Quick connects are heavier and take space. Even without quick connects, one either builds for compactness or ease of disassembly. The later always involved compromises in the former. Laptops are often used in public spaces. Anything that can be removed easily can often be removed even when the laptop is secure. While a battery that can only be used on a certain computer might not be valuable to everyone, memory and harddisks and other things might be,
This type of machine will appeal to a select group of people. Desktop macs starting in the late 90's were more easily expandable and easier to work on than any desktop PC. A single latch opened the machine. Hard drives were exposed at the bottom, memory was right there. No one cared. For a long time the powerbooks were reasonable easy to work on. Once the cover was open, secured with Torx, it was pretty easy to replace a hard disk, replace a keyboard, replace an wireless card, replace pretty much everything. Just like all machines, though replacing anything would be 10% the cost of the machine, so many opted to buy a new machine, or get Apple Care for 15% of the machine and have Apple fix it for three years, which would mean a four year lifetime.
But then no one cared preferring to buy a cheaper machine even though it was less elegant to upgrade.
Not all 14 episodes are the same. Some shows, with 24 episodes a year, have fillers, recaps, and general bad episodes. Ou of he 14 episodes, there is only 1 or 2 that are genuinely bad.
The Simpsons is probably going going to pass 500 episodes, but I don' know if there are 10 I would wach repeatedly. Fawlty Towers is 12 episodes, each perfect, each one I have watched serveral times. Yes, Minister 22 episodes, not all perfect, but quite wonderful.
It seems like this has been tried before, and as others has said it is an option on some browsers. If this were in fact a compelling feature, it would probably already exist.
Safari on iPad has the URL bar goes away when not in use.
The only reason to have the URL off by default is to prevent the user from 'hacking' it. The downside is that it is more difficult to check on phishing attacks. Exposing people to hacking may be something Google is willing to do to force more traffic.
Such melodrama. It is the nature of all children to rebel and lose trust in their parents. It is why we venture out on own and stop demanding that our parent take us to the mall but rather get their with our own resources, like a bus or a bicycle or walking. But wait, some kids never do that. They demand their parents drive them, or their parents car, and throw a a teenaged temper tantrum when they do not get it.
This loss of trust is really a want for privacy and self sufficiency, something that most teenagers do not even make an attempt to achieve, rather blaming the parents for unfair rules while enjoying shelter, water, power, cable, broadband, and all ther luxuries that are paid for the parents. In such a case, a loss of trust is not that big a deal because what is the kid going to do, give up a cell phone and cable because they can't pay for it? Not likely.
The real issue is the trust of the parent. Most parents will give give trust to the kids within the parents personal moral code. If a parent believes a behavior is acceptable, then as long as the parent trusts the kid the kid is free to engage in such behavior as long as it is responsible. A benign example is playing games on the computer. If a parent believes that playing games all the time is acceptable, then the kids can do that. If the parent thinks that time should be spent studying and reading and not playing games then they put blocks on the computer. The kid circumvent those blocks, and key logger can be useful to show how that happens. Now this is breaking the trust of the kid, but the kid is also breaking the trust of the parent. To the parents it is expected that the kid will fight these boundaries, and the same might be true for the kid, as kids will often test boundaries but will often feel secure when they find they still exist. In any case such cases might lead to a choice bettween key logger and no computer in the bedroom, which might even include the android phone.
What many people do not realize is that this can get really serious. Some parents don't play. I have seen kid thrown out at sixteen because they did not play by the parents rules. No food, no shelter, no nothing. I think it was the wrong thing for the parents to do, but also always wonder why the kid did not compromise to meet parent expectations until the kid was able to fend for themselves. Of course everything seems so real and overwhelming when one is a kid, everything seems so end of the world. Which is why sometimes the only countermeasure might be a keylogger.
There are too many civil servants who are happy to take tax payer money with out understanding that taking such money comes with strings attached. Many families sacrifice to pay their taxes, and do so willingly. Paying someone in corrections often means not paying for food for families who need it or schools that might provide an education so fewer people will need to be on the dole.
