Here's the inconvenient fact that whites like to ignore. From the time they're born, statistically speaking, they have access to better educational resources, better financial resources, more domestic stability, and a ton of other advantages to success in this world than minorities do.
I have two big questions about your argument.
One: when you say "minorities," do you actually mean all minorities, or just certain groups? Asians, for example, are a minority in the US. But I think you'll find in many areas of the country that they show higher education rates and per-capita incomes than "whites" do. So is it really a blanket statement about all minorities or are you referring specific ones? Is it really about "whitey keeping everyone else down" or is it about specific ethnic groups and how those groups were introduced into white American society and the comparative challenges they faced?
Two: When you say that "whites" have better access to these things "statistically speaking," I am sure that is true for many groups of minorities. But none of us are statistics. We are all individuals, with individual circumstances. Bully for white people if statistically they are likely to have those things, but "statistically speaking" doesn't mean that any one individual should be punished for having a statistical advantage. For example, nobody has ever offered me a job because I was white, my parents didn't stay together because I was white, and I didn't get a college scholarship because I was white. Do you think it's possible that when you say "whites" like to ignore something, or "whites" have all the advantages, it is maybe just as race-baiting as saying "blacks" are all one way?
How about we start distributing our hard work ourselves?
It's called a website and developers have been doing this for many years now, and they keep 100% of their sale price (minus transaction fees). Nobody can stop you from doing that, and nobody is forcing you to distribute PC or Android applications through an app store. And if you don't like the ecosystems that force you to use an app store (e.g. iOS or Windows Phone), don't develop for those platforms.
The reason developers have been flocking to those evil, awful, soul-sucking app stores is because it turns out that those aforementioned terrible corporate app stores actually add some value by attracting customers, and developers make more money (even with only a 70% cut) that way. Shocking, I know, but the truth is that Amazon isn't coming along and beating up developers and stealing their apps and taking their lunch money. Lots of developers are using these app stores because they want to and on balance they get a more benefits out of it than not being in the app stores. Simple as that.
The best Blackberry, the Bold 9780, is roughly equal to the iPhone 4 in all tests
True, but I think there is a perception that the BlackBerry's battery is better because there is a different usage profile. My work phone is a BlackBerry and my personal mobile is an iPhone. What do I do with the BlackBerry? Make calls and read e-mails. What do I do with the iPhone? Lots of web browsing and app usage, some of which are absolute battery killers. I also tend to leave WiFi active on my iPhone but turned off on my BB, since unlike the iPhone I don't do anything on the BlackBerry that needs the faster bandwidth.
The result is that I end up having to charge my iPhone after just a few hours of playing Monkey Island even if my BB is still going strong after many hours of e-mail and some phone calls. So I wouldn't be surprised if the anecdotal BB battery life review of a typical user is much better than the specs would suggest.
Here's the thing: information security, just like any other type of security or insurance, is completely relative.
My dinky little websites have adequate capacity to serve the few hundreds of people a day who visit them, but would not withstand a Slashdotting or DDoS. My house is secure enough to resist a burglar, but not secure enough to resist a Navy SEAL strike team. Does this mean I'm negligent? No, it means that I could spend thousands of dollars on additional infrastructure for security or capacity but I choose not to because it's highly unlikely I would need to.
That's why the example of LulzSec is pathethic and not instructional. There are lots of "soft targets" on the Internet (in terms of security or capacity) that you could take down pretty easily if you wanted to, just because those sites can't justify full-time security teams or massively extensible infrastructures. I'm not talking about high-profile sites like Sony or the CIA, but stuff like EVE login servers or some county in Arizona. A bunch of douchebag script kiddies taking down some MMO server doesn't necessarily mean that anyone was truly "negligent," it just means that they picked easy targets. And there is not, nor will ever be, a shortage of easy targets on the Internet if you're willing to aim at those.
Fair enough and a reasonable response... my apologies for calling you a troll. I don't recall the ads you're referring to but I certainly agree that over the years Apple has often tried to fight the tired old "Macs are shiny toys" argument from anti-Mac IT staff by showing that professionals use them.
From my perspective though, that was much much more prevalent when Apple was fighting for its life in the PC market - and clinging to any justification they could find - than today when in many (certainly not all) environments you don't need to fight desperately with anything you can find to get or keep a Mac computer. I don't think that argumentum ad verecundiam is a big part of Apple's marketing any more and hence isn't a big deal here.
allows those apple users to ignore rational arguments and say 'but high end video editing is done on apple computers'.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but you somehow managed to get modded up so I feel like burning some karma to reply.
