I think they are up to two goals here. If they find a smoking gun memo, one that says "don't bother measuring the tiny holes, estimate with this figure so it will show a worst case scenario", they'll have direct evidence of fraud, and could move to throw the whole report out. But in order to demand evidence of fraud, they should produce a basis for accusing them of fraud-and there really isn't one.
The other is the death by paperwork approach. Smother itand delay it by two decades, and hope something else happens to make it all go away.
Some prices are fixed by the game admins - the frequency and value of "random" drops, prices charged by NPC shopkeepers, etc. Others are not fixed, such as the prices you see items fetching at in-game auctions.
And games all need to manipulate the money supply. They can do it by adjusting the value and frequency of drops, and by offsetting those drops with prices spent on supplies. Excess money can be drained from the economy by having NPC shopkeepers charge more. Artificial means to extract the extra cash can be applied as well - with the world being digital, they can introduce a limited number of very desirable, very expensive, non-transferable items. The player expends lots of resources to gain the Belt of Heinousness, but if he can't resell it, his expenses in acquiring it are completely gone from the gameworld.
Look at what's happened when money bugs have kicked in. I don't remember which game (might have been EVE Online, but it was several years back) but I recall my son talking about a money-duping bug that cheaters exploited that about doubled the amount of money floating around the economy. Players complained that their savings were rendered almost worthless due to the inflation caused by the bug. The important lesson is that the effect would have been the same if the games admins had simply injected that extra money into the economy.
And while it's not easy to get it right, it's obviously important. Valve, 509, Bungie, have all reportedly hired economists to help run their in-game economies. In a game environment, it's now recognized that the money supply is a critical component for player satisfaction.
Apparently you've never seen what happens to the people of a country that have lost their belief in their currency. Imagine a loaf of bread selling for a million dollars today, and going for $1.2m tomorrow. They fall back to a barter system pretty quickly.
If you don't think it can happen in the USA, look up "shin plasters".
Currency that is not backed by gold is backed only by faith and promises. And those last only as long as you trust the people holding and printing them.
Game currencies have their own issues. If the money supply is managed poorly, then the game will fail. Too tight, and players can't afford to go on adventures, they spend 20 hours per day grinding away for a Sword of Boredom +.3141, with its special "tedium attack." Too loose and every noob who can kill three orcs is swinging a Sword of Godly Smiting +5000.
The creation of bitcoins is similarly in need of central control. Set the difficulty too low too fast, and inflation kicks in. Set it too high, and stagnation rules.
My bigger concern is what the folks with plastic money will do when bitcoins threaten their livelihood. Not the Fed or the IMF, but Visa and MasterCard. Bitcoins could damage their profitable transaction fees. They won't sit idly by if bitcoins look like they may do anything more substantial than buy and sell organic shampoo.
I'm sure if you read all of Steve Ballmer's personal e-mails and political statements you could say something equally vapid about Windows and all Microsoft products.
This is Slashdot, home of vapid comments about Windows and all Microsoft products. Ironically, many Slashdot commenters also seem to make faith-based claims that Windows [ sucks | is not secure | is worse than $(RandomOS) | is bats??t crazy ]. Why waste time reading Ballmer's statements when it's so much easier to head straight to the profanity? (Actually, there is one good reason to read Ballmer's drivel: you might learn some new profanities!)
Another link from Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1469623/a-few-basic-version-control-questions) was a link to this series of articles on source control by Eric Sink: http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html Chapter 0 includes his list of benefits:
It provides a place to store your source code.
It provides a historical record of what you have done over time.
It can provide a way for developers to work on separate tasks in parallel, merging their efforts later.
It can provide a way for developers to work together without getting in each others' way.
For a completely non-technical manager, a money analogy is probably more appropriate. Remind them that their source code represents the total of investments they've made in developing software. It's the output of thousands (or millions) of hours of very expensive labor. A source code control system is like a bank, keeping their investments safe and organized.
From there, you can use all of these arguments to point out how expensive it can be to not have a source code control system. It's a single point to back up, making maintenance of all your source code simpler and more manageable. It lets you get back to when something worked, in case someone's made a change that broke stuff. It's an efficient way for developers and projects to share code, to browse the whole library of what you've got. Let them know that it makes people working on a program more efficient, because they're not spending time hunting down where the code is hiding. Let them know that the development tools you already use have the capability to integrate into source management tools (assuming you use Eclipse or Visual Studio) and that they work faster with them. A good source code management system makes things faster, not slower.
