Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic. The Unlocked GSM North America edition (assuming you are in the US, and OK with only being able to choose between GSM carriers) was $250 last time I checked. That's about what we paid for it. Data works just fine over my home WiFi connection, and anywhere else you can get access to a WiFi access point. Best part: To your carrier, it's a dumb phone - you can use the GPS and the WiFi and the camera and all the other features and no carrier can tell you you can't, because you are just inserting their damned SIM card and making voice calls.
You CAN use their data plan (and the phone wants to, by default, so be sure you disable the WAN access points for data before you start using lots of data, I spent $10 learning that lesson!). But you can also disable it and tell the phone it can only get data from WiFi, and the phone does this quite nicely. Obviously, the Web browser and data-based apps get cranky when you get out of range, but that's to be expected.
My wife owns one. She wanted a phone she could do things like grocery lists and Facebook on, but didn't really feel a compelling need to connect all the time. Previously, she had a dumb phone and an iPod Touch she carried around, and she wanted to consolidate both to a single device. So now she has a smartphone that she can only use data on when she's at home.
However, being a Symbian phone, this has met her needs pretty damned well. You can work around the lack of a "fully mobile" data plan quite nicely for a lot of things, though obviously not everything.
- UpVise has a shopping list that syncs between your online account and the locally-stored data only when a connection is available. She goes on the Web, updates her shopping list, then syncs it to her phone before she goes to the store. At the store, she ticks off the things she's bought. When she gets back in WiFi range at home, her shopping list is updated on the Web to reflect what she's bought.
- Google allows her to sync email, calendar, and contacts to/from her phone, so she can manage her phone's contacts list on Google, or on the phone, and it syncs between them whenever she is in range. So she can't get email unless she's at a WiFi point, but if we need to communicate, the phone bits work just fine.
- Facebook requires a data connection to do anything with it, but she only does that at home anyway, so she doesn't care.
- Symbian's "Ovi Maps" allows you to store maps locally on the phone, and does voice-directed GPS routing using the locally-stored maps. The only thing she doesn't get is traffic updates, but she can use the GPS for voice-directed driving without a data plan.
- All other apps that don't require constant data (games, etc) can be installed using WiFi when she's at home, then once they are installed they just run, with or without a data plan.
Supposedly, Skype supports Symbian and her phone even has a little front camera to do video conferencing. We haven't tried it, she's got a netbook for that sort of thing with a bigger screen.
I think the physical book costs less than you think it does, and represents a far lower portion of the cost than you are assuming.
If an author gets a 10% royalty, that means they are being paid 10% of the list cover price of each book. For a hardcover, that can be upwards of 2 bucks a copy, and for a paperback that's still about 80 cents. That already means the publisher can "only" reduce the price of the book by 90% to make zero profit. But the publishing house probably paid the author an advance, taking a risk that the book would succeed (and not all of them do). They put work into editing the book, laying it out for various bookreader software, marketing it, doing cover art, and supporting a distribution infrastructure. There's probably twice as much that goes into all that than the original authorship, so let's call that 20% based on current margins.
So now the books cost $6 (hardcover) and $3 (softcover) to make, giving the author and publisher a reasonable chance at profit.
Then you have the distributor, who wants a cut. For electronic copies, that might just be a couple of bucks, but now you're up to $9 new releases and $6 older works.
Lower the cost to $0.25 as you suggest, and the publisher would have to sell 30 times as many copies just to reach their current profit margin, assuming absolutely zero incremental cost in distribution, which is unrealistic, so you're probably looking at 50 times as many or more. I'm not sure those kinds of numbers would be reasonable at all. I might buy more books instead of borrowing library copies if they were a quarter each (and songs, too, for that matter), but 30 times as many? 50? I'm not so sure.
Granted, for a quarter a copy, I'd be willing to tolerate some pretty draconian DRM, and if someone wanted to "borrow" my copy I'd just tell them to buy their own or buy one for them. So there's a certain economics at work at the 25-50 cent price point that you won't get even at the $1 or current $10 price points. But I'm not convinced it would counter the lack of margin on each sale.
Is this because if it was infinite nobody would need to buy a book anymore?
Yes.
This is the perfect example of "dilution of value" that is the heart of the argument against allowing piracy.
An author wrote that book, and expects a certain amount of money in return for that work. The individual copy you got might have cost the author nothing, and you might make the valid argument that you, yourself, would never have purchased the book therefore you are costing the author nothing, but there are a certain number of people who would have purchased the book (earning the author a royalty) who would not purchase the book if it were available for free.
If we want authors to continue writing books, we need to protect a reasonable copyright to reward them for doing so.
Note I said "reasonable", which leads to the other major issue - current multi-generational copyright is anything but "reasonable".
Copyrights should be placed for a certain number of years, not to exceed about 20-30, as originally intended. That gives the author sufficient time to profit from their work. I would also be in favor of strong DRM measures and enforcement laws with real penalties if copyright were set to a reasonable period of time. But, there's a caveat there.
Once that copyright expires, there has to be a provision in the law that makes it legal to circumvent any copy protection the author or publisher has originally placed on the work, or publishers need to file the decryption keys with their copyright application if appropriate, or file an unencrypted version with the copyright office that would automatically be released when the copyright expires.
We also need to have authors legally asserting copyright, not just able to put a (C) on something and call it good. If you want protection provided by law enforcement, you need to file an unencrypted copy of your work with a copyright office so the enforcement body knows what they are looking for, and the clock starts on that protection the instant you file it and have it approved. When your protection runs out, the copyright office should publish the unencrypted work.