1997 called and it wants its stereotype of Mac users back, please. Seriously, I haven't heard anybody use the "Macs are for graphic designers, film editors and TEH GHEYS" trope with a straight face since at least 2003. There was a time for Mac users - circa 1996-2000 - when the only quantitative advantage you could point out for Macs vs. Wintel PCs was the availability of certain graphic design software/plugins. As a result, Mac users clung to "well, So-and-So uses Macs" as a last-ditch rationale fighting Windows-centric business IT shops trying to squeeze them out.
But in case you haven't been reading the news over the last 10 years, the demographics of Mac computer users have changed dramatically. After some terrible early versions, Mac OS X ended up attracting lots of new converts... including not just the inevitable "ooh shiny iPod" crowd but many computer science luminaries who have a great deal more credibility in discussing operating system evaluation than you or me. So you may want to update your trolling bait as well.
100% correct. Any IT folks reading this should take the lesson to heart but should also realize that this isn't directed only at IT... at any company of a certain size, people inside the business will hire outside vendors to do tasks that their internal departments make painful.
For example, my company regularly pays outside firms to host servers for us when the internal IT group says "that will take two new headcount and six months" but the vendor says "it's $5K/month and will be ready tomorrow." Similarly, when we need some marketing campaign done and our creative dept. says "it will take two months to develop this" and an outside firm will do it in two weeks, we pay the outside vendor. Sometimes these decisions are good, sometimes they're bad, but they are made all the time with all different sorts of tasks when the internal resources aren't "competitive" to what's outside. Basically the only departments you can't route around are finance and legal.
If you're going to bother replying, at least try to make some kind of coherent argument.
Nothing personal my friend, and certainly not intended as an attack. As far as trying to make a coherent - or say logical - argument, I think there were some overly broad and unqualified statements in your post that I was subjecting to reductio ad absurdum. It was certainly nothing ad hominem.
whenever the government is given control of more wealth and power to legislate & regulate...that's the same as saying they want more of this crap like this videographer received
EXACTLY! The action of these cops is DIRECTLY related to the growth of government! We should return to a time of smaller government - say, the 1950s or even the early 1900s - when police in the US deep South never abused anybody. I think we can all recall how much better the cops - and government in the South in general - behaved before that darned Federal government started getting so big. In fact, instead of shooting a guy and destroying evidence, they probably would have sat down and had a nice discussion together over grits and chicory, if it weren't for the insidious creation of the Department of Health and Human Services which turned them into jerks.
This is the first post I have seen in this thread that actually gets what Apple is trying to do here. It's not for digital cameras - Apple doesn't make those and the companies that do have no incentive whatsoever to license a patent from them to do this.
It's for Apple iDevices - iPads, iPhones, iPods - with cameras. You can't take anything with a camera into courts, various government facilities, some concert venues or events etc. which means leaving your phone or tablet behind... but if businesses/governments recognize this system as "good enough" security against unauthorized photos, Apple mobiles will be the one kind that are allowed through the metal detector, ticket queue or other security checkpoint. The only thing that surprises me about this development is that Apple has never really cared about what businesses wanted in the past, so I'm not sure why they seem to be starting now.
Fair enough and my apologies if I misinterpreted your original post. I still think that if you look carefully, you'll find that commercial devices tend to carry the stock Android + the more restricted OHA bits (Google apps & marketplace)... and even though they may not be handing Google cash for these things it is no more fundamentally open from any perspective other than business model than Windows Mobile was.
How do you think it's available to many, many manufacturers? It's by virtue of it being open.
Actually, no. It's available to many, many manufacturers because it is Google's business model to do broad licensing - which has nothing to do with being open source per se. Flash back a few years ago and remember that the reason that Windows Mobile was on many, many handsets wasn't because it was "open," it was because that was the OS maker's business model too.
Specifically regarding why Android is available on so many devices, it is Google's business model to get as many OEMs as possible to license (free as in beer but not the same as the version you can download from android.com) the Google-supported [can access the Android Marketplace, gets Google logos, etc.] Android versions and put them on their hardware. AFAIK there are no commercial devices which ship with the default OS based on the purely open-source version of Android.
The benefits of Android being open source are really to individual hackers, not OEMs.
Typically RSA tokens are used for the high value shit, the hardest to get to, most protected shit.
In parts of the corporate world? Maybe. (Debatable though since my company uses RSA tokens and every Joe Sixpack with a laptop has one.)
In the US government? Not a chance. Information whose unauthorized release poses a threat to national security is "classified" and access restricted to networks which are 1.) logically airgapped from public networks and 2.) wouldn't let a RSA token get within spitting distance. This applies for defense contractors too... if it was a publicly accessible network they got into via spoofed RSA tokens, I can guarantee you it did them no good for getting the real juicy stuff unless Northrop Grumman seriously botched their Information Assurance architecture. And screwing that up doesn't result in bad press, it results in people wearing orange jumpsuits in Fort Leavenworth.
