes of freeway to deliver all those people, and they're all going to want to park next to the building, so make sure you have a really big terminal. A giant grass bridge over the freeway lets people wander aimlessly beneath the glory of your rocket-filled sky, so make sure to include one of those. And monorails should whiz by giving all the locals a chance to see the future you're providing them as they roll on to their uneventful days ahead.
A spaceport obviously can't serve anybody without support staff, like ticket agents, travel agents, baggage handlers, TSA gropers, insurance salesmen, USO staffers, McFood operators, cart drivers, taxi stand starters, and telephone sanitizers. So you're going to need a lot of lodging to house these people. And they're going to want to live in an interesting place, so stick an F15 on a metal post and now it's an interactive park-museum, fun for the whole family (for at least an hour on a Saturday.)
Now think about all those space customers. If you've been out orbiting hard all day, you're obviously going to want to crash in a nice five star hotel ("crash", "five STARS" - I'm using spaceflight metaphors there, did you get 'em?) at the end of the day. That means you need golfing and pubs and water hazards placed next to a tall building.
See? You're pretty close to an architect already. Just add crowds of people who have no reason to be there whatsoever, and sprinkle liberally with immature trees, and that's practically a bachelor's degree right there.
Wrong. Jobs still go overseas or go away, just that you don't see them leave.
Look at the plumbing industry. Drilling holes in a wall and sticking copper tubing through them seems like something that has to remain solidly on shore, right? Let's say it's 120 hours of work to plumb an average house. So you show up to work some day and your boss says "we're switching to PEX." Because you don't have elbows or joints, there is no soldering, and because those holes don't have to line up perfectly, plumbing a house with PEX now takes only about 40 hours. Where did the extra labor go? Some went overseas to the PEX factory, but the rest got laid off.
At the burger place? Where do you think those patties were manufactured? Do you see a McButcher shop in the back of the store? No, the animals were likely raised and slaughtered and packed in rural Brasil, or some other country with cheaper labor and farmland.
It's a global economy now. Parts and materials come from everywhere. Protectionism means little at the borders when it's only keeping out the $7.25/hour illegal immigrants. The total cost to the US economy of illegal immigrants is less than $30 billion. (Compare that to the Wall Street bailout of $750 billion, or to the Iraq / Afghanistan wars with their costs of over $2 trillion.) The real losses to the U.S. job market have come from increased efficiencies, more automation, and overseas manufacturing and labor, where $trillions of dollars have left our payrolls. But hey, let's get Fox banging the illegal immigrant drum and blame them for taking our jobs, because Mexicans are visible and the TV cop shows prove they're all criminals and drug lords. It takes our easily distracted minds off the facts of where the real losses are coming from.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I would prefer my car being stolen while I'm not using it than me not being able to use when I really need it.
Winner, winner! That's exactly why I have insurance on my vehicles. I'm paying someone else to accept the risk of theft. And they're gambling that I won't be a victim.
Sure, I don't want my nice new car stolen, nor even my old truck. I take sensible precautions, such as protecting my keys and always locking the vehicles when I leave them, no matter what. But if despite my best efforts, they are stolen, hey, there's some measure of reimbursement. Will I be happy? No. Will the reimbursement get me the same vehicle? Probably not. But will I be without a vehicle for too long? No, the insurance company is well-paid to get me back into a similar vehicle.
Might the insurance company decide to offer me a discount should I wear this stupid hat? They offer discounts for LoJack systems and other anti-theft measures, so they might offer one for a brain-scanning helmet. Will they someday require them? Probably not unless people really like and accept them.
Of course you "could" write a touch-friendly application in VB6 - and I did, back in about 1996. The concern is if the app written in 1996 for use on a desktop will be usable on a tablet today. Was it written with little tiny mouse-only sized buttons? That's touch-screen failure.
Doesn't matter if it's portable to a tablet if it's not usable on a tablet.
You do realize that a UI written in VB6 was merely bad 10 years ago will be unusably awful on a tablet form-factor screen?
I was simply trying to find a suitably Linus-specific painful substitute for the Die-In-A-Fire rhetoric.
Perhaps we should all wish Linus is given a ride in a gilded carriage drawn by unicorns to Soft Kitten Land, where kindergarten teachers repeat the Golden Rule to him.
Closing your website as a form of protest simply accomplishes the goals of the administration. If they can prevent your servicing a hundred other bad guys, they may happily choose to sacrifice chasing the one bad guy through your system. (Besides, it's not like there aren't other clues or trails out there.)
Of course, such an act is visible, noble, and it gets people talking; and you're seen as a good person for doing so. But those effects are all transient, and little more than a flap in today's breeze. The administration knows the negativity will fade over time. So over the long term, the closings provide the chilling effect the administration desires.
all that mattered was that they violated the letter of the law and needed to be sorry for doing so.
Close. All that mattered was that they were hunted to the ends of the earth and punished mercilessly as an example to any other would-be whistleblowers.
