The system you describe sounds interesting, but is ripe for abuse in its own way. How, for example, does the "university application center" know how one school varies from another, and how do they judge it? Does it somehow mean that my 4.0 GPA is worth less to them if they think my school wasn't as good as somebody else's?
I would much prefer to have everyone take the same test and be judged on standardized criteria - that leaves it up to every student to show their knowledge on a level playing field. Sure, SATs are imperfect tests, and can easily fail to capture a student's depth or breadth of knowledge. But that's why high school transcripts, AP tests and activities play a significant role in US college admissions as well.
The real question... how long can this franchise hold out when the last episode of any quality was made twenty years ago?
I actually liked Episode 3, and thought Episode 2 was passable as a "popcorn movie." There are still some pretty decent novels and comics being produced, and video games like Knights of the Old Republic have been breaking some pretty interesting new ground as well. The Star Wars universe keeps growing and producing some reasonably good entertainment, at least when George Lucas keeps his personal hands off it...
I will now return to my comic book store, where I dispense the insults rather than receiving them.
What I want IS the old stuff. I want the ORIGINAL series on DVD... Why can't we just buy the original cut?
You can. Sure, you have to get the special edition versionsas well, but this DVD set includes all the originals on "bonus discs." You can also find the orignal-only DVD single discs used as well.
Here's AT&T's handset approval and certification process as an example, and here is Verizon's. Nearly all carriers around the globe have them - some are very rigorous and demanding, while others are not much more than checking your CTIA and [your country's version of the FCC] radio performance certifications.
Regarding your specific example of T-Mobile USA - their certification process is known to be really easy, which makes things less onerous for handset developers but also doesn't catch sometimes serious bugs and issues like the Nexus One 3G problems. AT&T and Verizon have much more rigorous device certification processes (more of a PITA but better QA), and Sprint is somewhere in between.
Again, can you quantify the risks the boss of a financial firm faces? What, exactly, does he stand to lose above and beyond the obvious (aka his job) if things go belly-up?
Many financial firms are start-ups or small partnerships where the CEO or senior partners have invested significant portions of their own wealth into the company, so a failure can not just put them out of a job but also leave them financially wiped out. Even at the huge high-profile firms the senior people are expected to be financially "eating their own dogfood" by having a significant part of their net worth in the company's equity. There is also the possibility of getting sued into oblivion for losing other people's money, facing fines or sanctions if someone (it doesn't have to be you) at your company cut corners and broke the law, etc.
I'm not saying these people have it tough. But I do think they have a lot of things that could go wrong and hence a helluva lot of stress in return for those ridiculous paychecks.
This is an old argument..... the two markets have co-existed for decades.
Precisely! This is not about stupid or smart users, as some Slashdotters imply - it's about user preferences.
I like to tinker with electronics, but I do not want to tinker with my car, I just want it to work as simply and easily as possible. Other people love to tinker with their cars endlessly but wish their computers were simpler to operate. That doesn't make any of us dumb, it just means that we have respective areas where we prioritize "ease of use" over "freedom of use."
Why can't I get ads I would be even remotely interested in?
Remember that website owners don't just pick any ads they think you might be interested in - they only show the ads of those companies who have chosen to advertise with them. If GQ Magazine ads on Ars Technica aren't relevant to you, it isn't because Ars made a bad choice about which ads to find for you, it's because GQ Magazine made a bad choice purchasing impressions on Ars. If the companies offering things that you might be interested in don't choose to advertise with Ars, then you won't see them.
Whether those companies with stuff you are interested in don't advertise online or with Ars is because they think their target customers tend to block web ads is an entirely different question, and one I don't have the answer to.
His employer was the city. His job was to keep the passwords safe from everyone except the Mayor.