Oh, and you'll also need to pay an application fee to pay for the system, because my current tax dollars for law enforcement are intended for protection of real goods and real people, not the protection of your profit margin.
Honestly, does it matter? 10.04 is the latest LTS. LTS is a 2-year cycle. That means we won't see broadcomm open source drivers officially in an LTS until probably 12.04.
10.10 could easily get a broadcomm driver update for those who use it once the driver has been analyzed and tweaked by a few hundred geeks. 10.04 folks can easily backport something like this if they want to.
Meanwhile, the binary works pretty well (despite the Linux purists attitude about binaries, which Ubuntu doesn't really go by anyway).
I applaud Broadcomm for doing this, of course, but there's no huge massive rush.
Asimov himself wrote about robots that were capable of lying.
"Liar!", from "I, Robot", is about a robot who develops the ability to read minds and lies to people because he interprets hurting their feelings as a violation of the First Law.
"Little Lost Robot" (same book) is about a robot who, after being told vehemently to "get lost!", manages to hide among other robots of the same model and deceives its owners trying to obey that command.
There is no Law of Robotics that states that a robot shall be truthful to a human being, or by inaction allow a human being to be deceived.
My mother once tried to order a gift to be shipped to a friend in New Mexico. She ordered the item, specified all the details, etc, then it came time to set up the shipping address.
The woman on the other end then stated, rather brusquely, that the company did not ship internationally and that their catalog clearly stated that fact.
When my mother reiterated that it was in New Mexico, in the Southern United States, the woman (who worked at a call center in Texas, which happens to share a border with both Mexico (the country) and New Mexico (the US state)) yelled "New Mexico, Old Mexico, what's the difference? Can't you people read? I told you, we don't ship internationally!" and hung up on her.
Latency of the call is highly variable, and dependent on two factors:
1. How much latency is in the network? 2. How much latency is introduced by the VoIP conversion itself?
I joined Vonage about 5 years ago. On my first ISP, I got a little over 3/4 second of latency on a really good ISP connection. This was annoying, but not enough to really make me want to spend two and a half times as much for a landline with a non-portable number. Eventually, Vonage went through a stretch of upgrades to the firmware on my adapter and the latency dropped to about 1/4 second (all but unnoticeable). However, I traveled a lot a couple of years later and found that hotel connections tend to have a lot more latency, so I got a cheap prepaid cell for when I was on the road. I settled down to a local job again and had a lot of trouble with my new ISP for a while, resulting in poor call quality and very high latency, then we got that straightened out and I was back to 1/4-second delay, which was pretty much the rule until my company issued me a cell phone with unlimited minutes, so I ditched my Vonage line because I didn't use it. But friends who have joined since have reported very low delays, almost unnoticeable, as long as their connections were good.
So the technology has improved, but you are still dependent on someone who gives you the better tech, and on a good Internet connection between you and the adapter on the other end where the call is bridged back to a POTS network.
However, landlines have a few features that people have a hard time giving up. Whether you are willing to pay for them is a different matter.
1. No need to manage power to a device. If the wires are up, the connection is the telco's responsibility.
2. Real, honest 911 with pretty much 100% accurate location awareness. Your tax dollars at work (which are a generous chunk of the difference between telco and VoIP).
3. "Feedback loop" (you can hear yourself talk in your earpiece). This helps regulate your volume, which is why people tend to talk louder into cellphones (they don't get that feedback).
4. No-delay talking. When telcos use VoIP, they use really high-end gear and fast networks to support it.
5. True DTMF support. This has gotten a little better, but VoIP for the most part can't carry DTMF tones to sufficient clarity, so your local VoIP adapter has to recognize an attempt at one and generate a fresh tone that your analog gear can recognize. Conversations with people can occasionally be interrupted by a "BEEP" as your VoIP adapter misidentifies a sound in their voice or the background as a DTMF tone and faithfully reproduces it, and you may get occasional complaints of the same issue on the other side . If it fails to reproduce when needed and you run a menu system, your customers will really hate traversing your menus.
The net result of all of that is, well, you get what you pay for. Telcos are expensive, but you are pretty much guaranteed a good call every time. Most of the gear you probably own was built to analog specifications, and the telcos are good at maintaining that spec.
For most of us, cell or VoIP is sufficient. We're OK with slight delays, a less-than-perfect reproduction of our voices, the occasional errant DTMF tone, etc.
If you run a business and you strongly feel that clear telephony is a vital part of your business, then it's probably worth paying for in your case, or at least paying for a REALLY good Internet connection and high-end VoIP gear, not consumer-grade stuff. Though you could always run one VoIP line for a while and see how it works out (just use it for less critical calls to start with).
Some of the higher-end private aircraft actually have a parachute built into the fuselage (See: Cirrus SR-22). But that's expensive, and most private pilots aren't the independently wealthy individuals you seem to think we are. Most of the aircraft I fly are about my age, some are quite a bit older, and I'm over 40.
But there are two very good reasons why private pilots don't carry personal parachutes as a rule:
First and foremost, saving your own life is a lower priority than the lives of the people on the ground. Allowing your aircraft to fly into a house or a playground is unacceptable. Keeping the folks on the ground safe almost always means riding her down all the way.
The other, of course, is the odds of survival.
There are VERY few circumstances that a parachute would save you that your plane would not do a BETTER job of saving you. You've got this great protective metal skin, wings, communications gear, and attitude/directional control. Why in hell would anyone give that up and count on a sheet of fragile fabric instead?
