I am afraid you are quite wrong, the issue is PEAK volume, not total.
True - I missed a point there. But I'm not sure it changes the argument much; when people use a lot of bandwidth their usage is more likely to overlap that of other users, increasing the likelihood of reaching max capacity and therefore making it necessary to extend that capacity. That's why with many ISP's, data volume between 2AM and 8AM doesn't count towards your data cap - they don't care then, because most people are sleeping and there's much less likelihood of maxing out the system.
Fair enough it's like roads. It's also just like roads in that many of these companies have received subsidies to lay down their infrastructure too right? They're happily taking those payments to string out the last mile to a bunch of people still?
I don't disagree. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, any time the public is underwriting and/or subsidizing startup costs, the 'necessary monopoly' required to get things rolling should have a defined and unchangeable expiry date enforced by law. Yes, let the investors who are taking a large initial risk make scads of money for a limited period of time. After that it should be 'so long and thanks for all the fish - you've made your money, what you developed is now societal infrastructure and it belongs to the public - see you at The Next Big Thing'.
We wouldn't have all this trouble with telcos, cable providers, ISP's, and the like if we'd had the sense to tell them to bugger off when it was appropriate, instead of letting them hold us all hostage 'til the end of time because they took a risk once. In Vegas, if I gamble and win, I get my payout, and that's the end of it. The casino doesn't keep forking over money for the rest of my life just because I won a hand of poker once. And if I attempted to make them keep on paying me, it would be called extortion or theft.
But data transfer is essentially free compared to electricity, gas and water. Whether I download 1 megabyte or 500 megabytes it does not cost the ISP any more.
I really hate to dispute this, because I'm very much against bandwidth caps and per-byte pricing models. But the fact is that the more data ISP's handle, the more switches, servers, and cables they need to install, and the more power they consume. So arguably, those who transfer lots of data cost the ISP's more money because there is a causal relationship between increased data volume and increased infrastructure costs.
I think the better argument to make is that the Internet is like the roads - it benefits everyone in the country, even those who don't directly use it. Someone who doesn't drive nevertheless benefits from, say, a supermarket whose goods got there by road; and there are countless other examples of how someone who never sets foot out of the house benefits from roads. Similarly, even someone who doesn't have an Internet connection benefits from the lower costs of goods, greater efficiencies, more economic activity, etc, that the Internet makes possible.
I just junked a computer because the capacitors were all leaky and it wouldn't run stable any more. If the chips (CPU, RAM, etc) didn't need capacitors any more because they had the necessary capacitance built right in, and it was solid-state, I think that would be great.
It would be great, if the new supercaps are much more reliable than the current aerogel supercaps.
I've repaired a few MoBo's, (and some other consumer equipment as well), simply by replacing the bad electrolytic capacitors. But if the caps are 'in the chips', you can probably forget about repairing the equipment, unless you can find a replacement chip and are very good at fine-pitch close-quarter surface-mount rework soldering.
Call me when a supercap has anything like the energy density - by any measure of cubic or weight - as a battery.
Too true. The article says these new supercaps are "significantly better than commercial supercapacitors". How much better is "significantly"? Unless it's an order of magnitude or more, it's probably not that big a deal. Why? Because unlike batteries, whose voltage remains nearly constant for a large portion of their usable charge, capacitor voltage starts decreasing as soon as discharge begins. So for optimum usefulness you need to charge a supercap to higher than the system voltage, then regulate it down - and both of these processes have a major negative impact on efficiency, increase the cost, etc.
That said, it would be cool to have large capacitors right on the die to provide higher peak current capability for drivers and such
Tell you what, we'll take our apathy and greed and environmental destruction and you can have Quebec.
I'd be happy to take Quebec. I like Quebec. Sure, they have nutjobs and corruption there, (as they do everywhere else), but at least they've declared a moratorium on poisoning people's wells for the sake of Big Oil.
Maybe HP could sell its sorry ass back to Agilent, since the latter seems to be the only viable remnant of the dismemberment committed during Fiorina's Folly. That would give the current HP a way to gradually back out of what has become a commodity business and get back to innovating.
I wonder if either HP or Agilent has a Carly-faced dartboard or two lying around...