I can't say that I have read his official job description but I'm pretty sure that "keep the passwords to yourself and the mayor of a major metropolitan city" wasn't it. It was probably "to keep the passwords safe from people not authorized to have them." People authorized by city policy or law to have those passwords most likely included any number of his bosses on up the chain of command - people he did not provide them to when requested. Does every IT admin in a company think his job is to keep the passwords safe from everyone but themselves and the CEO?
Seriously - I know we all want to cheer for the IT guy here, and his case sounds terribly bungled by the city - but let's not try to pretend that he didn't violate rules and/or laws.
Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else?
That's the whole point of the New York Times model - they do provide original content and in-depth reporting. Columnists, sure, but that's not really the value for most readers. What you typically find on "news aggregator" recycle-AP-news-endlessly sites is a basic "what happened" account. The NYT hires many of the best reporters in the business and gives them the time and resources to write longer analysis pieces that seek to provide context, explain what's happening behind the scenes and what it may mean in the longer term. That's the kind of NYT-exclusive reporting which gives them a differentiated value but which is expensive to produce.
That being said, I personally find the NYT's content worth reading but not worth paying for. (I have discretionary budget for one news source that I find really valuable, so that will continue to go to a subscription to The Economist.) So the NYT will lose me as a reader, but I wasn't making them much money anyway so I doubt they'll care much. The bet they're making is that they will get more money in subscriptions than they will lose on ad impressions from people like me. Their bet may be wrong but it's their content to decide what to do with. Time will tell.
Ask an actual PR person about this commonly repeated phrase and they will roll their eyes. That phrase is only true for celebrities. For companies, there is A LOT of bad PR. Do you really think that the companies involved welcomed any of these:
PR AT&T has received over iPhone network problems?
PR Amazon received over wiping "1984" off people's Kindles?
PR T-Mobile and Microsoft received over vanished Sidekick data?
PR Microsoft received over Xbox Red Rings of Death? Or Vista's woefulness? Or... you get the idea.
For businesses with a brand to protect, there is absolutely such a thing as PR which taints their image and will stop customers from buying things from them/using them. I really wish the phrase "there's no such thing as bad press" would vanish from people's minds because (at least in some contexts) it's just not true.
I think the right of people to own and control the access to their own creative works is just as important.
Free expression (meaning the right to speak freely) is protected in the US constitution. Free distribution (meaning redistributing the speech or works of others without compensating the creators if they own it and ask to be compensated) is not. Neither of these are absolutes (e.g. yelling fire in a crowed theater or threatening someone) but in general this is the way the law works, and reflects the right that for some period of time (even if most of us think that period of time is too long), you as a creator are able to "own" the copying of what you have created.
So I guess we just disagree - and that's OK. Fortunately, the right of us all to disagree is protected under US law - as well as, if you've read the terms on the website, the fact that we both "own" our comments here.
At least in the USA, this has largely been quashed by the telcos in the courts, claiming that such networks are unfair competition to their price gouging mobile data plans.
The courts in the US have had nothing to do with the failure of municipal WiFi networks. Where these muni WiFi networks have failed, they have done so because they lacked a business model. The first generation of these efforts especially (I'm looking at you San Francisco and Philadelphia) were the product of starry-eyed city governments believing they could provide citizens with free network access at no cost to themselves, and crack-smoking startups and floundering incumbent telcos like Earthlink imagining they could somehow make money on this.
Seriously, if anybody has examples of anything good Steve Cook did during his 19 years at NASA, please post them.
If anybody has examples of anything good NASA did for manned spaceflight during the previous 19 years, please post them.
Of course NASA has sponsored plenty of worthwhile projects in the last 20 years, but all of them I can think of have been for unmanned spaceflight (Hubble, Mars Surveyor, etc.) Why should we be surprised when the program manager for NASA's seemingly perpetually delayed next-generation manned spaceflight program bails out? When the press description for the most recent Discovery shuttle launch - which cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars - was that it delivered the Stephen Colbert treadmill and some mice to the ISS, why should we continue to care about or support these efforts?
