I've lived in California for over 15 years, and have never experienced a brownout. Not even any rolling blackouts during the Enron days (because I was near a hospital), but never a brownout. There have been a few weather related blackouts and I remember one widespread blackout in San Francisco (construction related?) in the late 90's.
I've managed computers that whole time, and would have noticed a brownout since my UPS's would have gone into voltage boost mode (or the generator would have kicked in)
Where do you live that you experience so many brownouts?
They already have a procedure for accepting radioactive goods, why would they change that because of a single temporarily misplaced package? It's not like this is the first radioactive package they've hauled, and I'm sure it's not the first that they've misplaced.
As a former resident of Memphis who knew a number of Fedex employees there at the Fedex corporate office, there are a number of very bright Fedex employes in tennessee, and even the delivery drivers claim that they have greater oversight there since they are so close to the main office.
A single misplaced package doesn't imply incompetence given the millions of packages delivered daily. I've sent hundreds of packages (including when I lived in TN) through Fedex and only had one get completely lost. I've had a similar experience with UPS.
Maybe because explosives, corrosives, compressed gasses, etc all have the potential take down a cargo plane if the material explodes, leaks, etc. However, low level radio active materials cannot.
I wonder the same thing. Not only does my San Francisco not have "cheap superfast" connections, it has no "superfast" connections. I can get12mbit cable internet from Comcast or 1.5Mbit (not even 3Mbit) DSL from AT&T - there are no other options.
Even though I'm in a residential district of SF, it's not exactly a low-density suburban neighborhood. On my block alone there are 60 - 80 families within 400 feet -- surely that's enough density to provide other options? That density continues for a mile to the east, west, north and south.
In general, I don't like communities running their own utilities, but maybe municipal fiber to the home is the only way to get some real competition and some real first class broadband speeds. Though to be fair, I heard that it's NIMBY's that are delaying AT&T's U-verse rollout -- no one wants the U-Verse telcom cabinets on their street corner.
By that logic we should legalize people breaking car windows and stealing car stereos because its pretty easy, and the only thing we accomplish by making it illegal is that it prevents the good guys from demonstrating how easy it is to steal your car stereo.
Wow, we've traveled pretty far down that slippery slope -- stealing a stereo is quite a bit different than sitting outside with my computer listening to your unencrypted Wifi signals. (or your wireless keyboard, or shouting out the window, or whatever else you choose to transmit outside of your walls).
The technology exists to listen to conversations through walls. At some point we just need to say that its illegal to use that to invade people's privacy. Or do you plan to require that people encrypt their conversations.
I have no problem with making laser eavesdropping equipment illegal - you should have an expectation to privacy within your home. Though if your fear is the government, they already have such equipment.
Depends what you are trying to address. I'm honestly not all that worried about criminals at this point. The threat right now is coming from government and major corporations. And making it illegal does effectively curb their behavior.
Then insist upon encryption, not making it illegal. What do you fear that Google is going to do with your intercepted Wifi conversations? Nearly 200 million people have already given Google all of their email - what could they possible gain from driving a car around to record a few seconds of traffic? (Well, ok, the answer is that they gain a SSID and MAC address database for geolocation)
Making interception of Wifi traffic illegal does *nothing* to protect you from the government - only encryption (verifiable encryption with no backdoors) can do that.
As I said, making it illegal does nothing to protect your data - it just creates the illusion that you're protected.
What makes this one so much more beneficial that it's going to help pull our economy out?
I have no argument against this -- I don't see how any telescope is going to pull our economy out of the state it's in.
But some research has to be state funded or it will never get done -- space exploration in one of those areas. If governments don't fund it, it won't get done because there's not much commercial payback in deep space knowledge.
You apparently think that no large research projects should be state funded because on a project that takes over a decade to plan and execute, it can't be left to the whims of the economy.
Here's a fun exercise... take a look at this chart of the US budget, and see how much of our budget goes to science:
What happens when a firesheep comes out that can capture/intercept/decode the em from a wireless keyboard from outside one's home? That technology already exists. Should using a wireless keyboard be carteblanch for people to record your activities? I think not.
Yes, it should be, because if it's not, the bad guys will still do it and still capture the data. All that would be accomplished by making it illegal would be to prevent the good guys from demonstrating how easy it is to steal your data.
If there's some false assumption that no one will intercept my wireless data because it's "illegal", then there will be no demand from consumers for manufacturers to encrypt that data.