My understanding is that their calculators won't be allowable in standardized testing environments anymore if there is a likelihood that users are modifying the devices. I have never been part of the market for scientific calculators, so I'm not sure whether this is really a huge market for TI or just an excuse.
If law-abiding folk aren't willing to pay retail for your game, but are willing to pay a much lower cost for a used copy, then this seems to be speaking to an underlying issue... Maybe the problem is that you're charging too much.
Absolutely not! In Economics 101, this is called price discrimination. It sounds like a bad thing (like racism or something) but it's not.
In essence it means that you as a seller of goods want to maximize your sale price and make the most money from it. Originally this was accomplished when all goods were bartered for (you as a seller negotiated the highest price you can get from any given buyer). But over the last couple hundred years marketplaces emerged for fixed prices. This appealed to many consumers but robbed sellers of their ability to exercise price discrimination.
I will skip the long economic story, but this is the whole reason that the modern phenomenon of "sale prices" exist. Let's say you have some widgets that you can make a tiny profit on by selling for $5 each. But you know a sizeable number of people think it's worth buying for $20 each. So what do you do? As a rational economic actor, you price it at $20 and then after some period of time you have a "sale" of Widget X for $5. You have extracted $20 from the people who think it's worth $20, and you have also extracted the money from the people who think it's only worth $5 and wouldn't have paid $20. Those $5 buyers didn't get it immediately, but they bought it from you when they felt the price was what they were willing to pay. Maybe there are other buyers willing to pay $1 for it, but it's up to you as the seller to figure out if that group of buyers is worthwhile to you and if you can make money selling it at that price.
This is how most markets for almost all goods work. The fundamental principle of capitalism is that a thing is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. So it doesn't mean that you're charging too much for Widget X if one person doesn't think it's worth it; it is just an opportunity for you to exercise price discrimination until you have found the right market levels.
Of course the whole point of this story is that both piracy and used game sales rob developers of the power of price discrimination (at least in such a way that they get any of the sale price). And this developer seems to say that the used game sales hurt more because those are actually people willing to pay for something, unlike the majority of pirates who - let's not kid ourselves - just want to get stuff for free, regardless of the ethics thereof, and would never have bought anything.
I am of course too lazy to actually look through their quarterly reports, but my guess is that $158 million loss has a lot do with things like saying "we need to hand out large severance checks to people we are firing because we cancelled their game projects" or "we had developed stuff (code, graphics) built for this game that we valued on our books as assets worth $X million dollars but now they're cancelled so they're worthless" or even "we planned to spend $X million on advertising for these games but had to cancel our contract and pay some or all of that money upfront."
Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster.
Not necessarily true. It's all dependent on the atmospheric drag that the object generates and what orbit it was launched into (on purpose or accidentally) to begin with. Some LEO junk will at this rate stay up for millions of years.
Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into
Unfortunately the problem there is that armor inevitably adds weight, and every pound is precious in the design of a satellite. Until we have some orbital launching mechanism more efficient than our current chemical-based rockets, it will always be an inefficient tradeoff to take on the extra weight of armoring a satellite versus the likelihood of there being an impact that the armor would mitigate.
Technically, what you "own" in that description is the physical media. With that disc comes the rights to view it. You do not "own" the content in the sense of being able to modify it, repurpose it or redistribute it beyond selling your copy of the physical media which accompanies the license.
I don't agree with it, but that's what is technically being sold and "owned" by the purchaser.
They get your number through ANI; you can't block it. In fact, it's required by the FCC that they get to know your number.
[citation needed]
Please cite the FCC regulation or ruling per your post which stipulates that Microsoft has to know your phone number per ANI when you activate their software products. Or that anyone else needs to for that matter.
Oh, wait - you can't because it doesn't exist! And even if it did, it wouldn't matter! Why?
You can call in a product activation from a cellphone, for which there is no public user directory. You can call in a product activation from a prepaid cellphone that has no traceable personal information. You can call in a product activation from a VoIP service which may or may not be anonymized. You can call in a product activation from a payphone.
Please show me where I'm wrong about the above, I'm eager to know how Microsoft product activation over the phone necessarily reveals your identity or anything close to it.
Whose word? I thought that was the whole point of "Anonymous."
99.99% of however the hell you define "Anonymous" could have been uninvolved and 0.01% could have been been the perpetrators - how do you determine then if "Anonymous was involved?"
The strength of "Anonymous" is its untraceability in attacking things. The weakness of "Anonymous" is its inability to speak a coherent message because... the group is by design not coherent, with a single voice. This is precisely the reason that anarchic groups like Anon are very good at tearing things down, but very bad at building things up where you need to work together and follow a single voice or a common plan.
they've still done a lot of good work bringing to light corruption and lies our governments feed us.
I thought this was about Anonymous, not Wikileaks. Anonymous in particular and 4chan in general has not brought to light anything I'm aware of except tentactle porn torrents.
