It's easier to hire a business in a county that doesn't have a government that throws hissy fits for not getting as much of an increase in budget as they wanted from the previous year to turn a profit than it is to hire locally, where you have to support said government through each employee.
Governments don't care about profits. Most happily spend more than they make practically every year; it's called running a budget deficit, and it's something almost all governments do. In fact it's kind of the point of modern governments; if the government were to actually make a profit, that just means that the government is sitting on a pile of money rather than using it to make the country a better place.
No, there are two scenarios where outsourcing works (for certain values of "works"):
1) You are too small to rate a full-time employee in a particular field (eg. a small business outsourcing IT to a consulting firm), or the company you are outsourcing to can benefit from economies of scale that you can't by yourself (ex. service contracts for analytical instrumentation) 2) You are pulling a scam by externalizing costs, that is, you are: 2a) Externalizing infrastructure costs, as in dodging the taxes that keep the society around you functioning, 2b) Externalizing environmental costs, as in setting up manufacturing in a country that will let you dump toxic waste all over rather than cleaning up after yourself and relying on future generations to clean up your mess, 2c) Externalizing labor costs, as in setting up manufacturing/service centers in a country where workers have fewer rights, a lower starting skillset, and lower starting wages. 2d) Externalizing future capital outlays, as in getting a 1-2 year discount on this year's service, declaring a massive profit and giving yourself a huge 4th quarter bonus/boasting to the electorate about how much you saved them, knowing full well that in 2 years you'll have your golden parachute so you don't care about how much more the company will have to pay.
Governments rarely benefit from 1), and it certainly doesn't apply to airport security. In fact the opposite is true: the TSA can benefit from a nationwide scope that private companies can't hope to match. Local governments can benefit from 1, but mostly for small analytical contracts or by partnering with large multinationals (see City of Los Angeles outsourcing email to Google).
2a-2c pretty much don't ever apply to government outsourcing; that's more of a private industry thing. 2d is the big one, the big con job the neocons pulled off in the 2000s that saw us go from forecast surpluses to trillion dollar deficits inside of ten years. That's what government outsourcing means: it's a shell game, meant to give a politician a temporary political boost, at the cost of trillions of dollars to taxpayers.
That's just an outright lie. The few airports that are still allowed to have private security contractors (before the TSA put the kibosh on that program because they "saw no benefit" to it) consistently get higher ratings for performance and customer satisfaction.
Yeah, I know people who worked as private security in the airports before the TSA; they got better reviews because they did a bad job. People got through lines quickly and weren't harassed as much because they weren't being screened; there was a honk, a wave, and zero accountability.
Again, I'm not saying the TSA doesn't have massive room for improvement, but it is undeniably more effective than the haphazard patchwork network we had before.
So, basically, we should give it to someone else because they might suck less.
I'm not real fond of that choice either.
No, we give it to someone else because then that someone else would have to compete with the incumbents, and the resulting competition will force prices down, as opposed to our current system of two enormous rent-seekers sitting on vast piles of spectrum, doing nothing with it, and forcing us to pay extorionate amounts for terrible service.
Privatize everything. Its the only way to save air travel and bring airlines back to profitability.
Which is the same thing, in the private sector, as saying, "Outsource everything. The companies we send our jobs to will always have our best interests at heart."
Look, we've tried the whole government outsourcing thing. It doesn't work; the companies we outsource to just hire substandard workers and do less work while charging the government ever increasing fees to do what once was done efficiently and well. It's the reason we don't have private police or fire departments anymore. Sure, the TSA needs some serious reforms, but privatizing the whole thing will leave us with a bigger mess than we have now.
Who modified this insightful? Only one of his outrageous claims is even technically true, and that one is highly misleading (Obama tried to close Gitmo, but was blocked by Senate Republicans who filabustered the bill that would have funded the closure).