Running out of fuel is rarely fatal. Airplanes don't fall, they glide, and you can trade altitude for airspeed and almost always make a survivable (if not necessarily pretty) landing on pretty much anything that's mostly flat.
But even landings in trees and other very hostile environments are usually survivable if you are smart about it.
What usually ends badly is running out of fuel and getting all panicked about it, and losing focus on the important assets you have at your disposal. First of all is your brain.
Denver was at 500 feet or so, near a beach. That's VERY survivable, normally, if you use the assets at your disposal.
The general procedure is sorta like this:
ENGINE STARTS PRODUCING SILENCE
1. Establish best-glide immediately. Gives you more time to think, more choices of landing spots, etc.
2: Pick your landing spot and head in that general direction. Don't waffle on this - anything big, wide, and flat is pretty survivable.
3: (not on the checklist) Take a very brief moment to accept that the aircraft is (and if necessary you are) now a disposable asset, to be used exclusively to ensure the survival of (1) people on the ground, (2) your passengers, and (3) you. In that order. While saving the aircraft would be nice, it's a really low priority.
After you're done with that, and if you have time left before landing, you can call for help and/or start fiddling with the fuel systems.
Apparently it worked a couple of times for the Russians.
But, to be honest, who knows?
The nuke would have shifted the seabed, which of course is the point, since moving many tons of seabed around a hole has a net effect of filling the hole, and the shockwave would hold the oil in place long enough for a few thousand tons of stuff to settle down over the hole. So in terms of the damage done by that specific hole in the crust "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED", rent a flight suit and a carrier and instant photo op.
But that area was chosen because, well, the crust is pretty thin there. Using a tactical nuke would, in theory, be a very effective way of drilling a very large hole very fast through a thin crust. Whether that hole is desirable or not.
Day one: "Bad news: We had a blowout and we're losing 5,000 barrels of oil into the ocean." RABBLE RABBLE!
Day two: Obama authorizes the release of a tactical nuke strike, planning begins.
Day three: First CNN animation of the plan is aired.
Day eleven: BBBBBOOOOOMMMMMMM!!! And some cool videos hit the news.
Day twelve: "Good news: We filled the small hole, and stopped the 5,000 barrel per day leak." YAY! Rejoicing and self-congratulation at how clever us monkeys are.
Day thirteen: The ocean suddenly turns black over a large area.
Day fourteen: "Bad news: We made a new one the size of Rhode Island, and 50,000 barrels per SECOND are leaking out, and have been for two days now."
Day seventeen: the contamination hits the Pacific ocean after traveling across the Atlantic, hermetically sealing ocean water. Water oxygen temperatures drop, sea life starts to die, drop in evaporation shuts down cloud formation. Droughts start.
Day sixty: the water riots are over, only because the last human has died of thirst or poisoning from drinking contaminated water.
Actually, the real Michael Bay response would probably end in "Day nineteen, someone sets the worldwide ocean slick on fire, starting a spreading conflagration that consumes all oxygen in the atmosphere in a week."
What *wasn't* in the NTSB report: the switch was behind him, in a tight space, and he couldn't see over his shoulder clearly enough to tell if the switch was in the proper place.
That WAS in the NTSB report, in fact Denver and a mechanic discussed it, the mechanic attempted to attach a pair of vice-grips as a workaround, and Denver said he'd use the autopilot to ensure straight-and-level if he had to mess with it in flight. He also refused a refuel stating that he'd be flying for an hour.
But the engineer(s) who put the switch behind the pilot's seat are just as much, if not moreso, to blame
Actually, the aircraft wasn't engineered that way. Someone (apparently a previous owner) modified it. Denver was aware of the modification, aware of its shortcomings, had actually made arrangements to fix it permanently, attempted a failed temporary fix with an A&P mechanic, then decided to fly it anyway without making sure both tanks were full (in fact, the A&P interviewed stated that Denver had initially tried to start the engine on a tank that might have been empty, meaning Denver's attempts to change tanks would have been in vain since he switched to the only tank with an unknown quantity of fuel left before takeoff).
Sorry, John Denver was a great singer. But the blame for the crash rests firmly on his shoulders.
This is a perfect example of a "string of failures". Someone made an ill-considered modification to an aircraft that Denver (an experienced pilot) bought. This modification made it difficult to change tanks. Denver knew about the problem, but completely failed to mitigate it by:
1. Not making sure he had enough fuel on board in his chosen primary tank for a short flight, 2. Not making sure he would be able to switch the tanks while in flight, 3. Apparently not ensuring that his alternate tank had any fuel in it at all, so even if he did manipulate the switch he may well have been switching from one empty to another, 4. Insisting on a short flight before he would be taking a trip that would give his A&P plenty of time to fix the problem and relocate the switch where it belonged.
Proper handling of ANY of the four issues above could have turned the disaster into a safe flight (or at least a case of "being down here, wishing you were up there", which isn't usually fatal like "being up there, wishing you were down here" sometimes is).
But at least pointing at how pathetic Facebook users are apparently gave their own self esteem a little boost.
"We're into junk science, but at least we can make up statistics about another group so we can point and laugh at SOMEONE for being more pathetic than ourselves!"
By the time the various science fiction series comes around, they'll figure out how to make the beam work in space. If they've solved the whole "sound carrying through a vacuum" thing, and designed inertial dampers and artificial gravity that perfectly compensate for turns so as to cause you to lean over as if you were driving a car fast around a tight turn, tractor beams should be simple.
I studied one that I strongly suspected was an attempt to turn us into zombies. A scratchy black-and-white version of Waiting for Godot.
