but will it work with my family's ATT wireless plan?
Short version: yes. AT&T's GSM network does not automatically boot off devices that it doesnt recognize, although you will get no customer support for a device that hasn't gone through their extensive network certification process.
So your family plan will work if you swap your current SIMs out of your devices and into this phone. If you go into an AT&T store and say "what plans can I get with my Neo900?" they will stare at you blankly and try to sell you an iPhone... not out of malice but because they have no idea what it is. If the Neo900 has a different sized-SIM than what you currently use, just ask AT&T for a new SIM of that size with no device order and do the swap, it should work.
a row of white goblins suddenly ran single file across the highway, they were about 3 foot tall with one big red "Cyclops" eye that took up their entire face . They kept coming out of the thick scrub all in neat single file
I did that mission in GTA V, too. Did you have the chain gun as well?
Not necessarily. What it means is that my bitcoins are not worth [coins] x [current value], but instead are worth [what I sell today] x [current value], and [what I sell tomorrow] x [whatever the value is then], and so on. The actual number could end up being either much higher or much lower.
If you can sell them for $1 million, then by definition they are worth $1 million.
It seems pretty simple on the surface but it's actually not. The point that the GP post was trying to make is that in a small or illiquid market, large sales volumes can actually depress prices by introducing too much inventory to sell vs. people willing to buy. This is a somewhat different example, but back in the day when Bill Gates still had a meaningful percentage of all Microsoft's shares, he would be said in the media to be worth "[his share total] x [current MSFT quote]." But people who knew the market actually understood that if he ever decided to liquidate his shares all at once they would be worth far less because he would actually flood the market (leaving aside the fact that if people figured out that Bill Gates was selling all his MSFT shares, they would flee the stock in droves assuming he knew something they didn't.)
So long story short - if I have a trivial number of [shares, rare items, whatever] compared to the market size, then, yes, they are worth [quantity] x [going price]. But if I have a quantity that is significant to the size of the ability to make markets and I try to sell it all at once, it will invariably be worth far less.
News flash: highly successful engineer who did not go to business school thinks business school is a waste.
Shocking update: highly successful businessperson who went to business school thinks engineers don't know what they're talking about.
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
No, he didn't. That was the brilliant mathematician, comedian and pianist Tom Lehrer putting words into von Braun's mouth.
That doesn't necessarily discount your assertions about von Braun's complicity with the Nazi regime, but you should know better than to call someone a "stupid sack of shit" based off a (pretty obviously) fake quote that was meant as a joke.
They are also the reason most websites on the Internet are free. They are the reason Gmail is free, maps, and, hell, even Android are free. Everything on the Internet that isn't a charity needs to get paid for, and if you aren't buying something then an advertiser is paying in order to get to you.
It sucks that some ads are annoying and intrusive. Those should be avoided at all costs along with the sites that allow them. But advertisers don't ruin everything about the Internet... they actually are responsible for 95% of the Internet being free of charge.
you are in a dream world if you think these people work 2500 times harder, better, smarter than the average worker.
Pay has nothing to do with that. At all. This is a common misunderstanding on Slashdot. Your pay is based on what the market says you're worth. The more skills a job requires / the fewer people there are with those skills = more pay.
There are a lot of people willing to work checkout counters, sweep floors and run the fry machine (BTW I have done all three at one point or another) because they don't have the skills or experience to get a different job. By contrast, there are a comparatively very very small number of people with the expertise and experience to justify putting a company with tens of billions of dollars in revenue and jobs of tens of thousands of workers and the money of tens of millions of shareholders in their hands. Many of them suck at the job once they are given it, but you have only a small pool of people with even close to the right experiences and skills to pick from, so there you go.
I don't think that star NFL running backs are worth what they are paid, nor plumbers, nor wedding photographers. But you know what? They make that money because of the market, and I don't begrudge them that money since it's a lot better way to handle it than a socialist government picking how much money people should make for them. BTW I do think it's probably time to raise the minimum wage, but I think your point was more concerned with lowering the top of the scale than raising the bottom.
The right wing tends to be against regs that they/think/ affect people like them.
