Between CNN and Flipboard, I can read lots of news for free
People don't go to the NY Times for the same news they can read on CNN etc. (I say this as one of the million digital NYT customers referenced in the article). CNN and free news aggregators tend to just republish stories they licensed from the Associated Press or UPI. (True fact: you can be a "news site" without having a single reporter, just pay your AP license and publish recycled content all day long! viz. Breitbart)
"Premium" news outlets like NY Times, Wall Street Journal, FT, Economist, Washington Post, etc. spend the money required in many cases to actually send their own reporters out who can do original reporting and offer additional information, differing views, or focus on in-depth/investigative reporting and add some "why" to the "how" that most AP stories consist of. That's worthwhile reading to me, and why I am more than OK paying a subscription for it - I think supporting quality journalism is an important thing to do. Otherwise nothing will be left but the Breitbarts of the world.
I can't believe you think that's what I am saying. I am not saying they ARE the same. I'm saying, legally, HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT.
Legally, if I take a girl out on a date and I pay for a nice dinner and we have sex afterwards, it's not prostitution. That's because - although she might not have had sex with me if I didn't pay for dinner - there was no expressed or implied contract (offer, acceptance, exchange of value) saying that she DEFINITELY would have sex with me SPECIFICALLY in exchange for free dinner. Likewise, if a friend drives me somewhere and I offer to pay for gas, my friend may or may not take me up on it but will still drive me. If my friend said "if you agree in advance to reimburse me for gas and pay me for my time, then I will drive you there," then yes you have a contract for transportation services.
When you catch an Uber ride, there is a legal, contractual exchange of money happening explicitly for performance of services. It's not a very gray area at all. Legally speaking.
Prior to the rise of advertising, almost all sites were 'independent'. They'll be around for a long time after the end of Internet advertising, because they're run for love, not money.
And none of those sites carried breaking news or the AP wire, at least not legally. Or had sports scores (ditto). Or showed streaming video other than self-produced content in 240 x 160 "QuickTime postage stamp theater" format. Or paid anyone to write content for them. Or provided social media capabilities (vital to the ubiquity of the Internet, whether you personally like/use them or not). Or did much of fucking anything other than be personal projects or part-time blogs that ran until the proprietor got a job/spouse/kid and realized it was an unsustainable time (and bandwidth cost) investment. All that would be left is e-commerce sites; personal sites where the creator can handle technical duties and pay the cost of hosting (remember, no ad-supported WordPress!); 100% sponsored sites (which would thereby lose all credibility of independent thought); big corporations that could afford making "loss leader" websites or sustain the costs of being subscription-only (also as bad); a tiny number of donation-only sites like Wikipedia with enough notoriety to sustain themselves; and some government pages funded by your tax dollars.
I loved the era when you had to install WinSock or MacTCP to use your college's Internet connection. Browse the Wayback Machine from 1996 and you'll get warm fuzzy feelings, but remember that this was when the Internet was a nerd phenomenon like Usenet, not a global force for easy information dissemination and democratization of media. To return to it would be the death knell of the Internet in all functional ways.
Advertising may be annoying. But it is what fueled the growth of the Internet into what it is today, and I personally don't see celebrating the death of sites like Ars Technica, Longform, Foxtrot Alpha, Jalopnik, The Onion, Kotaku, TheForce.Net, Grantland, Slate, ESPN.com/SI.com, or pretty much any other site on the web that I currently enjoy for free. Insert whatever other site here that you enjoy reading and you do not currently directly pay for.Your mileage may vary, but I don't think "the rest of the world will celebrate" as you seem to believe.
Back in the real world, the reason there are so few phone companies is because the government gives them a monopoly on use of radio frequencies.
Umm, no. The reason that there are so few mobile phone carriers is that it is really f***ing expensive to put up 40,000 or so nationwide towers and all the network infrastructure and BSS/OSS needed to support them. Never mind care, devices, sales channels, marketing and all the rest. Cellular services simply don't work well with unlicensed spectrum (capacity planning is a NIGHTMARE if you don't know who you're sharing spectrum with and what their loads are), so you also need to have the money to buy spectrum licenses. (That's right, none of the carriers were "given" a monopoly on their spectrum, they had to buy it. For a lot of money.)
This is what business school professors call "high barriers to market entry." If you don't have giant piles of money in quantities starting with the letter "B," you naturally can't play. Sure, there are lots of MVNOs which can be stood up comparatively cheaply (as in the tens of millions of dollars startup cost), but those aren't new carriers, they are just resellers of one of the "big four." If you want to be a local wireless company where you don't need many towers etc. then you can do that - there are dozens of those in the US, primarily serving rural areas where the "big guys" don't see a good enough return on investment - but they have no pretensions of being competitors on a national scope.
It's like asking "why aren't there more car companies?" It's not because of regulation (though I am not personally a big fan of government regulation of wireless), it's because it costs a metric f***ton of money to become a company that builds its own cars.
That's adaptive multi-rate wideband, which goes by the commercial name of "HD Voice."
Yes and no. You're correct about the above, which is the codec being used, but the larger point is that when you're calling between iPhone 6 or higher (or Samsung Galaxy 5+, etc.) users on the same network, you're using VoLTE. It's not about Sprint per se; if you are on a VoLTE-capable phone with any US major carrier, and you call someone else on that carrier with a VoLTE-capable phone, you will get that same enhanced audio quality.
From analog phones through GSM 3G, everything was built around circuit switched voice, with the same audio quality that was the standard since digital switches were introduced onto the landline phone network. LTE is packet-based from the ground up, and everything else is just an application on top, including voice. And VoLTE is the LTE voice application standard, which uses different LTE EPS Bearers and provides a higher voice quality. (True fact: if you have a LTE phone but it's not designed for VoLTE, when you place a call your phone will drop back to the 3G network in order to make a regular circuit switched voice call.) VoLTE inter-carrier support is limited so calls between carriers, even on VoLTE phones, will go through a PSTN bridge at some point where you lose the enhanced quality. But generally speaking any intra-carrier call between VoLTE-capable phones (if both users are on the carrier's LTE footprint) will provide that same high-quality audio.