Actually, I got up and walked out half way through the movie. My instructor was not impressed, even after I told him that I got the point and decided to implement it for myself. I'm sure my shouting "He's not fucking coming! Ever!" on my way out didn't earn me any points either.
I always wondered why they added the "ot" at the end of his name, though.
A buddy of mine is considering it. He's IFR and commercial, and he says there's an iPad app that gives him his charts and approach plates and GPS tracking and everything for several hundred dollars a year less than he's paying for paper stuff.
He figures the thing will pay for itself in about 18 months, give or take, though he's still got to have at least a current chart just in case it breaks or the battery goes dead on him or something, so I think the ROI is probably closer to two years.
I'll probably never get enough benefit from it, but having all of the up-to-date information without having to buy new books/charts all the time would be sweet.
A proper open tablet might draw more of an audience, but I'm not even convinced of that. If I got a tablet, it would be for specific purposes. I might not mind a walled garden nearly as much for that purpose. It's not that a tablet would ever replace a main computer for me.
I love netbooks, they are light and portable and great for carry-around computing until my cell phone can slide a paper-thin full-sized keyboard out of the side and project a 10-12" screen on any surface. I can tether my Blackberry to my eeePC and connect to work, I can do almost anything on them I can do on a full desktop, albeit more slowly and on a smaller screen.
I still want a tablet, but it would be a replacement for my old paper kneeboard, AFD, backup GPS, and charts when flying. Trying to set one up as a temporary portable workstation would require that I carry some sort of keyboard, some sort of mounting rig to hold it upright, and a netbook is a better tool for that, and a tablet that can be expanded to that capability would be heavy and unwieldy for my tablet needs.
Different niches, different form factors, very little overlap between the two in real world usage.
The movie would be greatly enhanced with commentary from a guy named "Joel" or "Mike" and two robots (one made up of a couple of sets of salad tongs and the other made from a gumball machine).
Whadya mean? Dell has the same quality it always has. It blows steaming monkey chunks, and always has.
They built machines at the lowest possible cost, save expense by using horrible power supplies, bad motherboards, cases that appear to actively go out of their way to slash veins, and your "customization" allows you to pick what expensive quality components will be burned out by the first voltage spike the "Supar-Powur"-branded power supply puts out.
I used to support friends and family when they saved money listening to pot-buy say "Dude! Buy the Dell!" and saved $50. I'm done.
It always involves having the machine shipped to me, where there's almost always something wrong or broken and I get to wait on hold so I can talk for an hour to someone who claims to be named "Dave" where I'd really rather have them be honest and admit their name is really "Sanjay". Dave/Sanjay is invariably pleasant, personable, patient, and completely and utterly incomprehensible, and trained to delay actually shipping a part or accepting an RMA apparently at the threat of killing a cow.
Then, when all of the parts are in and the machine is working, I have to spend a few hours uninstalling large heaping mounds of trialware, adware, and FSM-knows-what-elseware.
Actually, to clarify... I do recommend Dells to people, as long as they pretend to be a small business and get the corporate machines. They actually make a half-decent corporate workstation, and their Latitude laptops aren't half bad, and not loaded with half the crap that the consumer machines get. But you get what you pay for, and the Latitudes are a tad pricier.
The name "Inspiron", to this day, makes me retch. About the only thing Dell Consumer has going for it is they drove Packard Bell and the original eMachines out of business, which saved me from exposure to boxes that were even worse. So some gratitude there, at least.
To be fair, HP's boxes don't tend to be much better. But Lenovo appears to be trying for the most part to match the quality they were good at when they built machines for IBM. Their ThinkPads are as kick-ass solid as the IBM models, for the most part, though I think they've introduced a lower-cost model that appears to have its share of issues.
only put the "Dell" badge on high-margin - and preferably high-quality - merchandise.
The problem is that Dell already has a pretty solid reputation... for building marginal quality merchandise in the corporate workstation side at the cheapest price, and absolute shit-scraped-off-my-shoe merchandise in the consumer side at even cheaper prices. Price is generally the first, last, and only reason to go Dell in the consumer marketspace. Corporate machines aren't quite as bad, but they are a tad less competitive in that space.
There's a reason their nickname at corporate purchasing a couple of jobs ago was "Packard Dell", and it was not a compliment.
If they seriously want to go quality, they really need a new brand name for that. Plus, they'd lose the last memories of pot-smoking Dell Dude.
In order to understand the difference between the term "truth" and Colbert's made-up word "truthiness", you'd have to, you know, actually watch the show at least once.
Colbert is a comedian who openly uses lies and manipulative humor to get laughs among his followers. He mocks everything in sight, with a double helping reserved for himself. He's in the business of entertainment, not news. He's a complete attention whore because that's what pays the bills.
I don't know the term for the opposite of "comedian", "tragedean", maybe? Whatever the term would be, that's Beck. He openly uses lies and manipulative tragedy to get outrage among his followers. He derides everything in sight, with a double helping reserved for anyone who he thinks his followers might agree with him on. He's in the business of entertainment, not news. He's a complete attention whore because that's what pays the bills.
My understanding is also that there has not yet been any problem with Linux viruses circulating in the wild.
Not as much, but that doesn't make it impossible. Most Linux distro managers maintain ClamAV in their repositories. You might want to consider installing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic. The Unlocked GSM North America edition (assuming you are in the US, and OK with only being able to choose between GSM carriers) was $250 last time I checked. That's about what we paid for it. Data works just fine over my home WiFi connection, and anywhere else you can get access to a WiFi access point. Best part: To your carrier, it's a dumb phone - you can use the GPS and the WiFi and the camera and all the other features and no carrier can tell you you can't, because you are just inserting their damned SIM card and making voice calls.