Precisely. The right wing in America is pro- all the personal freedoms enjoyed by a typical white male middle class homeowner in, say, Lexington Kentucky. Freedom to do what you want with your land? Check. Freedom to worship? Check. Freedom to smoke cigarettes? Check. Freedom from things like size limits on sodas, plastic bag bans and whatnot? Check.
But other personal freedoms - say maybe those valued by a twenty something woman in LA? Freedom to smoke dope? Nope. Freedom to engage in non-standard sexual practices? Nope. Freedom to have an abortion or have easy access to contraception? Nope. Freedom to get married if you're gay? Nope. Freedom from terrible atmospheric quality or water pollution? Nope. Freedom to avoid religious expression if you don't want it in your government? Nope.
These are all generalizations - not all right wingers favor sodomy laws, and not all liberals favor things like the Bloomberg Soda Ban. But it's important to remember that both US parties claim to support personal freedom. They just have different people's ideas of personal freedom in mind.
Why did you hire all these bad employees in the first place? Seems like an HR/management problem to me.
If you have figured out the magic formula to never ever hire a bad employee, we'd all love to hear it and how well it has worked at the scale of a large company.
The difference is that Google can't put me in jail on trumped up charges
So you think the police - if they wanted to frame you for something - couldn't do it before, but now Wi-Fi is going to change all that? Do you really think that if the police want you badly enough to fake evidence of a crime, they didn't have lots of other ways to do it already? Nobody is building multimillion dollar Wi-Fi networks just to do something they already had lots of ways to accomplish if they really wanted to.
The cops aren't setting this up for Joe citizen to use, it's for their use in emergencies. Maybe they can track you, maybe they can't, but we have no idea if they even have any interest in doing that. I live in Seattle and The Stranger is a fun alternative weekly, but they also enjoy stirring the pot and it's probably not a good idea to take their suppositions as fact.
Only on Slashdot can you get the same people freaking out because the police set up a Wi-Fi network that may know where you are even though they may have no intention of ever doing that... who will turn around and cheer Google for putting up municipal Wi-Fi that is definitely being used to track you and your location, browsing, mail, search and personal buying habits and send you ads. Why is the police Wi-Fi network the one that people are worried about?
...a password is transient knowledge and not a thing a single one person can possess. To me, a more apt analogy might be an employer trying to force a former employee to write down any thoughts they might have had related to their former position.
Huh? It's more like if you had a safe containing your money and paid one of your employees to maintain the safe and its contents, and he refused to tell you the combination of the safe.
[Karma suicide coming]
Reading about this whole Terry Childs thing on Slashdot has always amazed me. For what seemed like years, whenever this topic came up every post was flooded with "zOMG Terry Childs was justified because the mayor didn't know how to secure his servers!!!!" rhetoric. It seemed to make no sense except for geeks rooting for a fellow geek, regardless of what the real issues at stake were. Same goes for the teeming Slashbot hordes who insisted for months and months on Hans Reiser's innocence and how he was FRAMED, I TELL YOU. Or the people who previously would have condemned Kim Dotcom as a fraudster and spammer but who lionized him because the copyright police came after him. And frankly the same goes for the "zOMG Julian Assange was FRAMED by the CIA and the NSA because the MPAA owns Sweden or whatever" crowd. Occam's razor folks - if the US government wants to get their hands on somebody, they do what they tried to do to Edward Snowden, i.e. attempt to extradite them, not somehow make up fake rape charges in a separate country that doesn't even really like the US anyway.
Look, it's hardly a unique failing or blindness - most humans exhibit bad confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. But I just find it disappointing to find such prevalence of this behavior in a group that prides itself on its capacity for critical thinking.
some satellite internet services use DSL for the upstream connection
I've never heard of that... can you expound?
GlobalStar is a low earth orbit (about 60 miles up)
That would be REALLY low orbit.:-) That's basically the Karman line, which would be a ticket to almost immediate atmospheric blowtorching at the the speed required to orbit there. Multiply that altitude by about four and you're in the right ballpark for LEO.
To keep satellite costs down, the system is a "bent-pipe," so availability will depend on whether GlobalStar has a ground station somewhere near where you are using it. Having to license ground stations in hundreds of different countries is what really held back development of this system.