"centimeter" is American English. In British English it is indeed "centimetre". If the original posted had bothered to install both dictionaries (which I do, just to avoid this stuff), he would have found out the reason. So, I'll keep writing "centimetre", just like I keep writing "colour", "honour", "programme" and "centralization".
In Canadian English also, it is "centimetre", although our version of English is a mongrel mix of British and American spellings.We too tend to insist on '-our' endings, yet we usually spell "program" the American way. For me, the most jarring Americanisms are referring to a negotiable instrument as a "check", and the words "nite", "lite", and "thru".
IIRC, "centralization" is the only correct spelling in the States, whereas both spellings are acceptable in the UK, with "centralisation" being the historical favourite.
On the one horn of the dilemma, we like privacy and want information to be free. So we embrace technologies like Tor, form darknets, etc. But on the other horn, there really are people out there who will use these technologies to bring harm to innocent people--for the greater good, of course (or for a profit). These people will use technology against our best wishes.
When you say "these people will use technology against our best wishes", which people are you referring to - the "people out there", or the people in the NSA, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies?
Also, since all those Grade-C and B pencil pushers are out hunting for work, there's increased competition, which means that employers can get you for less. So more training, but lower wages
More, (and more expensive) training required for jobs that pay ever-decreasing wages is an across-the-board trend. If you wonder why the middle class is disappearing, look no farther.
The growth in productive capacity of mankind - the efficiency with which we grow and harvest food, take ore and oil from the earth and process it into fuel and manufactured goods, etc, has far outstripped our population growth. Yet we have growing economic uncertainty and a shrinking middle class coincident with a period of unprecedented per capita productive capacity. Why is this so? The sound-bite answer is "concentration of wealth". The complete answer is incredibly complex - historical events, human nature, natural laws, conspiracies, and a huge number of other factors, (many of which we're likely not aware of), contribute to the situation.
What's needed, (and here's where the Libertarians, capitalists, free-marketeers, and other rugged individualist types start howling), is a re-boot of the system. Our top-heavy corporatocracy needs to have its wealth re-distributed in a more equitable fashion. We need to get over the notion that landing first in line gives anyone a claim in perpetuity to resources and privileges. I have nothing against wealth - I'd love to be wealthy myself. But when a little wealth acquired through hard work, skill, and talent is transmuted into a vast monopolistic empire holding a sword over the heads of a huge percentage of the population, something needs to change. All those anti-collectivists out there conveniently ignore the fact that corporations are collectives, and that they are also welfare recipients who game the system, and make up and impose their own rules, in order to accrue wealth and power in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with providing goods and services of value in a truly competitive environment.
If we don't all come together and change this situation in an orderly fashion, then revolution is almost inevitable, and the next one may be very bloody indeed.
It has been available for a kind of long time. RFC 2440 for encrypted email was written in the 1990s, but people are really resistant to anything that might help their own privacy.
The problem is getting a critical mass of users to adopt encryption. And although it's largerly a matter of people either not caring, or not knowing enough to care, it's also a problem of not wanting to stand out in the crowd and risk getting singled out. My friends and I don't use e-mail encryption because, with so few other regular users of it, we would simply be marking ourselves for special attention from TLA's.
It's the kind of thing where a significant portion of the population - say 10% - needs to start using e-mail encryption simultaneously. And unfortunately, that's not likely to happen any time soon. I've said it before and I'll say it again: like sleight-of-hand in a magician's act, bread and circuses really do work to keep people distracted from what their leaders and masters are doing. Until enough of us pull our heads out of our popcorn bags, organize, and start engaging in the Internet's equivalent of 'passive resistance', the 1% and their minions are going to keep screwing us over.
The only thing that can keep a corporation from becoming totally evil is the consumers. The boardroom is an incubator for evil. If you want to keep a company from doing bad, you have to be a strategic consumer.
True, but not necessarily helpful. One problem is that few companies start out as evil, and by the time they become evil and the fact is widely recognized, they are often either monopolies or members of oligopolies. Another problem is that the overwhelming majority of people simply don't care, as long as they have their shiny new techno-toys, their reality TV shows, and all the other 'bread and circuses' stuff provided by government and the elites to keep them amused, confused, pliable, and quiet. Very few people have the awareness, or even the desire for awareness, that would cause them to boycott an integral company like Google for more than a day.