The market most smartwatches are aiming for is the market most watch-wearing millennials belong to: watch as practical fashion accessory. It's the same reason I still wear glasses rather than contacts or getting laser surgery: I like the way I look in glasses. I wear a hat--a Stetson, in fact--rather than a hoodie or a baseball cap for the same reason, and I have a nice, middle-of-the-road Seiko that I wear, not because it's impossible for me to find out the time any other way, but because I like the look of it.
A smartwatch adds a little more "practical" to the "practical fashion accessory". I like where the Pebble is going; if version 2 has a sapphire watch crystal then I'll definitely be on the preorder list; heck I might have been on this one if I had heard about the Kickstarter project before it closed.
Good thing the DMCA wasn't enforced in that instance, otherwise it would have been illegal to fix your computer after Sony broke it with their rootkit.
That doesn't make sense... For a variety of good reasons (cost, risk, others), you aren't going to lose a fight just to have an opportunity to fight again. Unless you're proposing it's a strategic move exclusively from Samsung's lawyers' perspective.
The lawyers get paid by the hour, having the opportunity to fight again is the win.
Doesn't matter if they are or aren't. If they are in-house, they want this case to be over so they can go out and sue other people. If they are outside, they want to keep a decent won/loss record, so other people will hire them to pursue their cases. The US doesn't have such a deficit of lawyers that it can't afford to jetison a few who don't preform.
I gave Obama the "meh" nod. Had Romney talked about Copyright reform two weeks ago, he very may well have changed my vote!
Not mine; I'd have just recognized it as Mitt changing his tune--again--because the flavor of the week has changed.
Mitt's opinion on copyright reform would depend on when you asked him:
--The Mitt Romney of eleven months ago might have argued for copyright reform, if he wasn't too busy railing against immigrants, abortion, and his own healthcare law. --The Mitt Romney of two months ago wouldn't have, though, because that Mitt Romney never met a corporation he didn't like, and entertainment companies count in that. --The Mitt Romney of one month ago was desperately trying to say everything he thought a moderate Democrat would say (tentative support for immigration reform and abortion, retaining everything about Obamacare except the name, etc), and since he believes that Democrats are shills for the liberal media that Mitt wouldn't have supported copyright reform. --And the current Mitt, the one from this week that's gone on a bitter tirade about how Obama won the election because he promised to give away a bunch of money to poor people instead of the rich people who deserve it, that Mitt would be for copyright reform, because it would punish one of the evil members of the evil conspiracy that kept him from his birthright of being President.
If you distribute the productivity gains fairly,... Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world.
What prevents individuals from designing and building open-source robots and using them for their own productivity? I can imagine a garden bot that grows food, and a garage bot that builds furniture, and a community "production center" that works like a credit union - many members contributing smaller amounts to buy the more expensive items, and can then borrow them as needed, or use them in place to produce stuff they can't make at home.
Patents and copyrights. You can't build an open-source smartphone today because smartphones are covered by thousands of patents; you won't be able to build a robot in the future because they will likewise be covered by thousands of patents. Those poor fake paper-people have to maintain their profits, after all.
"We didn't appeal to our core. We didn't pick a conservative enough candidate." Fox news is already spouting this.
The civil war between the right wingers and the plutocrats will heat up. I expect a divorce before the end of the decade, though neither faction can win many elections without the other.
And the plutocrats know it. That's the reason they turned to the right wingers in the first place: they're kinda dumb and they're easy to mold into giving the plutocrats whatever they want (tax breaks for their rich trust fund babies, busted unions, incentives for shipping jobs overseas, etc). All you have to do is pander to them about repealing Roe v. Wade and they're yours.
Begpardon?? Clinton was the first and only President in several decades to leave the Office with a budget balance or surplus. Before him was Nixon, before him Eisenhower, and before him Truman. Obama begins his second term in the Oval Office after adding six point one Trillion Dollars to the deficit. More than doubling it in just four years from the previous eight!