Very true. The good news is that Globalstar does have coverage of most of the world's landmasses, or at least the part that have many people in them. Globalstar even has a map up of where they cover. Globalstar's larger problem until recently was that many of their satellites had onboard failures that in essence made them one-way connections... only a few were left with full two-way functionality so you had to consult a calendar to see what hours of the day there would be an uplink-capable satellite in range of you. Not much fun.
Last I heard [Iridium] had been appropriated by the US military (they liked that all calls went through the US instead of ground stations in other countries). I don't know whether civil service is available any more.
It's very much still around and available for commercial service. Iridium has two hubs - one for defense traffic, and another for commercial traffic, both of which are in the US. The reason the US military liked Iridium wasn't so much the "all in the US" thing - remember, they have military bases around the world where they could set up earth stations if needed. It was that the satellite-to-satellite routing aspect of Iridium you mentioned means it's the only communications satellite constellation I'm aware of that has literally 100% pole to pole coverage, 24/7.
"Having 8,000 miles between you and the Internet is not a good idea."
It's more like 22,000+ miles up, 22,000+ miles down, and whatever the distance is between your satellite provider's earth station and wherever the server is that you're trying to reach. Even at the speed of light, it takes a little while. Real world ping times over VSAT satellite connections are more in the 1-3 second range though, not 10.
Correct in terms of what the submitter asked for, but he/she pretty much asked for the moon and the stars (no pun intended). There are usable services out there but, to your point, they don't provide anything like what was requested.
I can't speak to what's available in South America, but in the US you can find cheap satellite Internet service for around $200 upfront and $50 a month but the contention ratios are several hundred to one. For lower contention ratios like 10:1, you'll need a business class service that will run anywhere from $200 to $800/month for VSAT... a dedicated broadband SCPC connection with no contention is easily $10K or more per month and just as much or more for equipment.
If you're living in somewhere far North where the line of sight is lower and weather is worse, expect that upfront VSAT equipment will quickly run up to a couple thousand dollars since you need a bigger dish and higher-power transmitter. The "rain fade" thing the submitter refers to is particularly a problem with Ka-band services that are used on the consumer-grade services; enterprise-grade Ku-band services have much less of a problem with it. If you throw at 2-meter dish and an 8-watt transmitter at the problem, you can burn through almost any weather on either Ka or Ku, but again, that's a lot of $$$ to spend on the equipment.
BTW these are all for VSAT "broadband-ish" services using geosynchronous orbit satellites so you have a minimum real world latency of 600 ms. I saw another poster refer to using Iridium to get lower ping times (since that's Low Earth Orbit) but Iridium is just not usable for anything above 128 kbps in the best possible circumstance. It's just physics at work... an omnidirectional transmitter looking at LEO satellites whizzing overhead can't bring to bear the right amount of power as you get with a fixed dish always pointed at one point in the sky.
Long story short: satellite Internet is something you use because you have to, not because you want to. Lower your expectations and you'll find something economically reasonable. Keep your expectations high and you just won't be able to pay for it unless you're turning around and selling some of that bandwidth to others to defray the cost... and even then it's iffy.
The brand, the shiny retail space, the reassuringly high price that must mean it's made of better quality materials.
Where did he mention any of this? You seem to be stuck in some preconceived notions that everyone who buys a Mac is some kind of foppish dandy writing a screenplay at Starbucks who knows nothing about computers and hence buys it only because it's expensive and shiny. Do you actually know a significant number of people who use Macs, and are they all like that? Or are you just working from decade-old Penny Arcade tropes and second-hand Slashthink?
I'm not having a go at your personally, just pointing out how stereotypes operate, and why it's hard for the rest of us to take your comment too seriously.
Since the latest movies have rewritten the universe, I guess anything that relates to the old universe is public domain?
This right here is why I love Slashdot. Absolutely nowhere else on the Internet can you find people with otherwise highly above-average IQs who may seriously believe that retcons trump copyright law.
Re:A shot at other OS, computer *and* device maker
on
Apple Announces iPad Air
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The vast bulk of the market has already turned it's back on this notion of "design". Once you take that away, Apple is nothing special at all.