And if by chance someone DOES decide to boycott the 'bad guys', what viable alternatives exist? For example, if I decide to boycott my cell provider, I can either forsake cellular service altogether, or buy service from another provider that's equally bad, or possibly worse.
The whole 'consumers have ultimate control' presupposes both the will and the ability of a large number of consumers to act in concert over an extended period of time to further their common interests, even in the face of significant privation. Unfortunately, this seldom happens.
Damn it everyone, stop referring to Corporations as if they are people. Corporations do nothing, the people that run them do.
I agree that it's necessary for people to stop thinking of corporations as simply (rich) fellow citizens, and to start assigning personal responsibility, including blame and appropriate penalties, to the individuals who constitute corporations.
That said, I think it's also important to acknowledge the collectivist nature of corporations. People belonging to corporations, (like those in any large group where a certain degree of both anonymity and group support are assumed), tend to behave differently than they would if they were acting on their own. This doesn't excuse their actions, but it's worth keeping in mind, if only to protect oneself from a similar fate.
And yes, I meant 'collectivist' in the sense of 'communist'. I find it both amusing and liberating to realize that the self-styled rugged-individualist capitalist barons of industry and commerce are in fact not very different at all from the communists they usually disdain and despise.
You're wrong. Not everyone's eyes are the same, so be thankful yours aren't like mine. I have a kind of nystagmus that causes my eyes to move back and forth rapidly when I either move my eyes, or move my head while keeping my eyes focused on one spot. The rapid eye movement aliases the so-called "high" flicker rate well into the perceivable range. I see the flicker in some LED monitors, and at night while driving I can spot LED tail-lights easily. (As long as the brakes aren't on - then the duty cycle is at or close to 100%, and I don't see any flicker). Ditto for LED traffic lights that are dimmed, (we have a few of those in the Toronto area), and LED Christmas lights - they're the worst, because of the very low flicker frequency. I can even get a sense of the frequency used, as I barely notice the flicker at higher frequencies, while at lower frequencies it's a real distraction. (FWIW, I'm an electronics technologist with 35 years of experience in the field, and I understand the circuits involved, as well as the trade-offs among LED drive frequency, circuit complexity, component cost, and overal efficiency).
Some people don't sense the flicker at all, others are affected by it but can't see it, and still others, (like me), can actually perceive it. Don't assume that I can't see it just because you can't.
There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms.
There really needs to be a plan to shift Internet control from the private sector to the public sector over, say, the next 10 or 15 years. The Internet is now societal infrastructure and, like roads and water supplies, should no longer be privately owned. (If we'd done that with the telcos and the cell networks when we should have, things would be much better now). Private fortunes have been made on the backs of taxpayers while corporations enjoyed tax breaks, subsidies, favourable legislation, and access to public rights-of-way. That was legitimate when the Net was new and investing in it was risky, but it's past time for the gravy train to stop.
Corporations need to be disabused of the notion that putting capital at risk, and cajoling the government to grant them favours, gives them rights in perpetuity to the fruits of their efforts. Beyond a certain point in time and profit, anything that evolves into infrastructure needs to move into the public domain. If we don't start enforcing that idea, soon there will be no public sector at all. We'll lose what little freedom and autonomy we have left, and we'll all be feudal serfs in corporate fiefdoms. I figure we're already about 70% of the way there.
...wondering if perhaps Google has simply become a master of advertising and marketing in its own right, rather than being just the middleman. All of these projects make Google seem cool and geek-friendly, and keep Google brand front-and-centre in a mostly positive light. With all of their slick-new-project churn they simply look less moribund and uncool than either Microsoft or Apple, even as they're becoming a more staid and conservative company. And with their seemingly limitless supply of dollars, the cost of these projects is probably chump change to them.
It's also possible that they've chosen to 'throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks'. There's something to be said for the experimental approach to learning what large numbers of people will pay for, and Google has always struck me as being much stronger strategically than tactically.
...Like the "301 watch list" -- it's written entirely by industry, lacking in any objective evidence, but is pushed by the USTR as official policy to browbeat other countries into doing what's in the best interests of US/multinational companies...
You mean the US government is the enforcer / bodyguard of the world's largest corporations? Say it ain't so!