I don't know if asking for a face book login is right or wrong. I know civil servants are often have much less privacy than a privately employed person, which is the way it should be. We certainly don't want to to encourage people to think that government money is easy money. We want to encourage people to go out and start businesses in which their personal privacy, and what they do with their personal money, is basically afforded the maximum protection. Everyone else has to trade privacy for some other benefit.
I would say that PCWorld is more expensive than the paper it is printed on. I can but a ream of paper for a four dollars, enough to publish several issues of PC World. It seems that since PC World is not counted value added to the raw product, they should be selling magazines for the cost of paper.
When I look at this map, what I see is population distribution. For example, Indiana and Arizona has about the same population. In Arizona, about a quarter of the people are in the about 400 aquare miles of Pheonix. The rest are spread over the state in a density of less than 40 people per square mile. Compare this to indiana where only about 10% live in Indianapolis and the rest are spead with a density of about 150 people per square mile. In the case of Arizona the state will have to take huge sums of tax payer money to provide service to the state, while in Indianapolis more areas are able to pay a fair price for service without government regulations and waste. The same is true for Texas. There are simply not that many people that live south and east of Abilene. Sure we could pay huge taxes to pull fiber and provide broadband to the one farm located in the middle of a square mile of noting, but why would we?
Frankly when one goes east, the population density decreases, and we must assume the level of service to do so as well. I don't see broadband like I do land telephone. I hope over time we will see some cost saving, and decrease in taxes on communications, by encouraging individuals to cover more of the costs. For instance in some countries no physical lines are run to places with low population density. They are expected to use mobile phones. Furthermore, the coverage is not that good, and many people are required to buy home booster units if they want cell service. It is simply not fair to charge other customers high rates or taxes so that one person can use a phone. This type of thing can also deliver broadband to low density areas. New cell technology seems to able to cover 5 square miles, which in the case of Arizona would be 150 people, maybe enough to justify a station.
Maybe an acid etch instead of smashing. Hard disk is mechanical, so smashing will destroy the components. But SSD are electrical, so have to destroyt the components. Maybe a day in battery acid to remove the packaging, a day in PC Board cleaner to remove any copper, a day in HF wheel cleaner to destroy the silicone and gates.
First, the two movies mentioned are not like Watchmen. They are remakes, and remakes have their own issues. They are bought and sold on the popularity of the original and how other remakes in their class performed. In the case of Barberella and Heavy Metal, these are movies of their times, with little relevance to the contemporary world.
Second, IMHO, there are four audiences for films. First is the family, which is big as it can be as many as four tikets sold if one person wants to see a movie. No nudity in family movies. Second is the teenage date movie. These tend to be gross and with some nudity, but they are marketed to boys, and boys want to see teats, not penises, and also often must pass parent approval. Third are movies made for families with older teens, or adults who go and see movies, where there is something substantial in the movie. Nudity is optional, but promotion has to be done in such a way that potential viewer gets what the movie is about. Fourth is art crowd. Cinematography, story, writing is the thing. Nudity and sex is not always expected but no one is going to stay away because it is explicitly there. Budgets tend to be lower, and stories tend to be non-fantastical, at least outside the realm of believing that people with no money can afford expensive Paris flats.
When I look at watchmen I see a movie that did none of these things. It did not market outside of the group of viewers that understood it. It also feel to the current situation in which a movie that is not good, and does not do enough to promote the oening weekend, will fail because everyone who did not go the opening weekend will know it is not good and not go.
Many around here complain that the quality of science reporting is really bad because reporters tend not to understand the science and tend to think that they have to simplify the results to what the common reader can understand. In the process the reporters use words that are interpreted differently by common people and scientists who understand the science, so communication break down.
Then we do the same. The interesting results from this paper is a relationship between the spectra of the active galatic nucleus(AGN), which we infer to be a so-called black hole, the motion of the the AGN, and the geometry of the AGN. Given the inferred rotational velocity, the mass of central black-hole can be derived. If all this is true, the mass would be at most an order of magnitude less than previously thought. An order of magnitude correction is significant. It gives us something to test to confirm the assertions of the author. OTHO, I do not see that, in the absence of further work, these results are to be taken at face value that there is an order of magnitude discrepancy in the mass of these AGN.