As he should have; recessions are precisely the times when you need the government to step in and keep the evonomy moving, because the banks aren't adding liquidity and private citizens are busy digging themselves out of unemployment.
The unexcusable, fiscally irresponsible moves were made during the previous decade, where we racked up huge deficits in the middle of a market boom. 2001-2007 should have been a time of budget surpluses, where the country built up a rainy day fund to pay for the next market downcycle. Instead we gave the money away to trust fund rent-seekers like Romney, in the hopes that these "job creators" would trickle down jobs on the rest of us.
Now it could be that if google drop the indexing of the article of the newspaper , the newspaper suffers in readership, but I am not sure of that. If I can't skim off google, I would be forced to go for the real source.
No you wouldn't; you just wouldn't bother with the news. If all you're doing is skimming the headlines for 30 seconds a day, then if GNews goes away you'll get your news from the radio or TV, or Twitter feeds or Facebook; you're not going to go to a news site and put up with their ad-infested drek. You, and those like you, are not a part of a newspaper's ever-shrinking audience: people who actually read the news, rather than get spoon-fed ten-second soundbytes and think that makes you informed.
That's the paper version of what Google currently does. Hiding even the headlines and summaries is the online version of hiding the paper in an opaque dispenser. It's noteworthy that papers are regularly sold in containers that display headlines and summaries. Why should the online versions be different?
Although I am entirely on Google's side here, in the analogy above, the newspaper would be arguing that someone else owns the dispenser and is making money by selling ads on the side of it - and that the only reason that companies pay the owner of the dispenser to slap ads on it is that people are stopping by to look at the headlines on the paper inside the dispenser.
Except that Google News doesn't have ads. They just have the world's biggest virtual storefront, and they include an ad-free newsstand just so people drop by every day.
The only "ad" on Google News is the word "Google" at the top.
Tell you what - the newspapers split 50% of their ad revenue with the search engine that provides the content. The search engines provide 50% of the revenue that they get through listing the newspaper stories.
Well let's think about that:
1) Google News has no ads. The search engine side has ads, but realistically how many people use Google Search to find a specific newspaper article? 2) Newspapers have a whole lot of ads surrounding, and in some cases layered into, their content.
The net result here is that the newspapers will be paying Google. I don't think that's what they had in mind with this little cartel shakedown scheme.
The basic point is that Google is making money off of them, while also making them 'more' money in the process. That's a basic definition of win/win. And yet they don't want to accept it. It's mind bogglingly short sited.
It's pretty simple: they see a golden goose, one who lays them golden eggs, and they want to cut it open to get more gold out of it.
Maybe the new direction is going to be heterogeneous computing. We're already seeing AMD and Intel combine x86 and a GPU on one die; maybe AMD will try to combine everything and have a couple of ARM cores for low-power tasks, a couple of Bulldozer modules for more intensive tasks, all combined with their GPU.
Too often the forensic office is friends with and/or pressured by the police or DA to get results. Especially in election years or for high profile casrs.
Not even a little. The lab I work in doesn't care one whit about PD or DA "pressure", whatever you think that is. We do what they order, just like we do whatever the defense (or even the defendants themselves, when they choose to defend themselves) orders, but only so far as doing the tests they want. Our methods determine our results, not anything ridiculous like "politics" or "pressure".
Forensic science should be done behind a blind. I.E., with no name or trackable case number attached to the evidence, by a lab in an entirely different physical area than the case. Anonymous methods of communication can be devised to pass requests back and forth.
God, what a nightmare that would be. Can you imagine the chain of custody issues that would result from evidence criss-crossing the country, especially when a lot of evidence has a limited turnaround time in order to meet constitutional requirements for a speedy trial. The OJ trial was decided, not because of any forensic science "problems", but because the chain of custody had holes in it, and that was just within LAPD and the LAPD's crime lab; imagine the problems with evidence criss-crossing the country with "annonymizing" tracking numbers and the like; you'd never be able to convict anyone of anything.