I know your post is funny, but let's not overlook the opportunity to critique what is possibly the worst Slashdot article ever.
Apple, Microsoft Tout Their Privacy Policies To Get Positive PR
As opposed to all those times when companies tout thing to get negative PR?
Apple hasn't changed its privacy policy in more than a year
Okay, looking for the news here.
but that didn't stop the company from putting up a glossy website explaining it in layman's terms
Well, this is bad because... you know, because, something?
Microsoft too has been touting its respect for its users's privacy.
Link? Article? Something?
This doesn't represent any high-minded altruism on those companies' parts, of course
Of course. Because, you know, [CITATION NEEDED]
it's part of their battle against Google, their archrival that offers almost all of its services for free and makes its money mining user data.
Dear Slashdot/Dice/whoever is actually running the show, can someone actually articulate where there is actually anything to talk about here? Maybe other than stoking a clickbait + flame bait war over who loves TEH GOOOGLES vs. the homosexuals who likes TEH APPLES and the obvious shills who are the only ones who claim to like TEH MICROSOFTS omg zerg rush?
Seriously, Slashdot, WTF? What. The. Fuck? An article about how one company hasn't changed its privacy policy, and how another has... not done anything? What The. Fuck?
Look, I haven't left this site yet because I haven't found a better alternative. But you're making it harder and harder every day to justify staying here with shit like this.
what's really needed is for the sales people to not sell something they don't know what they're selling, because then you end up with a project that's starting and has a deadline before anyone knows wtf it's supposed to even do.
Then how would anyone every buy or sell any professional services work, or custom system development? If you are building a new ERP system for a client, you can't tell them "Well, we'll build it for you and then tell you how much it will cost after we're done." Maybe you can get away with a "cost plus" approach in the government (and we've all seen how well that works in terms of conserving taxpayer dollars), but in the real world a customer needs to budget for development well before it's delivered.
Or take another example: commercial airliners have a multi-year sales and development cycle; should Boeing salespeople not solicit any orders on a new plane until it's rolled off the assembly line (and how would they even know how many to build)? The fact is that in most industries you need to have customers pre-sold on any new product (software or physical) in order to 1.) know how much of it to make, 2.) to know what features are vital, and 3.) to have a reasonable payback period on your investment.
The fact is that there will always be things being sold or committed very early in the development process. The only way to keep things from going sideways is to have good salespeople managed by good managers and working with good engineers who all collectively communicate frequently to keep expectations manageable. And that requires good people, which is hard. There is no magic bullet to get this right or else everyone would be doing it.
In case you're wondering, it was simply that only the rental store could rewind rental tapes (cartridges). Not so much rights management as blanket functionality removal.
Yes, but it can also been seen as a rather clever technical solution to the question of "how do you get people to only watch a movie once if that is what they paid for?" Of course the smarter approach would have been that adopted by the later VHS rental industry - just pay for how long you keep it, not how many times you watched it. But these guys were writing the rules as they went along in an entirely new market, and it's at least a concept that was worth exploring given the technology at hand (and potential hostility of the movie industry).
The article notes that it was only the rental cartridges which couldn't be rewound by the home units, so it's not like that was entirely missing functionality. I still think it's a smart and simple technical approach to a business question given the limited technology at hand.
It would seem being an air traffic controller would be an easily automated task.
So it would seem. But there are a lot of them today, and axing human workers in favor of computers - even if the computers can do the job better - is always contentious.
This appears to be one of those issues where the Slashdot "horde" is of two minds: 1.) Technology is awesome and more reliable! and 2.) Down with automation when it replaces human jobs (or down with even replacing national human jobs with international ones)! From what I understand, given the more generally socialist and "universal welfare" stance of Scandinavian countries (with their low immigration rates and [in some cases] petrochemical trust funds), it would seem like even more of a battle to replace human workers.
As they say, "where you stand depends on where you sit," and I will be curious to see where the Slashbot majority falls on this particular question of automated coolness vs. white collar (not tech per se but definitely middle class) local jobs. Are those (at least in the US, unionized) jobs more important than potentially better results for all travelers through improved technology?
There shouldn't be critical cables. There should be redundant paths to make the network tolerant to any individual cut.
There should also be a magic money tree to pay for all the digging and trenching, and the expensive rights of way to make sure that the East Dead Cowskull, Texas, Central Office has redundant fiber in the middle of the Panhandle.
Oh wait, there is a magic money tree! It's your phone or Internet bill! Because if any of the major fiber/ISP/cable/whatevers built 100% physically diverse networks, that's where the money would come from. Unless it came from taxpayers, which is even worse.
That it can not store local movies as well is annoying. How many of us have kids who watch the same thing over and over and we watch our caps die a quick death?
You are familiar with iTunes Home Sharing, right? You download the movie/show/whatever once to a PC that's on the same WiFi network as the Apple TV, start Home Sharing, and away you go - get the content over your WLAN with no need to use up your Internet caps. No storage on the Apple TV itself (other than for buffering) required.
Copyright infringement is not really, not morally a crime
Disagree. Like many other crimes, it's easy to rationalize when you think of it as a crime against a faceless conglomerate or something. And, let's face it, I have downloaded stuff for free before that I shouldn't, you probably have too, so we like to wave our hands and say it's not really a crime or morally wrong, because we abstract things so the "victim" is someone we have no sympathy for.
But that's not really true, is it? Let's say for example that the copyright infringement was giving away free copies of a very useful $4.99 app that an independent developer worked very hard on. Or maybe it was giving away free copies of a $3.99 Amazon Kindle Single by a first time author or a Comixology independent comic. If you were the party that made these things and then had other people redistributing them for free... you would be pissed, right?
The fact of the matter is that when Person/Company/Whatever X says "I made this thing, I would like you to pay for it in order to use it," then morally our only choice is to say "yes, I agree to your terms in order to get this thing you created" or to say "no thanks, your thing is not worth the price you are asking." Taking and using the thing but not paying the price asked is not a morally valid choice.