This not about money. It never was. It is about control.
Yes, it IS about control. It's about clinging to a past that they were able to understand and manipulate, rather than forging ahead to an unknown future with different rules that require different competencies and a different kind of creativity. And it's about a sense of entitlement too - they believe that with all of the pillaging they've managed to do over the past six decades or so, they've somehow earned the right to continue in that vein.
But it's also about money, because they are incapable of seeing how they can continue to profit in the age of unstoppable file sharing. Deep down, they're scared. They're finally experiencing the kind of fear, resentment, and ultimately, powerlessness they've put countless recording artists through. And I say "Good!"
You can actually practice listening to music, it's something you learn.
Yes, I've noticed that as I've gotten older. Until I was in my late 40's I never cared much about bass, (the instrument, not the frequency range), in most songs. I heard it, but I felt the song would have been pretty much the same without it. Now, I delight in a good bass line - there's a lot going on there that I simply never heard before. I'm also much, much better at picking out the words a vocalist is singing - lyrics are more meaningful now, because I can hear more of what's being said.
I've always loved listening to music; had lots of records and CD's, built and modded my own equipment, did listening comparisons between the same CD pressed in different countries, etc. But in mid-life, the depth of my appreciation for music has grown considerably, and I hear so much more detail in it than I used to.
ignore the DAC the amp the source and everything......except the speaker drivers themselves. even the best in the world are wildly non-linear.
and then there's the air between your ears and the speakers
another non-linearity
Best source?.0001% THD. best amp?.0001% THD. Speakers? 1% THD haha good luck.
There is a fundamental problem with your argument, and that is the failure to take into account the nature and type of the distortion. It's not your fault - you share the misconception with most audio engineers, (who ought to know better), that THD figures correlate well with listening tests.
"THD measurements are taken as the ratio of the total power of all harmonics to the power of the fundamental, with no weighting of any kind applied. The trouble is, human hearing doesn't respond to harmonic distortions in this linear fashion - our ears find higher order harmonic distortions much more apparent and objectionable. This deficiency was noted by prominent BBC engineers D.E.L. Shorter and Norman Crowhurst in the 40's and 50's, when they proposed weighting harmonics by the square or the cube of the order; but their voices were drowned out by market forces that wanted a simple, flattering figure of merit that made the newer, more powerful pentode-based amps, (with lots of negative feedback), look better on paper than their lower-powered triode predecessors. The market won out over scientific and technical accuracy, (it usually does), and today engineers the world over, ignorant of this history, mistakenly believe that low THD is the gold standard for measuring and defining audio amplifier quality. (For a good technical analysis of distortion and the sound of an amplifier, see Lynn Olson's excellent investigation)."
Yes, speakers are hugely non-linear - but their non-linearity doesn't make distortions earlier in the reproduction chain inaudible, even though those distortions can be several orders of magnitude smaller. And that applies to all earlier distortions, whether they originate in an amplifier, a DAC, the digital encoding, or the recording equipment itself. Also, an amplifier with 1% THD can sound much better than one with 0.001% THD, not because the distortion in the 'poorer' amp sounds good, but because the distortion in the supposedly 'blameless' amplifier sounds bad. Then there are Intermodulation Distortion and Transient Intermodulation Distortion, which are difficult to measure thoroughly and seldom appear in amplifier specs, yet are often audible.
Audio quality isn't nearly as simple as THD figures imply, nor as simplistic as most manufacturers of audio equipment would have you believe.
In an earlier day, I'm sure pretty much the same could have been said of telephones and telephone books, and before that libraries, or even public roads and streets. If it's societal infrastructure and it's used to contact/connect with other people or access information, it's gonna be used A LOT in the commission of crimes.
I'm all for foiling identity thieves and the like, and I realize that cybercrime is a real threat to all of us. However this story should also be recognized as one that serves the best interests of those who are in power and want to remain there, to the point where it might be considered propaganda. Count on it, and others like it, being used as justification for further encroachments on freedom.
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I am afraid you are quite wrong, the issue is PEAK volume, not total.