You CAN use their data plan (and the phone wants to, by default, so be sure you disable the WAN access points for data before you start using lots of data, I spent $10 learning that lesson!). But you can also disable it and tell the phone it can only get data from WiFi, and the phone does this quite nicely. Obviously, the Web browser and data-based apps get cranky when you get out of range, but that's to be expected.
My wife owns one. She wanted a phone she could do things like grocery lists and Facebook on, but didn't really feel a compelling need to connect all the time. Previously, she had a dumb phone and an iPod Touch she carried around, and she wanted to consolidate both to a single device. So now she has a smartphone that she can only use data on when she's at home.
However, being a Symbian phone, this has met her needs pretty damned well. You can work around the lack of a "fully mobile" data plan quite nicely for a lot of things, though obviously not everything.
- UpVise has a shopping list that syncs between your online account and the locally-stored data only when a connection is available. She goes on the Web, updates her shopping list, then syncs it to her phone before she goes to the store. At the store, she ticks off the things she's bought. When she gets back in WiFi range at home, her shopping list is updated on the Web to reflect what she's bought.
- Google allows her to sync email, calendar, and contacts to/from her phone, so she can manage her phone's contacts list on Google, or on the phone, and it syncs between them whenever she is in range. So she can't get email unless she's at a WiFi point, but if we need to communicate, the phone bits work just fine.
- Facebook requires a data connection to do anything with it, but she only does that at home anyway, so she doesn't care.
- Symbian's "Ovi Maps" allows you to store maps locally on the phone, and does voice-directed GPS routing using the locally-stored maps. The only thing she doesn't get is traffic updates, but she can use the GPS for voice-directed driving without a data plan.
- All other apps that don't require constant data (games, etc) can be installed using WiFi when she's at home, then once they are installed they just run, with or without a data plan.
Supposedly, Skype supports Symbian and her phone even has a little front camera to do video conferencing. We haven't tried it, she's got a netbook for that sort of thing with a bigger screen.
I think the physical book costs less than you think it does, and represents a far lower portion of the cost than you are assuming.
If an author gets a 10% royalty, that means they are being paid 10% of the list cover price of each book. For a hardcover, that can be upwards of 2 bucks a copy, and for a paperback that's still about 80 cents. That already means the publisher can "only" reduce the price of the book by 90% to make zero profit. But the publishing house probably paid the author an advance, taking a risk that the book would succeed (and not all of them do). They put work into editing the book, laying it out for various bookreader software, marketing it, doing cover art, and supporting a distribution infrastructure. There's probably twice as much that goes into all that than the original authorship, so let's call that 20% based on current margins.
So now the books cost $6 (hardcover) and $3 (softcover) to make, giving the author and publisher a reasonable chance at profit.
Then you have the distributor, who wants a cut. For electronic copies, that might just be a couple of bucks, but now you're up to $9 new releases and $6 older works.
Lower the cost to $0.25 as you suggest, and the publisher would have to sell 30 times as many copies just to reach their current profit margin, assuming absolutely zero incremental cost in distribution, which is unrealistic, so you're probably looking at 50 times as many or more. I'm not sure those kinds of numbers would be reasonable at all. I might buy more books instead of borrowing library copies if they were a quarter each (and songs, too, for that matter), but 30 times as many? 50? I'm not so sure.
Granted, for a quarter a copy, I'd be willing to tolerate some pretty draconian DRM, and if someone wanted to "borrow" my copy I'd just tell them to buy their own or buy one for them. So there's a certain economics at work at the 25-50 cent price point that you won't get even at the $1 or current $10 price points. But I'm not convinced it would counter the lack of margin on each sale.
Is this because if it was infinite nobody would need to buy a book anymore?
Yes.
This is the perfect example of "dilution of value" that is the heart of the argument against allowing piracy.
An author wrote that book, and expects a certain amount of money in return for that work. The individual copy you got might have cost the author nothing, and you might make the valid argument that you, yourself, would never have purchased the book therefore you are costing the author nothing, but there are a certain number of people who would have purchased the book (earning the author a royalty) who would not purchase the book if it were available for free.
If we want authors to continue writing books, we need to protect a reasonable copyright to reward them for doing so.
Note I said "reasonable", which leads to the other major issue - current multi-generational copyright is anything but "reasonable".
Copyrights should be placed for a certain number of years, not to exceed about 20-30, as originally intended. That gives the author sufficient time to profit from their work. I would also be in favor of strong DRM measures and enforcement laws with real penalties if copyright were set to a reasonable period of time. But, there's a caveat there.
Once that copyright expires, there has to be a provision in the law that makes it legal to circumvent any copy protection the author or publisher has originally placed on the work, or publishers need to file the decryption keys with their copyright application if appropriate, or file an unencrypted version with the copyright office that would automatically be released when the copyright expires.
We also need to have authors legally asserting copyright, not just able to put a (C) on something and call it good. If you want protection provided by law enforcement, you need to file an unencrypted copy of your work with a copyright office so the enforcement body knows what they are looking for, and the clock starts on that protection the instant you file it and have it approved. When your protection runs out, the copyright office should publish the unencrypted work.
Oh, and you'll also need to pay an application fee to pay for the system, because my current tax dollars for law enforcement are intended for protection of real goods and real people, not the protection of your profit margin.
Honestly, does it matter? 10.04 is the latest LTS. LTS is a 2-year cycle. That means we won't see broadcomm open source drivers officially in an LTS until probably 12.04.