Look, we all know some content creators are greedy, unfair, predatory or worse. And if it's technically easy to pirate their works, a lot of us will. But let's not try to fool ourselves that this is a victimless crime, or to think that our moral evaluation of the part on the other end of the (non-)transaction makes any difference. Downloading for free stuff that the rightful owner wants you to pay for is not morally ambiguous. It's wrong. Many of us (including me!) sometimes do it. But let's not kid ourselves about the morality of what we're doing.
Exactly. This is the data apple has, it's the data being requested, the fact that neither apple nor the FBI can do anything useful with it should be of no legal concern to apple.
It's not what is being requested, though. The FBI is seeking something akin to the CALEA wiretap requirements that phone companies must comply with, where the carrier is responsible for turning over the plaintext or unencrypted audio, not a raw data dump.
CALEA is odd and outdated, in that it only applies to voice communications. (That includes VoIP services provided by wireless or landline phone companies.) There is no direct CALEA equivalent for data, though, in that if all you have is the encrypted stuff, then that's what you turn over in response to a subpoena. The FBI is trying to get around this issue by enforcing a CALEA equivalent on Apple, even though it's not a law - hence the disagreement and why Apple isn't being forced to re-architect iMessage so they can hand over the plaintext.
I don't think it's fair to call Steve Jobs a fruit. His sexual preference should not be an issue. Now, if you're referring to Apple customers... you still get points off for the homophobic slur, but gain points for accuracy.
Ha ha the people that buys the iPhones, they are teh GAYZ! I get the joke and it is teh funneys!
Some people like different things than you and are willing to pay for them. Not all of them are idiots, hipsters or TEH GAYZ. Apple makes terrible stuff for enterprise, but for the home? I really, really like the OS X UI. I like the way iTunes integrates with AppleTV, I like the way OS X backs up seamlessly to Time Capsule wireless base stations. I like the way iOS hands off phone calls to my Mac, I like the way the iOS and Mac app stores curate out malware. I like the way iMessages show up on all my devices, I like the way Siri works. I like that my Mac personal computers last longer than the Windows computers I get for work (your mileage may vary).
I like buying Apple stuff and think I get value for my money. You can call me stupid or TEH GAYZZZ if you want. Or you can just accept that other people like different stuff than you do and be a grownup about it.
Just to make sure I understand Slashbot logic correctly:
When Google (Android, search) has huge marketshare, it's clear evidence of a superior product
When Oracle, Microsoft or Apple has big marketshare, it's clear evidence of people being stupid
and
When Google makes huge profits, it's clear evidence of a superior product set
When Apple makes huge profits, it's clear evidence of people being stupid
Throwing out a crazy left-field idea here, but is there any remote chance that some people - or perhaps a lot of people - just find value in different things than the typical Slashbotter does? Just maybe there is some reason other than massive cranial deficiencies that the Linux desktop, Roku, Ogg Vorbis, Ubuntu Phone, Symbian, Libre Office and 3D Printers have not yet taken over the world?
I bought a fancy new DSLR camera five years ago when my first child was born. During the first 12 months of the child's life, I'd say I generated close to 15 GB of photos of her - every first burp, every time she went for a walk, etc. was absolutely precious.
Flash forward a couple years and the DSLR sits on a shelf because I realized that 1.) all the photos I took of her seemed incredibly important at the time but are never looked at any more, 2.) I don't really need 16 megapixels of every moment of her life, and 3.) what's most important to me is always having the camera with me for the truly cute and memorable times I do want to take pictures of her or her little sister.
So all the photos of my older daughter since age 1 1/2 or so and all the photos since her little sister was born have been taken with a cellphone camera. It's good enough for anything but a portrait/Christmas card staged photo, and it's with me all the time. The only time I wish I still carried the DSLR all the time is when the kids are doing something split-second and the cellphone camera doesn't shoot quickly enough to capture it. Your mileage may vary, but just don't be surprised if whatever awesome setup you invest in becomes less and less used over time...
It's like, if you rob a bank for real it's bank robbery, if you plan to do it it's conspiracy and you've still broken the law.
That depends. Did you actually plan to go through with the bank robbery? Or from the outset did you know you were just fantasizing about being Bonnie and Clyde, and you were just pretending to plan a bank robbery because it gave you a thrill to act like your nebbishy couch-potato self really ever would?
I'm sure there are people who believe that even playfully flirting with someone else while you are in a committed relationship is infidelity. Most people - or at least those who have been married a long time - would probably see that as harmless as long as you never had any intent to go through with it.
To your point, I would agree that joining Ashley Madison goes well beyond the harmless flirting stage, and you can't tell from the outside whether someone did it for kicks or as a serious precursor to infidelity. But it is entirely possible that at least some subset of users did it without any intention of being physically unfaithful.
Surely if the job is not wanted but necessary, it is worth paying more for it.
The system already works that way, but only to a small extent in monetary terms. What a job pays is a function of two market forces: 1.) the more people who want a job, the less it will pay; and 2.) the fewer people who are qualified to do the job, the more it will pay. The problem is that in the real world, the second has far more influence than the first.
To your point, an undesirable job can command a wage premium. Military personnel assigned to service radar dishes in Alaska instead of defending Hawaii's coasts get hardship pay. Prospective CEOs of companies that are on the brink of failure tend to get paid better (or at least have bigger golden parachutes) because fewer qualified candidates want to take responsibility for a clunker. One of my first jobs in high school was at Toys 'R' Us. I could work the register for $5/hour, or I could be the janitor for $6/hour. Yes, the janitor job paid more because as you point out there were fewer people who wanted to do it, and the company realized they had to incentivize someone to take that job (I did, and I earned my pay every time I had to clean up after a three year old blew her Spaghetti-Os all over the Barbie aisle).
However, the vast majority of unattractive jobs come from the pool where there is a limited or no qualifications barrier to entry. So while the janitor may have been paid at a 20% premium to the cash register worker, you're still talking about the shallow end of the wage pool. The jobs with more scarcity of available talent make far more than any job where you have essentially an inexhaustible pool of potential applicants. And we all see that play itself out day after day.
I'm not going to pretend T-Mobile is an angel, but I think they've truly changed the industry.