You might give them specific examples of a couple of costly failures that impacted your organization. "Remember that time Joe spent two months working on Project X, and then his PC crashed and his disk drive went bad? Remember when Jane suddenly left and nobody could find the stuff she'd been working on? Those incidents had to have cost us several thousand dollars each in wasted effort redoing all that work. A source code control tool would have prevented them automatically."
You could remind them that it's a computer program whose entire purpose is to automate the processes that your people are currently managing with manual processes. It can do those tasks far more reliably and much faster than the humans.
And to dive off the deep end, a complete application lifecycle management system makes it much easier to organize everything about your products. It lets you manage everything by storing it all in the tool, such as requirements or other project documentation, along with the source code. You can manage the projects in the tool, by assigning work items in it, collecting and managing bug reports, creating tests, managing product feature backlogs, etc. An ALM tool can make the project visible to everyone involved by presenting project status on a web page. But given that your manager doesn't yet understand the value of such an ordinary and foundational tool as a source code management system, you'd no doubt scare them off by throwing out an ambitious plan to change a lot of stuff. But it wouldn't hurt you to consider features like those as potential next steps of improving your software engineering practices.
I don't disagree with any of your points. The issue I have is with people; in particular with people who look at these standards and say "I have to have the newest thing, because the newest thing is the most secure." These are not cryptographers, these are CIOs and managers. They get their ideas of security from the security professionals themselves, who are constantly saying "always download and install the latest patches as quick as possible." These people will see SHA-3 as a "patch" or "upgrade" on top of SHA-2 and will order a change, one that introduces risk and cost for no demonstrable benefit.
This will probably be made worse as security companies take advantage of the situation and start pitching upgrades to include their products as being "up to date with the latest SHA-3 standards from NIST." Who doesn't want to buy the latest in security?
And if something does break as a result of a botched "upgrade", they'll have someone dig deeper and ultimately discover that SHA-3 wasn't really a required upgrade. Instead of blaming their own decisions based on incomplete information, or their poor development practices, they'll blame the security industry for crying wolf. And they might be right.
Bruce's argument is essentially "the devil you know." Five years ago it seemed like SHA-2 might succumb to an attack. However, it's been five years, and those attacks never materialized on SHA-512. That's five more years of convincing evidence that SHA-2 is fairly secure. None of the SHA-3 finalists have had the same level of scrutiny. Sure, they've been looked at seriously, but nothing like the widespread amount of attention that an actual standard gets.
Another consideration is practicality. If a new standard is published, millions of dollars will be expended changing systems around the world. Will all that money have been well spent? If there was no cryptographic reason for the change, all that money and effort was wasted.
And what about security? Will every replacement be perfect? I personally doubt it; mistakes are made and people screw up implementations all the time. An organization that hired a cryptographer to design and implement a secure solution in 2007 might feel they can do the work themselves today. But we know that cryptographic protocols are notoriously finicky when it comes to unintended information leakage or security. If a secure design is modified in any way, the potential to introduce a security bug means the risk of change is much higher than the risk of sticking with SHA-2.
I know a guy who runs a fleet of 500 trucks. If he could save $627 annually per truck that would mean a third of a million dollars back in his pocket every year. Another benefit is if his 500 drivers are each spending 5 minutes a day checking tire pressure, he could possibly reduce that to once per week if he rolled with these tires, saving another $200,000 annually on simple maintenance. (I don't know how anything about how often his drivers check tire pressure manually, or if they have remote sensors, so that could be completely imaginary savings.)
Under-inflated tires fail more often than properly maintained tires, which means less down-time dealing with flats. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you realize that tires last only about 80,000 miles each and you have 18 on a rig, that could be a tire failure every 13 days. If all your tires are under-inflated, they would all last about 9% less, which would be a failure every 12 days. Most failed tires are caught by inspection, where the driver is already in a truck stop and repairs are less costly than side of the road service, and some tire failures are drivable to the next truck stop, where the driver will burn some downtime while he's getting it fixed, but not every failure is so convenient. Roadside service will take a couple of hours out of your schedule while you wait for the local guy to come out and fix it. Plus, tires are not cheap (the smaller trailer tires can cost around $500 each for new, (less for retreads,) and steer tires are significantly higher) and if a blowout damages something else, it's even more money. You want to get every mile you can out of those tires.