Generally this is a non-exclusive license for use of the product. This does not conflict with any OSS license I know of, as any license will allow the author to grant individual rights. The problem with OSS license is that they will, in general, prevent companies like MS from taking the software, putting a copyright on it, and preventing even the author from innovating on it.
I wonder what the ramifications are going to be. For instance, from what I can tell, most of the engines for LaTex are OSS. Does this mean that LaTex editors will not appear in the App Store. Such engines do exist in the Apple App store. This certainly will prevent Firefox, just in a different manner than Apple. Pretty much this seems to a clear means to prevent any software that competes with MS from entering the store, since almost all such software is OSS.
Off topic, I wonder if LibreOffice is going to truly innovate the Office App and write a touch interface so we can use this on the iPad.
Google did a good search engine. Even more important Google understood that it had to provide good service so that people who knew better would allow Google to set a cookie on the computer for the ad side of the business. The ad side of Google is about as ethical of 2o7, so without the search the ad business would be worth much less.
But search is not going so well. JC Penny hacked Google for months before the NY Times called them on it, and now it is unclear if Google will or can do anything about it. JC Penny did nothing illegal. Given the current state of technology, Google no longer has a relevant search engine. It is too easily hacked. Often the top searches are ad farms that auto generate random phrases to match a search. I am more and more going to known good locations for answers. It reminds me of then the web got too big for Yahoo to hand pick sites or too popular for key words to be a honest proxy for Alta Vista to index. Google can whine that what JC Penny did was unfair, but whining is not going to fix search. Maybe MS will fix search, and Google will see ad revenue drop.
And what is my point? Instead of innovating search, Google is copying what everyone else is doing. Now, Docs might be good enough to allow Google to dominate ads, but I can see the day coming when I am going to turn off the Google cookie. Certainly checkout is not valuable enough to trade personal information. Google should fix search and not just complain that others are doing perfectly reasonable thing to maximize their profile. Link farms are not the evil. Bad Google algorithms are. And as long as Google plays me too, they will not be in the forefront. If we think this cannot happen, look at Nokia.
I subscribe to about three magazines on the iPad. The big problem I have is that that downloads do not happen in the background, and downloads are very slow. If Apple serves the content, and as a result the speed increases and download can happen in the background, this will be a good thing. Right now publishers servers are pretty useless. If Apple serves content, it should be worth the price to publishers. If publishers have to serve content, then i agree that Apple is charges excessive amounts.
Even so, one issue that annoys me will still remain. On the iPad ATT plan, we are paying twice for content when downloaded through ATT. We pay for the content, and we pay ATT for the download. To be truly mobile, and fair, we should not have to pay for content downloaded from Apple. If this were the case, the 250 MB plan would be a great deal instead of a annoying necessity.
This is why people drink corporate coffee and imbibe corporate jam. Corporate products are all about the masses, what they want, with as little controversy and variation as possible. This can be very good as it allows people to focus on other things
Indie Jam, OTOH, is often about creating a tension. This is good as it differentiates the bussiness from corporate, as well as provide places for people o go who don't want corporate.
What irritates me is when an indie place complains that hey are being overrun by corporate overlords when differentiation becomes dogma and hey no longer serve a profitable purpose. We have enough churches leeching off he public good will, we don't need coffe shops. What is also irritating is corporate shops pretending to be indie shops. Powell's comes to mind, as does Whole Foods, though they are becoming more honest.
Like so many quaint customs the conservatives are attached to, state and local sales tax is an idea that worked well in 1950 but is unsuitable to the 21st century. Of couse new ideas have never been top on such agendas, so we will not see it go very soon.
The rational person who wants sales tax to succeed would set up an inland spending service. This service would monitor bank and credit cards, look at the purchases, look at the sales tax, and send a bill to residents of texas for difference. Individuals can show how the difference is non taxable, and occasional audits would keep everyone honest. There would probably be a net gain after the bureaucracy is paid for. The benefit of such a service, like NCLB and Homeland security is that it provides many opportunities for corporations who are dependent on the government purse. That such a system like sales tax hurts the small and local business is inconsequential.
