Mega seems to be trying to exploit either the misunderstanding or the ambiguity of trust and security. In Liars and Outliers Bruce Schneier discuss how we depend on a basic level of trust to efficiently live our life, but we still have levels of trust. So while we may well trust Mega to hold pictures of cat, do we trust Mega enough to store our bank accounts or business records? Some will.
Now they are saying if you don't trust their implementation of SLL, then you can't trust anything on the web. That is stilly It is like saying if you are just as well off banking with a stranger standing on the corner as a well FDIC insured bank.
I was pretty up on this new venture until all of these clearly misleading statements began to appear.
It is interesting how libertarian some IT people claim to be, but as soon as they can't do what they want to do, they sue. There is nothing wrong, from a libertarian or free market point of view, for a group of companies to form a syndicate for the purpose fo managing employees. There is no shareholder value in companies fighting over employees. This only artificially raises labor costs and is a threat to profit. It is much better to agree between companies that the lowest possible compensation will be offered to a agreed upon pool of labor.
Now, obviously whiny labor who wants a great deal of money for no work is not going to like this. While the worker could use libertarian and free market values to make his or her life better, such as opening a consulting firm, find a new line of work and an employer outside the syndicate, or work within the rules of management to rise up the defined chain of responsibility, many will attack the system instead.
For instance, they will ask the government to come into and regulate the businesses by and create a crime where no crime existed by making such syndicates illegal. Or they will tell management that they must follow government rules, not the rules that will naturally create the most efficient labor market that will maximize short term profits. In the most agressive and impetuous cases, labor will organize as if they have the same rights and profit motivations as management and the firms in order to form their own syndicate to maximize the profits of labor.
I have a two generic external batteries that interface via USB cable. The only power it can't provide is to my laptop. Otherwise whatever device I have can be charged. It is imune to the mobile USB zoo., mini A, B; micro A, B. Just carry four cable, and one is sure to be set. Of course really 6 cables, as Apple has the dock and the new tiny one.
That an a multipot wall plug. And the charger for the battery as the requires a unique charger, and does not charge through the USB. I guess we can never win.
No, because it is promoted as a secure site that protects the users privacy. If we promoted as a place where users could get 50GB free space and there was an effort using various means to provide some insurance that user data was protected that would be different. One thing we have learned is that free data storage is seldom secure.
The point of the story is to shore up the idea that many of us have had. That the encryption is not intended to to one's data secure, or to insure privacy, but to provide a means by a arms length relationship between Mega and the data that user upload. This may force any future legal battles to be between right holders and individual uploader, not right holders and mega. If you wonder what the benefit of that is to Mega and uploader, just think of how corporations hate class action lawsuits.
But the damage occurs if users believe that the site is secure and private, so upload valuable information that Mega could later, through a change in the terms of use, mine or sell. Or some may use the site as the primary depository of data, then lose access to the data through the muddled security.
This is an interesting topic because many believe security is easy. That I can put 100 combination locks on a door and make it 100 time more secure. That I can advertise a product 'uses 4096 Bozo military grade encryption', plug a product that uses this encryption into the software, and automagically have a more secure product that uses 1024 bozo encryption.
It is not uncommon for a firm to separate it's legacy product that are no longer in a growth sector from the current growth products. That an analyst would suggest this does not so much indicate that a company actually has any real plans for this to happen, but rather suggests that the players in the market want this to happen so that short term profits can be realized in trading. Such things can be negative for a firm, but generate profits for the vultures.
Examples of such separations are RJR-Nabisco. This is not really an relavent example. except that tabaco products are kind of like the Windows desktop, something that is no longer seen as sexy, even by corporate drones.
The first mistake was partnering with Google. There is not a service that Google does want to give away to sell advertising. So while Google was bidding on the assumption that it would never make any direct cash, just build market dominance, Apple could build based on real value of the service. In this side Lala was doomed. Either Apple would bought it, or google would have put it out of business.