And what happens if you're running a hot shot, with a significant penalty for failing to deliver on time? One late load can cost a large amount in direct losses, (think six figures) plus the potential loss of business if the big-spending customer never hires that sloppy trucking firm again.
Every little improvement is significant to someone when multiplied by fleet sizes.
This is simply not true. Only one end of the chargers Apple uses is USB.
It is true because ANY USB charger will work with that Apple cable to charge an iPhone 5.
No, it is absolutely not true because none of my iPhones or iDevices have ever been able to recharge from "dumb" USB chargers. I've had USB cigarette lighter power jacks for years in my vehicles. They used to work fine to charge various Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola phones. The Moto phones were especially convenient to charge anywhere because they had mini-USB ports on the phone ends, so the ubiquitous mini-USB cables were a perfect fit. But once I got an iPhone, the dumb chargers were no longer good enough for it. My choices were to either trot over to the Apple store and buy expensive new incompatible crap with 30 pin connectors, or poorly made junk from some third party.
Look at the use cases for the new dock connector that you're defending. 75% or more of the connections anyone makes to an iPhone are solely for charging purposes. USB works fine for that (or at least it would if Apple would remove the circuitry that limits its ability to charge from a dumb power source.) Over the remaining uses, most connections are to host computers for syncing and charging. That's 100% USB today, even to a Mac. There are a few connections to docking media players and car stereos, so a docking station makes sense, right? Actually, no. They transfer the music data and control information over USB. Watching video on your Apple TV? Finally, something that isn't USB - except for the part where it's wireless. No dock connector needed at all. So what use case exists where anyone actually needs a proprietary dock connector? Making money.
This is not a "nickel and dime" recurring bleed, this is a one time charge to adapt to a connector that is is better and simpler - than either the older iPhone connector OR Micro-USB.
I'd like to point out for the counting-impaired that this is now a second one-time charge, or as everyone else calls the practice "nickel and diming". At some point you have to look beyond the supposed "oh this might make a potential future technology perfect in every way" and look at the reality - Apple makes their customers bleed so often that their fans are cutters.
I realize nobody will convince you that the new proprietary connector is horseshit, because you don't want to hear that Apple is enjoying screwing you. Fine, close your ears, but don't expect the rest of us to believe that shit.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned it before, but the Kinect doesn't require agility in your hand, just the presence and motion of it. No, you're not going to get first person twitch gaming experience out of it, but you'll be on an absolutely equal par with anyone playing it.
Seriously? You had to scroll down past how many valid answers to the guy's question to post this stupidity?
Please, please, click the button in the corner of your screen that closes the browser, and go drinking alone in a bar. At least that's where bitter, sad people like you have traditionally wasted their remaining days.
I think that the electronic records are probably making it easier for physicians to bill more accurately, not necessarily more "lucratively". Electronic recordkeeping doesn't turn otherwise honest people into fraudsters overnight. So I don't see the increase in billing as tied to an increase in fraud.
Now, the Australian company you declined to work for, they seem like the kinds of scum who hospital administrators might hire to commit wholesale fraud. That obviously would give rise to increased billing rates. If there's still a sliver of justice in the world, they'll go to jail for falsifying records.
So you're in an area where there isn't enough power available to enable computers, but you need to teach people to type on them?
The only other idea is typewriter, but if there isn't enough money for power, there probably isn't enough money for typewriters and supplies, either.
The need is what again?
The need is to give these students an opportunity.
Someone is opening a business nearby and hiring many people. This business will presumably have the resources needed to remain in business: money, net access, a reliable backup generator, a building, etc.
There are many people in Bangladesh willing to work, and at least some of them have typing skills. If his students learn to type, they have a better chance at getting some of those jobs. If his students don't know typing, those jobs will certainly go to others.
His budget and resources are limited, as he explained. Unlike you, he knows better than to throw his hands up in despair at a simple hurdle. Things like unreliable power are part of everyday life, and people in that region simply deal with it.
That's a very American attitude, and it doesn't work like that over there. Labor is plentiful. Skill less so.
He is trying to create an opportunity for those attending the village school. Nobody said "hey, train these students and I'll hire them." His hope is to provide enough qualified candidates so that the employers are pleased. If his students don't know typing they won't get the jobs, they'll simply go to others. In no case will the employer be without enough applicants.