We think of NYT as a trend-setter, but it's really just a trend-follower, just like Slashdot, always trying to get new readers by recycling the same old keywords and the same old news every day.
I'm pretty sure the news changes every day on The New York Times. Are you sure you aren't just reading a cached version?
99 cents ain't resonable to anyone but an Apple fanboy.
Actually, it seems reasonable to tens of millions of people, including me. Considering how much enjoyment I get out of the music I buy, I'd say it's a very reasonable deal indeed.
Fuck marketing! Just give people the free and open truth.
Let me guess... you're an engineer?
Seriously, I think the problem here is you are confusing marketing with spin. Marketing actually encompasses a LOT of useful things, not just spin - and most F/OSS projects could REALLY use them. The definition of marketing includes:
Competitive analysis (what do competing products do? are we ahead or behind?)
Market research (how many people use this/want this/care about this? do they want something different?)
Product management (what do our customers want us to build? what can we really build?)
Reporting and analysis (how are we doing? what can we learn from the buying behavior of our customers?)
Public relations and press/analyst relations (how can we get correct info to reporters, bloggers, analysts and get them to write about it?)
Branding, advertising and customer communications (how can we tell customers about this and make it sound appealing?)
It's a common mistake among technical people to think that marketing only includes that last item. Just like many sales or marketing people misunderstand what "technical people" do...
If we're really lucky, maybe someone will be able to look at this and move us one step closer to an unlocked Pre that could jump onto Verizon's network.
I thought people would eventually learn this after all the discussion of "why can't I move my iPhone to Verizon?" In the US, Verizon and Sprint use CDMA. Each phone has to be developed for each specific network. AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM, the worldwide standard where phones can be "unlocked" and moved to other networks (as long as the phone support the frequencies used by those networks). So don't hold your breath waiting for a Verizon Pre.
everyone knows that "fair and balanced" means balancing out the other side.
You know, that is the first time anyone has ever explained that phrase to me in a way that made sense. Taken from that vantage point, FOX News actually is healthily supporting balance by being a counterpart to other networks.
The problem is that your suggested context is not what FOX claims to be. Remember their other tagline, "We report. You decide?" That strongly implies impartiality on their part, which, come on - nobody can claim with a straight face. FOX is so blatant in their bias that they are generally held up as the exemplars of modern yellow journalism.
I agree with you that broadcast and newspaper journalism organizations held a palpable liberal bias for many years. Offering a counterpoint to that is fine. But what FOX does is so over the top that I think you should only watch it - hey, the same goes for MSNBC for the most part - if you don't like hearing anything that might disagree with your preconceived notions. Bully for you if you like your "news" filtered in advance to agree with you... I just don't think it does much to stretch your worldview or improve your ability to see multiple sides of an issue. That's why I try to stay away from TV and radio news in general.
Are there many non-PR types in "journalism" these days anyway?
Yes! Actual journalists - as in the people who write the news stories that you read in a newspaper or online, hear on the radio or... maybe... see on TV - are actually highly dedicated professionals who (for the most part) care deeply about truth and accuracy. Spokespeople, flacks, talking heads and gibbering mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann etc. are not journalists and represent a very tiny fraction of the "journalism" industry; they are just more visible, especially if you only watch TV news and don't read a newspaper.
Don't let the fact that FOX News is 99% eye candy or asinine talking heads fool you, since 99% of actual news published comes from real professional journalists. And these selfsame people you disparage are among the very best guarantors of your constitutional liberties and right to know what your government is up to.
The equipment is expensive, but is it _that_ expensive?
Yeah, it is. With 4G you are dealing with dramatically larger capacity so your whole infrastructure needs an overhaul.