I promised myself a long time ago to stop replying in Slashdot Apple fanboy/troll wars, but this one really got me.
Having used all modern OSes quite a bit, I can tell you plainly that if you think Apple is about fancy hardware cases and rounded corners, you don't get it. Please do not make comparisons to Windows commodity PCs solely based on hardware, because that's not what Apple is about on the desktop. Unlike almost anyone else in the industry, Apple is a software company that makes their money with hardware.
Their goal is to sell you a high-margin, high-end piece of hardware that may not be differentiated based on hardware, but is differentiated based on shipping with a UNIX-based OS that has a slick and efficient UI; integrated cloud sharing and automatic backups; bundled office apps that can match or beat MS Office/LibreOffice; iLife apps (iMovie, iPhoto, Garage Band) that have so serious free competition; and an integrated entertainment ecosystem (iTunes) that nobody else but Amazon comes close to (sorry, Google Play is nowhere near competitive for a desktop user). "I can get the equivalent hardware for cheaper with Windows or Ubuntu" is a false argument, because it's the software that makes a Mac special. I know there are "lots" of people who buy Macs and install a different OS on them, but I think that's a Slashdot-centric view of "lots" - a.k.a. "lots of people buy Raspberry Pis."
YMMV as to what that software differentiation is worth, but for those who buy Macs, the answer is clearly "it's worth a lot and still a bargain."
I think that's a pretty common misunderstanding of "escape velocity" but it's a little scary that a teacher would misunderstand it. Escape velocity isn't a speed that you have to travel constantly - you are correct that you could fly steadily away from the Earth at 1 mph and eventually escape the gravity well. My understanding was that escape velocity is meant to represent the "initial speed required to go from an initial point in a gravitational potential field to infinity with a residual velocity of zero," meaning (oversimplified) that if I wanted to stand on the ground and throw a baseball and have it just leave Earth's gravitational well, it would have to leave my hand traveling at 25,000 mph (the "escape velocity" your teacher referred to).
Except for, you know, that part where the Asians, Jews, Irish, Germans, etc. did their paperwork to get in.
One critical difference is that my (Irish, German) ancestors came to the US back when all you had to do was show up. You got your paperwork done when you arrived because the US was still taking all comers. Today we restrict immigration heavily... my ancestors either wouldn't have come or - who knows - might have tried to get in illegally.
I'm not saying that what illegal immigrants do is right. But I'm saying it's very easy for most of us to look down on it because our ancestors didn't have the same hard time getting here legally that current would-be immigrants do.
Correct me if I'm wrong but settlements outside of court cannot be converted to wage garnishments, right?
Not true. But hopefully IsoHunt was a corporation, not an individual proprietorship or partnership. Part of the purpose of a corporation's "legal personhood" is that wrongdoing on the part of the corporation cannot be transferred to the people who worked there or owned it. Of course, a corporation won't stop individuals for being charged with crimes, but a lawsuit settlement that bankrupts a company should not then bankrupt the individuals behind that corporation assuming they set things up properly.
This corporate protection from individual liability works for the bad guys, it works for good guys, it works for everyone.
Real investigative journalism is a passion, it is expensive and it is exhausting.
100% agree. Slashdotters, please remember this the next time you complain about any news source that does original, investigative journalism wanting to - gasp - show you ads or charge you for a subscription.
Recycling press releases can be done for free. REAL journalism takes dedication and money to pay the people who are doing the work.
Why is that?... I don't understand where this arbitrary distinction of "that's not a computer" comes from.
Yes, technically they are all computers. Maybe it would be better to find a new set of terms to describe the difference between a handheld device and a traditional PC.
But the distinction is important because (generally speaking) people use these types of devices differently, and that has a big impact on user interface, what capabilities are important to the typical user, and what to optimize the user experience for. All the Slashdotters who show up to every dicussion on Windows 8 or OS X bemoaning "they're trying to make Windows into Windows Phone!" or "stop making my Mac like my iPad!" are evidence of the importance of that dichotomy.
Slashdot Mirror
but will it work with my family's ATT wireless plan?
Short version: yes. AT&T's GSM network does not automatically boot off devices that it doesnt recognize, although you will get no customer support for a device that hasn't gone through their extensive network certification process.