Or have all Slashbot favorite entities merged into one? We can call it GNU WikiBuntuDroidNonymous. Like "Muad'dib" becoming a killing word, its very name will become a nerd totem of +5 Righteousness and +20 Defense Against Potential Girlfriends.
I learnt today that USA phones don't use SIM cards
It is of course more complicated than that.;-) Some US mobile phones use SIM cards, and others don't.
Unlike Europe, the US has a much more mixed bag of wireless frequency usage and network technologies. As a result, some phones can be moved across carriers, but only to carriers using the same technology... and even then they may not be able to take advantage of all the features of the new network.
Two big mobile carriers in the US (Verizon and Sprint) have for years operated CDMA mobile networks. CDMA phones do not use SIM cards. Verizon has recently deployed an LTE network, which is part of the GSM technology family, so if you have a Verizon LTE phone it does have a SIM card.
The other two big mobile carriers in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile) operate GSM-based networks. All phones on these carriers have SIM cards. Most AT&T phones are quad-band 'world phones' but phones designed specifically for T-Mobile include an additional 1700 MHz band which is where T-Mobile runs its "3G" and/or "4G" HSPA network. So you can move phones between AT&T and T-Mobile as with any other GSM carriers but phones designed for AT&T (like the iPhone) cannot access T-Mobile's 3G+ networks.
If you use some other carrier, it may be either just a reseller of one of the "big four" (in which case it follows the rules of its parent network) or a network of its own which runs either CDMA or GSM technology.
The non-profit, online-only journalism model is being tested out across the country to some notable success.
You are right, and Pro Publica is a great exemplar of investigative journalism done right in the service of its audience.They collaborated with This American Life to do an audio episode based on the stories that won them the Pulitzer and it was fantastic - you can download the podcast version here.
However, before the Slashbot crowd comes out to cite this as proof positive that nobody should have to pay for news, information wants to be free, the establishment is keeping them down, skateboarding is not a crime, etc. - it should be noted that Pro Publica was created specifically to do a certain kind of investigative reporting and relies on donations and grants from organizations that think the commercial media don't do enough of those stories. i.e., there is something that the commercial press doesn't do, and people are willing to donate in order to fill that particular need.
Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is a sustainable model in which foundations will give out grants or individuals will donate to have someone cover your local city council meeting, write up the police blotter, ask questions at White House press conferences or report on the scene from the Zimbabwean elections - the kind of thing that the Associated Press and individual for-profit media (TV or newspaper/online) outlets do. So while Pro Publica is a wonderful resource and a great example of how non-profit journalism can work, it is not necessarily a replacement for the existing commercial media industry.
the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benefits.
I think what you really mean is that the Cold War funding climate made it possible for politicians to vote to fund those things. Today, with Moody's on the threshold of downgrading US credit, nearly every state running massive deficits and every penny of the Federal budget being fought over, you're damn right that no politician in the US is eager to fund "expensive research unlikely to have any direct benefits." And frankly that may not be a bad thing. Maybe one of those other countries that I keep hear is beating the US soundly in science can fund that research for a change while we return to solvency, and we can all benefit from the knowledge.
Maybe it's possible to work in one division of a major corporation and have no idea what the other divisions are doing.
MAYBE it's possible? My friend, you have clearly never worked at even a mid-sized company, let alone a big one.
My previous employer had about 200 employees scattered across three cities. People in my department had never met and had absolutely no idea who various other employees were or what they were doing, let alone having any authority over the choices they made. Now I work for a company that has more employees than there are residents in the city of Madison, Wisconsin. I have no more knowledge of what all my fellow employees do than one resident of Madison knows what every single other person in the city is doing.
Think about it - even at a comparatively tiny 200 person company, if the accountants decide to cheat on the company's taxes, what is the likelihood that the engineers, IT staff, sales guys, receptionists or customer care reps know? And why should they? It would be crazy for any company to ask the IT help desk to review the work and policies of the accountants, or vice versa.
Let's say that company X is cheating on its taxes... it may be only 10 people (or even just a couple like the controller and CFO) who did anything wrong. But by your logic the other 190+ people are responsible when they had neither knowledge or influence. It's like saying the residents of New York City are responsible for some dumb "intelligent design" law in the state of Texas because "they're all Americans."
So it may be very comforting when you want to blame someone to say "employees of X are scum" or are all responsible for some element of malfeasance, but unfortunately it's an overly simplistic and very naive view. Let's hold the comparatively small group of executives responsible for these decisions personally and professionally accountable and keep the blame where it belongs.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the inconvenient fact that whites like to ignore. From the time they're born, statistically speaking, they have access to better educational resources, better financial resources, more domestic stability, and a ton of other advantages to success in this world than minorities do.
I have two big questions about your argument.