Enforcing security by making it illegal to listen is worse than security through obscurity. At least obscurity does make it harder to see the data - - making it illegal does no such thing.
The problem with this type of contract is that if the project starts to go too far under budget, the project manager will add enough resources to keep it on track. Likewise, if it starts to go over budget, then fewer resources can be devoted "Do we really need 6 months of QA with 24 people? I'll just pressure one of my engineers to write up a justification for why it can be done in 4 months with 16 people without sacrificing quality".
Can we please stop calling Google's Wifi drive-by data collection a "Privacy violation" - they only collected traffic that was publicly available because people chose to transmit it. If anything, it was good for public awareness, hopefully at least a few people encrypted their Wifi traffic because of it.
It's not like Google put the data up on their search engine, it was an artifact of the collection process leftover on corporate hard drives.
While it's nice to see lawmakers taking an interest in privacy, rather than go after Google, they should be going after the manufacturers that still sell access points that default to unencrypted traffic.
The danger that all of these people who had their data snooped face is not from Google -- it's not like Google is going to use their credit cards or try to steal their identity. The real danger is in having their data snooped by people with criminal intent.
As anyone who has done any project of significant size, there are always change orders that end up ballooning the price of the contract. It's not that the vendor keeps stalling and adding more billable hours -- open ended contracts like that are relatively rare.
No complex project has a 100% complete spec, there are always things found along the way. "You know those halogen lights we spec'ed 5 years ago? Now we want LED lighting, how much will that cost us?" "I know we said wanted this software to do X last year, but our business changed and we need it to do Y too." "We field tested the motors you're using and even though they are within spec, we found that they cause resonant vibrations in another part of the device, we need you to use different motors or better vibration dampening"
Not everything can be anticipated ahead of time, especially when you're developing a one-off product with a development schedule spans a decade. If a change order is significant enough, then the contract gets rebid -- and depending on the scale of the change, you may lose all of the work that the initial vendor did.
So the James Webb telescope will have about 5.8 times more mirror surface area than Hubble, and it will be able to observe on frequencies that Hubble can’t
That doesn't sound like a semi-marginal improvement. If the JWST had double the mirror surface and operated at the same wavelengths as the Hubble, then maybe you could call it a "semi-marginable" upgrade.
I don't have high voltage lines going to my house, do you? The lines that lead to my house carry 240V and they are insulated. Since the feed wires to my house are all twisted together, they have to be insulated.
The lines on the power pole across the street appear to be uninsulated. I dunno what voltage they run, but it must be some medium voltage..600V? 2400V? 7200V?
But I doubt my neighborhood power poles (or yours) are "high voltage" by the Electrical company's standards. It depends who you ask, but typically High Voltage is > 38KV.
The point of this research is not say "aha! this is the solution". It is an exploration of a technique in its embryonic stage. Obviously, it is not about coating all trees down the boulevard with gold nano particles and having them bathe under directed UV lamps.
For people who like to think of themselves as highly technical, many/.'ers seem to have zero understanding of what research is about.
I think the problem that most people have is that the article was not presented as early stage research, but as a solution (and the article itself shows false-color images of trees that appear to be glowing):
But what if we could create natural street lights that don't need electricity to power them?... The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one — not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities
When you read the summary, it appears as if scientists have come up with a way to turn trees into streetlights. It's not until you read the article that it becomes clear that this is just a small step in research for making leaves glow when illuminated by UV light.
So I don't think that anyone here has a problem with the research process, but don't like to see a claim of a cancer cure when that's been done is vaporizing a cancer cell in a petri dish with a laser. If it's just basic research, call it such. If the article said "Gold nanoparticles can make tree leaves glow under UV light", people would have been just as interested in the topic but you wouldn't have had half the threads debunking the claims made in the summary.
So the energy usage of streetlights is right up there with global warming, malaria, AIDs, cancer, hunger, and the contamination of our precious bodily fluids? Who knew?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? Are you suggesting that no science should be done unless it solves global warming, malaria, AIDS, cancer or hunger? You realize that there are more than a handful of scientists in the world... there are enough scientists to work on a variety of problems of varying importance. And sometimes one scientists research can solve some unrelated problem. For example, who would have ever thought that the invention of Tang would have allowed astronauts to walk on the moon!?