Texas needs to do something new. Sales tax generates about 21 billion a year. The drag on the economy, which generates about 1 trillion dollars a year, is a unknown yet certainly non trivial quantity. What we know is that works out to about $2,500 a household. With a median income of 50K, a flat tax of 5% would generate that income. This is less than 6.25. While it would certainly put a significant additional burden on the low income, it would also impose a inescapable burden on the wealthy. we could help both by deducting the first, maybe, 10K of income.
There are many area that are not widely profitable to provide a particular service. There are people who choose to live in such areas. There are services that are seen as important to safety and quality of life. While those of us who choose to live in areas where a particular service is cost effective, so we have many options and through competition the prices remain low, some person who choose to live in less competitive areas have to pay higher prices or not have service at all. For persons in my residential area can get quite adequate broadband for under $30 a month. Quite reliable cell phone and mobile broadband coverage can be had for for $50 a month. Others who choose to live in less competitive areas have to pay more. That is a choice.
The problem that this plan is meant to solve are those people who live in places that are not profitable to serve. This is the same as the land line issue. Sure it was unfair in a way. Those of us who live economically have to subsidize those who do not. Places like Arizona and Alaska that requires huge federal subsidies to survive. OTOH we in America do strive to give everyone a basic standard of living, even if they do not deserve it. So now mobile broadband is seen as a quality of life issue. For the most part in places where it is profitable it is now accesible at a price that most people can afford. So we know have to subsidize so that people who can't afford it can have it. Just like we do for land lines. Just like we do for fuel for cars.
Paypal has this system and I really like it. At first they had a one time pad which they sold for a few dollars. Then they went a system in which they texted a number from a one time pad. For people without phones with them at all time, I suppose this would be an option, i.e. google selling a one time pad.
Also, I am not sure if this is completely new. I notices when i was signing people in Google back in August that google was asking for a phone number, and people were getting texts and calls. I suppose this may have only been for registration.
I an not sure if I really want this to be standard. With paypal it is not an issue, as I only log in occasionally. For sites, like my bank, where I am on all the time it would become annoying. Likewise gmail, which is used in various production setting, might become an impediment to productivity. It might drive people to MS solutions, which generally focus a bit more on ease of use at the expense of security.
She is not necessarily a bad teacher any more then Petraeus was a bad General. In both cases these are public servants who are paid to carry our the public interest. In both cases they had seemed to have reservations about why they were doing, most public servants do, which made it difficult to professionally carry out their duties.. And in both cases they disrespected the taxpayers who slave away every day to pay their salaries by putting personal feeling in front of the mission. Teachers missions are to teach the curriculum they are paid to tech to children they are paid to teach. If they cannot do so, and cannot keep personal feeling personal, they they need to find another job instead of wasting taxpayer money. This is even more so for military people who are under command of the entire civilian authority, including the voters. If someone is not going to work for the mission decided by the people, it is insulting to the people to take their money.
So the question becomes is she a good teacher who can be made into a better teacher of a good teacher that can no longer push foward the mission effectively. Should she be fired, or like Petraeus, reassigned in light of previous work. The kneejerk is to fire these people, but teaching is stressful. While the taxpayers have every right to demand superior performance from their employees, we must make decisions based on the mission, not personal feeling.
I will note that the first step is to remove the sim card. We see that once the sim card is removed, (assuming the phone is not on another network accesible to the owner) there is a large amount of time to break the phone. The six minutes is not an issue, so the lack of protection is not an issue. Arguably the real security flaw, and on most smart phone, is we are storing extremely sensitive data on devices with are easily lost or stolen, but without effective countermeasures.
The six minutes, and unencrypted passwords, are important because it allows criminals to steal low or unknown value assets and crack them at a rate such that the operation might still prove profitable. Clearly if this is no longer an issue that is a good thing. But that still leaves emails, browsing history, phone numbers, and other personal data. Again this may or may not be issue with only iphone. Android is easily rooted, and anything unencrypted should theoretically be available. I doubt email is encrypted.
This may be why corporate still prefers RIM. There are no consumer based compromises made for security.
To be fair, Jobs and many like him do not draw a salary because they have basic and serious equity with the company, i.e. they are founders. To be fair Ballmer should have enough stock with MS than any salary or bonus should be rounding error, but some people want money, even if it is chump change.