And that's "government regulation", which the GP decried as not the solution to American financial prosperity. Capitalism can't save business unless there's a level playing field.
They did something for some reason that wasn't just to screw over the sheep. Now I can't hate them as much.
C'mon, it's Apple. You didn't honestly think they wouldn't let you down like that, would they?
Here's something extra to hate about them. They took away the god-awful proprietary 30 pin connector, and replaced it with a new god-awful smaller proprietary connector that remains incompatible with the rest of the world. Nobody's old apple-y devices, cables, or chargers will work with their new phones; and non-apple cables or devices will remain incompatible. Yay, Apple, your i5 adopters all get to replace a couple hundred dollars worth of peripherals each.
Is that enough sheeple screwing to make sure your hate equation remains balanced?
That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording. Pono is a try to capture like 100% of what the musician get on the studio tapes.
Nah, just throw a hum on there at 60Hz and they'll tell you it's magical.
Don't forget to add lots of harmonics to make it sound like tubes were involved. It's not High Fidelity without the characteristic tube distortions.
OK, quick searching revealed a lot more easy answers: Assembled seeeduino (with USB chip): $22. 16x2 LCD is $8. Full size new keyboard from random internet vendor: $7. 3.7V Li-Ion batteries: $4. Total: probably less than $50 from existing parts.
It also needs project cases, something custom that would clip on to the keyboards and serve as the LCD mount would be ideal. Once designed and posted to Thingiverse, a call could go out to people with RepRaps to ask for volunteers to print up and donate them.
They'd need a few other things, like shared battery chargers and some teacher's software package, something to create assignments and upload new firmware into the seeeduinos.
He'd probably be able to convince a local community organization to do the soldering, assembly, and testing. Then there's packaging and shipping, which is probably a sizable expense. Funding it could be a kickstarter project. Actually, this is the kind of project a Boy Scout might complete for his Eagle rank, or a Girl Scout for her Silver project.
We obviously are going to differ on the topic of "is a technologically enhanced existence better?", so I'll try not to belabor that point, mostly because I consider it moot - the world we live in has already progressed down the path of complexity, and voluntary regression would not be realistic to expect from its current beneficiaries. "When you can pry my TV remote from my cold dead hands..." etc. A change would be possible only in a new generation, one intentionally deprived of modern conveniences, or through deprivation due to massive external influences, such as a devastating global war, exhaustion of petroleum and other fuels, or complete economic and social collapse. I do not believe even a fraction of Western civilization would "give it all up to return to nature" voluntarily.
I would also point out that the habitable portions of the planet (outside of the Americas) are near capacity, yet population growth is still positive. Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded. A move to a self-sustaining agrarian society would take a massive shift and reduction in population - and nobody I know would volunteer for the needed culling. We've crossed the Rubicon. So again, the point is moot.
Regarding capitalism, I believe that the levels of technology we have come to appreciate arrived only through capitalism. Profit has driven the technical revolution, from people like Edison, Bell, and Ford through Noyce and Gates. Sure, there is a huge group of Open Source advocates who are all about building free solutions for tech problems, but they are building them with the basic foundational tools that were born of the drive for profits, and many are building them out of leisure time: something else the world lacked until we had cheap and plentiful energy. The sewing machine was invented to make money by automating a job done by tailors for thousands of years. But capitalism was Thimonnier's vehicle, not socialism, and not altruism.
So that kind of leads back to the dual currency idea. People are both altruistic and selfish, and most lean one way or another. But there is always a set of "cheaters", which could be defined as people who will accept altruistic help, but then selfishly hoard (see Schneier's book, The Dishonest Minority, or the thesis posted at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/status_report_t.html). You can't wish or logic or breed that kind of behavior away. And from the success of the strategy (for it is indeed a very successful strategy for the minority willing to set aside any morals and exercise it), and from the selfishness I've seen exhibited by the Romneys of the world, the rich will always expend their resources to keep the poor at arm's length. Therefore I think a basic income would always boil down to being a socialist currency in a capitalist economy, and would carry that essence as a stigma. It would divide us.
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Now I may as well delete all the Skein rainbow tables I have been generating. Boy, did I back the wrong horse.
I think they are up to two goals here. If they find a smoking gun memo, one that says "don't bother measuring the tiny holes, estimate with this figure so it will show a worst case scenario", they'll have direct evidence of fraud, and could move to throw the whole report out. But in order to demand evidence of fraud, they should produce a basis for accusing them of fraud-and there really isn't one.