True - I missed a point there. But I'm not sure it changes the argument much; when people use a lot of bandwidth their usage is more likely to overlap that of other users, increasing the likelihood of reaching max capacity and therefore making it necessary to extend that capacity. That's why with many ISP's, data volume between 2AM and 8AM doesn't count towards your data cap - they don't care then, because most people are sleeping and there's much less likelihood of maxing out the system.
Fair enough it's like roads. It's also just like roads in that many of these companies have received subsidies to lay down their infrastructure too right? They're happily taking those payments to string out the last mile to a bunch of people still?
I don't disagree. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, any time the public is underwriting and/or subsidizing startup costs, the 'necessary monopoly' required to get things rolling should have a defined and unchangeable expiry date enforced by law. Yes, let the investors who are taking a large initial risk make scads of money for a limited period of time. After that it should be 'so long and thanks for all the fish - you've made your money, what you developed is now societal infrastructure and it belongs to the public - see you at The Next Big Thing'.
We wouldn't have all this trouble with telcos, cable providers, ISP's, and the like if we'd had the sense to tell them to bugger off when it was appropriate, instead of letting them hold us all hostage 'til the end of time because they took a risk once. In Vegas, if I gamble and win, I get my payout, and that's the end of it. The casino doesn't keep forking over money for the rest of my life just because I won a hand of poker once. And if I attempted to make them keep on paying me, it would be called extortion or theft.
But data transfer is essentially free compared to electricity, gas and water. Whether I download 1 megabyte or 500 megabytes it does not cost the ISP any more.
I really hate to dispute this, because I'm very much against bandwidth caps and per-byte pricing models. But the fact is that the more data ISP's handle, the more switches, servers, and cables they need to install, and the more power they consume. So arguably, those who transfer lots of data cost the ISP's more money because there is a causal relationship between increased data volume and increased infrastructure costs.
I think the better argument to make is that the Internet is like the roads - it benefits everyone in the country, even those who don't directly use it. Someone who doesn't drive nevertheless benefits from, say, a supermarket whose goods got there by road; and there are countless other examples of how someone who never sets foot out of the house benefits from roads. Similarly, even someone who doesn't have an Internet connection benefits from the lower costs of goods, greater efficiencies, more economic activity, etc, that the Internet makes possible.
I just junked a computer because the capacitors were all leaky and it wouldn't run stable any more. If the chips (CPU, RAM, etc) didn't need capacitors any more because they had the necessary capacitance built right in, and it was solid-state, I think that would be great.
It would be great, if the new supercaps are much more reliable than the current aerogel supercaps.
I've repaired a few MoBo's, (and some other consumer equipment as well), simply by replacing the bad electrolytic capacitors. But if the caps are 'in the chips', you can probably forget about repairing the equipment, unless you can find a replacement chip and are very good at fine-pitch close-quarter surface-mount rework soldering.
Call me when a supercap has anything like the energy density - by any measure of cubic or weight - as a battery.
Too true. The article says these new supercaps are "significantly better than commercial supercapacitors". How much better is "significantly"? Unless it's an order of magnitude or more, it's probably not that big a deal. Why? Because unlike batteries, whose voltage remains nearly constant for a large portion of their usable charge, capacitor voltage starts decreasing as soon as discharge begins. So for optimum usefulness you need to charge a supercap to higher than the system voltage, then regulate it down - and both of these processes have a major negative impact on efficiency, increase the cost, etc.
That said, it would be cool to have large capacitors right on the die to provide higher peak current capability for drivers and such
Tell you what, we'll take our apathy and greed and environmental destruction and you can have Quebec.
I'd be happy to take Quebec. I like Quebec. Sure, they have nutjobs and corruption there, (as they do everywhere else), but at least they've declared a moratorium on poisoning people's wells for the sake of Big Oil.
Juno Needs Radio Amateurs!
Mars Needs Women!
Maybe HP could sell its sorry ass back to Agilent, since the latter seems to be the only viable remnant of the dismemberment committed during Fiorina's Folly. That would give the current HP a way to gradually back out of what has become a commodity business and get back to innovating.
I wonder if either HP or Agilent has a Carly-faced dartboard or two lying around...
"centimeter" is American English. In British English it is indeed "centimetre". If the original posted had bothered to install both dictionaries (which I do, just to avoid this stuff), he would have found out the reason. So, I'll keep writing "centimetre", just like I keep writing "colour", "honour", "programme" and "centralization".