Price, price, price. If I'm buying 15,000 of them for video signs, kiosk usage, mounted-on-wall building controllers, or other non-handheld-tablet usage, you better believe there's a difference between a $179 bid and a $159 bid - and that difference will be a lot more important to me than access speed, G-force protection, or even potential multiple uses.
The thickness of the disk may or may not be important to my use, but if I can get large quantities of standard tablets that don't have to have their cases re-engineered to house thicker disks, they remain cheaper.
Not everybody needs a human friendly portable tablet. Some people just need the tablet form-factor at a certain price point - and they need a lot of them.
Regardless of the price, it doesn't make the iPhone an "investment". It's an expense, because the value of the phone has almost no chance to rise over time. If you're restricting the conversation to people who can ill afford them, that makes it a really foolish expense - but it's still not an investment.
How is this different from homomorphism? The thing is that it's not intended to keep secrets. Correlations might still exist that could give basic traffic kinds of data away. Have they figured ways to prevent those secrets from leaking?
None of those are "bleeding edge" enhancements which the GP suggested would be a reason to avoid the new iPhone.
an additional security mechanism cannot hurt.
Actually, an "additional security measure" often hurts in unexpected ways. Allowing two different ways into a system allows an attacker to choose the easier of the two. Sometimes, the interaction between the two can reveal secrets, or allow novel attacks. And if the fingerprint reader isn't perfectly secured, it might be possible to extract information from it that could be used to attack a different fingerprint system.
why would anyone let aged technologies play an important role in new devices?
Cost and capabilities. Spinny disks will be a lot cheaper, and hold a lot more data. If that's what you need, and aren't as concerned about shocks, durability, longevity, or access speed, then 'yay disks'.
Places where these might come in useful: Low end larger-screen digital media players. Kiosks (think of the tap-your-phone-number-at-checkout loyalty programs.) Smaller shelf signs and advertising in stores, where unit cost is the limiting factor.
Don't get too hung up in the idea that "tablet" means the same thing to everyone. It doesn't have to mean "usage model". Sometimes it can just mean "useful shape".
First, an iPhone is unlikely to be on the bleeding edge of anything. The OS is version 7 (nothing more than a UI refinement of OS version 6, and it's already appearing on today's iPhones.) The hardware won't represent any great leaps in processor or battery technology. As a matter of fact, the only new aspect will be the slightly larger screen. It won't be anything unexpected for its new users.
Next, a phone is hardly what many people would classify as either "considerable" or even an "investment". It's only a few hundred dollars - less in America, where cellular companies subsidize the bulk of the cost of the phone. Being the first on your block to own one isn't exactly placing most owners at financial risk. And cell phones don't even qualify as an "investment", as they never deliver value in the form of money growth over time. In the best case you can get a small fraction of their purchase price from a reseller after a year or so.
The risks you experienced with your car purchase are substantially higher than these new customers will realize. Engineering changes to cars are a lot more complex than laying out a new circuit board for a phone.
But I think we'd both agree the completely silly thing is squandering a fraction of your life standing in line for one.
It may be a rant, but it's about the most balanced statement on the problem I've read here. Thanks for it.
Let's inventory the players, and see what we have to work with. The people who produce energy are willing to damage anything to dig it up and sell it, they have a lot of money, and can afford to fund enough AGW deniers to mess with the political equation. Their customers are people who are addicted to energy and aren't willing to change much or give up their more energy consuming habits, and they are the voters - but they're not all that bright, and the majority are easily swayed by money that defends their energy-consuming stance. The people who are in a position to implement the proposed solutions (cap and trade, smart grids, efficient appliances and vehicles, non-carbon power generation) are also the ones who stand to profit from the solutions, and they have economic incentive to steer them in the direction of maximum gain for themselves instead of to actually correct the problems. And the people (environmentalists) who know the science and are proposing the solutions have no economic power, and modest political power.
So how does it lead us to solutions? The environmentalists need to keep fighting, but that's hard for them to keep going when they never seem to make actual progress. The real answer is it might take a dozen Hurricane Sandys and Katrinas. It might take some kind of global disruption (wars, floods, disasters) causing a permanent rise in the cost of fuel. It might take a five meter rise in sea levels, and the changes in insurance costs that will result. Nothing else has changed much, so far.
In Washington, it actually led to an extremely high voter turnout (pun fully intended). Apparently that's the kind of thing that leads people to actually care about politics.
It only means they cared about politics exactly once. Now that they've passed it ... uhh ... they, um, are going to ... dude, do you have any more of those Fritos? I mean they are sooo good.
What do you mean we were supposed to vote yesterday?
RTFS. The researcher didn't know any of those details. She was given only a Btc address, and she discovered the rest. The reporter who made the buy was able to confirm that she correctly identified those facts. ( I assume it was a test buy, and the materials turned over to the proper authorities.)
The materials were not turned over to authorities, but were thoroughly destroyed. I believe the method used was "a series of small fires".
A "controlled burn", no doubt. :-)
RTFS. The researcher didn't know any of those details. She was given only a Btc address, and she discovered the rest. The reporter who made the buy was able to confirm that she correctly identified those facts. ( I assume it was a test buy, and the materials turned over to the proper authorities.)