Not to mention the enormous expense of building a secure courier system the size of UPS to package, transport, and store evidence travelling all over the place like that.
In addition, whenever possible the work should be peer reviewed as in redone, again anoymously by another lab.
We do better than that: evidence is always made available for the defense, whenever it is asked for, to be sent to whatever outside, independent labs they want to use. This happens dozens of times a year, and only once has the outside lab come up with anything that contradicts what the crime lab itself came up with (it turned out that the unaccredited outside lab was at fault)
As for anonymously re-analyzing everything... how much money do you think is out there for redundant tests? The LAPD alone does 15,000 cases a year, just in the narcotics section; it would require the full-time work of over a dozen highly trained professionals, in a second state of the art lab, to redo all their work. That's millions of dollars a year, spent in what will be a futile effort to find fault with the first set of analyses, which will then proceed to be denegrated for also not being "independent" enough for you.
We spend millions locking up people for joints, this is peoples entire lives that are ruined by mistakes, over zealouness, and -gasp- corruption. But, lile security theater, it is not about safety, but the illusion of safety. Oh, and raking in tax dollars for a job done wrong.
Now you're just galloping on to incresingly irrelevant points. Corruption and over-zealousness on the part of the police has nothing to do with forensic science labs, nor does the war on marijuana, even if it is an assinine waste of time.
What has Obama or the Democrats done for you in the past four years when it concerns Internet or technology freedom?
They've blocked the AT&T - T-mobile merger. They forced Verizon to actually follow the net neutrality guidelines they agreed to as part of the spectrum auction. They approved really weak net neutrality guidelines, though this last one will take years before it really affects anything.
That's mostly it. They've had a rough four years: most government agencies are still understaffed, since so many high-level government positions are still vacant thanks to Republican fillabusters.
"Can you name ANY ISP that blocks traffic from any competitors domains as you claim?"
Yes: every ISP/TV provider out there counts Netflix against your bandwidth cap, but not the pay-per-view choices you get through their service. Phone calls are free, but Skype counts against your bandwidth cap. Watching live TV doesn't slow down your internet connection, but streaming a video through Youtube does.
These are the beginnings of non-neutral networks. These are the beginnings of telcos and cable providers cracking down on possible competitors on the content side by leveraging their last-mile assets. At the same time, these large incumbants have multi-billion dollar legacy networks and content assets that prevent any new startup gathering enough cash and clout to make a go at competition on the last-mile end.
We're already seeing where this road leads: the US is falling further and further behind the leaders in the internet race, since the incumbants would rather spend their time cashing out on their legacy networks and strangling (or merging) startups to death rather than compete by building out new technology. This is what happens when you spend 10 years "letting the market govern itself": it doesn't work, and continuing to do nothing is just going to mean that we continue to fail as we have for the last decade.
Oh well, at least the ISPs didn't manage to cock up the stock market, like what happened when we let the banks "govern themselves."
Why do companies outsource their factories to China? Why did AIG and several other companies leverage themselves to several times what they were worth?
Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. Pointy-haired bosses gotta sacrifice the future for a monetary bonus today.
-AMD supposedly releases driver updates on a monthly basis, though they haven't quite managed it for the last couple years, sometimes not making the deadline, sometimes just releasing basically the same driver two months in a row, then releasing out-of-band updates when games break their cards.) -nVIDIA has always released drivers "as needed'. -AMD switches to releasing drivers "as needed". -Everyone complains, and threatens to switch to nVIDIA.
You miss the point altogether. Now, Google will not be prosecuted in Australia for stealing people's data. It is theft whether or not they left their wifi open.
No, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement.
It's not even that; it's failing to turn off your tape recorder when you ride past someone who's shouting into the street from his open window.
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There's a reason outsourcing works.
It's easier to hire a business in a county that doesn't have a government that throws hissy fits for not getting as much of an increase in budget as they wanted from the previous year to turn a profit than it is to hire locally, where you have to support said government through each employee.