But in any case, if you believe that global warming is caused by CO2 in the atmosphere, streetlights in the USA contribute around 1M tons of CO2 emissions.
So, as long as our electrical power comes mostly from fossil fuels, if we could replace streetlights with trees, that would help with global warming (though by a tiny amount since that's only around.02% of the USA's emissions - but come up with a thousand tiny solutions and you can reduce emissions by 20%).
Uhh..it says nothing about the leaves storing energy to glow later - it says that the leaves require a UV light source in order to glow, much like the phosphor in a traditional white LED.
It's quite likely that light from the sun does have the right UV wavelength to make the trees glow, but having trees that glow only when lit by sunlight seems somewhat pointless.
I assumed that the UV light would be directed upwards at the tree (or sideways or some other way that doesn't expose people directly to the UV light source). I don't know how reflective trees are to UV light, so perhaps this would still cause excessive UV light exposure due to reflected light.
just use a fluorophore. Actually, better yet, why not use a fluorophore that doesn't emit red light?
To be fair, the article did answer your question:
However, phosphor powder is highly toxic and its price is expensive.
It's not clear that replacing the fluorescing phosphor coating and an entire tree is really a better solution, but they did say why they want to replace the phosphor.
...A lot of light emitting diode, especially white light emitting diode, uses phosphor powder to stimulate light of different wavelengths. However, phosphor powder is highly toxic and its price is expensive. As a result, Dr. Yen-Hsun Wu had the idea to discover a method that is less toxic to replace phosphor powder.... By implanting the gold nanoparticles into the leaves of the Bacopa caroliniana plants, the scientists were able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under a high wavelength of ultraviolet light, the gold nanoparticles were able to produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission in the surrounding chlorophyll.
So it sounds like the trees need a "high wavelength of ultraviolet light" to get them to glow. Seems like they are just replacing the phosphor that makes a white LED glow with these gold implanted leaves. But you'd still need a UV light source (which could be an array of UV LED's?).
I'm not sure that this is really an environmental win -- replacing an array of white LED's that last 10 years with an array of UV LED's that point to trees that need their leaves to be impregnated with gold (and replaced annually?) doesn't sound all that environmentally friendly. How bad is the LED phosphor for the environment?
How can you say "hogwash" if you haven't even read what I wrote? I clearly said used books. Why buy new when the words on a used book are just as legible as a new book? I rarely keep a book after I read it, so I don't care if the cover is torn or the pages are a little dogeared.
I'm not talking about bookstore bargain bin prices,I'm talking Amazon used books delivered to my door.
I was moments away from ordering a Kindle - I had added it to my Amazon shopping cart and had started to add some e-book titles. Then I noticed the used book prices. Every one of the 5 e-books I had picked out were priced at $9.99, while used books with shipping came out to prices ranging from $4.50 to $9.99 including shipping.
While I understand that people that travel a lot may prefer an e-book for the convenience, I do 90% of my reading in my living room. Why would I pay $139 for a device plus a premium price on each book just to have a fancy gadget? I'm not one to run out and buy the latest bestseller and I have enough books on hand to not find it hard to wait a couple weeks for a used book to arrive.
I could even resell the books after I'm done and make the effective cost even cheaper (printing a priority mail label takes a couple minutes, so there's hardly any inconvenience). Though in reality, I donate my books to a local charity.
I don't expect the publisers to allow e-book resales, but unless they cut their book prices significantly, they are going to have a hard time competing against paper.
If you don't understand the issues well enough to do an audit yourself, insist on an outside audit by a company that does, *and* does not sell any security products or services themselves.
Asking Slashdot is just going to get you a whole lot of uninformed suggestions from mostly well-meaning people with the occasional good suggestion buried in the noise. But you don't know enough about the subject to know which ones are the good suggestions and which are not.
They've got millions of hotmail users, a large ad network centered on Bing that also spans many high volume sites like Facebook, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Even if their search engine and email market share is a fraction of Google's, if you use their services, MS is still collecting your data.
IS MS's privacy policy so different from Google that it precludes them from selling my data? I always thought the difference between the two is that you *know* that Google is watching your emails, but MS isn't so overt about it.
I can't believe that MS would not be pursuing that same revenue stream.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived in California for over 15 years, and have never experienced a brownout. Not even any rolling blackouts during the Enron days (because I was near a hospital), but never a brownout. There have been a few weather related blackouts and I remember one widespread blackout in San Francisco (construction related?) in the late 90's.