So of course you start with the equipment in each tower (which is pretty expensive). You also have to upgrade the backhaul circuits attached to each and every one of those thousands of towers from copper T1s or microwave to fiber/Metro Ethernet etc. to handle the much larger throughputs that LTE supports. On top of that, throw in all the heavy-duty routers, management and QoS gear for the core network and you're looking at some heavy-duty cash. AT&T and Verizon each spend many billions each year on network capital investment, and the costs of a wholesale technology upgrade go well beyond typical expansion/upgrade costs... Moving to 4G will save the carriers a lot of operational expense in teh long run (and that will be passed on to the users in terms of lower data costs), but the upfront implementation costs are ginormous.
If this ever comes to pass, and Apple releases an LTE-compatible iPhone, the technology roadblock should vanish.
Not necessarily. Cellular carriers don't flip a switch and make their network technologies change - it happens market by market, tower by tower. Until Verizon upgrades 100% of their nationwide network to LTE - which even optimistically takes several years and costs tens of billions of dollars - then large parts of their network will continue to be CDMA, which is incompatible with the GSM-based iPhone. So even if Verizon could get access to a future LTE-based iPhone, it wouldn't work on large parts of their network for quite some time.
To your point, NASA continues to do great, worthwhile things. But "spectacular?" No. Not in the same way their early triumphs were. Cassini-Huygens is great but does it compare with Mercury, Apollo, Voyager, Skylab or the Shuttle? No.
Maybe it's okay, we just aren't trying to do anything that catches the public imagination in the same way those older things did. But I think that's also the reason that if you ask Joe Public - who through public opinion has a great impact on NASA's funding - what NASA has done for the last 20 years, he may mention Hubble then he'll say that NASA is in the business of delaying shuttle launches that he wasn't sure why they were happening in the first place.
This sounds like flamebait but I swear it's not. I would love to hear someone knowledgeable explain to me why (at least as it seems to a layman like myself) NASA did amazing things for so long then hasn't done anything to capture the public's imagination for decades. I understand how massive the funding was in their heyday, but every other technology sector seems to do more with less over time - is NASA's mission just impossible to accomplish for less than 3% of GDP? Or did they hire worse and worse recruits over time? Or did the wrong people get put in charge? Or does this stuff just get harder to do?
This has baffled and saddened me for years. I really do want to hear an answer from someone who has some insight...
As others have mentioned, the framers of the Constitution had just finished overthrowing England's colonial administration and had this in mind. And note that neither after the Whiskey Rebellion or after the end of slavery did the government abolish the Second Amendment, which would seem not to fit with your theory. On top of all that, the Supreme Court of the United States has held repeatedly that the framers' intent wasn't even related to militias per se, but as a purely individual right. (I don't agree with this interpretation personally, but I am willing to believe that Supreme Court justices are better qualified to interpret the Constitution than you or me.) So while it squares nicely with modern revisionist "People's History"-style historical interpretations, the whole "slavery" argument you're pushing really just holds no water.
Look, I'm not a NRA member, I haven't held a firearm since my grand-dad taught me to shoot when I was 12, and I'm all for restricting the access to guns in America. So I'm not philosophically out of line with your ideal outcome. But when you extrapolate wild things like the Second Amendment being related to slavery, you appear to abandon logic and do harm to your own cause.
Exchange does it. IMAP servers can do it (though not all do).
Yes, the newest versions of Exchange with Direct Push do it as well. Although IMAP IDLE can theoretically do it, I have yet to see it in the wild. The deficiency in IMAP is that (unlike RIM's NOC or Exchange Direct Push + SCMDM) the encrypted permanent connection is used for device management as well (OTA provisioning, remote wipe if the device is stolen, etc.)
That doesn't sound like much of a feature to me [...] I could just set my phone up to have my work account *and* my gmail account, which makes even more sense.
The point of PIN-to-PIN is not just proofing against just one e-mail account being unavailable (although in most large enterprise/government environments you would be shot by the IT security group for sending potentially sensitive information via your gmail account). It's about the fact that those communications go from any BlackBerry to the RIM NOC and straight to the other BlackBerry. The whole Internet could disappear and as long as the RIM NOC (which links directly to the packet networks of the major cell carriers) is there you can still send messages between BlackBerries. Not an everyday feature but very useful in emergency situations...