One: when you say "minorities," do you actually mean all minorities, or just certain groups? Asians, for example, are a minority in the US. But I think you'll find in many areas of the country that they show higher education rates and per-capita incomes than "whites" do. So is it really a blanket statement about all minorities or are you referring specific ones? Is it really about "whitey keeping everyone else down" or is it about specific ethnic groups and how those groups were introduced into white American society and the comparative challenges they faced?
Two: When you say that "whites" have better access to these things "statistically speaking," I am sure that is true for many groups of minorities. But none of us are statistics. We are all individuals, with individual circumstances. Bully for white people if statistically they are likely to have those things, but "statistically speaking" doesn't mean that any one individual should be punished for having a statistical advantage. For example, nobody has ever offered me a job because I was white, my parents didn't stay together because I was white, and I didn't get a college scholarship because I was white. Do you think it's possible that when you say "whites" like to ignore something, or "whites" have all the advantages, it is maybe just as race-baiting as saying "blacks" are all one way?
How about we start distributing our hard work ourselves?
It's called a website and developers have been doing this for many years now, and they keep 100% of their sale price (minus transaction fees). Nobody can stop you from doing that, and nobody is forcing you to distribute PC or Android applications through an app store. And if you don't like the ecosystems that force you to use an app store (e.g. iOS or Windows Phone), don't develop for those platforms.
The reason developers have been flocking to those evil, awful, soul-sucking app stores is because it turns out that those aforementioned terrible corporate app stores actually add some value by attracting customers, and developers make more money (even with only a 70% cut) that way. Shocking, I know, but the truth is that Amazon isn't coming along and beating up developers and stealing their apps and taking their lunch money. Lots of developers are using these app stores because they want to and on balance they get a more benefits out of it than not being in the app stores. Simple as that.
The best Blackberry, the Bold 9780, is roughly equal to the iPhone 4 in all tests
True, but I think there is a perception that the BlackBerry's battery is better because there is a different usage profile. My work phone is a BlackBerry and my personal mobile is an iPhone. What do I do with the BlackBerry? Make calls and read e-mails. What do I do with the iPhone? Lots of web browsing and app usage, some of which are absolute battery killers. I also tend to leave WiFi active on my iPhone but turned off on my BB, since unlike the iPhone I don't do anything on the BlackBerry that needs the faster bandwidth.
The result is that I end up having to charge my iPhone after just a few hours of playing Monkey Island even if my BB is still going strong after many hours of e-mail and some phone calls. So I wouldn't be surprised if the anecdotal BB battery life review of a typical user is much better than the specs would suggest.
Here's the thing: information security, just like any other type of security or insurance, is completely relative.
My dinky little websites have adequate capacity to serve the few hundreds of people a day who visit them, but would not withstand a Slashdotting or DDoS. My house is secure enough to resist a burglar, but not secure enough to resist a Navy SEAL strike team. Does this mean I'm negligent? No, it means that I could spend thousands of dollars on additional infrastructure for security or capacity but I choose not to because it's highly unlikely I would need to.
That's why the example of LulzSec is pathethic and not instructional. There are lots of "soft targets" on the Internet (in terms of security or capacity) that you could take down pretty easily if you wanted to, just because those sites can't justify full-time security teams or massively extensible infrastructures. I'm not talking about high-profile sites like Sony or the CIA, but stuff like EVE login servers or some county in Arizona. A bunch of douchebag script kiddies taking down some MMO server doesn't necessarily mean that anyone was truly "negligent," it just means that they picked easy targets. And there is not, nor will ever be, a shortage of easy targets on the Internet if you're willing to aim at those.
Fair enough and a reasonable response... my apologies for calling you a troll. I don't recall the ads you're referring to but I certainly agree that over the years Apple has often tried to fight the tired old "Macs are shiny toys" argument from anti-Mac IT staff by showing that professionals use them.
From my perspective though, that was much much more prevalent when Apple was fighting for its life in the PC market - and clinging to any justification they could find - than today when in many (certainly not all) environments you don't need to fight desperately with anything you can find to get or keep a Mac computer. I don't think that argumentum ad verecundiam is a big part of Apple's marketing any more and hence isn't a big deal here.
allows those apple users to ignore rational arguments and say 'but high end video editing is done on apple computers'.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but you somehow managed to get modded up so I feel like burning some karma to reply.
1997 called and it wants its stereotype of Mac users back, please. Seriously, I haven't heard anybody use the "Macs are for graphic designers, film editors and TEH GHEYS" trope with a straight face since at least 2003. There was a time for Mac users - circa 1996-2000 - when the only quantitative advantage you could point out for Macs vs. Wintel PCs was the availability of certain graphic design software/plugins. As a result, Mac users clung to "well, So-and-So uses Macs" as a last-ditch rationale fighting Windows-centric business IT shops trying to squeeze them out.