10.10 could easily get a broadcomm driver update for those who use it once the driver has been analyzed and tweaked by a few hundred geeks. 10.04 folks can easily backport something like this if they want to.
Meanwhile, the binary works pretty well (despite the Linux purists attitude about binaries, which Ubuntu doesn't really go by anyway).
I applaud Broadcomm for doing this, of course, but there's no huge massive rush.
Asimov himself wrote about robots that were capable of lying.
"Liar!", from "I, Robot", is about a robot who develops the ability to read minds and lies to people because he interprets hurting their feelings as a violation of the First Law.
"Little Lost Robot" (same book) is about a robot who, after being told vehemently to "get lost!", manages to hide among other robots of the same model and deceives its owners trying to obey that command.
There is no Law of Robotics that states that a robot shall be truthful to a human being, or by inaction allow a human being to be deceived.
My mother once tried to order a gift to be shipped to a friend in New Mexico. She ordered the item, specified all the details, etc, then it came time to set up the shipping address.
The woman on the other end then stated, rather brusquely, that the company did not ship internationally and that their catalog clearly stated that fact.
When my mother reiterated that it was in New Mexico, in the Southern United States, the woman (who worked at a call center in Texas, which happens to share a border with both Mexico (the country) and New Mexico (the US state)) yelled "New Mexico, Old Mexico, what's the difference? Can't you people read? I told you, we don't ship internationally!" and hung up on her.
Latency of the call is highly variable, and dependent on two factors:
1. How much latency is in the network?
2. How much latency is introduced by the VoIP conversion itself?
I joined Vonage about 5 years ago. On my first ISP, I got a little over 3/4 second of latency on a really good ISP connection. This was annoying, but not enough to really make me want to spend two and a half times as much for a landline with a non-portable number. Eventually, Vonage went through a stretch of upgrades to the firmware on my adapter and the latency dropped to about 1/4 second (all but unnoticeable). However, I traveled a lot a couple of years later and found that hotel connections tend to have a lot more latency, so I got a cheap prepaid cell for when I was on the road. I settled down to a local job again and had a lot of trouble with my new ISP for a while, resulting in poor call quality and very high latency, then we got that straightened out and I was back to 1/4-second delay, which was pretty much the rule until my company issued me a cell phone with unlimited minutes, so I ditched my Vonage line because I didn't use it. But friends who have joined since have reported very low delays, almost unnoticeable, as long as their connections were good.
So the technology has improved, but you are still dependent on someone who gives you the better tech, and on a good Internet connection between you and the adapter on the other end where the call is bridged back to a POTS network.
However, landlines have a few features that people have a hard time giving up. Whether you are willing to pay for them is a different matter.
1. No need to manage power to a device. If the wires are up, the connection is the telco's responsibility.
2. Real, honest 911 with pretty much 100% accurate location awareness. Your tax dollars at work (which are a generous chunk of the difference between telco and VoIP).
3. "Feedback loop" (you can hear yourself talk in your earpiece). This helps regulate your volume, which is why people tend to talk louder into cellphones (they don't get that feedback).
4. No-delay talking. When telcos use VoIP, they use really high-end gear and fast networks to support it.
5. True DTMF support. This has gotten a little better, but VoIP for the most part can't carry DTMF tones to sufficient clarity, so your local VoIP adapter has to recognize an attempt at one and generate a fresh tone that your analog gear can recognize. Conversations with people can occasionally be interrupted by a "BEEP" as your VoIP adapter misidentifies a sound in their voice or the background as a DTMF tone and faithfully reproduces it, and you may get occasional complaints of the same issue on the other side . If it fails to reproduce when needed and you run a menu system, your customers will really hate traversing your menus.
The net result of all of that is, well, you get what you pay for. Telcos are expensive, but you are pretty much guaranteed a good call every time. Most of the gear you probably own was built to analog specifications, and the telcos are good at maintaining that spec.
For most of us, cell or VoIP is sufficient. We're OK with slight delays, a less-than-perfect reproduction of our voices, the occasional errant DTMF tone, etc.
If you run a business and you strongly feel that clear telephony is a vital part of your business, then it's probably worth paying for in your case, or at least paying for a REALLY good Internet connection and high-end VoIP gear, not consumer-grade stuff. Though you could always run one VoIP line for a while and see how it works out (just use it for less critical calls to start with).
Some of the higher-end private aircraft actually have a parachute built into the fuselage (See: Cirrus SR-22). But that's expensive, and most private pilots aren't the independently wealthy individuals you seem to think we are. Most of the aircraft I fly are about my age, some are quite a bit older, and I'm over 40.
But there are two very good reasons why private pilots don't carry personal parachutes as a rule:
First and foremost, saving your own life is a lower priority than the lives of the people on the ground. Allowing your aircraft to fly into a house or a playground is unacceptable. Keeping the folks on the ground safe almost always means riding her down all the way.
The other, of course, is the odds of survival.
There are VERY few circumstances that a parachute would save you that your plane would not do a BETTER job of saving you. You've got this great protective metal skin, wings, communications gear, and attitude/directional control. Why in hell would anyone give that up and count on a sheet of fragile fabric instead?
Running out of fuel is rarely fatal. Airplanes don't fall, they glide, and you can trade altitude for airspeed and almost always make a survivable (if not necessarily pretty) landing on pretty much anything that's mostly flat.
But even landings in trees and other very hostile environments are usually survivable if you are smart about it.
What usually ends badly is running out of fuel and getting all panicked about it, and losing focus on the important assets you have at your disposal. First of all is your brain.