Which was the problem with Xerox machines as well. The thing about Apple is that they are selling stuff that sometimes isn't quite ready, from a commodity point of view, to be sold yet, or does not ultimately fit into the way we use computers. Here is what was wrong with the Newton. It was sold as a stand alone device. Some may disagree, but I used both models for a long time. They were very useful. They allowed my to do a lot of things. I could plug it into my network with a standard cable and work.
Here is what they got wrong. It was not a stand alone device. It really required a bigger more powerful machine to work well. That is why I move to the much less powerful, useful, rugged Palm V. At the end of the day, a partner was more useful than a competitor.
Apple has gotten that right now. Data can be viewed across a range of devices. Entered anywhere viewed anywhere. Which is the critical difference between the iPhone and Newton. Data Compatibility between the software. Google is also doing a very good job at this using Google Drive. MS still seems to be focused on making sure they receive a license payment for each individual box.
Just wanted to mention that while this is interesting, make custom cases for anything is not that difficult. All that is requires is a good caliper, and the ability to use it, as well as a copy of Autodesk Inventor, Solidworks, and the like. These programs can acquired for low cost of free through student licensing. There is a learning curve, but if someone wanted to do this, it is not a big deal. Basic reverse engineering. We don't have to wait for the company to release the drawing.
Shapeways, which is the 3D printing company i have heard mentioned, seems to accept native SolidWorks and Inventor files. For this phone, I estimated the volume based on listed dimensions and estimated that it would cost about $60 to print. I think if you had you own printer it would costs less than $20 in materials. Some places seem to charge based on material and time in printing. That is the thing with 3D printers. They are slow the way inkjet printers were when they first came out. I recall printing a small chess piece when I had access to one and it took a few hours.
One nice thing about using a service is that they presumable will clean up the object prior to shipping. Sometimes the object does not come out of the printer in usable form, and there can be some loss in the clean up process.
But who gives them that information? Is there really a reason to have a phone number anywhere on the web unless you want people to call you? I know that somethings on facebook are supposed to be private, or accessible only to select people, but we have seen in case case where that status was not protected or changes in the privacy statement made information public. This is not 2012. We don't really have the excuse to say that facebook, funded by advertisers, made my data public without my knowledge. We pretty much know that facebook is going to do this. It is like complaining that you gave a stranger $900 to buy an ipad and you never got it. Sure you were robbed, but not under threat of violence or even something that common sense should have told you not to do.
What might be interesting is why this problem of leaked phone numbers is not more widespread. To phrase it differently, why does google not recognize a phone number and perform some magic to make it link to a name. I would think because the traditionally extremely profitable and protective reverse lookup services have convinced them the ad revenue from said services would be more lucrative than any benefit the additional end user feature might provide. After all the phone book is public record, and given their agressive collection of personal information during their drive bys, they really care nothing about safety or privacy.
I have experience as a student and working in a inner city public school. The high school I went to still apparently has crack houses across the street. My siblings went to better, but similar schools. I also have spent much time in another country.
There is some issue with segregating the data by SES. While SES is not a predictor of standardized test success, lower SES groups for many reasons will tend to score less on most tests. Therefore though there will be many students with low SES who are going to quite well, on average it is likely the students will bring the scores down.
That said in education there is usually not a purposeful effort to separate by SES. While very high SES will go to very guarded neighborhood school or private schools, in the inner city private school. the effort is made to bring students of similar gifted or talented ability in common schools. This allows a mixture of SES and race profiles. This was my situation in high school. Very rigorous public programs from grade 4 to graduations.
The overall issue has been very well known. In the US everyone is educated, and an effort has been made to provide a maximum education to everyone. For instance more and more high schools are giving College Board exams to everyone. This will reduce the scores. Other countries do limit testing.
I guess what I would look at is the total cost of checking book, acquisition, processing, shelving, checking out, checking in, late fees that do not get paid, average check outs of a book, and then compare it cost the ebook.