So your family plan will work if you swap your current SIMs out of your devices and into this phone. If you go into an AT&T store and say "what plans can I get with my Neo900?" they will stare at you blankly and try to sell you an iPhone... not out of malice but because they have no idea what it is. If the Neo900 has a different sized-SIM than what you currently use, just ask AT&T for a new SIM of that size with no device order and do the swap, it should work.
a row of white goblins suddenly ran single file across the highway, they were about 3 foot tall with one big red "Cyclops" eye that took up their entire face . They kept coming out of the thick scrub all in neat single file
I did that mission in GTA V, too. Did you have the chain gun as well?
it doesn't make them any more or less valuable.
Not necessarily. What it means is that my bitcoins are not worth [coins] x [current value], but instead are worth [what I sell today] x [current value], and [what I sell tomorrow] x [whatever the value is then], and so on. The actual number could end up being either much higher or much lower.
If you can sell them for $1 million, then by definition they are worth $1 million.
It seems pretty simple on the surface but it's actually not. The point that the GP post was trying to make is that in a small or illiquid market, large sales volumes can actually depress prices by introducing too much inventory to sell vs. people willing to buy. This is a somewhat different example, but back in the day when Bill Gates still had a meaningful percentage of all Microsoft's shares, he would be said in the media to be worth "[his share total] x [current MSFT quote]." But people who knew the market actually understood that if he ever decided to liquidate his shares all at once they would be worth far less because he would actually flood the market (leaving aside the fact that if people figured out that Bill Gates was selling all his MSFT shares, they would flee the stock in droves assuming he knew something they didn't.)
So long story short - if I have a trivial number of [shares, rare items, whatever] compared to the market size, then, yes, they are worth [quantity] x [going price]. But if I have a quantity that is significant to the size of the ability to make markets and I try to sell it all at once, it will invariably be worth far less.
News flash: highly successful engineer who did not go to business school thinks business school is a waste.
Shocking update: highly successful businessperson who went to business school thinks engineers don't know what they're talking about.
This is pretty normal... the path you took to get where you are starts to look like the best or only path. There is room for all specialties and approaches when used in the right way and mixed with other viewpoints.
For the same reason there's one in Hawai'i.
Which is?
Because there's a glottal stop there in the original pronounciation that is hard to reflect in English characters without it.
Werner von Braun said those words
No, he didn't. That was the brilliant mathematician, comedian and pianist Tom Lehrer putting words into von Braun's mouth.
That doesn't necessarily discount your assertions about von Braun's complicity with the Nazi regime, but you should know better than to call someone a "stupid sack of shit" based off a (pretty obviously) fake quote that was meant as a joke.
Advertisers ruin everything about the internet
They are also the reason most websites on the Internet are free. They are the reason Gmail is free, maps, and, hell, even Android are free. Everything on the Internet that isn't a charity needs to get paid for, and if you aren't buying something then an advertiser is paying in order to get to you.
It sucks that some ads are annoying and intrusive. Those should be avoided at all costs along with the sites that allow them. But advertisers don't ruin everything about the Internet ... they actually are responsible for 95% of the Internet being free of charge.
you are in a dream world if you think these people work 2500 times harder, better, smarter than the average worker.
Pay has nothing to do with that. At all. This is a common misunderstanding on Slashdot. Your pay is based on what the market says you're worth. The more skills a job requires / the fewer people there are with those skills = more pay.
There are a lot of people willing to work checkout counters, sweep floors and run the fry machine (BTW I have done all three at one point or another) because they don't have the skills or experience to get a different job. By contrast, there are a comparatively very very small number of people with the expertise and experience to justify putting a company with tens of billions of dollars in revenue and jobs of tens of thousands of workers and the money of tens of millions of shareholders in their hands. Many of them suck at the job once they are given it, but you have only a small pool of people with even close to the right experiences and skills to pick from, so there you go.
I don't think that star NFL running backs are worth what they are paid, nor plumbers, nor wedding photographers. But you know what? They make that money because of the market, and I don't begrudge them that money since it's a lot better way to handle it than a socialist government picking how much money people should make for them. BTW I do think it's probably time to raise the minimum wage, but I think your point was more concerned with lowering the top of the scale than raising the bottom.