Governments don't care about profits. Most happily spend more than they make practically every year; it's called running a budget deficit, and it's something almost all governments do. In fact it's kind of the point of modern governments; if the government were to actually make a profit, that just means that the government is sitting on a pile of money rather than using it to make the country a better place.
No, there are two scenarios where outsourcing works (for certain values of "works"):
1) You are too small to rate a full-time employee in a particular field (eg. a small business outsourcing IT to a consulting firm), or the company you are outsourcing to can benefit from economies of scale that you can't by yourself (ex. service contracts for analytical instrumentation)
2) You are pulling a scam by externalizing costs, that is, you are:
2a) Externalizing infrastructure costs, as in dodging the taxes that keep the society around you functioning,
2b) Externalizing environmental costs, as in setting up manufacturing in a country that will let you dump toxic waste all over rather than cleaning up after yourself and relying on future generations to clean up your mess,
2c) Externalizing labor costs, as in setting up manufacturing/service centers in a country where workers have fewer rights, a lower starting skillset, and lower starting wages.
2d) Externalizing future capital outlays, as in getting a 1-2 year discount on this year's service, declaring a massive profit and giving yourself a huge 4th quarter bonus/boasting to the electorate about how much you saved them, knowing full well that in 2 years you'll have your golden parachute so you don't care about how much more the company will have to pay.
Governments rarely benefit from 1), and it certainly doesn't apply to airport security. In fact the opposite is true: the TSA can benefit from a nationwide scope that private companies can't hope to match. Local governments can benefit from 1, but mostly for small analytical contracts or by partnering with large multinationals (see City of Los Angeles outsourcing email to Google).
2a-2c pretty much don't ever apply to government outsourcing; that's more of a private industry thing. 2d is the big one, the big con job the neocons pulled off in the 2000s that saw us go from forecast surpluses to trillion dollar deficits inside of ten years. That's what government outsourcing means: it's a shell game, meant to give a politician a temporary political boost, at the cost of trillions of dollars to taxpayers.
That's just an outright lie. The few airports that are still allowed to have private security contractors (before the TSA put the kibosh on that program because they "saw no benefit" to it) consistently get higher ratings for performance and customer satisfaction.
Yeah, I know people who worked as private security in the airports before the TSA; they got better reviews because they did a bad job. People got through lines quickly and weren't harassed as much because they weren't being screened; there was a honk, a wave, and zero accountability.
Again, I'm not saying the TSA doesn't have massive room for improvement, but it is undeniably more effective than the haphazard patchwork network we had before.
So, basically, we should give it to someone else because they might suck less.
I'm not real fond of that choice either.
No, we give it to someone else because then that someone else would have to compete with the incumbents, and the resulting competition will force prices down, as opposed to our current system of two enormous rent-seekers sitting on vast piles of spectrum, doing nothing with it, and forcing us to pay extorionate amounts for terrible service.
Privatize everything. Its the only way to save air travel and bring airlines back to profitability.
Which is the same thing, in the private sector, as saying, "Outsource everything. The companies we send our jobs to will always have our best interests at heart."
Look, we've tried the whole government outsourcing thing. It doesn't work; the companies we outsource to just hire substandard workers and do less work while charging the government ever increasing fees to do what once was done efficiently and well. It's the reason we don't have private police or fire departments anymore. Sure, the TSA needs some serious reforms, but privatizing the whole thing will leave us with a bigger mess than we have now.
Who modified this insightful? Only one of his outrageous claims is even technically true, and that one is highly misleading (Obama tried to close Gitmo, but was blocked by Senate Republicans who filabustered the bill that would have funded the closure).
The market most smartwatches are aiming for is the market most watch-wearing millennials belong to: watch as practical fashion accessory. It's the same reason I still wear glasses rather than contacts or getting laser surgery: I like the way I look in glasses. I wear a hat--a Stetson, in fact--rather than a hoodie or a baseball cap for the same reason, and I have a nice, middle-of-the-road Seiko that I wear, not because it's impossible for me to find out the time any other way, but because I like the look of it.