Slashdot Mirror
The system you describe sounds interesting, but is ripe for abuse in its own way. How, for example, does the "university application center" know how one school varies from another, and how do they judge it? Does it somehow mean that my 4.0 GPA is worth less to them if they think my school wasn't as good as somebody else's?
I would much prefer to have everyone take the same test and be judged on standardized criteria - that leaves it up to every student to show their knowledge on a level playing field. Sure, SATs are imperfect tests, and can easily fail to capture a student's depth or breadth of knowledge. But that's why high school transcripts, AP tests and activities play a significant role in US college admissions as well.
The real question ... how long can this franchise hold out when the last episode of any quality was made twenty years ago?
I actually liked Episode 3, and thought Episode 2 was passable as a "popcorn movie." There are still some pretty decent novels and comics being produced, and video games like Knights of the Old Republic have been breaking some pretty interesting new ground as well. The Star Wars universe keeps growing and producing some reasonably good entertainment, at least when George Lucas keeps his personal hands off it...
I will now return to my comic book store, where I dispense the insults rather than receiving them.
What I want IS the old stuff. I want the ORIGINAL series on DVD ... Why can't we just buy the original cut?
You can. Sure, you have to get the special edition versionsas well, but this DVD set includes all the originals on "bonus discs." You can also find the orignal-only DVD single discs used as well.
Here's AT&T's handset approval and certification process as an example, and here is Verizon's. Nearly all carriers around the globe have them - some are very rigorous and demanding, while others are not much more than checking your CTIA and [your country's version of the FCC] radio performance certifications.
Regarding your specific example of T-Mobile USA - their certification process is known to be really easy, which makes things less onerous for handset developers but also doesn't catch sometimes serious bugs and issues like the Nexus One 3G problems. AT&T and Verizon have much more rigorous device certification processes (more of a PITA but better QA), and Sprint is somewhere in between.
Again, can you quantify the risks the boss of a financial firm faces? What, exactly, does he stand to lose above and beyond the obvious (aka his job) if things go belly-up?
Many financial firms are start-ups or small partnerships where the CEO or senior partners have invested significant portions of their own wealth into the company, so a failure can not just put them out of a job but also leave them financially wiped out. Even at the huge high-profile firms the senior people are expected to be financially "eating their own dogfood" by having a significant part of their net worth in the company's equity. There is also the possibility of getting sued into oblivion for losing other people's money, facing fines or sanctions if someone (it doesn't have to be you) at your company cut corners and broke the law, etc.
I'm not saying these people have it tough. But I do think they have a lot of things that could go wrong and hence a helluva lot of stress in return for those ridiculous paychecks.
This is an old argument..... the two markets have co-existed for decades.
Precisely! This is not about stupid or smart users, as some Slashdotters imply - it's about user preferences.
I like to tinker with electronics, but I do not want to tinker with my car, I just want it to work as simply and easily as possible. Other people love to tinker with their cars endlessly but wish their computers were simpler to operate. That doesn't make any of us dumb, it just means that we have respective areas where we prioritize "ease of use" over "freedom of use."
p.s. Car analogy used per Slashdot RFC 1693.
Why can't I get ads I would be even remotely interested in?
Remember that website owners don't just pick any ads they think you might be interested in - they only show the ads of those companies who have chosen to advertise with them. If GQ Magazine ads on Ars Technica aren't relevant to you, it isn't because Ars made a bad choice about which ads to find for you, it's because GQ Magazine made a bad choice purchasing impressions on Ars. If the companies offering things that you might be interested in don't choose to advertise with Ars, then you won't see them.
Whether those companies with stuff you are interested in don't advertise online or with Ars is because they think their target customers tend to block web ads is an entirely different question, and one I don't have the answer to.
His employer was the city. His job was to keep the passwords safe from everyone except the Mayor.