I suspect the major cost of the ebook in this case would be the reader. There will be a lifetime and they will need to be periodically replaced. This would be funded by lack of other costs related to physical books
I would hope that a public library system could do what Amazon does. Throw a temper tantrum and cut off revenue to the publishers. One would assume that the major library systems could get together in Texas and say that no more books will be bought unless a digital licensee can also be acquired at a per checkout fee. This fee would be given to publishers based on the above calculations. One would imagine that a rational publisher would accept a per checkout fee as it would provide a steady income. Such a fee would also allow libraries to more easily own 'multiple' books for simultaneous checkout. The publishers would obviously limit the number of copies, so that sales are not decimated. Perhaps older books are allowed more copies, while new book the per checkout fee is higher. I hope those in texas might write the leg right now as ask if this could be law for libraries in Texas, no print book if an ebook is nor provided at a statutory rate. It might save some money.
The licensee, as it works when I check out books is managed by a third party. I think it is overdrive. The book appears on my reader, then at the end of checkout disappears. Not physical connection is required. I do not have to go the library. The limitation is that I must prove I live in the area served by the library. If a per checkout fee is in use, this third party can also bill, collect, and distribute the fee.
I must that one thing I like about this is that there may be more MLA staff that will be available to assist patrons, or library assistants, instead of using the all the time shelving and locating books. While curating will be a critical job in some libraries, having that expense at the neighborhood level is seems increasingly wasteful.
If one is going to work for a lifetime, I think it is important to flexible. This is why I prefer a good general education rather than have a two year degree where they teach you to use MS Office or configure a windows network. At some point that work is going away, and it sucks to have to look for a job that is becoming obsolete, or at least not as desperate for worker as it one was.
On hopes that people have found other jobs rather than being forced to exist on unemployment until someone gives them back what is essentially their old job. That is what recovery is. People finding work and the economy moving forward. I think it would be better if we educated ourselves for a flexible work load rather than a specific and narrow trade. That is why so many PhD students have trouble finding positions.
Any heavy drug use, be it cannabis, caffeine, alcohol, sugar, during the developing years is likely to cause significant problems in later life. That is why so many people are freaked out about the quantity of drugs given to children and young adults. For females the body might be mature by 18, but for males it is more likely 20, so any excessive drug use prior to that can be damaging.
Even though something can be explained by low SES doesn't mean it that low SES is the explanation. In fact low SES is almost never the answer by itself. it is a factor that must be controlled, and if the study in fact did not control for it then the study may in question. Even so SES may indicate that pot use, with other factors such as nutrition, may lead to lower IQ. Or it could mean that the IQ test is flawed. I was watching Firefly with the episode they had cows walking on grates. All I thought of is Josh Whedon probably has a pretty high IQ, but does not know anything about cows. Imagine that. It is hard to pinpoint exact bias in a test, but the assumptions made are the cultural norms of the test writer.
Facebook is becoming grey. Many kids I know are spend their time on other service. Their parents spend their time on facebook monitoring what the kids are saying. Facebook is alienating kids by acting like their parents and suspending accounts.
But there is demographic that likes to conform, do what the popular kids are doing, even though, or because, they themselves are not popular. The greatest risk in these people lives is to go an unpopular movie or have the wrong clothes. Ever since Facebook left the college culture, this has been the demographic that kept it going.
Of course, for many of us this is another reason to never create a facebook account. Another way for employers or stalkers or jealous lovers to make life difficult.
For those that want to be out there, there is always tumblr.
So your saying he lives next door to a chronic cell phones thief. Are you saying the las vegas police are not competent enough to check next door? Seems if there was a ring of cell phone thieves, and they knew the general location, they would have some incentive to take them down.
As opposed to the current situation where you are free to murder the stupid teen that comes to your house out of fear that his parents might find out he lost his phone. Yeah, any escuse to kill.
No one is saying he is not cheating. All that is being said is that if presume he is cheating, without knowing how, then we are allowing an complex algorithm to determine ranking, not simply the results of competition.