The right wing tends to be against regs that they /think/ affect people like them.
Precisely. The right wing in America is pro- all the personal freedoms enjoyed by a typical white male middle class homeowner in, say, Lexington Kentucky. Freedom to do what you want with your land? Check. Freedom to worship? Check. Freedom to smoke cigarettes? Check. Freedom from things like size limits on sodas, plastic bag bans and whatnot? Check.
But other personal freedoms - say maybe those valued by a twenty something woman in LA? Freedom to smoke dope? Nope. Freedom to engage in non-standard sexual practices? Nope. Freedom to have an abortion or have easy access to contraception? Nope. Freedom to get married if you're gay? Nope. Freedom from terrible atmospheric quality or water pollution? Nope. Freedom to avoid religious expression if you don't want it in your government? Nope.
These are all generalizations - not all right wingers favor sodomy laws, and not all liberals favor things like the Bloomberg Soda Ban. But it's important to remember that both US parties claim to support personal freedom. They just have different people's ideas of personal freedom in mind.
Why did you hire all these bad employees in the first place? Seems like an HR/management problem to me.
If you have figured out the magic formula to never ever hire a bad employee, we'd all love to hear it and how well it has worked at the scale of a large company.
The difference is that Google can't put me in jail on trumped up charges
So you think the police - if they wanted to frame you for something - couldn't do it before, but now Wi-Fi is going to change all that? Do you really think that if the police want you badly enough to fake evidence of a crime, they didn't have lots of other ways to do it already? Nobody is building multimillion dollar Wi-Fi networks just to do something they already had lots of ways to accomplish if they really wanted to.
This is insightful? Really?
The cops aren't setting this up for Joe citizen to use, it's for their use in emergencies. Maybe they can track you, maybe they can't, but we have no idea if they even have any interest in doing that. I live in Seattle and The Stranger is a fun alternative weekly, but they also enjoy stirring the pot and it's probably not a good idea to take their suppositions as fact.
Only on Slashdot can you get the same people freaking out because the police set up a Wi-Fi network that may know where you are even though they may have no intention of ever doing that ... who will turn around and cheer Google for putting up municipal Wi-Fi that is definitely being used to track you and your location, browsing, mail, search and personal buying habits and send you ads. Why is the police Wi-Fi network the one that people are worried about?
...a password is transient knowledge and not a thing a single one person can possess. To me, a more apt analogy might be an employer trying to force a former employee to write down any thoughts they might have had related to their former position.
Huh? It's more like if you had a safe containing your money and paid one of your employees to maintain the safe and its contents, and he refused to tell you the combination of the safe.
[Karma suicide coming]
Reading about this whole Terry Childs thing on Slashdot has always amazed me. For what seemed like years, whenever this topic came up every post was flooded with "zOMG Terry Childs was justified because the mayor didn't know how to secure his servers!!!!" rhetoric. It seemed to make no sense except for geeks rooting for a fellow geek, regardless of what the real issues at stake were. Same goes for the teeming Slashbot hordes who insisted for months and months on Hans Reiser's innocence and how he was FRAMED, I TELL YOU. Or the people who previously would have condemned Kim Dotcom as a fraudster and spammer but who lionized him because the copyright police came after him. And frankly the same goes for the "zOMG Julian Assange was FRAMED by the CIA and the NSA because the MPAA owns Sweden or whatever" crowd. Occam's razor folks - if the US government wants to get their hands on somebody, they do what they tried to do to Edward Snowden, i.e. attempt to extradite them, not somehow make up fake rape charges in a separate country that doesn't even really like the US anyway.
Look, it's hardly a unique failing or blindness - most humans exhibit bad confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance. But I just find it disappointing to find such prevalence of this behavior in a group that prides itself on its capacity for critical thinking.
some satellite internet services use DSL for the upstream connection
I've never heard of that... can you expound?
GlobalStar is a low earth orbit (about 60 miles up)
That would be REALLY low orbit. :-) That's basically the Karman line, which would be a ticket to almost immediate atmospheric blowtorching at the the speed required to orbit there. Multiply that altitude by about four and you're in the right ballpark for LEO.