A smartwatch adds a little more "practical" to the "practical fashion accessory". I like where the Pebble is going; if version 2 has a sapphire watch crystal then I'll definitely be on the preorder list; heck I might have been on this one if I had heard about the Kickstarter project before it closed.
Good thing the DMCA wasn't enforced in that instance, otherwise it would have been illegal to fix your computer after Sony broke it with their rootkit.
Given this is Slashdot... a case for something other than an iPhone? :)
That doesn't make sense... For a variety of good reasons (cost, risk, others), you aren't going to lose a fight just to have an opportunity to fight again. Unless you're proposing it's a strategic move exclusively from Samsung's lawyers' perspective.
The lawyers get paid by the hour, having the opportunity to fight again is the win.
Doesn't matter if they are or aren't. If they are in-house, they want this case to be over so they can go out and sue other people. If they are outside, they want to keep a decent won/loss record, so other people will hire them to pursue their cases. The US doesn't have such a deficit of lawyers that it can't afford to jetison a few who don't preform.
... he might have earned my vote!
I gave Obama the "meh" nod.
Had Romney talked about Copyright reform two weeks ago, he very may well have changed my vote!
Not mine; I'd have just recognized it as Mitt changing his tune--again--because the flavor of the week has changed.
Mitt's opinion on copyright reform would depend on when you asked him:
--The Mitt Romney of eleven months ago might have argued for copyright reform, if he wasn't too busy railing against immigrants, abortion, and his own healthcare law.
--The Mitt Romney of two months ago wouldn't have, though, because that Mitt Romney never met a corporation he didn't like, and entertainment companies count in that.
--The Mitt Romney of one month ago was desperately trying to say everything he thought a moderate Democrat would say (tentative support for immigration reform and abortion, retaining everything about Obamacare except the name, etc), and since he believes that Democrats are shills for the liberal media that Mitt wouldn't have supported copyright reform.
--And the current Mitt, the one from this week that's gone on a bitter tirade about how Obama won the election because he promised to give away a bunch of money to poor people instead of the rich people who deserve it, that Mitt would be for copyright reform, because it would punish one of the evil members of the evil conspiracy that kept him from his birthright of being President.
If you distribute the productivity gains fairly, ... Otherwise, a few will life a life of luxury while most live in a Mad Max style world.
What prevents individuals from designing and building open-source robots and using them for their own productivity? I can imagine a garden bot that grows food, and a garage bot that builds furniture, and a community "production center" that works like a credit union - many members contributing smaller amounts to buy the more expensive items, and can then borrow them as needed, or use them in place to produce stuff they can't make at home.
Patents and copyrights. You can't build an open-source smartphone today because smartphones are covered by thousands of patents; you won't be able to build a robot in the future because they will likewise be covered by thousands of patents. Those poor fake paper-people have to maintain their profits, after all.
The party will go further right.
"We didn't appeal to our core. We didn't pick a conservative enough candidate." Fox news is already spouting this.
The civil war between the right wingers and the plutocrats will heat up. I expect a divorce before the end of the decade, though neither faction can win many elections without the other.
And the plutocrats know it. That's the reason they turned to the right wingers in the first place: they're kinda dumb and they're easy to mold into giving the plutocrats whatever they want (tax breaks for their rich trust fund babies, busted unions, incentives for shipping jobs overseas, etc). All you have to do is pander to them about repealing Roe v. Wade and they're yours.
Begpardon?? Clinton was the first and only President in several decades to leave the Office with a budget balance or surplus. Before him was Nixon, before him Eisenhower, and before him Truman. Obama begins his second term in the Oval Office after adding six point one Trillion Dollars to the deficit. More than doubling it in just four years from the previous eight!