The other is the death by paperwork approach. Smother itand delay it by two decades, and hope something else happens to make it all go away.
Some prices are fixed by the game admins - the frequency and value of "random" drops, prices charged by NPC shopkeepers, etc. Others are not fixed, such as the prices you see items fetching at in-game auctions.
And games all need to manipulate the money supply. They can do it by adjusting the value and frequency of drops, and by offsetting those drops with prices spent on supplies. Excess money can be drained from the economy by having NPC shopkeepers charge more. Artificial means to extract the extra cash can be applied as well - with the world being digital, they can introduce a limited number of very desirable, very expensive, non-transferable items. The player expends lots of resources to gain the Belt of Heinousness, but if he can't resell it, his expenses in acquiring it are completely gone from the gameworld.
Look at what's happened when money bugs have kicked in. I don't remember which game (might have been EVE Online, but it was several years back) but I recall my son talking about a money-duping bug that cheaters exploited that about doubled the amount of money floating around the economy. Players complained that their savings were rendered almost worthless due to the inflation caused by the bug. The important lesson is that the effect would have been the same if the games admins had simply injected that extra money into the economy.
And while it's not easy to get it right, it's obviously important. Valve, 509, Bungie, have all reportedly hired economists to help run their in-game economies. In a game environment, it's now recognized that the money supply is a critical component for player satisfaction.
Apparently you've never seen what happens to the people of a country that have lost their belief in their currency. Imagine a loaf of bread selling for a million dollars today, and going for $1.2m tomorrow. They fall back to a barter system pretty quickly.
If you don't think it can happen in the USA, look up "shin plasters".
Currency that is not backed by gold is backed only by faith and promises. And those last only as long as you trust the people holding and printing them.
Game currencies have their own issues. If the money supply is managed poorly, then the game will fail. Too tight, and players can't afford to go on adventures, they spend 20 hours per day grinding away for a Sword of Boredom +.3141, with its special "tedium attack." Too loose and every noob who can kill three orcs is swinging a Sword of Godly Smiting +5000.
The creation of bitcoins is similarly in need of central control. Set the difficulty too low too fast, and inflation kicks in. Set it too high, and stagnation rules.
My bigger concern is what the folks with plastic money will do when bitcoins threaten their livelihood. Not the Fed or the IMF, but Visa and MasterCard. Bitcoins could damage their profitable transaction fees. They won't sit idly by if bitcoins look like they may do anything more substantial than buy and sell organic shampoo.
I'm sure if you read all of Steve Ballmer's personal e-mails and political statements you could say something equally vapid about Windows and all Microsoft products.
This is Slashdot, home of vapid comments about Windows and all Microsoft products. Ironically, many Slashdot commenters also seem to make faith-based claims that Windows [ sucks | is not secure | is worse than $(RandomOS) | is bats??t crazy ]. Why waste time reading Ballmer's statements when it's so much easier to head straight to the profanity? (Actually, there is one good reason to read Ballmer's drivel: you might learn some new profanities!)
Another link from Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1469623/a-few-basic-version-control-questions) was a link to this series of articles on source control by Eric Sink: http://www.ericsink.com/scm/source_control.html Chapter 0 includes his list of benefits:
For a completely non-technical manager, a money analogy is probably more appropriate. Remind them that their source code represents the total of investments they've made in developing software. It's the output of thousands (or millions) of hours of very expensive labor. A source code control system is like a bank, keeping their investments safe and organized.
From there, you can use all of these arguments to point out how expensive it can be to not have a source code control system. It's a single point to back up, making maintenance of all your source code simpler and more manageable. It lets you get back to when something worked, in case someone's made a change that broke stuff. It's an efficient way for developers and projects to share code, to browse the whole library of what you've got. Let them know that it makes people working on a program more efficient, because they're not spending time hunting down where the code is hiding. Let them know that the development tools you already use have the capability to integrate into source management tools (assuming you use Eclipse or Visual Studio) and that they work faster with them. A good source code management system makes things faster, not slower.
You might give them specific examples of a couple of costly failures that impacted your organization. "Remember that time Joe spent two months working on Project X, and then his PC crashed and his disk drive went bad? Remember when Jane suddenly left and nobody could find the stuff she'd been working on? Those incidents had to have cost us several thousand dollars each in wasted effort redoing all that work. A source code control tool would have prevented them automatically."