I don't know about changing the industry, but other carriers have made moves to match T-Mobile, which has resulted in more consumer-friendly options across the board. So kudos to T-Mo for that. But the whole "Un-Carrier" schtick wasn't done from altruism, it was a strategic play decided on when T-Mobile didn't have many options except to be disruptive.
Flash back four years ago and T-Mobile is recognizing the decreasing distance between its rock and its hard place. It was the fourth largest carrier in the US, in a business where scale is EVERYTHING. (Think of it this way: you need 40,000 towers or so to cover the country whether you have 10 million subscribers or 100 million subscribers, so divide up their support costs per customer and...) T-Mo is owned by Deutsche Telekom, which had enjoyed being in the growing US market (compared to Europe) but basically said at this point, "your network is mediocre but making it genuinely good would cost billions and billions of dollars, which we don't want to spend. We will be trying to sell you as soon as we can. Barring that, figure a way out of this and send us a postcard once in a while on how it's going."
Deutsche did in fact shortly agree to sell T-Mobile to AT&T, which ultimately fell through due to FCC/antitrust objections. T-Mo couldn't compete based on economies of scale, and they couldn't compete based on network; their strategy had always been to have good coverage in urban/suburban areas but skip the more rural areas that you need to have really good reach but are not very cost-efficient. T-Mobile basically had to do something creative or die. Given that choice, to their credit, the opted for the former.
With that being said - and even though they have passed Sprint to become the #3 carrier in the US by customers - the fact that they are offering consumer-friendly deals and adding subscribers doesn't mean they are actually in a position to be profitable in the long run. Hint: there's a reason that T-Mobile was engaged in talks to be acquired by Sprint last year, and then again with DISH Network this year... companies with sound long-term economic prospects don't go around seeking to be bought by larger companies.
The military was still holding out, but even they knew that there was little chance of reaching a stalemate by that point.
Demonstrably untrue. While you are correct that the civilian members of the Japanese government had realized that the game was up, the military (which was dominated by nationalist hard-liners and junior officers besotted with banzai spirit) continued to actually welcome the idea of a US invasion. They believed the exact same thing they had believed before which made the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa so bloody: their best option was to make any US gains so expensive in blood and treasure that a negotiated settlement would be made that would allow them to retain their conquered possessions in Manchukuo and elsewhere. The military was not giving up anytime soon, and in fact some elements led a coup when they heard the Emperor had sanctioned surrender to prevent his imperial rescript from being broadcast. Read up on Ronald Spector's The Eagle Against the Sun or Max Hastings's Retribution to learn more.
A demonstration of the bomb, with Japanese military officials invited to see it, was considered by the US. It's hard to justify why that was not even tried first, before moving directly to the bombing of civilians.
I see this a lot, but it is not hard to answer this question. The bomb target selection committee - which included Dr. Oppenheimer - considered this idea but specifically rejected it because:
There was no way of guaranteeing that the Japanese government and military would believe that it was what it claimed to be. So there's a huge flash and a mushroom cloud over Tokyo Bay or Mt. Fuji. But a nondestructive test might very well lead the Japanese to believe that the bomb was less powerful than it really was, or to not understand its impact.
If the bomb failed or fizzled - which was certainly not impossible - it would in fact embolden the Japanese
Time was a factor. Roosevelt had secured a promise several months earlier from the Russians to get them to enter the war, back when it looked like we really needed their help. Now, though, they were getting ready to enter the war on their own terms and in the way that best suited them (i.e. striking first at territories they wanted to conquer and control), and if Japan didn't surrender quickly it might not be until the Soviets had occupied all of China in the process. Had the Soviet invasion been avoided by a quick, bomb-induced surrender then North Korea would not exist and there is a chance that Mao would never have succeeded against Chiang Kai-Shek...
There's a great deal of factual reporting about the thoughts and motivations of the bomb targeting group in the above two books as well as Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
No one knows how sticking with Maemo would have worked out. Would it have saved Nokia? Who knows?
You're right, nobody knows. But the probable answer is "not bloody likely." No matter how technically superior the OS may have been, it was going to be playing in a crowded space against entrenched competitors... the appropriate military metaphor would be a frontal assault against a numerically superior enemy entrenched in defensive positions. With one notable exception (Apple), every vertically integrated OEM (OS + hardware) in the mobile space has gotten mediocre results - BlackBerry, HP and Palm/WebOS, Samsung with Tizen, and now Microsoft. There's no reason to believe that Nokia's experience with Maemo would have been any different.
On top of that, Google and Apple both had fully fleshed out ecosystems for buying and using apps and music/video content - vital to success in the consumer smart device market - and Nokia would have been starting largely from scratch. Think how badly even Microsoft and Sony have struggled to make their content ecosystems work.
Given the needs for developer mindshare and the snowballing benefits of mass market adoption, I find it highly unlikely that there can ever be more than two truly successful (non-niche) mobile OSes in the market, at least for the foreseeable future. And if Apple ever stumbles badly with its iOS hardware refreshes one of these years, that number might be down to one.
A big company in an unaligned industry buys a formerly popular hardware maker, now falling on hard times, and eventually sells or pretty much writes all the assets of the acquisition off. I'm having a strange sense of deja vu... almost like this has happened before several times.
True to the nature of hipster-ism, these things will decline again at some point. But the presence of cool tastemakers interested in retro stuff is a real thing that impacts sales beyond just their own ranks. God help us all if these people rediscover fax machines.
So the Internet was designed with resilience unless someone has a strong pair of garden shears?
The Internet will do just fine. Your personal ability to access it, watch a movie or dial 911 will not.
The big networks all have many data centers and diverse physical routing paths between them. But most people seemingly fail to realize that your house, your neighborhood - heck, maybe even your county if you're rural - probably does not. There is more than one physical path to get data from a colo facility in San Francisco to one in Seattle (even if it adds a lot of latency). There is probably only one physical way to get data to your house. Yes, even your cable provider and the telco almost certainly share a conduit somewhere near you. Mostly that's because there are simply a limited number of good rights of way to run fiber (frequently railroad tracks, gas pipelines, etc.) in any given area.