In Canadian English also, it is "centimetre", although our version of English is a mongrel mix of British and American spellings.We too tend to insist on '-our' endings, yet we usually spell "program" the American way. For me, the most jarring Americanisms are referring to a negotiable instrument as a "check", and the words "nite", "lite", and "thru".
IIRC, "centralization" is the only correct spelling in the States, whereas both spellings are acceptable in the UK, with "centralisation" being the historical favourite.
As long as we know that the NSA is doing this, I'm happy to have them as pentesters. Who better to help keep TOR's security top notch?
On the one horn of the dilemma, we like privacy and want information to be free. So we embrace technologies like Tor, form darknets, etc. But on the other horn, there really are people out there who will use these technologies to bring harm to innocent people--for the greater good, of course (or for a profit). These people will use technology against our best wishes.
When you say "these people will use technology against our best wishes", which people are you referring to - the "people out there", or the people in the NSA, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies?
Also, since all those Grade-C and B pencil pushers are out hunting for work, there's increased competition, which means that employers can get you for less. So more training, but lower wages
More, (and more expensive) training required for jobs that pay ever-decreasing wages is an across-the-board trend. If you wonder why the middle class is disappearing, look no farther.
The growth in productive capacity of mankind - the efficiency with which we grow and harvest food, take ore and oil from the earth and process it into fuel and manufactured goods, etc, has far outstripped our population growth. Yet we have growing economic uncertainty and a shrinking middle class coincident with a period of unprecedented per capita productive capacity. Why is this so? The sound-bite answer is "concentration of wealth". The complete answer is incredibly complex - historical events, human nature, natural laws, conspiracies, and a huge number of other factors, (many of which we're likely not aware of), contribute to the situation.
What's needed, (and here's where the Libertarians, capitalists, free-marketeers, and other rugged individualist types start howling), is a re-boot of the system. Our top-heavy corporatocracy needs to have its wealth re-distributed in a more equitable fashion. We need to get over the notion that landing first in line gives anyone a claim in perpetuity to resources and privileges. I have nothing against wealth - I'd love to be wealthy myself. But when a little wealth acquired through hard work, skill, and talent is transmuted into a vast monopolistic empire holding a sword over the heads of a huge percentage of the population, something needs to change. All those anti-collectivists out there conveniently ignore the fact that corporations are collectives, and that they are also welfare recipients who game the system, and make up and impose their own rules, in order to accrue wealth and power in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with providing goods and services of value in a truly competitive environment.
If we don't all come together and change this situation in an orderly fashion, then revolution is almost inevitable, and the next one may be very bloody indeed.
It has been available for a kind of long time. RFC 2440 for encrypted email was written in the 1990s, but people are really resistant to anything that might help their own privacy.
The problem is getting a critical mass of users to adopt encryption. And although it's largerly a matter of people either not caring, or not knowing enough to care, it's also a problem of not wanting to stand out in the crowd and risk getting singled out. My friends and I don't use e-mail encryption because, with so few other regular users of it, we would simply be marking ourselves for special attention from TLA's.
It's the kind of thing where a significant portion of the population - say 10% - needs to start using e-mail encryption simultaneously. And unfortunately, that's not likely to happen any time soon. I've said it before and I'll say it again: like sleight-of-hand in a magician's act, bread and circuses really do work to keep people distracted from what their leaders and masters are doing. Until enough of us pull our heads out of our popcorn bags, organize, and start engaging in the Internet's equivalent of 'passive resistance', the 1% and their minions are going to keep screwing us over.
The only thing that can keep a corporation from becoming totally evil is the consumers. The boardroom is an incubator for evil. If you want to keep a company from doing bad, you have to be a strategic consumer.
True, but not necessarily helpful. One problem is that few companies start out as evil, and by the time they become evil and the fact is widely recognized, they are often either monopolies or members of oligopolies. Another problem is that the overwhelming majority of people simply don't care, as long as they have their shiny new techno-toys, their reality TV shows, and all the other 'bread and circuses' stuff provided by government and the elites to keep them amused, confused, pliable, and quiet. Very few people have the awareness, or even the desire for awareness, that would cause them to boycott an integral company like Google for more than a day.