You could remind them that it's a computer program whose entire purpose is to automate the processes that your people are currently managing with manual processes. It can do those tasks far more reliably and much faster than the humans.
And to dive off the deep end, a complete application lifecycle management system makes it much easier to organize everything about your products. It lets you manage everything by storing it all in the tool, such as requirements or other project documentation, along with the source code. You can manage the projects in the tool, by assigning work items in it, collecting and managing bug reports, creating tests, managing product feature backlogs, etc. An ALM tool can make the project visible to everyone involved by presenting project status on a web page. But given that your manager doesn't yet understand the value of such an ordinary and foundational tool as a source code management system, you'd no doubt scare them off by throwing out an ambitious plan to change a lot of stuff. But it wouldn't hurt you to consider features like those as potential next steps of improving your software engineering practices.
I don't disagree with any of your points. The issue I have is with people; in particular with people who look at these standards and say "I have to have the newest thing, because the newest thing is the most secure." These are not cryptographers, these are CIOs and managers. They get their ideas of security from the security professionals themselves, who are constantly saying "always download and install the latest patches as quick as possible." These people will see SHA-3 as a "patch" or "upgrade" on top of SHA-2 and will order a change, one that introduces risk and cost for no demonstrable benefit.
This will probably be made worse as security companies take advantage of the situation and start pitching upgrades to include their products as being "up to date with the latest SHA-3 standards from NIST." Who doesn't want to buy the latest in security?
And if something does break as a result of a botched "upgrade", they'll have someone dig deeper and ultimately discover that SHA-3 wasn't really a required upgrade. Instead of blaming their own decisions based on incomplete information, or their poor development practices, they'll blame the security industry for crying wolf. And they might be right.
Bruce's argument is essentially "the devil you know." Five years ago it seemed like SHA-2 might succumb to an attack. However, it's been five years, and those attacks never materialized on SHA-512. That's five more years of convincing evidence that SHA-2 is fairly secure. None of the SHA-3 finalists have had the same level of scrutiny. Sure, they've been looked at seriously, but nothing like the widespread amount of attention that an actual standard gets.
Another consideration is practicality. If a new standard is published, millions of dollars will be expended changing systems around the world. Will all that money have been well spent? If there was no cryptographic reason for the change, all that money and effort was wasted.
And what about security? Will every replacement be perfect? I personally doubt it; mistakes are made and people screw up implementations all the time. An organization that hired a cryptographer to design and implement a secure solution in 2007 might feel they can do the work themselves today. But we know that cryptographic protocols are notoriously finicky when it comes to unintended information leakage or security. If a secure design is modified in any way, the potential to introduce a security bug means the risk of change is much higher than the risk of sticking with SHA-2.
I know a guy who runs a fleet of 500 trucks. If he could save $627 annually per truck that would mean a third of a million dollars back in his pocket every year. Another benefit is if his 500 drivers are each spending 5 minutes a day checking tire pressure, he could possibly reduce that to once per week if he rolled with these tires, saving another $200,000 annually on simple maintenance. (I don't know how anything about how often his drivers check tire pressure manually, or if they have remote sensors, so that could be completely imaginary savings.)
Under-inflated tires fail more often than properly maintained tires, which means less down-time dealing with flats. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you realize that tires last only about 80,000 miles each and you have 18 on a rig, that could be a tire failure every 13 days. If all your tires are under-inflated, they would all last about 9% less, which would be a failure every 12 days. Most failed tires are caught by inspection, where the driver is already in a truck stop and repairs are less costly than side of the road service, and some tire failures are drivable to the next truck stop, where the driver will burn some downtime while he's getting it fixed, but not every failure is so convenient. Roadside service will take a couple of hours out of your schedule while you wait for the local guy to come out and fix it. Plus, tires are not cheap (the smaller trailer tires can cost around $500 each for new, (less for retreads,) and steer tires are significantly higher) and if a blowout damages something else, it's even more money. You want to get every mile you can out of those tires.
And what happens if you're running a hot shot, with a significant penalty for failing to deliver on time? One late load can cost a large amount in direct losses, (think six figures) plus the potential loss of business if the big-spending customer never hires that sloppy trucking firm again.
Every little improvement is significant to someone when multiplied by fleet sizes.
This is simply not true. Only one end of the chargers Apple uses is USB.