And that's also because it makes doesn't make financial sense to spend the money to ensure that your house has two redundant cables coming out of it that take two separate paths out of your neighborhood to different COs, etc. That's true not just for houses but in many cases for cell towers, Central Offices and other telecom points of presence that make last-mile connections rather than backbone connections. So that's why a fiber cut is so bad - everyone served locally by that fiber will be out of luck, even if the Internet as a whole is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Between CNN and Flipboard, I can read lots of news for free
People don't go to the NY Times for the same news they can read on CNN etc. (I say this as one of the million digital NYT customers referenced in the article). CNN and free news aggregators tend to just republish stories they licensed from the Associated Press or UPI. (True fact: you can be a "news site" without having a single reporter, just pay your AP license and publish recycled content all day long! viz. Breitbart)
"Premium" news outlets like NY Times, Wall Street Journal, FT, Economist, Washington Post, etc. spend the money required in many cases to actually send their own reporters out who can do original reporting and offer additional information, differing views, or focus on in-depth/investigative reporting and add some "why" to the "how" that most AP stories consist of. That's worthwhile reading to me, and why I am more than OK paying a subscription for it - I think supporting quality journalism is an important thing to do. Otherwise nothing will be left but the Breitbarts of the world.
I can't believe you think that's what I am saying. I am not saying they ARE the same. I'm saying, legally, HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT.
Legally, if I take a girl out on a date and I pay for a nice dinner and we have sex afterwards, it's not prostitution. That's because - although she might not have had sex with me if I didn't pay for dinner - there was no expressed or implied contract (offer, acceptance, exchange of value) saying that she DEFINITELY would have sex with me SPECIFICALLY in exchange for free dinner. Likewise, if a friend drives me somewhere and I offer to pay for gas, my friend may or may not take me up on it but will still drive me. If my friend said "if you agree in advance to reimburse me for gas and pay me for my time, then I will drive you there," then yes you have a contract for transportation services.
When you catch an Uber ride, there is a legal, contractual exchange of money happening explicitly for performance of services. It's not a very gray area at all. Legally speaking.
Prior to the rise of advertising, almost all sites were 'independent'. They'll be around for a long time after the end of Internet advertising, because they're run for love, not money.
And none of those sites carried breaking news or the AP wire, at least not legally. Or had sports scores (ditto). Or showed streaming video other than self-produced content in 240 x 160 "QuickTime postage stamp theater" format. Or paid anyone to write content for them. Or provided social media capabilities (vital to the ubiquity of the Internet, whether you personally like/use them or not). Or did much of fucking anything other than be personal projects or part-time blogs that ran until the proprietor got a job/spouse/kid and realized it was an unsustainable time (and bandwidth cost) investment. All that would be left is e-commerce sites; personal sites where the creator can handle technical duties and pay the cost of hosting (remember, no ad-supported WordPress!); 100% sponsored sites (which would thereby lose all credibility of independent thought); big corporations that could afford making "loss leader" websites or sustain the costs of being subscription-only (also as bad); a tiny number of donation-only sites like Wikipedia with enough notoriety to sustain themselves; and some government pages funded by your tax dollars.
I loved the era when you had to install WinSock or MacTCP to use your college's Internet connection. Browse the Wayback Machine from 1996 and you'll get warm fuzzy feelings, but remember that this was when the Internet was a nerd phenomenon like Usenet, not a global force for easy information dissemination and democratization of media. To return to it would be the death knell of the Internet in all functional ways.
Advertising may be annoying. But it is what fueled the growth of the Internet into what it is today, and I personally don't see celebrating the death of sites like Ars Technica, Longform, Foxtrot Alpha, Jalopnik, The Onion, Kotaku, TheForce.Net, Grantland, Slate, ESPN.com/SI.com, or pretty much any other site on the web that I currently enjoy for free. Insert whatever other site here that you enjoy reading and you do not currently directly pay for.Your mileage may vary, but I don't think "the rest of the world will celebrate" as you seem to believe.
Back in the real world, the reason there are so few phone companies is because the government gives them a monopoly on use of radio frequencies.
Umm, no. The reason that there are so few mobile phone carriers is that it is really f***ing expensive to put up 40,000 or so nationwide towers and all the network infrastructure and BSS/OSS needed to support them. Never mind care, devices, sales channels, marketing and all the rest. Cellular services simply don't work well with unlicensed spectrum (capacity planning is a NIGHTMARE if you don't know who you're sharing spectrum with and what their loads are), so you also need to have the money to buy spectrum licenses. (That's right, none of the carriers were "given" a monopoly on their spectrum, they had to buy it. For a lot of money.)
This is what business school professors call "high barriers to market entry." If you don't have giant piles of money in quantities starting with the letter "B," you naturally can't play. Sure, there are lots of MVNOs which can be stood up comparatively cheaply (as in the tens of millions of dollars startup cost), but those aren't new carriers, they are just resellers of one of the "big four." If you want to be a local wireless company where you don't need many towers etc. then you can do that - there are dozens of those in the US, primarily serving rural areas where the "big guys" don't see a good enough return on investment - but they have no pretensions of being competitors on a national scope.
It's like asking "why aren't there more car companies?" It's not because of regulation (though I am not personally a big fan of government regulation of wireless), it's because it costs a metric f***ton of money to become a company that builds its own cars.
That's adaptive multi-rate wideband, which goes by the commercial name of "HD Voice."
Yes and no. You're correct about the above, which is the codec being used, but the larger point is that when you're calling between iPhone 6 or higher (or Samsung Galaxy 5+, etc.) users on the same network, you're using VoLTE. It's not about Sprint per se; if you are on a VoLTE-capable phone with any US major carrier, and you call someone else on that carrier with a VoLTE-capable phone, you will get that same enhanced audio quality.