To keep satellite costs down, the system is a "bent-pipe," so availability will depend on whether GlobalStar has a ground station somewhere near where you are using it. Having to license ground stations in hundreds of different countries is what really held back development of this system.
Very true. The good news is that Globalstar does have coverage of most of the world's landmasses, or at least the part that have many people in them. Globalstar even has a map up of where they cover. Globalstar's larger problem until recently was that many of their satellites had onboard failures that in essence made them one-way connections... only a few were left with full two-way functionality so you had to consult a calendar to see what hours of the day there would be an uplink-capable satellite in range of you. Not much fun.
Last I heard [Iridium] had been appropriated by the US military (they liked that all calls went through the US instead of ground stations in other countries). I don't know whether civil service is available any more.
It's very much still around and available for commercial service. Iridium has two hubs - one for defense traffic, and another for commercial traffic, both of which are in the US. The reason the US military liked Iridium wasn't so much the "all in the US" thing - remember, they have military bases around the world where they could set up earth stations if needed. It was that the satellite-to-satellite routing aspect of Iridium you mentioned means it's the only communications satellite constellation I'm aware of that has literally 100% pole to pole coverage, 24/7.
"Having 8,000 miles between you and the Internet is not a good idea."
It's more like 22,000+ miles up, 22,000+ miles down, and whatever the distance is between your satellite provider's earth station and wherever the server is that you're trying to reach. Even at the speed of light, it takes a little while. Real world ping times over VSAT satellite connections are more in the 1-3 second range though, not 10.
There are none
Correct in terms of what the submitter asked for, but he/she pretty much asked for the moon and the stars (no pun intended). There are usable services out there but, to your point, they don't provide anything like what was requested.
I can't speak to what's available in South America, but in the US you can find cheap satellite Internet service for around $200 upfront and $50 a month but the contention ratios are several hundred to one. For lower contention ratios like 10:1, you'll need a business class service that will run anywhere from $200 to $800/month for VSAT... a dedicated broadband SCPC connection with no contention is easily $10K or more per month and just as much or more for equipment.
If you're living in somewhere far North where the line of sight is lower and weather is worse, expect that upfront VSAT equipment will quickly run up to a couple thousand dollars since you need a bigger dish and higher-power transmitter. The "rain fade" thing the submitter refers to is particularly a problem with Ka-band services that are used on the consumer-grade services; enterprise-grade Ku-band services have much less of a problem with it. If you throw at 2-meter dish and an 8-watt transmitter at the problem, you can burn through almost any weather on either Ka or Ku, but again, that's a lot of $$$ to spend on the equipment.
BTW these are all for VSAT "broadband-ish" services using geosynchronous orbit satellites so you have a minimum real world latency of 600 ms. I saw another poster refer to using Iridium to get lower ping times (since that's Low Earth Orbit) but Iridium is just not usable for anything above 128 kbps in the best possible circumstance. It's just physics at work ... an omnidirectional transmitter looking at LEO satellites whizzing overhead can't bring to bear the right amount of power as you get with a fixed dish always pointed at one point in the sky.
Long story short: satellite Internet is something you use because you have to, not because you want to. Lower your expectations and you'll find something economically reasonable. Keep your expectations high and you just won't be able to pay for it unless you're turning around and selling some of that bandwidth to others to defray the cost... and even then it's iffy.
The brand, the shiny retail space, the reassuringly high price that must mean it's made of better quality materials.
Where did he mention any of this? You seem to be stuck in some preconceived notions that everyone who buys a Mac is some kind of foppish dandy writing a screenplay at Starbucks who knows nothing about computers and hence buys it only because it's expensive and shiny. Do you actually know a significant number of people who use Macs, and are they all like that? Or are you just working from decade-old Penny Arcade tropes and second-hand Slashthink?
I'm not having a go at your personally, just pointing out how stereotypes operate, and why it's hard for the rest of us to take your comment too seriously.
Since the latest movies have rewritten the universe, I guess anything that relates to the old universe is public domain?
This right here is why I love Slashdot. Absolutely nowhere else on the Internet can you find people with otherwise highly above-average IQs who may seriously believe that retcons trump copyright law.