I don't know if her methods would stand up in a courtroom. They would, however, be enough to put John Law on someone's trail, and possibly enough to seek a warrant.
Usually, the point of an art project is to get you to think. I think this one succeeded.
What's wrong with a Segway? Self-balancing, 12 MPH, silent, small, compatible with people, and fun to ride?
It's not a dumb idea. Some of the grand visions aren't likely to come to pass, like cities designing themselves around Segways, but the ideas were never dumb.
Exactly! Here's a guy desperately trying to make things as cool as Tony Stark, and people are filled with reasons he shouldn't.
Elon Musk, you can be Ironman. I approve.
The point of an art project is to get other people to recognize the problem. Ordinary people don't know they're buying DRM. They just think they're "buying e-books", but they have no understanding what that means. Their only experience with DRM is when they think about sharing the book with someone else, and then they only dimly realize the problem when they can't find a menu option labeled "make a copy for my friend".
This puts a clumsy bunch of Lego out there, making motor noises, and getting people thinking "why is he doing all that crap?"
So assuming the Star Trek communicators inspired flip phones, carry that one out the rest of the way. They made us think of communication systems with tiny electronics and no wires. Those are still the identifying characteristics of cell phones regardless of the form factor. Uhura had her non-Bluetooth earpiece, and now we have Jawbones. Yeoman Rand had Kirk signing a tablet, and while William Shatner could have signed on a Palm Pilot fifteen years ago, you can do even better on your iPad Mini or your Kindle HD today.
So here we are, still 250 years away from the future portrayed in the show (and 46 years after the sci-fi tech was shown), and we already have fourth or fifth generations of some of their tools. I am not disappointed that someone obsessed on achieving those technologies exactly - I celebrate that we've surpassed them.
What we really need are more inventors inspired by the science fiction writers, and more science fiction writers creating more ideas. It's even OK if we try to turn them all into reality, yet chase down a lot of dead ends. Most are no doubt doomed to languish forever on untended wiki pages, while others will be destined to become the ubiquitous tech of tomorrow.
Anyone else take a look at those renders for Ellington Airport? I just love how the roads and platforms make no engineering sense whatsoever.
Well, you need customers at your spaceport, so therefore you need roads. If you build them, they will fly. Obviously, you'll have full commuter ships leaving for space every 30 minutes, so you'll need four lanes of freeway to deliver all those people, and they're all going to want to park next to the building, so make sure you have a really big terminal. A giant grass bridge over the freeway lets people wander aimlessly beneath the glory of your rocket-filled sky, so make sure to include one of those. And monorails should whiz by giving all the locals a chance to see the future you're providing them as they roll on to their uneventful days ahead.
A spaceport obviously can't serve anybody without support staff, like ticket agents, travel agents, baggage handlers, TSA gropers, insurance salesmen, USO staffers, McFood operators, cart drivers, taxi stand starters, and telephone sanitizers. So you're going to need a lot of lodging to house these people. And they're going to want to live in an interesting place, so stick an F15 on a metal post and now it's an interactive park-museum, fun for the whole family (for at least an hour on a Saturday.)
Now think about all those space customers. If you've been out orbiting hard all day, you're obviously going to want to crash in a nice five star hotel ("crash", "five STARS" - I'm using spaceflight metaphors there, did you get 'em?) at the end of the day. That means you need golfing and pubs and water hazards placed next to a tall building.
See? You're pretty close to an architect already. Just add crowds of people who have no reason to be there whatsoever, and sprinkle liberally with immature trees, and that's practically a bachelor's degree right there.
Wrong. Jobs still go overseas or go away, just that you don't see them leave.
Look at the plumbing industry. Drilling holes in a wall and sticking copper tubing through them seems like something that has to remain solidly on shore, right? Let's say it's 120 hours of work to plumb an average house. So you show up to work some day and your boss says "we're switching to PEX." Because you don't have elbows or joints, there is no soldering, and because those holes don't have to line up perfectly, plumbing a house with PEX now takes only about 40 hours. Where did the extra labor go? Some went overseas to the PEX factory, but the rest got laid off.
At the burger place? Where do you think those patties were manufactured? Do you see a McButcher shop in the back of the store? No, the animals were likely raised and slaughtered and packed in rural Brasil, or some other country with cheaper labor and farmland.
It's a global economy now. Parts and materials come from everywhere. Protectionism means little at the borders when it's only keeping out the $7.25/hour illegal immigrants. The total cost to the US economy of illegal immigrants is less than $30 billion. (Compare that to the Wall Street bailout of $750 billion, or to the Iraq / Afghanistan wars with their costs of over $2 trillion.) The real losses to the U.S. job market have come from increased efficiencies, more automation, and overseas manufacturing and labor, where $trillions of dollars have left our payrolls. But hey, let's get Fox banging the illegal immigrant drum and blame them for taking our jobs, because Mexicans are visible and the TV cop shows prove they're all criminals and drug lords. It takes our easily distracted minds off the facts of where the real losses are coming from.