But in case you haven't been reading the news over the last 10 years, the demographics of Mac computer users have changed dramatically. After some terrible early versions, Mac OS X ended up attracting lots of new converts... including not just the inevitable "ooh shiny iPod" crowd but many computer science luminaries who have a great deal more credibility in discussing operating system evaluation than you or me. So you may want to update your trolling bait as well.
100% correct. Any IT folks reading this should take the lesson to heart but should also realize that this isn't directed only at IT... at any company of a certain size, people inside the business will hire outside vendors to do tasks that their internal departments make painful.
For example, my company regularly pays outside firms to host servers for us when the internal IT group says "that will take two new headcount and six months" but the vendor says "it's $5K/month and will be ready tomorrow." Similarly, when we need some marketing campaign done and our creative dept. says "it will take two months to develop this" and an outside firm will do it in two weeks, we pay the outside vendor. Sometimes these decisions are good, sometimes they're bad, but they are made all the time with all different sorts of tasks when the internal resources aren't "competitive" to what's outside. Basically the only departments you can't route around are finance and legal.
If you're going to bother replying, at least try to make some kind of coherent argument.
Nothing personal my friend, and certainly not intended as an attack. As far as trying to make a coherent - or say logical - argument, I think there were some overly broad and unqualified statements in your post that I was subjecting to reductio ad absurdum. It was certainly nothing ad hominem.
whenever the government is given control of more wealth and power to legislate & regulate...that's the same as saying they want more of this crap like this videographer received
EXACTLY! The action of these cops is DIRECTLY related to the growth of government! We should return to a time of smaller government - say, the 1950s or even the early 1900s - when police in the US deep South never abused anybody. I think we can all recall how much better the cops - and government in the South in general - behaved before that darned Federal government started getting so big. In fact, instead of shooting a guy and destroying evidence, they probably would have sat down and had a nice discussion together over grits and chicory, if it weren't for the insidious creation of the Department of Health and Human Services which turned them into jerks.
This is the first post I have seen in this thread that actually gets what Apple is trying to do here. It's not for digital cameras - Apple doesn't make those and the companies that do have no incentive whatsoever to license a patent from them to do this.
It's for Apple iDevices - iPads, iPhones, iPods - with cameras. You can't take anything with a camera into courts, various government facilities, some concert venues or events etc. which means leaving your phone or tablet behind... but if businesses/governments recognize this system as "good enough" security against unauthorized photos, Apple mobiles will be the one kind that are allowed through the metal detector, ticket queue or other security checkpoint. The only thing that surprises me about this development is that Apple has never really cared about what businesses wanted in the past, so I'm not sure why they seem to be starting now.
Fair enough and my apologies if I misinterpreted your original post. I still think that if you look carefully, you'll find that commercial devices tend to carry the stock Android + the more restricted OHA bits (Google apps & marketplace) ... and even though they may not be handing Google cash for these things it is no more fundamentally open from any perspective other than business model than Windows Mobile was.
How do you think it's available to many, many manufacturers? It's by virtue of it being open.
Actually, no. It's available to many, many manufacturers because it is Google's business model to do broad licensing - which has nothing to do with being open source per se. Flash back a few years ago and remember that the reason that Windows Mobile was on many, many handsets wasn't because it was "open," it was because that was the OS maker's business model too.
Specifically regarding why Android is available on so many devices, it is Google's business model to get as many OEMs as possible to license (free as in beer but not the same as the version you can download from android.com) the Google-supported [can access the Android Marketplace, gets Google logos, etc.] Android versions and put them on their hardware. AFAIK there are no commercial devices which ship with the default OS based on the purely open-source version of Android.
The benefits of Android being open source are really to individual hackers, not OEMs.
Typically RSA tokens are used for the high value shit, the hardest to get to, most protected shit.
In parts of the corporate world? Maybe. (Debatable though since my company uses RSA tokens and every Joe Sixpack with a laptop has one.)
In the US government? Not a chance. Information whose unauthorized release poses a threat to national security is "classified" and access restricted to networks which are 1.) logically airgapped from public networks and 2.) wouldn't let a RSA token get within spitting distance. This applies for defense contractors too... if it was a publicly accessible network they got into via spoofed RSA tokens, I can guarantee you it did them no good for getting the real juicy stuff unless Northrop Grumman seriously botched their Information Assurance architecture. And screwing that up doesn't result in bad press, it results in people wearing orange jumpsuits in Fort Leavenworth.
My understanding is that their calculators won't be allowable in standardized testing environments anymore if there is a likelihood that users are modifying the devices. I have never been part of the market for scientific calculators, so I'm not sure whether this is really a huge market for TI or just an excuse.