I can't say that I have read his official job description but I'm pretty sure that "keep the passwords to yourself and the mayor of a major metropolitan city" wasn't it. It was probably "to keep the passwords safe from people not authorized to have them." People authorized by city policy or law to have those passwords most likely included any number of his bosses on up the chain of command - people he did not provide them to when requested. Does every IT admin in a company think his job is to keep the passwords safe from everyone but themselves and the CEO?
Seriously - I know we all want to cheer for the IT guy here, and his case sounds terribly bungled by the city - but let's not try to pretend that he didn't violate rules and/or laws.
Why would I pay for content that I can get for free anywhere else?
That's the whole point of the New York Times model - they do provide original content and in-depth reporting. Columnists, sure, but that's not really the value for most readers. What you typically find on "news aggregator" recycle-AP-news-endlessly sites is a basic "what happened" account. The NYT hires many of the best reporters in the business and gives them the time and resources to write longer analysis pieces that seek to provide context, explain what's happening behind the scenes and what it may mean in the longer term. That's the kind of NYT-exclusive reporting which gives them a differentiated value but which is expensive to produce.
That being said, I personally find the NYT's content worth reading but not worth paying for. (I have discretionary budget for one news source that I find really valuable, so that will continue to go to a subscription to The Economist.) So the NYT will lose me as a reader, but I wasn't making them much money anyway so I doubt they'll care much. The bet they're making is that they will get more money in subscriptions than they will lose on ad impressions from people like me. Their bet may be wrong but it's their content to decide what to do with. Time will tell.
"No PR is bad PR."
Ask an actual PR person about this commonly repeated phrase and they will roll their eyes. That phrase is only true for celebrities. For companies, there is A LOT of bad PR. Do you really think that the companies involved welcomed any of these:
For businesses with a brand to protect, there is absolutely such a thing as PR which taints their image and will stop customers from buying things from them/using them. I really wish the phrase "there's no such thing as bad press" would vanish from people's minds because (at least in some contexts) it's just not true.
I think the right of people to own and control the access to their own creative works is just as important. Free expression (meaning the right to speak freely) is protected in the US constitution. Free distribution (meaning redistributing the speech or works of others without compensating the creators if they own it and ask to be compensated) is not. Neither of these are absolutes (e.g. yelling fire in a crowed theater or threatening someone) but in general this is the way the law works, and reflects the right that for some period of time (even if most of us think that period of time is too long), you as a creator are able to "own" the copying of what you have created. So I guess we just disagree - and that's OK. Fortunately, the right of us all to disagree is protected under US law - as well as, if you've read the terms on the website, the fact that we both "own" our comments here.
At least in the USA, this has largely been quashed by the telcos in the courts, claiming that such networks are unfair competition to their price gouging mobile data plans.
The courts in the US have had nothing to do with the failure of municipal WiFi networks. Where these muni WiFi networks have failed, they have done so because they lacked a business model. The first generation of these efforts especially (I'm looking at you San Francisco and Philadelphia) were the product of starry-eyed city governments believing they could provide citizens with free network access at no cost to themselves, and crack-smoking startups and floundering incumbent telcos like Earthlink imagining they could somehow make money on this.
Seriously, if anybody has examples of anything good Steve Cook did during his 19 years at NASA, please post them.
If anybody has examples of anything good NASA did for manned spaceflight during the previous 19 years, please post them.
Of course NASA has sponsored plenty of worthwhile projects in the last 20 years, but all of them I can think of have been for unmanned spaceflight (Hubble, Mars Surveyor, etc.) Why should we be surprised when the program manager for NASA's seemingly perpetually delayed next-generation manned spaceflight program bails out? When the press description for the most recent Discovery shuttle launch - which cost tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars - was that it delivered the Stephen Colbert treadmill and some mice to the ISS, why should we continue to care about or support these efforts?