This may be acceptable, and in many so-called competitions complex processes and algorithms determine the results rather than simple understandable results. For many this is acceptable and make the competition fair. To me, if the nominal use case in the sport is pitting humans against each other, then the judging should also be done by humans.
First, if a player is so clever that cheating can't be detected in situ, but only after the fact by statistical analysis, then there is nothing that can done. I read the article a few days ago, and this is what I came away with. That they have some vague idea that the wins are statistically unlikely, but if there is process that can be shown to facilite the cheating, then you are going to have matches and ranking determined by statistical algorithm, not competition.
In any case one end up with a competition that is ultimately going to be destroyed by technology. Computers can play better than humans, so it is going to be all about who can outplay the computer. Like some many sports, it is not going to be who is the best, but who can be shown to be good, but not too good, as that would indicated cheating.
It is really pointless because in the real world we don't focus on who suceeds under lab conditions and with an arbitrary set of rules. It is who succeeds without causes excessive damage.
Exactly. What is impossible depends on experience, surroundings and time frame. It is impossible that I will travel on supersonic aircraft. It is impossible that I will see a penguin in the native habitat. These are things that are possible but not likely for me.
Is it in any way impossible that a brides hair will catch on fire. Of course not. Probability says it will happen somewhere. Is it impossible in any particular persons life. If the chance is 1 in a million, and one goes to hundred weddings in a life time, then there is a 1 in 10 thousand chance it could happen. Not likely. But if there are a million wedding a year, then yeah, it is likely to happen once a year. Not near impossible.
Thank you for saying that. Also, systems that are going to propel a rocket over long times have to be reliable. Like in Voyager reliable. Who power comes from nuclear thermoelectric device,but propulsion from hydrazine. For small satellites the propulsion can be nitrogen.
Space travel is hard and there are three steps. The launch, the travel and the landing or orbit. For unmanned travel, there are several options. One of the most interesting might be an ion drive, which would accelerate a ship to 300000kph in a year.
The real research needs to be done on launch. One possibility is slingshot, but current systems appear to be many orders of magnitude away from supplying the necessary energy.
What you are talking about is fluctuation in supply caused by reasonable issue with capacity. If a freeze cause produce prices to skyrocket, there is a national day of mourning that produce costs more. No. We complain but we either choose to pay the price, perhaps buy canned or frozen, or do without. As participants in the free market, the choice is ours.
The problem is that for the most part people did not respond appropriately to those price signals. Rather they went to the government to complain, went to their churches to hear conspiracy theories about how the liberals wanted to destroy the christian way of life, blaming regulation, speculators, evil oil people gouging the common people. All these are partly true, and gouging people who are too stupid to make adjustments so they don't get gouged is fun and profitable, but it does come down to choices.
If a single shut down can raise prices, then we are at capacity and there are only two choices. The first is to raise the price of the commodity, i.e. refined petroleum, so the refiners will have an incentive to build more capacity. Regulation will raise this costs, but so will the need of refiners to pay the expected huge salaries(sometimes well over 100K to a college grad).
The other is to use less so that current capacity is sufficient, reserves can be built, or older plants can be shut down and maybe updated.
The problem is that neither of these are acceptable to the whiners who expect the government to give them everything for nothing. Who expect to live in suburbs and have the city people subsidies their lifestyle. For those that will not drive their cars so they can approach 30 mph instead os 20 mph
Yes, some of use have known for years that selective sampling will lead to incorrect conclusions. For instance, we tend to hear about the entrepreneurs who are successful, and the top managers who fail.
Think about what is new. Not when a dog bytes a person, but when a person bytes a dog. A manager has been vetted, so this person has a bunch of failures and succeses behind, presumably with more succeses, so the failures are news. However, an entrepreneur likely has no track record, or failures, so success is news. For instance we have a local retailer who has a successful business. Prior to this, however, he had a string of failure. Even late in his career he took chances which failed.
The point here is that in any pursuit, failing is not problem if you know how to fail, and your are resilient enough not give up and try again. The damage occurs when one believes that failure is not necessary in the process, or that certain people are more prone to failure than others. This is what leads to people just giving up. Which is what to a lot of entrepreneurs, while managers will persevere. And build up failures. Which is ok.