It is true because ANY USB charger will work with that Apple cable to charge an iPhone 5.
No, it is absolutely not true because none of my iPhones or iDevices have ever been able to recharge from "dumb" USB chargers. I've had USB cigarette lighter power jacks for years in my vehicles. They used to work fine to charge various Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola phones. The Moto phones were especially convenient to charge anywhere because they had mini-USB ports on the phone ends, so the ubiquitous mini-USB cables were a perfect fit. But once I got an iPhone, the dumb chargers were no longer good enough for it. My choices were to either trot over to the Apple store and buy expensive new incompatible crap with 30 pin connectors, or poorly made junk from some third party.
Look at the use cases for the new dock connector that you're defending. 75% or more of the connections anyone makes to an iPhone are solely for charging purposes. USB works fine for that (or at least it would if Apple would remove the circuitry that limits its ability to charge from a dumb power source.) Over the remaining uses, most connections are to host computers for syncing and charging. That's 100% USB today, even to a Mac. There are a few connections to docking media players and car stereos, so a docking station makes sense, right? Actually, no. They transfer the music data and control information over USB. Watching video on your Apple TV? Finally, something that isn't USB - except for the part where it's wireless. No dock connector needed at all. So what use case exists where anyone actually needs a proprietary dock connector? Making money.
This is not a "nickel and dime" recurring bleed, this is a one time charge to adapt to a connector that is is better and simpler - than either the older iPhone connector OR Micro-USB.
I'd like to point out for the counting-impaired that this is now a second one-time charge, or as everyone else calls the practice "nickel and diming". At some point you have to look beyond the supposed "oh this might make a potential future technology perfect in every way" and look at the reality - Apple makes their customers bleed so often that their fans are cutters.
I realize nobody will convince you that the new proprietary connector is horseshit, because you don't want to hear that Apple is enjoying screwing you. Fine, close your ears, but don't expect the rest of us to believe that shit.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned it before, but the Kinect doesn't require agility in your hand, just the presence and motion of it. No, you're not going to get first person twitch gaming experience out of it, but you'll be on an absolutely equal par with anyone playing it.
Seriously? You had to scroll down past how many valid answers to the guy's question to post this stupidity?
Please, please, click the button in the corner of your screen that closes the browser, and go drinking alone in a bar. At least that's where bitter, sad people like you have traditionally wasted their remaining days.
I think that the electronic records are probably making it easier for physicians to bill more accurately, not necessarily more "lucratively". Electronic recordkeeping doesn't turn otherwise honest people into fraudsters overnight. So I don't see the increase in billing as tied to an increase in fraud.
Now, the Australian company you declined to work for, they seem like the kinds of scum who hospital administrators might hire to commit wholesale fraud. That obviously would give rise to increased billing rates. If there's still a sliver of justice in the world, they'll go to jail for falsifying records.
We'd need more nuclear plants to power the pumps, which would result in more shitstorms, requiring more pumps and so on. It's a vicious cycle.
Sounds more like a viscous cycle.
So you're in an area where there isn't enough power available to enable computers, but you need to teach people to type on them?
The only other idea is typewriter, but if there isn't enough money for power, there probably isn't enough money for typewriters and supplies, either.
The need is what again?
The need is to give these students an opportunity.
Someone is opening a business nearby and hiring many people. This business will presumably have the resources needed to remain in business: money, net access, a reliable backup generator, a building, etc.
There are many people in Bangladesh willing to work, and at least some of them have typing skills. If his students learn to type, they have a better chance at getting some of those jobs. If his students don't know typing, those jobs will certainly go to others.
His budget and resources are limited, as he explained. Unlike you, he knows better than to throw his hands up in despair at a simple hurdle. Things like unreliable power are part of everyday life, and people in that region simply deal with it.
That's a very American attitude, and it doesn't work like that over there. Labor is plentiful. Skill less so.
He is trying to create an opportunity for those attending the village school. Nobody said "hey, train these students and I'll hire them." His hope is to provide enough qualified candidates so that the employers are pleased. If his students don't know typing they won't get the jobs, they'll simply go to others. In no case will the employer be without enough applicants.
And that's "government regulation", which the GP decried as not the solution to American financial prosperity. Capitalism can't save business unless there's a level playing field.
That's deep.
So who gets the shaft?
They did something for some reason that wasn't just to screw over the sheep. Now I can't hate them as much.