Also to be fair MS has had very few extremely great products. What they had was a closed system of interconnected adequate software products. it was cheaper for many firms to buy these parts or all of this closed system of highly integrated software and customize rather than go onto the open market and build their own. Individuals bought the stuff because the basics were cheap and they got free support and software through work. It is the same reason that small firms buy form Apple. They want an integrated systen that will let them efficiently complete a workflow. Both are 'good enough' and relatively inexpensive.
So the traditional MS business model has a limited lifetime because the gambit to continue the closed system using IE to close the internet, something that is Gates, not Ballmers, fault has failed. They are working on other closed systems of products that will provide some value. Clearly xBox is a success. OTOH, MS almost invented the smart phone, but has not been able to innovate to actual produce a product people want. If the could close the Echange barn door, they could conceivable put RIM out of business like they did to Netscape, but at the risk customers would move en mass to another platform, and MS would quickly become a shriveled husk.
MS could also try to be a services company like IBM, but that would kill the business as well. MS makes huge money allowing developers to work with it's closed system, VS with access to the database. If MS took over this business, then MS would look like the closed company it is and any positive myths would be destroyed.
So Ballmer is doing the best he can with the mess he was left with. Engineers are not going to help. Honestly might.
This is mostly a problem with who are letting into college. The vast majority of people I went to school with were there to become educated. They wanted to learn how to solve problems, the wanted to learn how to communicate. Many were there so they could have choices in life.
Then there were the people who saw school as nothing by an obstacle to be overcome. There was no sense of the wonders of the world, or the incredible creativity we call the Human Condition. They thought that all things were known and school was only there to award a sheet of paper in exchange for money. These people often cheated. And I do not think cheating is the issue. What I think is the issue that anyone who goes to college should be able to make B/C grades without cheating, and those that do cheat, even if they makes A's, should probably not be in college. This does not mean we should go around and find all the cheaters and kick them out. Rather entry standards should be set so that the student population will, in general, consist of students smart enough that they will find it easier to learn than to cheat.
Classes that involve writing should not be an issue for people who go to college, any more than math or science classes. If a person can't 100 problems in a week, then maybe they should not be in college. If a person can't write a research paper in a an evening and read a few hundred pages a week, then maybe they should not be in college. Because college is not for everyone, and these are the skills that one needs to educate oneself. College is not high school, where all you know for sure is the kid can get to class on time. A college grad should be able to learn and problem solve without supervision.
So maybe the solution to cheating is to have more alternatives to colleges. Places that smart, but not highly educable people, can be sent for training in simple tasks. That way employers can have the skills they need, but student at college who are there to learn are not disrupted by those who only wish an easy way to a job.
The internet has certainly disrupted many media models and the purchase of virtual online assets by less virtual companies is part of this. Newscorp is putting huge investment into an iPad app because the other physical assets are going to performing less well over time. The Fox news channel will lose viewers quickly as the death camps kill the old people that make up most of it viewers. The purchase of the WSJ was only a stopgap as the journalism has been declining for years and now it is mostly just dress up. Eventually the Simpsons is going to end. People are going to move to internet delivery of content, and when that happens the biggest moneymaker for NewsCorp is going away.
What is fascinating about AOL is that they use their assets to reshape the company rather than buying toys. AOL wants to increase the amount of original content and decrease the cost per item. HuffPo allows it to do exactly this. It also establishes AOL as a particular perspective on news that is different from the other major players. It is not going to be more of the same. Many companies are not so clever.
But such purchases are hard to be classified as aggregation. The barriers of entry are low so it is easy for the unpaid bloggers to move to another site. There are a few that could explode if there is mass exodus from the HuffPo.
This is precisely why all this stuff about testing, about exact curriculum, is all a red herring. If we hire teachers that are knowledgable in the subject and process, and let them teach, and expect the kids to learn, then all will be well. Education in US is not bad. I see people everyday educated in a America making interesting product, providing interest services, pushing the state of the art. I don't see them doing obscure advanced math or science, but we have no shortage of these people. The fact that many of them are not born in the US has nothing to do with US education. It has to do with we, in America, demanding the best of the best. The free market says not just the best of the best in the US, despite what socialist believe, but the best of the best in the world. That is what makes America great.