Denver was at 500 feet or so, near a beach. That's VERY survivable, normally, if you use the assets at your disposal.
The general procedure is sorta like this:
ENGINE STARTS PRODUCING SILENCE
1. Establish best-glide immediately. Gives you more time to think, more choices of landing spots, etc.
2: Pick your landing spot and head in that general direction. Don't waffle on this - anything big, wide, and flat is pretty survivable.
3: (not on the checklist) Take a very brief moment to accept that the aircraft is (and if necessary you are) now a disposable asset, to be used exclusively to ensure the survival of (1) people on the ground, (2) your passengers, and (3) you. In that order. While saving the aircraft would be nice, it's a really low priority.
After you're done with that, and if you have time left before landing, you can call for help and/or start fiddling with the fuel systems.
Apparently it worked a couple of times for the Russians.
But, to be honest, who knows?
The nuke would have shifted the seabed, which of course is the point, since moving many tons of seabed around a hole has a net effect of filling the hole, and the shockwave would hold the oil in place long enough for a few thousand tons of stuff to settle down over the hole. So in terms of the damage done by that specific hole in the crust "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED", rent a flight suit and a carrier and instant photo op.
But that area was chosen because, well, the crust is pretty thin there. Using a tactical nuke would, in theory, be a very effective way of drilling a very large hole very fast through a thin crust. Whether that hole is desirable or not.
http://xkcd.com/748/
Michael Bay scenario for this one:
Day one: "Bad news: We had a blowout and we're losing 5,000 barrels of oil into the ocean."
RABBLE RABBLE!
Day two: Obama authorizes the release of a tactical nuke strike, planning begins.
Day three: First CNN animation of the plan is aired.
Day eleven: BBBBBOOOOOMMMMMMM!!! And some cool videos hit the news.
Day twelve: "Good news: We filled the small hole, and stopped the 5,000 barrel per day leak." YAY! Rejoicing and self-congratulation at how clever us monkeys are.
Day thirteen: The ocean suddenly turns black over a large area.
Day fourteen: "Bad news: We made a new one the size of Rhode Island, and 50,000 barrels per SECOND are leaking out, and have been for two days now."
Day seventeen: the contamination hits the Pacific ocean after traveling across the Atlantic, hermetically sealing ocean water. Water oxygen temperatures drop, sea life starts to die, drop in evaporation shuts down cloud formation. Droughts start.
Day sixty: the water riots are over, only because the last human has died of thirst or poisoning from drinking contaminated water.
Actually, the real Michael Bay response would probably end in "Day nineteen, someone sets the worldwide ocean slick on fire, starting a spreading conflagration that consumes all oxygen in the atmosphere in a week."
What *wasn't* in the NTSB report: the switch was behind him, in a tight space, and he couldn't see over his shoulder clearly enough to tell if the switch was in the proper place.
That WAS in the NTSB report, in fact Denver and a mechanic discussed it, the mechanic attempted to attach a pair of vice-grips as a workaround, and Denver said he'd use the autopilot to ensure straight-and-level if he had to mess with it in flight. He also refused a refuel stating that he'd be flying for an hour.
http://www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/GenPDF.asp?id=LAX98FA008&rpt=fa
But the engineer(s) who put the switch behind the pilot's seat are just as much, if not moreso, to blame
Actually, the aircraft wasn't engineered that way. Someone (apparently a previous owner) modified it. Denver was aware of the modification, aware of its shortcomings, had actually made arrangements to fix it permanently, attempted a failed temporary fix with an A&P mechanic, then decided to fly it anyway without making sure both tanks were full (in fact, the A&P interviewed stated that Denver had initially tried to start the engine on a tank that might have been empty, meaning Denver's attempts to change tanks would have been in vain since he switched to the only tank with an unknown quantity of fuel left before takeoff).
Sorry, John Denver was a great singer. But the blame for the crash rests firmly on his shoulders.
This is a perfect example of a "string of failures". Someone made an ill-considered modification to an aircraft that Denver (an experienced pilot) bought. This modification made it difficult to change tanks. Denver knew about the problem, but completely failed to mitigate it by:
1. Not making sure he had enough fuel on board in his chosen primary tank for a short flight,
2. Not making sure he would be able to switch the tanks while in flight,
3. Apparently not ensuring that his alternate tank had any fuel in it at all, so even if he did manipulate the switch he may well have been switching from one empty to another,
4. Insisting on a short flight before he would be taking a trip that would give his A&P plenty of time to fix the problem and relocate the switch where it belonged.
Proper handling of ANY of the four issues above could have turned the disaster into a safe flight (or at least a case of "being down here, wishing you were up there", which isn't usually fatal like "being up there, wishing you were down here" sometimes is).
They must have been stress-testing the site blowout preventer by attempting to Slashdot it.
But at least pointing at how pathetic Facebook users are apparently gave their own self esteem a little boost.
"We're into junk science, but at least we can make up statistics about another group so we can point and laugh at SOMEONE for being more pathetic than ourselves!"
By the time the various science fiction series comes around, they'll figure out how to make the beam work in space. If they've solved the whole "sound carrying through a vacuum" thing, and designed inertial dampers and artificial gravity that perfectly compensate for turns so as to cause you to lean over as if you were driving a car fast around a tight turn, tractor beams should be simple.
Lone Star: "We're caught in a tweezer beam, it's pulling us in!"
Does that work better?
I studied one that I strongly suspected was an attempt to turn us into zombies. A scratchy black-and-white version of Waiting for Godot.