C'mon, it's Apple. You didn't honestly think they wouldn't let you down like that, would they?
Here's something extra to hate about them. They took away the god-awful proprietary 30 pin connector, and replaced it with a new god-awful smaller proprietary connector that remains incompatible with the rest of the world. Nobody's old apple-y devices, cables, or chargers will work with their new phones; and non-apple cables or devices will remain incompatible. Yay, Apple, your i5 adopters all get to replace a couple hundred dollars worth of peripherals each.
Is that enough sheeple screwing to make sure your hate equation remains balanced?
That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording. Pono is a try to capture like 100% of what the musician get on the studio tapes.
Nah, just throw a hum on there at 60Hz and they'll tell you it's magical.
Don't forget to add lots of harmonics to make it sound like tubes were involved. It's not High Fidelity without the characteristic tube distortions.
No kidding it would be easy. This code for driving an LCD from a USB keyboard was on the first few hits from DDG.
OK, quick searching revealed a lot more easy answers: Assembled seeeduino (with USB chip): $22. 16x2 LCD is $8. Full size new keyboard from random internet vendor: $7. 3.7V Li-Ion batteries: $4. Total: probably less than $50 from existing parts.
It also needs project cases, something custom that would clip on to the keyboards and serve as the LCD mount would be ideal. Once designed and posted to Thingiverse, a call could go out to people with RepRaps to ask for volunteers to print up and donate them.
They'd need a few other things, like shared battery chargers and some teacher's software package, something to create assignments and upload new firmware into the seeeduinos.
He'd probably be able to convince a local community organization to do the soldering, assembly, and testing. Then there's packaging and shipping, which is probably a sizable expense. Funding it could be a kickstarter project. Actually, this is the kind of project a Boy Scout might complete for his Eagle rank, or a Girl Scout for her Silver project.
He's trying for a "hack once, 'sploit everywhere" solution, which is a lot more valuable than a simple hardware mod.
We obviously are going to differ on the topic of "is a technologically enhanced existence better?", so I'll try not to belabor that point, mostly because I consider it moot - the world we live in has already progressed down the path of complexity, and voluntary regression would not be realistic to expect from its current beneficiaries. "When you can pry my TV remote from my cold dead hands..." etc. A change would be possible only in a new generation, one intentionally deprived of modern conveniences, or through deprivation due to massive external influences, such as a devastating global war, exhaustion of petroleum and other fuels, or complete economic and social collapse. I do not believe even a fraction of Western civilization would "give it all up to return to nature" voluntarily.
I would also point out that the habitable portions of the planet (outside of the Americas) are near capacity, yet population growth is still positive. Without technology providing additional food, or transport from farms to tables, I believe the balance point for hunter-gatherers or subsistence agriculture has already been exceeded. A move to a self-sustaining agrarian society would take a massive shift and reduction in population - and nobody I know would volunteer for the needed culling. We've crossed the Rubicon. So again, the point is moot.
Regarding capitalism, I believe that the levels of technology we have come to appreciate arrived only through capitalism. Profit has driven the technical revolution, from people like Edison, Bell, and Ford through Noyce and Gates. Sure, there is a huge group of Open Source advocates who are all about building free solutions for tech problems, but they are building them with the basic foundational tools that were born of the drive for profits, and many are building them out of leisure time: something else the world lacked until we had cheap and plentiful energy. The sewing machine was invented to make money by automating a job done by tailors for thousands of years. But capitalism was Thimonnier's vehicle, not socialism, and not altruism.
So that kind of leads back to the dual currency idea. People are both altruistic and selfish, and most lean one way or another. But there is always a set of "cheaters", which could be defined as people who will accept altruistic help, but then selfishly hoard (see Schneier's book, The Dishonest Minority, or the thesis posted at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/status_report_t.html). You can't wish or logic or breed that kind of behavior away. And from the success of the strategy (for it is indeed a very successful strategy for the minority willing to set aside any morals and exercise it), and from the selfishness I've seen exhibited by the Romneys of the world, the rich will always expend their resources to keep the poor at arm's length. Therefore I think a basic income would always boil down to being a socialist currency in a capitalist economy, and would carry that essence as a stigma. It would divide us.
Only so long as the Greenies In Government prevent them from using the massive amounts of shale gas that's just waiting to be tapped.
Ahhh, Greenies. Frack 'em.