I've managed computers that whole time, and would have noticed a brownout since my UPS's would have gone into voltage boost mode (or the generator would have kicked in)
Where do you live that you experience so many brownouts?
They already have a procedure for accepting radioactive goods, why would they change that because of a single temporarily misplaced package? It's not like this is the first radioactive package they've hauled, and I'm sure it's not the first that they've misplaced.
As a former resident of Memphis who knew a number of Fedex employees there at the Fedex corporate office, there are a number of very bright Fedex employes in tennessee, and even the delivery drivers claim that they have greater oversight there since they are so close to the main office.
A single misplaced package doesn't imply incompetence given the millions of packages delivered daily. I've sent hundreds of packages (including when I lived in TN) through Fedex and only had one get completely lost. I've had a similar experience with UPS.
Maybe because explosives, corrosives, compressed gasses, etc all have the potential take down a cargo plane if the material explodes, leaks, etc. However, low level radio active materials cannot.
I wonder the same thing. Not only does my San Francisco not have "cheap superfast" connections, it has no "superfast" connections. I can get12mbit cable internet from Comcast or 1.5Mbit (not even 3Mbit) DSL from AT&T - there are no other options.
Even though I'm in a residential district of SF, it's not exactly a low-density suburban neighborhood. On my block alone there are 60 - 80 families within 400 feet -- surely that's enough density to provide other options? That density continues for a mile to the east, west, north and south.
In general, I don't like communities running their own utilities, but maybe municipal fiber to the home is the only way to get some real competition and some real first class broadband speeds. Though to be fair, I heard that it's NIMBY's that are delaying AT&T's U-verse rollout -- no one wants the U-Verse telcom cabinets on their street corner.
By that logic we should legalize people breaking car windows and stealing car stereos because its pretty easy, and the only thing we accomplish by making it illegal is that it prevents the good guys from demonstrating how easy it is to steal your car stereo.
Wow, we've traveled pretty far down that slippery slope -- stealing a stereo is quite a bit different than sitting outside with my computer listening to your unencrypted Wifi signals. (or your wireless keyboard, or shouting out the window, or whatever else you choose to transmit outside of your walls).
The technology exists to listen to conversations through walls. At some point we just need to say that its illegal to use that to invade people's privacy. Or do you plan to require that people encrypt their conversations.
I have no problem with making laser eavesdropping equipment illegal - you should have an expectation to privacy within your home. Though if your fear is the government, they already have such equipment.
Depends what you are trying to address. I'm honestly not all that worried about criminals at this point. The threat right now is coming from government and major corporations. And making it illegal does effectively curb their behavior.
Then insist upon encryption, not making it illegal. What do you fear that Google is going to do with your intercepted Wifi conversations? Nearly 200 million people have already given Google all of their email - what could they possible gain from driving a car around to record a few seconds of traffic? (Well, ok, the answer is that they gain a SSID and MAC address database for geolocation)
Making interception of Wifi traffic illegal does *nothing* to protect you from the government - only encryption (verifiable encryption with no backdoors) can do that.
As I said, making it illegal does nothing to protect your data - it just creates the illusion that you're protected.
What makes this one so much more beneficial that it's going to help pull our economy out?
I have no argument against this -- I don't see how any telescope is going to pull our economy out of the state it's in.
But some research has to be state funded or it will never get done -- space exploration in one of those areas. If governments don't fund it, it won't get done because there's not much commercial payback in deep space knowledge.
You apparently think that no large research projects should be state funded because on a project that takes over a decade to plan and execute, it can't be left to the whims of the economy.
Here's a fun exercise... take a look at this chart of the US budget, and see how much of our budget goes to science:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp
What happens when a firesheep comes out that can capture/intercept/decode the em from a wireless keyboard from outside one's home? That technology already exists. Should using a wireless keyboard be carteblanch for people to record your activities? I think not.
Yes, it should be, because if it's not, the bad guys will still do it and still capture the data. All that would be accomplished by making it illegal would be to prevent the good guys from demonstrating how easy it is to steal your data.
If there's some false assumption that no one will intercept my wireless data because it's "illegal", then there will be no demand from consumers for manufacturers to encrypt that data.
Enforcing security by making it illegal to listen is worse than security through obscurity. At least obscurity does make it harder to see the data - - making it illegal does no such thing.