From analog phones through GSM 3G, everything was built around circuit switched voice, with the same audio quality that was the standard since digital switches were introduced onto the landline phone network. LTE is packet-based from the ground up, and everything else is just an application on top, including voice. And VoLTE is the LTE voice application standard, which uses different LTE EPS Bearers and provides a higher voice quality. (True fact: if you have a LTE phone but it's not designed for VoLTE, when you place a call your phone will drop back to the 3G network in order to make a regular circuit switched voice call.) VoLTE inter-carrier support is limited so calls between carriers, even on VoLTE phones, will go through a PSTN bridge at some point where you lose the enhanced quality. But generally speaking any intra-carrier call between VoLTE-capable phones (if both users are on the carrier's LTE footprint) will provide that same high-quality audio.
I know your post is funny, but let's not overlook the opportunity to critique what is possibly the worst Slashdot article ever.
Apple, Microsoft Tout Their Privacy Policies To Get Positive PR
As opposed to all those times when companies tout thing to get negative PR?
Apple hasn't changed its privacy policy in more than a year
Okay, looking for the news here.
but that didn't stop the company from putting up a glossy website explaining it in layman's terms
Well, this is bad because... you know, because, something?
Microsoft too has been touting its respect for its users's privacy.
Link? Article? Something?
This doesn't represent any high-minded altruism on those companies' parts, of course
Of course. Because, you know, [CITATION NEEDED]
it's part of their battle against Google, their archrival that offers almost all of its services for free and makes its money mining user data.
Dear Slashdot/Dice/whoever is actually running the show, can someone actually articulate where there is actually anything to talk about here? Maybe other than stoking a clickbait + flame bait war over who loves TEH GOOOGLES vs. the homosexuals who likes TEH APPLES and the obvious shills who are the only ones who claim to like TEH MICROSOFTS omg zerg rush?
Seriously, Slashdot, WTF? What. The. Fuck? An article about how one company hasn't changed its privacy policy, and how another has... not done anything? What The. Fuck?
Look, I haven't left this site yet because I haven't found a better alternative. But you're making it harder and harder every day to justify staying here with shit like this.
what's really needed is for the sales people to not sell something they don't know what they're selling, because then you end up with a project that's starting and has a deadline before anyone knows wtf it's supposed to even do.
Then how would anyone every buy or sell any professional services work, or custom system development? If you are building a new ERP system for a client, you can't tell them "Well, we'll build it for you and then tell you how much it will cost after we're done." Maybe you can get away with a "cost plus" approach in the government (and we've all seen how well that works in terms of conserving taxpayer dollars), but in the real world a customer needs to budget for development well before it's delivered.
Or take another example: commercial airliners have a multi-year sales and development cycle; should Boeing salespeople not solicit any orders on a new plane until it's rolled off the assembly line (and how would they even know how many to build)? The fact is that in most industries you need to have customers pre-sold on any new product (software or physical) in order to 1.) know how much of it to make, 2.) to know what features are vital, and 3.) to have a reasonable payback period on your investment.
The fact is that there will always be things being sold or committed very early in the development process. The only way to keep things from going sideways is to have good salespeople managed by good managers and working with good engineers who all collectively communicate frequently to keep expectations manageable. And that requires good people, which is hard. There is no magic bullet to get this right or else everyone would be doing it.
In case you're wondering, it was simply that only the rental store could rewind rental tapes (cartridges). Not so much rights management as blanket functionality removal.
Yes, but it can also been seen as a rather clever technical solution to the question of "how do you get people to only watch a movie once if that is what they paid for?" Of course the smarter approach would have been that adopted by the later VHS rental industry - just pay for how long you keep it, not how many times you watched it. But these guys were writing the rules as they went along in an entirely new market, and it's at least a concept that was worth exploring given the technology at hand (and potential hostility of the movie industry).
The article notes that it was only the rental cartridges which couldn't be rewound by the home units, so it's not like that was entirely missing functionality. I still think it's a smart and simple technical approach to a business question given the limited technology at hand.
It would seem being an air traffic controller would be an easily automated task.
So it would seem. But there are a lot of them today, and axing human workers in favor of computers - even if the computers can do the job better - is always contentious.
This appears to be one of those issues where the Slashdot "horde" is of two minds: 1.) Technology is awesome and more reliable! and 2.) Down with automation when it replaces human jobs (or down with even replacing national human jobs with international ones)! From what I understand, given the more generally socialist and "universal welfare" stance of Scandinavian countries (with their low immigration rates and [in some cases] petrochemical trust funds), it would seem like even more of a battle to replace human workers.
As they say, "where you stand depends on where you sit," and I will be curious to see where the Slashbot majority falls on this particular question of automated coolness vs. white collar (not tech per se but definitely middle class) local jobs. Are those (at least in the US, unionized) jobs more important than potentially better results for all travelers through improved technology?
There shouldn't be critical cables. There should be redundant paths to make the network tolerant to any individual cut.
There should also be a magic money tree to pay for all the digging and trenching, and the expensive rights of way to make sure that the East Dead Cowskull, Texas, Central Office has redundant fiber in the middle of the Panhandle.
Oh wait, there is a magic money tree! It's your phone or Internet bill! Because if any of the major fiber/ISP/cable/whatevers built 100% physically diverse networks, that's where the money would come from. Unless it came from taxpayers, which is even worse.
That it can not store local movies as well is annoying. How many of us have kids who watch the same thing over and over and we watch our caps die a quick death?
You are familiar with iTunes Home Sharing, right? You download the movie/show/whatever once to a PC that's on the same WiFi network as the Apple TV, start Home Sharing, and away you go - get the content over your WLAN with no need to use up your Internet caps. No storage on the Apple TV itself (other than for buffering) required.
Copyright infringement is not really, not morally a crime
Disagree. Like many other crimes, it's easy to rationalize when you think of it as a crime against a faceless conglomerate or something. And, let's face it, I have downloaded stuff for free before that I shouldn't, you probably have too, so we like to wave our hands and say it's not really a crime or morally wrong, because we abstract things so the "victim" is someone we have no sympathy for.
But that's not really true, is it? Let's say for example that the copyright infringement was giving away free copies of a very useful $4.99 app that an independent developer worked very hard on. Or maybe it was giving away free copies of a $3.99 Amazon Kindle Single by a first time author or a Comixology independent comic. If you were the party that made these things and then had other people redistributing them for free... you would be pissed, right?