My intel I7 computer has no moving parts. And it can run in 128 GB of mass storage. Three years ago it ran on 64GB.
Windows has lot of bulk, some might call it bloat. As a result it does not lend itself so much to a solid state device, which is where computers have heading for 50 years.
The mistake that Windows has made it to label both these devices WIndows. Apple labeled their legacy OS Mac OS X and their tablet OS iOS. The consumer is going to see these as separate devices.
Some of the problems are going to unavoidable, like the netbook. People are going to be looking for a cheap computer, and then complain that it does not run windows, and demand a return. But other problems are avoidable.
I am sure that some of the problem is that MS is playing the money game, like it has done with Windows for a long time. Supply an arbitrarily limited OS that can be sold on inexpensive computers. Then they demand additional monies to unlock the full feature set of the WIndows OS.
And we have seen this hardware issue with MS Vista. Contemporary computers being sold as MS Vista ready. when they weren't. MS has put themselves in the position in which consumers assume that every computer sold today is going to be able run the MS Windows sold today, and the OEM is going be held responsible if it doesn't. Does it surprise anyone if Samsung does not want to deal with the consumer backlash.
I think it is a this is a stement that a track of music is worth almost nothing, and so value must be added to encourage people to actually buy music. This value is that you will always have your music.
People always put for the fiction that we used to own the music. I did not own the music? if the album wore out, if the tape broke, if the CD was stolen, I was not able to get that music back for free. At best I could buy a used copy of listen to copy with generational defects. This allowed the music people to resell tracks. Not any more.
Now there is no reason to buy music at all given that services like pandora will just stream it. So for the first time you actually can own music, meaning that the track is your. Does selling your CD mean you don't have possession of the track? Of course not. As soon as Apple put auto rip in iTunes, and sold a iPod that could hold all the music, can you imagine that many did not buy a CD, rip it, and resell it. This service, with apple essentially started an equivalent of a year ago, is simply acknowledging that status quo. If you want anything other than low royalty payments for Pandora, you have to give something extra to consumers.
If we take Webkit to be the *nix engine, gecko the cross platform, and Trident the MS WIndows engine, then MS moving to webkit would make no sense for anyone. MS has no reason to make IE cross platform, which it abandoned over a decade ago as it became clear that the internet was not going to become an MS property.
So given that MS does what MS does, what would happen would be a fork with Webkit for MS Windows. In a way this would not be dissimilar with what happend when Apple came in, but one would assume that MS would have no incentive to resolve the problem.
The advantage with IE with respect to MS is that MS completely controls IE. MS has the resources to develop IE. MS Can make IE do whatever it wants. Right now it is MS interest to be standards based. There is no reason to believe that this interest will continue forever. If MS relinquishes control of IE in favor of an OSS browser, and convinces everyone to use it, then it loses the control it has over customers. And it still has control over customers. There are still plenty of developments that require IE>
Slashdot Mirror
Now they are saying if you don't trust their implementation of SLL, then you can't trust anything on the web. That is stilly It is like saying if you are just as well off banking with a stranger standing on the corner as a well FDIC insured bank.
I was pretty up on this new venture until all of these clearly misleading statements began to appear.
Now, obviously whiny labor who wants a great deal of money for no work is not going to like this. While the worker could use libertarian and free market values to make his or her life better, such as opening a consulting firm, find a new line of work and an employer outside the syndicate, or work within the rules of management to rise up the defined chain of responsibility, many will attack the system instead.
For instance, they will ask the government to come into and regulate the businesses by and create a crime where no crime existed by making such syndicates illegal. Or they will tell management that they must follow government rules, not the rules that will naturally create the most efficient labor market that will maximize short term profits. In the most agressive and impetuous cases, labor will organize as if they have the same rights and profit motivations as management and the firms in order to form their own syndicate to maximize the profits of labor.