The problem with this type of contract is that if the project starts to go too far under budget, the project manager will add enough resources to keep it on track. Likewise, if it starts to go over budget, then fewer resources can be devoted "Do we really need 6 months of QA with 24 people? I'll just pressure one of my engineers to write up a justification for why it can be done in 4 months with 16 people without sacrificing quality".
Can we please stop calling Google's Wifi drive-by data collection a "Privacy violation" - they only collected traffic that was publicly available because people chose to transmit it. If anything, it was good for public awareness, hopefully at least a few people encrypted their Wifi traffic because of it.
It's not like Google put the data up on their search engine, it was an artifact of the collection process leftover on corporate hard drives.
While it's nice to see lawmakers taking an interest in privacy, rather than go after Google, they should be going after the manufacturers that still sell access points that default to unencrypted traffic.
The danger that all of these people who had their data snooped face is not from Google -- it's not like Google is going to use their credit cards or try to steal their identity. The real danger is in having their data snooped by people with criminal intent.
As anyone who has done any project of significant size, there are always change orders that end up ballooning the price of the contract. It's not that the vendor keeps stalling and adding more billable hours -- open ended contracts like that are relatively rare.
No complex project has a 100% complete spec, there are always things found along the way. "You know those halogen lights we spec'ed 5 years ago? Now we want LED lighting, how much will that cost us?" "I know we said wanted this software to do X last year, but our business changed and we need it to do Y too." "We field tested the motors you're using and even though they are within spec, we found that they cause resonant vibrations in another part of the device, we need you to use different motors or better vibration dampening"
Not everything can be anticipated ahead of time, especially when you're developing a one-off product with a development schedule spans a decade. If a change order is significant enough, then the contract gets rebid -- and depending on the scale of the change, you may lose all of the work that the initial vendor did.
I'm no scientist, but I thought the whole point of the JWST was that it could do things Hubble can't. Not because it's a "semi marginal" improvement.
From http://michaelgr.com/2007/05/20/the-hubble-space-telescope-vs-new-james-webb-space-telescope/:
So the James Webb telescope will have about 5.8 times more mirror surface area than Hubble, and it will be able to observe on frequencies that Hubble can’t
That doesn't sound like a semi-marginal improvement. If the JWST had double the mirror surface and operated at the same wavelengths as the Hubble, then maybe you could call it a "semi-marginable" upgrade.
I don't have high voltage lines going to my house, do you? The lines that lead to my house carry 240V and they are insulated. Since the feed wires to my house are all twisted together, they have to be insulated.
The lines on the power pole across the street appear to be uninsulated. I dunno what voltage they run, but it must be some medium voltage..600V? 2400V? 7200V?
But I doubt my neighborhood power poles (or yours) are "high voltage" by the Electrical company's standards. It depends who you ask, but typically High Voltage is > 38KV.
You could do it by using an earth return:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-wire_earth_return
The point of this research is not say "aha! this is the solution". It is an exploration of a technique in its embryonic stage. Obviously, it is not about coating all trees down the boulevard with gold nano particles and having them bathe under directed UV lamps.
For people who like to think of themselves as highly technical, many /.'ers seem to have zero understanding of what research is about.
I think the problem that most people have is that the article was not presented as early stage research, but as a solution (and the article itself shows false-color images of trees that appear to be glowing):
But what if we could create natural street lights that don't need electricity to power them? ...
The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one — not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities
When you read the summary, it appears as if scientists have come up with a way to turn trees into streetlights. It's not until you read the article that it becomes clear that this is just a small step in research for making leaves glow when illuminated by UV light.
So I don't think that anyone here has a problem with the research process, but don't like to see a claim of a cancer cure when that's been done is vaporizing a cancer cell in a petri dish with a laser. If it's just basic research, call it such. If the article said "Gold nanoparticles can make tree leaves glow under UV light", people would have been just as interested in the topic but you wouldn't have had half the threads debunking the claims made in the summary.
So the energy usage of streetlights is right up there with global warming, malaria, AIDs, cancer, hunger, and the contamination of our precious bodily fluids? Who knew?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? Are you suggesting that no science should be done unless it solves global warming, malaria, AIDS, cancer or hunger? You realize that there are more than a handful of scientists in the world... there are enough scientists to work on a variety of problems of varying importance. And sometimes one scientists research can solve some unrelated problem. For example, who would have ever thought that the invention of Tang would have allowed astronauts to walk on the moon!?