The fact of the matter is that when Person/Company/Whatever X says "I made this thing, I would like you to pay for it in order to use it," then morally our only choice is to say "yes, I agree to your terms in order to get this thing you created" or to say "no thanks, your thing is not worth the price you are asking." Taking and using the thing but not paying the price asked is not a morally valid choice.
Look, we all know some content creators are greedy, unfair, predatory or worse. And if it's technically easy to pirate their works, a lot of us will. But let's not try to fool ourselves that this is a victimless crime, or to think that our moral evaluation of the part on the other end of the (non-)transaction makes any difference. Downloading for free stuff that the rightful owner wants you to pay for is not morally ambiguous. It's wrong. Many of us (including me!) sometimes do it. But let's not kid ourselves about the morality of what we're doing.
Exactly. This is the data apple has, it's the data being requested, the fact that neither apple nor the FBI can do anything useful with it should be of no legal concern to apple.
It's not what is being requested, though. The FBI is seeking something akin to the CALEA wiretap requirements that phone companies must comply with, where the carrier is responsible for turning over the plaintext or unencrypted audio, not a raw data dump.
CALEA is odd and outdated, in that it only applies to voice communications. (That includes VoIP services provided by wireless or landline phone companies.) There is no direct CALEA equivalent for data, though, in that if all you have is the encrypted stuff, then that's what you turn over in response to a subpoena. The FBI is trying to get around this issue by enforcing a CALEA equivalent on Apple, even though it's not a law - hence the disagreement and why Apple isn't being forced to re-architect iMessage so they can hand over the plaintext.
I don't think it's fair to call Steve Jobs a fruit. His sexual preference should not be an issue. Now, if you're referring to Apple customers... you still get points off for the homophobic slur, but gain points for accuracy.
Ha ha the people that buys the iPhones, they are teh GAYZ! I get the joke and it is teh funneys!
Some people like different things than you and are willing to pay for them. Not all of them are idiots, hipsters or TEH GAYZ. Apple makes terrible stuff for enterprise, but for the home? I really, really like the OS X UI. I like the way iTunes integrates with AppleTV, I like the way OS X backs up seamlessly to Time Capsule wireless base stations. I like the way iOS hands off phone calls to my Mac, I like the way the iOS and Mac app stores curate out malware. I like the way iMessages show up on all my devices, I like the way Siri works. I like that my Mac personal computers last longer than the Windows computers I get for work (your mileage may vary).
I like buying Apple stuff and think I get value for my money. You can call me stupid or TEH GAYZZZ if you want. Or you can just accept that other people like different stuff than you do and be a grownup about it.
Just to make sure I understand Slashbot logic correctly:
and
Throwing out a crazy left-field idea here, but is there any remote chance that some people - or perhaps a lot of people - just find value in different things than the typical Slashbotter does? Just maybe there is some reason other than massive cranial deficiencies that the Linux desktop, Roku, Ogg Vorbis, Ubuntu Phone, Symbian, Libre Office and 3D Printers have not yet taken over the world?
I bought a fancy new DSLR camera five years ago when my first child was born. During the first 12 months of the child's life, I'd say I generated close to 15 GB of photos of her - every first burp, every time she went for a walk, etc. was absolutely precious.
Flash forward a couple years and the DSLR sits on a shelf because I realized that 1.) all the photos I took of her seemed incredibly important at the time but are never looked at any more, 2.) I don't really need 16 megapixels of every moment of her life, and 3.) what's most important to me is always having the camera with me for the truly cute and memorable times I do want to take pictures of her or her little sister.
So all the photos of my older daughter since age 1 1/2 or so and all the photos since her little sister was born have been taken with a cellphone camera. It's good enough for anything but a portrait/Christmas card staged photo, and it's with me all the time. The only time I wish I still carried the DSLR all the time is when the kids are doing something split-second and the cellphone camera doesn't shoot quickly enough to capture it. Your mileage may vary, but just don't be surprised if whatever awesome setup you invest in becomes less and less used over time...
It's like, if you rob a bank for real it's bank robbery, if you plan to do it it's conspiracy and you've still broken the law.
That depends. Did you actually plan to go through with the bank robbery? Or from the outset did you know you were just fantasizing about being Bonnie and Clyde, and you were just pretending to plan a bank robbery because it gave you a thrill to act like your nebbishy couch-potato self really ever would?
I'm sure there are people who believe that even playfully flirting with someone else while you are in a committed relationship is infidelity. Most people - or at least those who have been married a long time - would probably see that as harmless as long as you never had any intent to go through with it.
To your point, I would agree that joining Ashley Madison goes well beyond the harmless flirting stage, and you can't tell from the outside whether someone did it for kicks or as a serious precursor to infidelity. But it is entirely possible that at least some subset of users did it without any intention of being physically unfaithful.
Surely if the job is not wanted but necessary, it is worth paying more for it.
The system already works that way, but only to a small extent in monetary terms. What a job pays is a function of two market forces: 1.) the more people who want a job, the less it will pay; and 2.) the fewer people who are qualified to do the job, the more it will pay. The problem is that in the real world, the second has far more influence than the first.
To your point, an undesirable job can command a wage premium. Military personnel assigned to service radar dishes in Alaska instead of defending Hawaii's coasts get hardship pay. Prospective CEOs of companies that are on the brink of failure tend to get paid better (or at least have bigger golden parachutes) because fewer qualified candidates want to take responsibility for a clunker. One of my first jobs in high school was at Toys 'R' Us. I could work the register for $5/hour, or I could be the janitor for $6/hour. Yes, the janitor job paid more because as you point out there were fewer people who wanted to do it, and the company realized they had to incentivize someone to take that job (I did, and I earned my pay every time I had to clean up after a three year old blew her Spaghetti-Os all over the Barbie aisle).
However, the vast majority of unattractive jobs come from the pool where there is a limited or no qualifications barrier to entry. So while the janitor may have been paid at a 20% premium to the cash register worker, you're still talking about the shallow end of the wage pool. The jobs with more scarcity of available talent make far more than any job where you have essentially an inexhaustible pool of potential applicants. And we all see that play itself out day after day.