That an a multipot wall plug. And the charger for the battery as the requires a unique charger, and does not charge through the USB. I guess we can never win.
The point of the story is to shore up the idea that many of us have had. That the encryption is not intended to to one's data secure, or to insure privacy, but to provide a means by a arms length relationship between Mega and the data that user upload. This may force any future legal battles to be between right holders and individual uploader, not right holders and mega. If you wonder what the benefit of that is to Mega and uploader, just think of how corporations hate class action lawsuits.
But the damage occurs if users believe that the site is secure and private, so upload valuable information that Mega could later, through a change in the terms of use, mine or sell. Or some may use the site as the primary depository of data, then lose access to the data through the muddled security.
This is an interesting topic because many believe security is easy. That I can put 100 combination locks on a door and make it 100 time more secure. That I can advertise a product 'uses 4096 Bozo military grade encryption', plug a product that uses this encryption into the software, and automagically have a more secure product that uses 1024 bozo encryption.
Examples of such separations are RJR-Nabisco. This is not really an relavent example. except that tabaco products are kind of like the Windows desktop, something that is no longer seen as sexy, even by corporate drones.
The first mistake was partnering with Google. There is not a service that Google does want to give away to sell advertising. So while Google was bidding on the assumption that it would never make any direct cash, just build market dominance, Apple could build based on real value of the service. In this side Lala was doomed. Either Apple would bought it, or google would have put it out of business.
Here is what they got wrong. It was not a stand alone device. It really required a bigger more powerful machine to work well. That is why I move to the much less powerful, useful, rugged Palm V. At the end of the day, a partner was more useful than a competitor.
Apple has gotten that right now. Data can be viewed across a range of devices. Entered anywhere viewed anywhere. Which is the critical difference between the iPhone and Newton. Data Compatibility between the software. Google is also doing a very good job at this using Google Drive. MS still seems to be focused on making sure they receive a license payment for each individual box.
Shapeways, which is the 3D printing company i have heard mentioned, seems to accept native SolidWorks and Inventor files. For this phone, I estimated the volume based on listed dimensions and estimated that it would cost about $60 to print. I think if you had you own printer it would costs less than $20 in materials. Some places seem to charge based on material and time in printing. That is the thing with 3D printers. They are slow the way inkjet printers were when they first came out. I recall printing a small chess piece when I had access to one and it took a few hours.
One nice thing about using a service is that they presumable will clean up the object prior to shipping. Sometimes the object does not come out of the printer in usable form, and there can be some loss in the clean up process.
What might be interesting is why this problem of leaked phone numbers is not more widespread. To phrase it differently, why does google not recognize a phone number and perform some magic to make it link to a name. I would think because the traditionally extremely profitable and protective reverse lookup services have convinced them the ad revenue from said services would be more lucrative than any benefit the additional end user feature might provide. After all the phone book is public record, and given their agressive collection of personal information during their drive bys, they really care nothing about safety or privacy.
There is some issue with segregating the data by SES. While SES is not a predictor of standardized test success, lower SES groups for many reasons will tend to score less on most tests. Therefore though there will be many students with low SES who are going to quite well, on average it is likely the students will bring the scores down.
That said in education there is usually not a purposeful effort to separate by SES. While very high SES will go to very guarded neighborhood school or private schools, in the inner city private school. the effort is made to bring students of similar gifted or talented ability in common schools. This allows a mixture of SES and race profiles. This was my situation in high school. Very rigorous public programs from grade 4 to graduations.
The overall issue has been very well known. In the US everyone is educated, and an effort has been made to provide a maximum education to everyone. For instance more and more high schools are giving College Board exams to everyone. This will reduce the scores. Other countries do limit testing.