And if by chance someone DOES decide to boycott the 'bad guys', what viable alternatives exist? For example, if I decide to boycott my cell provider, I can either forsake cellular service altogether, or buy service from another provider that's equally bad, or possibly worse.
The whole 'consumers have ultimate control' presupposes both the will and the ability of a large number of consumers to act in concert over an extended period of time to further their common interests, even in the face of significant privation. Unfortunately, this seldom happens.
Damn it everyone, stop referring to Corporations as if they are people. Corporations do nothing, the people that run them do.
I agree that it's necessary for people to stop thinking of corporations as simply (rich) fellow citizens, and to start assigning personal responsibility, including blame and appropriate penalties, to the individuals who constitute corporations.
That said, I think it's also important to acknowledge the collectivist nature of corporations. People belonging to corporations, (like those in any large group where a certain degree of both anonymity and group support are assumed), tend to behave differently than they would if they were acting on their own. This doesn't excuse their actions, but it's worth keeping in mind, if only to protect oneself from a similar fate.
And yes, I meant 'collectivist' in the sense of 'communist'. I find it both amusing and liberating to realize that the self-styled rugged-individualist capitalist barons of industry and commerce are in fact not very different at all from the communists they usually disdain and despise.
...(an)Other OS to screw users out of being able to use OtherOS!
I'm positive it's placebo here.
You're wrong. Not everyone's eyes are the same, so be thankful yours aren't like mine. I have a kind of nystagmus that causes my eyes to move back and forth rapidly when I either move my eyes, or move my head while keeping my eyes focused on one spot. The rapid eye movement aliases the so-called "high" flicker rate well into the perceivable range. I see the flicker in some LED monitors, and at night while driving I can spot LED tail-lights easily. (As long as the brakes aren't on - then the duty cycle is at or close to 100%, and I don't see any flicker). Ditto for LED traffic lights that are dimmed, (we have a few of those in the Toronto area), and LED Christmas lights - they're the worst, because of the very low flicker frequency. I can even get a sense of the frequency used, as I barely notice the flicker at higher frequencies, while at lower frequencies it's a real distraction. (FWIW, I'm an electronics technologist with 35 years of experience in the field, and I understand the circuits involved, as well as the trade-offs among LED drive frequency, circuit complexity, component cost, and overal efficiency).
Some people don't sense the flicker at all, others are affected by it but can't see it, and still others, (like me), can actually perceive it. Don't assume that I can't see it just because you can't.
There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms.
There really needs to be a plan to shift Internet control from the private sector to the public sector over, say, the next 10 or 15 years. The Internet is now societal infrastructure and, like roads and water supplies, should no longer be privately owned. (If we'd done that with the telcos and the cell networks when we should have, things would be much better now). Private fortunes have been made on the backs of taxpayers while corporations enjoyed tax breaks, subsidies, favourable legislation, and access to public rights-of-way. That was legitimate when the Net was new and investing in it was risky, but it's past time for the gravy train to stop.
Corporations need to be disabused of the notion that putting capital at risk, and cajoling the government to grant them favours, gives them rights in perpetuity to the fruits of their efforts. Beyond a certain point in time and profit, anything that evolves into infrastructure needs to move into the public domain. If we don't start enforcing that idea, soon there will be no public sector at all. We'll lose what little freedom and autonomy we have left, and we'll all be feudal serfs in corporate fiefdoms. I figure we're already about 70% of the way there.
...wondering if perhaps Google has simply become a master of advertising and marketing in its own right, rather than being just the middleman. All of these projects make Google seem cool and geek-friendly, and keep Google brand front-and-centre in a mostly positive light. With all of their slick-new-project churn they simply look less moribund and uncool than either Microsoft or Apple, even as they're becoming a more staid and conservative company. And with their seemingly limitless supply of dollars, the cost of these projects is probably chump change to them.
It's also possible that they've chosen to 'throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks'. There's something to be said for the experimental approach to learning what large numbers of people will pay for, and Google has always struck me as being much stronger strategically than tactically.
...Like the "301 watch list" -- it's written entirely by industry, lacking in any objective evidence, but is pushed by the USTR as official policy to browbeat other countries into doing what's in the best interests of US/multinational companies...