As he should have; recessions are precisely the times when you need the government to step in and keep the evonomy moving, because the banks aren't adding liquidity and private citizens are busy digging themselves out of unemployment.
The unexcusable, fiscally irresponsible moves were made during the previous decade, where we racked up huge deficits in the middle of a market boom. 2001-2007 should have been a time of budget surpluses, where the country built up a rainy day fund to pay for the next market downcycle. Instead we gave the money away to trust fund rent-seekers like Romney, in the hopes that these "job creators" would trickle down jobs on the rest of us.
Now it could be that if google drop the indexing of the article of the newspaper , the newspaper suffers in readership, but I am not sure of that. If I can't skim off google, I would be forced to go for the real source.
No you wouldn't; you just wouldn't bother with the news. If all you're doing is skimming the headlines for 30 seconds a day, then if GNews goes away you'll get your news from the radio or TV, or Twitter feeds or Facebook; you're not going to go to a news site and put up with their ad-infested drek. You, and those like you, are not a part of a newspaper's ever-shrinking audience: people who actually read the news, rather than get spoon-fed ten-second soundbytes and think that makes you informed.
That's the paper version of what Google currently does. Hiding even the headlines and summaries is the online version of hiding the paper in an opaque dispenser. It's noteworthy that papers are regularly sold in containers that display headlines and summaries. Why should the online versions be different?
Although I am entirely on Google's side here, in the analogy above, the newspaper would be arguing that someone else owns the dispenser and is making money by selling ads on the side of it - and that the only reason that companies pay the owner of the dispenser to slap ads on it is that people are stopping by to look at the headlines on the paper inside the dispenser.
Except that Google News doesn't have ads. They just have the world's biggest virtual storefront, and they include an ad-free newsstand just so people drop by every day.
The only "ad" on Google News is the word "Google" at the top.
Tell you what - the newspapers split 50% of their ad revenue with the search engine that provides the content. The search engines provide 50% of the revenue that they get through listing the newspaper stories.
Well let's think about that:
1) Google News has no ads. The search engine side has ads, but realistically how many people use Google Search to find a specific newspaper article?
2) Newspapers have a whole lot of ads surrounding, and in some cases layered into, their content.
The net result here is that the newspapers will be paying Google. I don't think that's what they had in mind with this little cartel shakedown scheme.
The basic point is that Google is making money off of them, while also making them 'more' money in the process. That's a basic definition of win/win. And yet they don't want to accept it. It's mind bogglingly short sited.
It's pretty simple: they see a golden goose, one who lays them golden eggs, and they want to cut it open to get more gold out of it.
Maybe the new direction is going to be heterogeneous computing. We're already seeing AMD and Intel combine x86 and a GPU on one die; maybe AMD will try to combine everything and have a couple of ARM cores for low-power tasks, a couple of Bulldozer modules for more intensive tasks, all combined with their GPU.
...Verizon would be receiving an anti-trust conviction a few hours after admitting something like this.
Too often the forensic office is friends with and/or pressured by the police or DA to get results. Especially in election years or for high profile casrs.
Not even a little. The lab I work in doesn't care one whit about PD or DA "pressure", whatever you think that is. We do what they order, just like we do whatever the defense (or even the defendants themselves, when they choose to defend themselves) orders, but only so far as doing the tests they want. Our methods determine our results, not anything ridiculous like "politics" or "pressure".
Forensic science should be done behind a blind. I.E., with no name or trackable case number attached to the evidence, by a lab in an entirely different physical area than the case.
Anonymous methods of communication can be devised to pass requests back and forth.
God, what a nightmare that would be. Can you imagine the chain of custody issues that would result from evidence criss-crossing the country, especially when a lot of evidence has a limited turnaround time in order to meet constitutional requirements for a speedy trial. The OJ trial was decided, not because of any forensic science "problems", but because the chain of custody had holes in it, and that was just within LAPD and the LAPD's crime lab; imagine the problems with evidence criss-crossing the country with "annonymizing" tracking numbers and the like; you'd never be able to convict anyone of anything.