I would hope that a public library system could do what Amazon does. Throw a temper tantrum and cut off revenue to the publishers. One would assume that the major library systems could get together in Texas and say that no more books will be bought unless a digital licensee can also be acquired at a per checkout fee. This fee would be given to publishers based on the above calculations. One would imagine that a rational publisher would accept a per checkout fee as it would provide a steady income. Such a fee would also allow libraries to more easily own 'multiple' books for simultaneous checkout. The publishers would obviously limit the number of copies, so that sales are not decimated. Perhaps older books are allowed more copies, while new book the per checkout fee is higher. I hope those in texas might write the leg right now as ask if this could be law for libraries in Texas, no print book if an ebook is nor provided at a statutory rate. It might save some money.
The licensee, as it works when I check out books is managed by a third party. I think it is overdrive. The book appears on my reader, then at the end of checkout disappears. Not physical connection is required. I do not have to go the library. The limitation is that I must prove I live in the area served by the library. If a per checkout fee is in use, this third party can also bill, collect, and distribute the fee.
I must that one thing I like about this is that there may be more MLA staff that will be available to assist patrons, or library assistants, instead of using the all the time shelving and locating books. While curating will be a critical job in some libraries, having that expense at the neighborhood level is seems increasingly wasteful.
On hopes that people have found other jobs rather than being forced to exist on unemployment until someone gives them back what is essentially their old job. That is what recovery is. People finding work and the economy moving forward. I think it would be better if we educated ourselves for a flexible work load rather than a specific and narrow trade. That is why so many PhD students have trouble finding positions.
Even though something can be explained by low SES doesn't mean it that low SES is the explanation. In fact low SES is almost never the answer by itself. it is a factor that must be controlled, and if the study in fact did not control for it then the study may in question. Even so SES may indicate that pot use, with other factors such as nutrition, may lead to lower IQ. Or it could mean that the IQ test is flawed. I was watching Firefly with the episode they had cows walking on grates. All I thought of is Josh Whedon probably has a pretty high IQ, but does not know anything about cows. Imagine that. It is hard to pinpoint exact bias in a test, but the assumptions made are the cultural norms of the test writer.
But there is demographic that likes to conform, do what the popular kids are doing, even though, or because, they themselves are not popular. The greatest risk in these people lives is to go an unpopular movie or have the wrong clothes. Ever since Facebook left the college culture, this has been the demographic that kept it going.
Of course, for many of us this is another reason to never create a facebook account. Another way for employers or stalkers or jealous lovers to make life difficult.
For those that want to be out there, there is always tumblr.
So your saying he lives next door to a chronic cell phones thief. Are you saying the las vegas police are not competent enough to check next door? Seems if there was a ring of cell phone thieves, and they knew the general location, they would have some incentive to take them down.
As opposed to the current situation where you are free to murder the stupid teen that comes to your house out of fear that his parents might find out he lost his phone. Yeah, any escuse to kill.
This may be acceptable, and in many so-called competitions complex processes and algorithms determine the results rather than simple understandable results. For many this is acceptable and make the competition fair. To me, if the nominal use case in the sport is pitting humans against each other, then the judging should also be done by humans.
In any case one end up with a competition that is ultimately going to be destroyed by technology. Computers can play better than humans, so it is going to be all about who can outplay the computer. Like some many sports, it is not going to be who is the best, but who can be shown to be good, but not too good, as that would indicated cheating.
It is really pointless because in the real world we don't focus on who suceeds under lab conditions and with an arbitrary set of rules. It is who succeeds without causes excessive damage.
Is it in any way impossible that a brides hair will catch on fire. Of course not. Probability says it will happen somewhere. Is it impossible in any particular persons life. If the chance is 1 in a million, and one goes to hundred weddings in a life time, then there is a 1 in 10 thousand chance it could happen. Not likely. But if there are a million wedding a year, then yeah, it is likely to happen once a year. Not near impossible.
So this is really just an ill posed statement.
Space travel is hard and there are three steps. The launch, the travel and the landing or orbit. For unmanned travel, there are several options. One of the most interesting might be an ion drive, which would accelerate a ship to 300000kph in a year.
The real research needs to be done on launch. One possibility is slingshot, but current systems appear to be many orders of magnitude away from supplying the necessary energy.