But in any case, if you believe that global warming is caused by CO2 in the atmosphere, streetlights in the USA contribute around 1M tons of CO2 emissions.
So, as long as our electrical power comes mostly from fossil fuels, if we could replace streetlights with trees, that would help with global warming (though by a tiny amount since that's only around .02% of the USA's emissions - but come up with a thousand tiny solutions and you can reduce emissions by 20%).
Uhh..it says nothing about the leaves storing energy to glow later - it says that the leaves require a UV light source in order to glow, much like the phosphor in a traditional white LED.
It's quite likely that light from the sun does have the right UV wavelength to make the trees glow, but having trees that glow only when lit by sunlight seems somewhat pointless.
I assumed that the UV light would be directed upwards at the tree (or sideways or some other way that doesn't expose people directly to the UV light source). I don't know how reflective trees are to UV light, so perhaps this would still cause excessive UV light exposure due to reflected light.
just use a fluorophore. Actually, better yet, why not use a fluorophore that doesn't emit red light?
To be fair, the article did answer your question:
However, phosphor powder is highly toxic and its price is expensive.
It's not clear that replacing the fluorescing phosphor coating and an entire tree is really a better solution, but they did say why they want to replace the phosphor.
The article says:
...A lot of light emitting diode, especially white light emitting diode, uses phosphor powder to stimulate light of different wavelengths. However, phosphor powder is highly toxic and its price is expensive. As a result, Dr. Yen-Hsun Wu had the idea to discover a method that is less toxic to replace phosphor powder. ...
By implanting the gold nanoparticles into the leaves of the Bacopa caroliniana plants, the scientists were able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under a high wavelength of ultraviolet light, the gold nanoparticles were able to produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission in the surrounding chlorophyll.
So it sounds like the trees need a "high wavelength of ultraviolet light" to get them to glow. Seems like they are just replacing the phosphor that makes a white LED glow with these gold implanted leaves. But you'd still need a UV light source (which could be an array of UV LED's?).
I'm not sure that this is really an environmental win -- replacing an array of white LED's that last 10 years with an array of UV LED's that point to trees that need their leaves to be impregnated with gold (and replaced annually?) doesn't sound all that environmentally friendly. How bad is the LED phosphor for the environment?
How can you say "hogwash" if you haven't even read what I wrote? I clearly said used books. Why buy new when the words on a used book are just as legible as a new book? I rarely keep a book after I read it, so I don't care if the cover is torn or the pages are a little dogeared.
I'm not talking about bookstore bargain bin prices,I'm talking Amazon used books delivered to my door.
I was moments away from ordering a Kindle - I had added it to my Amazon shopping cart and had started to add some e-book titles. Then I noticed the used book prices. Every one of the 5 e-books I had picked out were priced at $9.99, while used books with shipping came out to prices ranging from $4.50 to $9.99 including shipping.
While I understand that people that travel a lot may prefer an e-book for the convenience, I do 90% of my reading in my living room. Why would I pay $139 for a device plus a premium price on each book just to have a fancy gadget? I'm not one to run out and buy the latest bestseller and I have enough books on hand to not find it hard to wait a couple weeks for a used book to arrive.
I could even resell the books after I'm done and make the effective cost even cheaper (printing a priority mail label takes a couple minutes, so there's hardly any inconvenience). Though in reality, I donate my books to a local charity.
I don't expect the publisers to allow e-book resales, but unless they cut their book prices significantly, they are going to have a hard time competing against paper.
If you don't understand the issues well enough to do an audit yourself, insist on an outside audit by a company that does, *and* does not sell any security products or services themselves.
Asking Slashdot is just going to get you a whole lot of uninformed suggestions from mostly well-meaning people with the occasional good suggestion buried in the noise. But you don't know enough about the subject to know which ones are the good suggestions and which are not.
Why don't they have as much data?
They've got millions of hotmail users, a large ad network centered on Bing that also spans many high volume sites like Facebook, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Even if their search engine and email market share is a fraction of Google's, if you use their services, MS is still collecting your data.
IS MS's privacy policy so different from Google that it precludes them from selling my data? I always thought the difference between the two is that you *know* that Google is watching your emails, but MS isn't so overt about it.
I can't believe that MS would not be pursuing that same revenue stream.