Not to mention the enormous expense of building a secure courier system the size of UPS to package, transport, and store evidence travelling all over the place like that.
In addition, whenever possible the work should be peer reviewed as in redone, again anoymously by another lab.
We do better than that: evidence is always made available for the defense, whenever it is asked for, to be sent to whatever outside, independent labs they want to use. This happens dozens of times a year, and only once has the outside lab come up with anything that contradicts what the crime lab itself came up with (it turned out that the unaccredited outside lab was at fault)
As for anonymously re-analyzing everything... how much money do you think is out there for redundant tests? The LAPD alone does 15,000 cases a year, just in the narcotics section; it would require the full-time work of over a dozen highly trained professionals, in a second state of the art lab, to redo all their work. That's millions of dollars a year, spent in what will be a futile effort to find fault with the first set of analyses, which will then proceed to be denegrated for also not being "independent" enough for you.
We spend millions locking up people for joints, this is peoples entire lives that are ruined by mistakes, over zealouness, and -gasp- corruption.
But, lile security theater, it is not about safety, but the illusion of safety. Oh, and raking in tax dollars for a job done wrong.
Now you're just galloping on to incresingly irrelevant points. Corruption and over-zealousness on the part of the police has nothing to do with forensic science labs, nor does the war on marijuana, even if it is an assinine waste of time.
What has Obama or the Democrats done for you in the past four years when it concerns Internet or technology freedom?
They've blocked the AT&T - T-mobile merger.
They forced Verizon to actually follow the net neutrality guidelines they agreed to as part of the spectrum auction.
They approved really weak net neutrality guidelines, though this last one will take years before it really affects anything.
That's mostly it. They've had a rough four years: most government agencies are still understaffed, since so many high-level government positions are still vacant thanks to Republican fillabusters.
"Can you name ANY ISP that blocks traffic from any competitors domains as you claim?"
Yes: every ISP/TV provider out there counts Netflix against your bandwidth cap, but not the pay-per-view choices you get through their service. Phone calls are free, but Skype counts against your bandwidth cap. Watching live TV doesn't slow down your internet connection, but streaming a video through Youtube does.
These are the beginnings of non-neutral networks. These are the beginnings of telcos and cable providers cracking down on possible competitors on the content side by leveraging their last-mile assets. At the same time, these large incumbants have multi-billion dollar legacy networks and content assets that prevent any new startup gathering enough cash and clout to make a go at competition on the last-mile end.
We're already seeing where this road leads: the US is falling further and further behind the leaders in the internet race, since the incumbants would rather spend their time cashing out on their legacy networks and strangling (or merging) startups to death rather than compete by building out new technology. This is what happens when you spend 10 years "letting the market govern itself": it doesn't work, and continuing to do nothing is just going to mean that we continue to fail as we have for the last decade.
Oh well, at least the ISPs didn't manage to cock up the stock market, like what happened when we let the banks "govern themselves."
Why do companies outsource their factories to China? Why did AIG and several other companies leverage themselves to several times what they were worth?
Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. Pointy-haired bosses gotta sacrifice the future for a monetary bonus today.
Here's irony for you:
-AMD supposedly releases driver updates on a monthly basis, though they haven't quite managed it for the last couple years, sometimes not making the deadline, sometimes just releasing basically the same driver two months in a row, then releasing out-of-band updates when games break their cards.)
-nVIDIA has always released drivers "as needed'.
-AMD switches to releasing drivers "as needed".
-Everyone complains, and threatens to switch to nVIDIA.
You miss the point altogether. Now, Google will not be prosecuted in Australia for stealing people's data. It is theft whether or not they left their wifi open.
No, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement.
It's not even that; it's failing to turn off your tape recorder when you ride past someone who's shouting into the street from his open window.