If law-abiding folk aren't willing to pay retail for your game, but are willing to pay a much lower cost for a used copy, then this seems to be speaking to an underlying issue ... Maybe the problem is that you're charging too much.
Absolutely not! In Economics 101, this is called price discrimination. It sounds like a bad thing (like racism or something) but it's not.
In essence it means that you as a seller of goods want to maximize your sale price and make the most money from it. Originally this was accomplished when all goods were bartered for (you as a seller negotiated the highest price you can get from any given buyer). But over the last couple hundred years marketplaces emerged for fixed prices. This appealed to many consumers but robbed sellers of their ability to exercise price discrimination.
I will skip the long economic story, but this is the whole reason that the modern phenomenon of "sale prices" exist. Let's say you have some widgets that you can make a tiny profit on by selling for $5 each. But you know a sizeable number of people think it's worth buying for $20 each. So what do you do? As a rational economic actor, you price it at $20 and then after some period of time you have a "sale" of Widget X for $5. You have extracted $20 from the people who think it's worth $20, and you have also extracted the money from the people who think it's only worth $5 and wouldn't have paid $20. Those $5 buyers didn't get it immediately, but they bought it from you when they felt the price was what they were willing to pay. Maybe there are other buyers willing to pay $1 for it, but it's up to you as the seller to figure out if that group of buyers is worthwhile to you and if you can make money selling it at that price.
This is how most markets for almost all goods work. The fundamental principle of capitalism is that a thing is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. So it doesn't mean that you're charging too much for Widget X if one person doesn't think it's worth it; it is just an opportunity for you to exercise price discrimination until you have found the right market levels.
Of course the whole point of this story is that both piracy and used game sales rob developers of the power of price discrimination (at least in such a way that they get any of the sale price). And this developer seems to say that the used game sales hurt more because those are actually people willing to pay for something, unlike the majority of pirates who - let's not kid ourselves - just want to get stuff for free, regardless of the ethics thereof, and would never have bought anything.
what i'm more interested in, is WHERE THE FUCK IS THE MONEY GOING?
When businesses report losses in their earnings reports, it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually spent that much money more than they brought in during the process of doing business. What is usually the source of very large losses is that they are taking on charges for future liabilities or writing down assets.
I am of course too lazy to actually look through their quarterly reports, but my guess is that $158 million loss has a lot do with things like saying "we need to hand out large severance checks to people we are firing because we cancelled their game projects" or "we had developed stuff (code, graphics) built for this game that we valued on our books as assets worth $X million dollars but now they're cancelled so they're worthless" or even "we planned to spend $X million on advertising for these games but had to cancel our contract and pay some or all of that money upfront."
Without constant effort stuff tends to come down and the smaller the faster.
Not necessarily true. It's all dependent on the atmospheric drag that the object generates and what orbit it was launched into (on purpose or accidentally) to begin with. Some LEO junk will at this rate stay up for millions of years.
Come up with some sort of armor for microscopic stuff to embed into
Unfortunately the problem there is that armor inevitably adds weight, and every pound is precious in the design of a satellite. Until we have some orbital launching mechanism more efficient than our current chemical-based rockets, it will always be an inefficient tradeoff to take on the extra weight of armoring a satellite versus the likelihood of there being an impact that the armor would mitigate.
"own it on dvd today!"
Technically, what you "own" in that description is the physical media. With that disc comes the rights to view it. You do not "own" the content in the sense of being able to modify it, repurpose it or redistribute it beyond selling your copy of the physical media which accompanies the license.
I don't agree with it, but that's what is technically being sold and "owned" by the purchaser.
They get your number through ANI; you can't block it. In fact, it's required by the FCC that they get to know your number.
[citation needed]
Please cite the FCC regulation or ruling per your post which stipulates that Microsoft has to know your phone number per ANI when you activate their software products. Or that anyone else needs to for that matter.
Oh, wait - you can't because it doesn't exist! And even if it did, it wouldn't matter! Why?
You can call in a product activation from a cellphone, for which there is no public user directory. You can call in a product activation from a prepaid cellphone that has no traceable personal information. You can call in a product activation from a VoIP service which may or may not be anonymized. You can call in a product activation from a payphone.
Please show me where I'm wrong about the above, I'm eager to know how Microsoft product activation over the phone necessarily reveals your identity or anything close to it.
Yes, you should take them at their word.
Whose word? I thought that was the whole point of "Anonymous."
99.99% of however the hell you define "Anonymous" could have been uninvolved and 0.01% could have been been the perpetrators - how do you determine then if "Anonymous was involved?"
The strength of "Anonymous" is its untraceability in attacking things. The weakness of "Anonymous" is its inability to speak a coherent message because... the group is by design not coherent, with a single voice. This is precisely the reason that anarchic groups like Anon are very good at tearing things down, but very bad at building things up where you need to work together and follow a single voice or a common plan.
they've still done a lot of good work bringing to light corruption and lies our governments feed us.