We think of NYT as a trend-setter, but it's really just a trend-follower, just like Slashdot, always trying to get new readers by recycling the same old keywords and the same old news every day.
I'm pretty sure the news changes every day on The New York Times. Are you sure you aren't just reading a cached version?
99 cents ain't resonable to anyone but an Apple fanboy.
Actually, it seems reasonable to tens of millions of people, including me. Considering how much enjoyment I get out of the music I buy, I'd say it's a very reasonable deal indeed.
Fuck marketing! Just give people the free and open truth.
Let me guess ... you're an engineer?
Seriously, I think the problem here is you are confusing marketing with spin. Marketing actually encompasses a LOT of useful things, not just spin - and most F/OSS projects could REALLY use them. The definition of marketing includes:
It's a common mistake among technical people to think that marketing only includes that last item. Just like many sales or marketing people misunderstand what "technical people" do...
If we're really lucky, maybe someone will be able to look at this and move us one step closer to an unlocked Pre that could jump onto Verizon's network.
I thought people would eventually learn this after all the discussion of "why can't I move my iPhone to Verizon?" In the US, Verizon and Sprint use CDMA. Each phone has to be developed for each specific network. AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM, the worldwide standard where phones can be "unlocked" and moved to other networks (as long as the phone support the frequencies used by those networks). So don't hold your breath waiting for a Verizon Pre.
everyone knows that "fair and balanced" means balancing out the other side.
You know, that is the first time anyone has ever explained that phrase to me in a way that made sense. Taken from that vantage point, FOX News actually is healthily supporting balance by being a counterpart to other networks.
The problem is that your suggested context is not what FOX claims to be. Remember their other tagline, "We report. You decide?" That strongly implies impartiality on their part, which, come on - nobody can claim with a straight face. FOX is so blatant in their bias that they are generally held up as the exemplars of modern yellow journalism.
I agree with you that broadcast and newspaper journalism organizations held a palpable liberal bias for many years. Offering a counterpoint to that is fine. But what FOX does is so over the top that I think you should only watch it - hey, the same goes for MSNBC for the most part - if you don't like hearing anything that might disagree with your preconceived notions. Bully for you if you like your "news" filtered in advance to agree with you ... I just don't think it does much to stretch your worldview or improve your ability to see multiple sides of an issue. That's why I try to stay away from TV and radio news in general.
Are there many non-PR types in "journalism" these days anyway?
Yes! Actual journalists - as in the people who write the news stories that you read in a newspaper or online, hear on the radio or ... maybe ... see on TV - are actually highly dedicated professionals who (for the most part) care deeply about truth and accuracy. Spokespeople, flacks, talking heads and gibbering mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann etc. are not journalists and represent a very tiny fraction of the "journalism" industry; they are just more visible, especially if you only watch TV news and don't read a newspaper.
Don't let the fact that FOX News is 99% eye candy or asinine talking heads fool you, since 99% of actual news published comes from real professional journalists. And these selfsame people you disparage are among the very best guarantors of your constitutional liberties and right to know what your government is up to.
The equipment is expensive, but is it _that_ expensive?
Yeah, it is. With 4G you are dealing with dramatically larger capacity so your whole infrastructure needs an overhaul.
So of course you start with the equipment in each tower (which is pretty expensive). You also have to upgrade the backhaul circuits attached to each and every one of those thousands of towers from copper T1s or microwave to fiber/Metro Ethernet etc. to handle the much larger throughputs that LTE supports. On top of that, throw in all the heavy-duty routers, management and QoS gear for the core network and you're looking at some heavy-duty cash. AT&T and Verizon each spend many billions each year on network capital investment, and the costs of a wholesale technology upgrade go well beyond typical expansion/upgrade costs... Moving to 4G will save the carriers a lot of operational expense in teh long run (and that will be passed on to the users in terms of lower data costs), but the upfront implementation costs are ginormous.
If this ever comes to pass, and Apple releases an LTE-compatible iPhone, the technology roadblock should vanish.