The vast bulk of the market has already turned it's back on this notion of "design". Once you take that away, Apple is nothing special at all.
I promised myself a long time ago to stop replying in Slashdot Apple fanboy/troll wars, but this one really got me.
Having used all modern OSes quite a bit, I can tell you plainly that if you think Apple is about fancy hardware cases and rounded corners, you don't get it. Please do not make comparisons to Windows commodity PCs solely based on hardware, because that's not what Apple is about on the desktop. Unlike almost anyone else in the industry, Apple is a software company that makes their money with hardware.
Their goal is to sell you a high-margin, high-end piece of hardware that may not be differentiated based on hardware, but is differentiated based on shipping with a UNIX-based OS that has a slick and efficient UI; integrated cloud sharing and automatic backups; bundled office apps that can match or beat MS Office/LibreOffice; iLife apps (iMovie, iPhoto, Garage Band) that have so serious free competition; and an integrated entertainment ecosystem (iTunes) that nobody else but Amazon comes close to (sorry, Google Play is nowhere near competitive for a desktop user). "I can get the equivalent hardware for cheaper with Windows or Ubuntu" is a false argument, because it's the software that makes a Mac special. I know there are "lots" of people who buy Macs and install a different OS on them, but I think that's a Slashdot-centric view of "lots" - a.k.a. "lots of people buy Raspberry Pis."
YMMV as to what that software differentiation is worth, but for those who buy Macs, the answer is clearly "it's worth a lot and still a bargain."
I think that's a pretty common misunderstanding of "escape velocity" but it's a little scary that a teacher would misunderstand it. Escape velocity isn't a speed that you have to travel constantly - you are correct that you could fly steadily away from the Earth at 1 mph and eventually escape the gravity well. My understanding was that escape velocity is meant to represent the "initial speed required to go from an initial point in a gravitational potential field to infinity with a residual velocity of zero," meaning (oversimplified) that if I wanted to stand on the ground and throw a baseball and have it just leave Earth's gravitational well, it would have to leave my hand traveling at 25,000 mph (the "escape velocity" your teacher referred to).
Additionally, Escape Velocity also happens to be one of the most awesome video games ever.
Except for, you know, that part where the Asians, Jews, Irish, Germans, etc. did their paperwork to get in.
One critical difference is that my (Irish, German) ancestors came to the US back when all you had to do was show up. You got your paperwork done when you arrived because the US was still taking all comers. Today we restrict immigration heavily... my ancestors either wouldn't have come or - who knows - might have tried to get in illegally.
I'm not saying that what illegal immigrants do is right. But I'm saying it's very easy for most of us to look down on it because our ancestors didn't have the same hard time getting here legally that current would-be immigrants do.
Correct me if I'm wrong but settlements outside of court cannot be converted to wage garnishments, right?
Not true. But hopefully IsoHunt was a corporation, not an individual proprietorship or partnership. Part of the purpose of a corporation's "legal personhood" is that wrongdoing on the part of the corporation cannot be transferred to the people who worked there or owned it. Of course, a corporation won't stop individuals for being charged with crimes, but a lawsuit settlement that bankrupts a company should not then bankrupt the individuals behind that corporation assuming they set things up properly.
This corporate protection from individual liability works for the bad guys, it works for good guys, it works for everyone.
Real investigative journalism is a passion, it is expensive and it is exhausting.
100% agree. Slashdotters, please remember this the next time you complain about any news source that does original, investigative journalism wanting to - gasp - show you ads or charge you for a subscription.
Recycling press releases can be done for free. REAL journalism takes dedication and money to pay the people who are doing the work.
Why is that? ... I don't understand where this arbitrary distinction of "that's not a computer" comes from.
Yes, technically they are all computers. Maybe it would be better to find a new set of terms to describe the difference between a handheld device and a traditional PC.
But the distinction is important because (generally speaking) people use these types of devices differently, and that has a big impact on user interface, what capabilities are important to the typical user, and what to optimize the user experience for. All the Slashdotters who show up to every dicussion on Windows 8 or OS X bemoaning "they're trying to make Windows into Windows Phone!" or "stop making my Mac like my iPad!" are evidence of the importance of that dichotomy.