I'm not going to pretend T-Mobile is an angel, but I think they've truly changed the industry.
I don't know about changing the industry, but other carriers have made moves to match T-Mobile, which has resulted in more consumer-friendly options across the board. So kudos to T-Mo for that. But the whole "Un-Carrier" schtick wasn't done from altruism, it was a strategic play decided on when T-Mobile didn't have many options except to be disruptive.
Flash back four years ago and T-Mobile is recognizing the decreasing distance between its rock and its hard place. It was the fourth largest carrier in the US, in a business where scale is EVERYTHING. (Think of it this way: you need 40,000 towers or so to cover the country whether you have 10 million subscribers or 100 million subscribers, so divide up their support costs per customer and...) T-Mo is owned by Deutsche Telekom, which had enjoyed being in the growing US market (compared to Europe) but basically said at this point, "your network is mediocre but making it genuinely good would cost billions and billions of dollars, which we don't want to spend. We will be trying to sell you as soon as we can. Barring that, figure a way out of this and send us a postcard once in a while on how it's going."
Deutsche did in fact shortly agree to sell T-Mobile to AT&T, which ultimately fell through due to FCC/antitrust objections. T-Mo couldn't compete based on economies of scale, and they couldn't compete based on network; their strategy had always been to have good coverage in urban/suburban areas but skip the more rural areas that you need to have really good reach but are not very cost-efficient. T-Mobile basically had to do something creative or die. Given that choice, to their credit, the opted for the former.
With that being said - and even though they have passed Sprint to become the #3 carrier in the US by customers - the fact that they are offering consumer-friendly deals and adding subscribers doesn't mean they are actually in a position to be profitable in the long run. Hint: there's a reason that T-Mobile was engaged in talks to be acquired by Sprint last year, and then again with DISH Network this year... companies with sound long-term economic prospects don't go around seeking to be bought by larger companies.
The military was still holding out, but even they knew that there was little chance of reaching a stalemate by that point.
Demonstrably untrue. While you are correct that the civilian members of the Japanese government had realized that the game was up, the military (which was dominated by nationalist hard-liners and junior officers besotted with banzai spirit) continued to actually welcome the idea of a US invasion. They believed the exact same thing they had believed before which made the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa so bloody: their best option was to make any US gains so expensive in blood and treasure that a negotiated settlement would be made that would allow them to retain their conquered possessions in Manchukuo and elsewhere. The military was not giving up anytime soon, and in fact some elements led a coup when they heard the Emperor had sanctioned surrender to prevent his imperial rescript from being broadcast. Read up on Ronald Spector's The Eagle Against the Sun or Max Hastings's Retribution to learn more.
A demonstration of the bomb, with Japanese military officials invited to see it, was considered by the US. It's hard to justify why that was not even tried first, before moving directly to the bombing of civilians.
I see this a lot, but it is not hard to answer this question. The bomb target selection committee - which included Dr. Oppenheimer - considered this idea but specifically rejected it because:
There's a great deal of factual reporting about the thoughts and motivations of the bomb targeting group in the above two books as well as Richard Rhodes's Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
even demented abhumans buy things, so somebody must be interested in them
Sure, but how big is the market for Japanese sex robots anyway?
No one knows how sticking with Maemo would have worked out. Would it have saved Nokia? Who knows?
You're right, nobody knows. But the probable answer is "not bloody likely." No matter how technically superior the OS may have been, it was going to be playing in a crowded space against entrenched competitors... the appropriate military metaphor would be a frontal assault against a numerically superior enemy entrenched in defensive positions. With one notable exception (Apple), every vertically integrated OEM (OS + hardware) in the mobile space has gotten mediocre results - BlackBerry, HP and Palm/WebOS, Samsung with Tizen, and now Microsoft. There's no reason to believe that Nokia's experience with Maemo would have been any different.
On top of that, Google and Apple both had fully fleshed out ecosystems for buying and using apps and music/video content - vital to success in the consumer smart device market - and Nokia would have been starting largely from scratch. Think how badly even Microsoft and Sony have struggled to make their content ecosystems work.
Given the needs for developer mindshare and the snowballing benefits of mass market adoption, I find it highly unlikely that there can ever be more than two truly successful (non-niche) mobile OSes in the market, at least for the foreseeable future. And if Apple ever stumbles badly with its iOS hardware refreshes one of these years, that number might be down to one.
A big company in an unaligned industry buys a formerly popular hardware maker, now falling on hard times, and eventually sells or pretty much writes all the assets of the acquisition off. I'm having a strange sense of deja vu... almost like this has happened before several times.
Oh wait, it has happened before with Oracle and Sun. And again with HP and Palm. And again with Google and Motorola.
You would think people would notice a pattern here...
Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product
How about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer? Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?
True to the nature of hipster-ism, these things will decline again at some point. But the presence of cool tastemakers interested in retro stuff is a real thing that impacts sales beyond just their own ranks. God help us all if these people rediscover fax machines.
So the Internet was designed with resilience unless someone has a strong pair of garden shears?
The Internet will do just fine. Your personal ability to access it, watch a movie or dial 911 will not.
The big networks all have many data centers and diverse physical routing paths between them. But most people seemingly fail to realize that your house, your neighborhood - heck, maybe even your county if you're rural - probably does not. There is more than one physical path to get data from a colo facility in San Francisco to one in Seattle (even if it adds a lot of latency). There is probably only one physical way to get data to your house. Yes, even your cable provider and the telco almost certainly share a conduit somewhere near you. Mostly that's because there are simply a limited number of good rights of way to run fiber (frequently railroad tracks, gas pipelines, etc.) in any given area.
And that's also because it makes doesn't make financial sense to spend the money to ensure that your house has two redundant cables coming out of it that take two separate paths out of your neighborhood to different COs, etc. That's true not just for houses but in many cases for cell towers, Central Offices and other telecom points of presence that make last-mile connections rather than backbone connections. So that's why a fiber cut is so bad - everyone served locally by that fiber will be out of luck, even if the Internet as a whole is not.