You mean the US government is the enforcer / bodyguard of the world's largest corporations? Say it ain't so!
This not about money. It never was. It is about control.
Yes, it IS about control. It's about clinging to a past that they were able to understand and manipulate, rather than forging ahead to an unknown future with different rules that require different competencies and a different kind of creativity. And it's about a sense of entitlement too - they believe that with all of the pillaging they've managed to do over the past six decades or so, they've somehow earned the right to continue in that vein.
But it's also about money, because they are incapable of seeing how they can continue to profit in the age of unstoppable file sharing. Deep down, they're scared. They're finally experiencing the kind of fear, resentment, and ultimately, powerlessness they've put countless recording artists through. And I say "Good!"
You can actually practice listening to music, it's something you learn.
Yes, I've noticed that as I've gotten older. Until I was in my late 40's I never cared much about bass, (the instrument, not the frequency range), in most songs. I heard it, but I felt the song would have been pretty much the same without it. Now, I delight in a good bass line - there's a lot going on there that I simply never heard before. I'm also much, much better at picking out the words a vocalist is singing - lyrics are more meaningful now, because I can hear more of what's being said.
I've always loved listening to music; had lots of records and CD's, built and modded my own equipment, did listening comparisons between the same CD pressed in different countries, etc. But in mid-life, the depth of my appreciation for music has grown considerably, and I hear so much more detail in it than I used to.
ignore the DAC the amp the source and everything... ...except the speaker drivers themselves. even the best in the world are wildly non-linear.
and then there's the air between your ears and the speakers
another non-linearity
Best source? .0001% THD. best amp? .0001% THD. Speakers? 1% THD haha good luck.
There is a fundamental problem with your argument, and that is the failure to take into account the nature and type of the distortion. It's not your fault - you share the misconception with most audio engineers, (who ought to know better), that THD figures correlate well with listening tests.
Quoting from my own comment in an earlier Slashdot story:
"THD measurements are taken as the ratio of the total power of all harmonics to the power of the fundamental, with no weighting of any kind applied. The trouble is, human hearing doesn't respond to harmonic distortions in this linear fashion - our ears find higher order harmonic distortions much more apparent and objectionable. This deficiency was noted by prominent BBC engineers D.E.L. Shorter and Norman Crowhurst in the 40's and 50's, when they proposed weighting harmonics by the square or the cube of the order; but their voices were drowned out by market forces that wanted a simple, flattering figure of merit that made the newer, more powerful pentode-based amps, (with lots of negative feedback), look better on paper than their lower-powered triode predecessors. The market won out over scientific and technical accuracy, (it usually does), and today engineers the world over, ignorant of this history, mistakenly believe that low THD is the gold standard for measuring and defining audio amplifier quality. (For a good technical analysis of distortion and the sound of an amplifier, see Lynn Olson's excellent investigation)."
Yes, speakers are hugely non-linear - but their non-linearity doesn't make distortions earlier in the reproduction chain inaudible, even though those distortions can be several orders of magnitude smaller. And that applies to all earlier distortions, whether they originate in an amplifier, a DAC, the digital encoding, or the recording equipment itself. Also, an amplifier with 1% THD can sound much better than one with 0.001% THD, not because the distortion in the 'poorer' amp sounds good, but because the distortion in the supposedly 'blameless' amplifier sounds bad. Then there are Intermodulation Distortion and Transient Intermodulation Distortion, which are difficult to measure thoroughly and seldom appear in amplifier specs, yet are often audible.
Audio quality isn't nearly as simple as THD figures imply, nor as simplistic as most manufacturers of audio equipment would have you believe.
I guess we have to give the money back now, and pretend our hand ended up in your pocket by accident. You believe us, right?
In an earlier day, I'm sure pretty much the same could have been said of telephones and telephone books, and before that libraries, or even public roads and streets. If it's societal infrastructure and it's used to contact/connect with other people or access information, it's gonna be used A LOT in the commission of crimes.
I'm all for foiling identity thieves and the like, and I realize that cybercrime is a real threat to all of us. However this story should also be recognized as one that serves the best interests of those who are in power and want to remain there, to the point where it might be considered propaganda. Count on it, and others like it, being used as justification for further encroachments on freedom.