Actually, I got up and walked out half way through the movie. My instructor was not impressed, even after I told him that I got the point and decided to implement it for myself. I'm sure my shouting "He's not fucking coming! Ever!" on my way out didn't earn me any points either.
I always wondered why they added the "ot" at the end of his name, though.
My tractor has a reverse gear. Don't they all? :)
shitty pun about ambient gas
No point now, you've already made it.
A buddy of mine is considering it. He's IFR and commercial, and he says there's an iPad app that gives him his charts and approach plates and GPS tracking and everything for several hundred dollars a year less than he's paying for paper stuff.
He figures the thing will pay for itself in about 18 months, give or take, though he's still got to have at least a current chart just in case it breaks or the battery goes dead on him or something, so I think the ROI is probably closer to two years.
I'll probably never get enough benefit from it, but having all of the up-to-date information without having to buy new books/charts all the time would be sweet.
No, no, and no. Did I mention no?
A proper open tablet might draw more of an audience, but I'm not even convinced of that. If I got a tablet, it would be for specific purposes. I might not mind a walled garden nearly as much for that purpose. It's not that a tablet would ever replace a main computer for me.
I love netbooks, they are light and portable and great for carry-around computing until my cell phone can slide a paper-thin full-sized keyboard out of the side and project a 10-12" screen on any surface. I can tether my Blackberry to my eeePC and connect to work, I can do almost anything on them I can do on a full desktop, albeit more slowly and on a smaller screen.
I still want a tablet, but it would be a replacement for my old paper kneeboard, AFD, backup GPS, and charts when flying. Trying to set one up as a temporary portable workstation would require that I carry some sort of keyboard, some sort of mounting rig to hold it upright, and a netbook is a better tool for that, and a tablet that can be expanded to that capability would be heavy and unwieldy for my tablet needs.
Different niches, different form factors, very little overlap between the two in real world usage.
I wish there was some way to direct these things.
Many would say the same about "Armageddon", but I digress, and the problems started long before and go way deeper than just directing.
The movie would be greatly enhanced with commentary from a guy named "Joel" or "Mike" and two robots (one made up of a couple of sets of salad tongs and the other made from a gumball machine).
Just sayin'
3) What happened to quality?
Whadya mean? Dell has the same quality it always has. It blows steaming monkey chunks, and always has.
They built machines at the lowest possible cost, save expense by using horrible power supplies, bad motherboards, cases that appear to actively go out of their way to slash veins, and your "customization" allows you to pick what expensive quality components will be burned out by the first voltage spike the "Supar-Powur"-branded power supply puts out.
I used to support friends and family when they saved money listening to pot-buy say "Dude! Buy the Dell!" and saved $50. I'm done.
It always involves having the machine shipped to me, where there's almost always something wrong or broken and I get to wait on hold so I can talk for an hour to someone who claims to be named "Dave" where I'd really rather have them be honest and admit their name is really "Sanjay". Dave/Sanjay is invariably pleasant, personable, patient, and completely and utterly incomprehensible, and trained to delay actually shipping a part or accepting an RMA apparently at the threat of killing a cow.
Then, when all of the parts are in and the machine is working, I have to spend a few hours uninstalling large heaping mounds of trialware, adware, and FSM-knows-what-elseware.
Actually, to clarify... I do recommend Dells to people, as long as they pretend to be a small business and get the corporate machines. They actually make a half-decent corporate workstation, and their Latitude laptops aren't half bad, and not loaded with half the crap that the consumer machines get. But you get what you pay for, and the Latitudes are a tad pricier.
The name "Inspiron", to this day, makes me retch. About the only thing Dell Consumer has going for it is they drove Packard Bell and the original eMachines out of business, which saved me from exposure to boxes that were even worse. So some gratitude there, at least.
To be fair, HP's boxes don't tend to be much better. But Lenovo appears to be trying for the most part to match the quality they were good at when they built machines for IBM. Their ThinkPads are as kick-ass solid as the IBM models, for the most part, though I think they've introduced a lower-cost model that appears to have its share of issues.
only put the "Dell" badge on high-margin - and preferably high-quality - merchandise.
The problem is that Dell already has a pretty solid reputation... for building marginal quality merchandise in the corporate workstation side at the cheapest price, and absolute shit-scraped-off-my-shoe merchandise in the consumer side at even cheaper prices. Price is generally the first, last, and only reason to go Dell in the consumer marketspace. Corporate machines aren't quite as bad, but they are a tad less competitive in that space.
There's a reason their nickname at corporate purchasing a couple of jobs ago was "Packard Dell", and it was not a compliment.
If they seriously want to go quality, they really need a new brand name for that. Plus, they'd lose the last memories of pot-smoking Dell Dude.
In order to understand the difference between the term "truth" and Colbert's made-up word "truthiness", you'd have to, you know, actually watch the show at least once.
Colbert is a comedian who openly uses lies and manipulative humor to get laughs among his followers. He mocks everything in sight, with a double helping reserved for himself. He's in the business of entertainment, not news. He's a complete attention whore because that's what pays the bills.
I don't know the term for the opposite of "comedian", "tragedean", maybe? Whatever the term would be, that's Beck. He openly uses lies and manipulative tragedy to get outrage among his followers. He derides everything in sight, with a double helping reserved for anyone who he thinks his followers might agree with him on. He's in the business of entertainment, not news. He's a complete attention whore because that's what pays the bills.
My understanding is also that there has not yet been any problem with Linux viruses circulating in the wild.
Not as much, but that doesn't make it impossible. Most Linux distro managers maintain ClamAV in their repositories. You might want to consider installing it.