The problem is that for the most part people did not respond appropriately to those price signals. Rather they went to the government to complain, went to their churches to hear conspiracy theories about how the liberals wanted to destroy the christian way of life, blaming regulation, speculators, evil oil people gouging the common people. All these are partly true, and gouging people who are too stupid to make adjustments so they don't get gouged is fun and profitable, but it does come down to choices.
If a single shut down can raise prices, then we are at capacity and there are only two choices. The first is to raise the price of the commodity, i.e. refined petroleum, so the refiners will have an incentive to build more capacity. Regulation will raise this costs, but so will the need of refiners to pay the expected huge salaries(sometimes well over 100K to a college grad).
The other is to use less so that current capacity is sufficient, reserves can be built, or older plants can be shut down and maybe updated.
The problem is that neither of these are acceptable to the whiners who expect the government to give them everything for nothing. Who expect to live in suburbs and have the city people subsidies their lifestyle. For those that will not drive their cars so they can approach 30 mph instead os 20 mph
Think about what is new. Not when a dog bytes a person, but when a person bytes a dog. A manager has been vetted, so this person has a bunch of failures and succeses behind, presumably with more succeses, so the failures are news. However, an entrepreneur likely has no track record, or failures, so success is news. For instance we have a local retailer who has a successful business. Prior to this, however, he had a string of failure. Even late in his career he took chances which failed.
The point here is that in any pursuit, failing is not problem if you know how to fail, and your are resilient enough not give up and try again. The damage occurs when one believes that failure is not necessary in the process, or that certain people are more prone to failure than others. This is what leads to people just giving up. Which is what to a lot of entrepreneurs, while managers will persevere. And build up failures. Which is ok.
Windows has lot of bulk, some might call it bloat. As a result it does not lend itself so much to a solid state device, which is where computers have heading for 50 years.
The mistake that Windows has made it to label both these devices WIndows. Apple labeled their legacy OS Mac OS X and their tablet OS iOS. The consumer is going to see these as separate devices.
Some of the problems are going to unavoidable, like the netbook. People are going to be looking for a cheap computer, and then complain that it does not run windows, and demand a return. But other problems are avoidable.
I am sure that some of the problem is that MS is playing the money game, like it has done with Windows for a long time. Supply an arbitrarily limited OS that can be sold on inexpensive computers. Then they demand additional monies to unlock the full feature set of the WIndows OS.
And we have seen this hardware issue with MS Vista. Contemporary computers being sold as MS Vista ready. when they weren't. MS has put themselves in the position in which consumers assume that every computer sold today is going to be able run the MS Windows sold today, and the OEM is going be held responsible if it doesn't. Does it surprise anyone if Samsung does not want to deal with the consumer backlash.
People always put for the fiction that we used to own the music. I did not own the music? if the album wore out, if the tape broke, if the CD was stolen, I was not able to get that music back for free. At best I could buy a used copy of listen to copy with generational defects. This allowed the music people to resell tracks. Not any more.
Now there is no reason to buy music at all given that services like pandora will just stream it. So for the first time you actually can own music, meaning that the track is your. Does selling your CD mean you don't have possession of the track? Of course not. As soon as Apple put auto rip in iTunes, and sold a iPod that could hold all the music, can you imagine that many did not buy a CD, rip it, and resell it. This service, with apple essentially started an equivalent of a year ago, is simply acknowledging that status quo. If you want anything other than low royalty payments for Pandora, you have to give something extra to consumers.
So given that MS does what MS does, what would happen would be a fork with Webkit for MS Windows. In a way this would not be dissimilar with what happend when Apple came in, but one would assume that MS would have no incentive to resolve the problem.
The advantage with IE with respect to MS is that MS completely controls IE. MS has the resources to develop IE. MS Can make IE do whatever it wants. Right now it is MS interest to be standards based. There is no reason to believe that this interest will continue forever. If MS relinquishes control of IE in favor of an OSS browser, and convinces everyone to use it, then it loses the control it has over customers. And it still has control over customers. There are still plenty of developments that require IE>