I thought this was about Anonymous, not Wikileaks. Anonymous in particular and 4chan in general has not brought to light anything I'm aware of except tentactle porn torrents.
Or have all Slashbot favorite entities merged into one? We can call it GNU WikiBuntuDroidNonymous. Like "Muad'dib" becoming a killing word, its very name will become a nerd totem of +5 Righteousness and +20 Defense Against Potential Girlfriends.
I learnt today that USA phones don't use SIM cards
It is of course more complicated than that. ;-) Some US mobile phones use SIM cards, and others don't.
Unlike Europe, the US has a much more mixed bag of wireless frequency usage and network technologies. As a result, some phones can be moved across carriers, but only to carriers using the same technology... and even then they may not be able to take advantage of all the features of the new network.
Two big mobile carriers in the US (Verizon and Sprint) have for years operated CDMA mobile networks. CDMA phones do not use SIM cards. Verizon has recently deployed an LTE network, which is part of the GSM technology family, so if you have a Verizon LTE phone it does have a SIM card.
The other two big mobile carriers in the US (AT&T and T-Mobile) operate GSM-based networks. All phones on these carriers have SIM cards. Most AT&T phones are quad-band 'world phones' but phones designed specifically for T-Mobile include an additional 1700 MHz band which is where T-Mobile runs its "3G" and/or "4G" HSPA network. So you can move phones between AT&T and T-Mobile as with any other GSM carriers but phones designed for AT&T (like the iPhone) cannot access T-Mobile's 3G+ networks.
If you use some other carrier, it may be either just a reseller of one of the "big four" (in which case it follows the rules of its parent network) or a network of its own which runs either CDMA or GSM technology.
The non-profit, online-only journalism model is being tested out across the country to some notable success.
You are right, and Pro Publica is a great exemplar of investigative journalism done right in the service of its audience.They collaborated with This American Life to do an audio episode based on the stories that won them the Pulitzer and it was fantastic - you can download the podcast version here.
However, before the Slashbot crowd comes out to cite this as proof positive that nobody should have to pay for news, information wants to be free, the establishment is keeping them down, skateboarding is not a crime, etc. - it should be noted that Pro Publica was created specifically to do a certain kind of investigative reporting and relies on donations and grants from organizations that think the commercial media don't do enough of those stories. i.e., there is something that the commercial press doesn't do, and people are willing to donate in order to fill that particular need.
Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily mean that there is a sustainable model in which foundations will give out grants or individuals will donate to have someone cover your local city council meeting, write up the police blotter, ask questions at White House press conferences or report on the scene from the Zimbabwean elections - the kind of thing that the Associated Press and individual for-profit media (TV or newspaper/online) outlets do. So while Pro Publica is a wonderful resource and a great example of how non-profit journalism can work, it is not necessarily a replacement for the existing commercial media industry.
the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benefits.
I think what you really mean is that the Cold War funding climate made it possible for politicians to vote to fund those things. Today, with Moody's on the threshold of downgrading US credit, nearly every state running massive deficits and every penny of the Federal budget being fought over, you're damn right that no politician in the US is eager to fund "expensive research unlikely to have any direct benefits." And frankly that may not be a bad thing. Maybe one of those other countries that I keep hear is beating the US soundly in science can fund that research for a change while we return to solvency, and we can all benefit from the knowledge.
Maybe it's possible to work in one division of a major corporation and have no idea what the other divisions are doing.
MAYBE it's possible? My friend, you have clearly never worked at even a mid-sized company, let alone a big one.
My previous employer had about 200 employees scattered across three cities. People in my department had never met and had absolutely no idea who various other employees were or what they were doing, let alone having any authority over the choices they made. Now I work for a company that has more employees than there are residents in the city of Madison, Wisconsin. I have no more knowledge of what all my fellow employees do than one resident of Madison knows what every single other person in the city is doing.
Think about it - even at a comparatively tiny 200 person company, if the accountants decide to cheat on the company's taxes, what is the likelihood that the engineers, IT staff, sales guys, receptionists or customer care reps know? And why should they? It would be crazy for any company to ask the IT help desk to review the work and policies of the accountants, or vice versa.
Let's say that company X is cheating on its taxes... it may be only 10 people (or even just a couple like the controller and CFO) who did anything wrong. But by your logic the other 190+ people are responsible when they had neither knowledge or influence. It's like saying the residents of New York City are responsible for some dumb "intelligent design" law in the state of Texas because "they're all Americans."
So it may be very comforting when you want to blame someone to say "employees of X are scum" or are all responsible for some element of malfeasance, but unfortunately it's an overly simplistic and very naive view. Let's hold the comparatively small group of executives responsible for these decisions personally and professionally accountable and keep the blame where it belongs.