Not necessarily. Cellular carriers don't flip a switch and make their network technologies change - it happens market by market, tower by tower. Until Verizon upgrades 100% of their nationwide network to LTE - which even optimistically takes several years and costs tens of billions of dollars - then large parts of their network will continue to be CDMA, which is incompatible with the GSM-based iPhone. So even if Verizon could get access to a future LTE-based iPhone, it wouldn't work on large parts of their network for quite some time.
To your point, NASA continues to do great, worthwhile things. But "spectacular?" No. Not in the same way their early triumphs were. Cassini-Huygens is great but does it compare with Mercury, Apollo, Voyager, Skylab or the Shuttle? No.
Maybe it's okay, we just aren't trying to do anything that catches the public imagination in the same way those older things did. But I think that's also the reason that if you ask Joe Public - who through public opinion has a great impact on NASA's funding - what NASA has done for the last 20 years, he may mention Hubble then he'll say that NASA is in the business of delaying shuttle launches that he wasn't sure why they were happening in the first place.
This sounds like flamebait but I swear it's not. I would love to hear someone knowledgeable explain to me why (at least as it seems to a layman like myself) NASA did amazing things for so long then hasn't done anything to capture the public's imagination for decades. I understand how massive the funding was in their heyday, but every other technology sector seems to do more with less over time - is NASA's mission just impossible to accomplish for less than 3% of GDP? Or did they hire worse and worse recruits over time? Or did the wrong people get put in charge? Or does this stuff just get harder to do?
This has baffled and saddened me for years. I really do want to hear an answer from someone who has some insight...
Well, you're wrong. America's economy depended on slavery. Guns were necessary for slavery. Connect the dots.
Boy, those are some reeeeaaalll far apart dots to connect. Sorry, pal, but the economies of the Northern states in 1789 had nothing to do with slavery. Even the Southern states' economies weren't inextricably tied to slavery until after the invention of Eli Whitney's cotton gin in 1793.
As others have mentioned, the framers of the Constitution had just finished overthrowing England's colonial administration and had this in mind. And note that neither after the Whiskey Rebellion or after the end of slavery did the government abolish the Second Amendment, which would seem not to fit with your theory. On top of all that, the Supreme Court of the United States has held repeatedly that the framers' intent wasn't even related to militias per se, but as a purely individual right. (I don't agree with this interpretation personally, but I am willing to believe that Supreme Court justices are better qualified to interpret the Constitution than you or me.) So while it squares nicely with modern revisionist "People's History"-style historical interpretations, the whole "slavery" argument you're pushing really just holds no water.
Look, I'm not a NRA member, I haven't held a firearm since my grand-dad taught me to shoot when I was 12, and I'm all for restricting the access to guns in America. So I'm not philosophically out of line with your ideal outcome. But when you extrapolate wild things like the Second Amendment being related to slavery, you appear to abandon logic and do harm to your own cause.
Exchange does it. IMAP servers can do it (though not all do).
Yes, the newest versions of Exchange with Direct Push do it as well. Although IMAP IDLE can theoretically do it, I have yet to see it in the wild. The deficiency in IMAP is that (unlike RIM's NOC or Exchange Direct Push + SCMDM) the encrypted permanent connection is used for device management as well (OTA provisioning, remote wipe if the device is stolen, etc.)
That doesn't sound like much of a feature to me [...] I could just set my phone up to have my work account *and* my gmail account, which makes even more sense.
The point of PIN-to-PIN is not just proofing against just one e-mail account being unavailable (although in most large enterprise/government environments you would be shot by the IT security group for sending potentially sensitive information via your gmail account). It's about the fact that those communications go from any BlackBerry to the RIM NOC and straight to the other BlackBerry. The whole Internet could disappear and as long as the RIM NOC (which links directly to the packet networks of the major cell carriers) is there you can still send messages between BlackBerries. Not an everyday feature but very useful in emergency situations...