But the fundamentalist right only cares about promoting Dogma not making America great. So they push reading programs that are ineffective. They want to close down libraries so that the kids cannot educate themselves, and all anyone has to read is a bible or quoran. In particular they push science programs that do not push science process but rather facts. It really does not matter if we talk about science or religion, as long as we teach observation, analysis, and prediction. This is what is not being taught with a faith based approach. With faith based science observation is not critical because everything we need to know is a random book written by politicians long ago. Analysis is not rigorous, merely glue that connects dispariate factoids. No prediction is neccesary become the random book contains all of the past present and future that we need to know.
The thing is that fundamentalist know that science is destroying their sad little world, but they are so spoiled with the comforts of science that they can't do anything to stop it. So they try it slow it down to a point where the death is slow but the perks are still high. One has to wonder what kind of sad backwater New Mexico would be without the likes of Los Alamos. Probably like Arizona with unemployment rate at national average instead of a point under it.
Suppose I own a business that trades in services that the law says can legally be made available for segments of the population who desire such things. No suppose that terrorist christians, as they have been known to do, decide the democratically achieved laws of the land are not good enough for them so they engage in a denial of service attack. Technically these terrorists do nothing wrong. They have the freedom to congregate, they have the freedom to visit any business they wish, they freedom to take pictures, post pictures, make statements suggesting that the world might be better off without certain people and posting the name, adress, and school that their children go to.
All of this stuff is basic rights, so tweaking a system to prevent this would result in a reduction of basic rights. This is not optimal because why should everyone have to suffer just because some ill bred people can't behave. Fortunately we don't have to because the laws tend to criminalize such behavior when one citizen attacks another. If I incite a murder, either with money or deeds, then I can be charged with a criminal act. If I obstruct the natural flow and refuse to move, I can be charged. These exist because they codify the means in which civilized people interact. That is so that the anti-free market people who do not trust the democratic process will not have the ability to destroy the US economy.
But let's ask the question what can be done if we are not going to reduce rights or file charges? Well the firms owner clearly has to do something to protect the value in the firm. With no legal recourse the owner might be forced into unscrupulous moves. The owner might hire prostitues to seduce the married men involved int he attack and post video to the internet. The owner might photoshop photos of the women to make them look like they are in porn pictures. The owner might hire private investigators to check into the backgrounds of all the people involved, or follow the children around. The owner might choose to shoot protestors who illegally eneter the premises or the private residence. None of these are solutions civilized person would want to use. They would be last ditch effforts against terrorists that the legal process cannot disuade.
Again, nothing these terrorists do is strictly illegal, but the effects of the DDOS attacks do have ramifications. When on attacks a firm or a government, one is depriving people of livelihoods, conforts for their children, assets for retirement, and no one is going to allow that to happen if they have a means to stop it.
So he can ask. Do they have to comply? Of course not. Does Elsevier know this. Of course. Do they think a random person posting a random photo on free website is going to come after them with a lawsuit? No more than a random person downloading a random movie from a random website believes that the non random corporation is going to come after them.
Certain people have not respected IP rights and stolen work to make huge amounts for a long time. The copyleft movement resulted from firm stealing IP, reworking it, and releasing it under their copyright, thus removing the work from the public domain and destroying original authors rights.
I do publish some of my stuff as CC. I don't post this stuff on free general popular websites as I believe that such websites reduce my ownership rights of such materials. I would have little expectation that the CC is going to keep unscrupulous companies from using my work. My hope is that CC license is strong enough to keep these companies from taking copyright away from me.
My IANAL suggestion would be to retain a lawyer to send a notice to Elsevier stating the they are violating copyright. Ask them to remove the image. It could be that they do not even know the providence of the image. I suspect they will do as it should be pretty easy to get an image that is not encumbered. This is obviously not a profit situation for the person who posted the photo.
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This type of machine will appeal to a select group of people. Desktop macs starting in the late 90's were more easily expandable and easier to work on than any desktop PC. A single latch opened the machine. Hard drives were exposed at the bottom, memory was right there. No one cared. For a long time the powerbooks were reasonable easy to work on. Once the cover was open, secured with Torx, it was pretty easy to replace a hard disk, replace a keyboard, replace an wireless card, replace pretty much everything. Just like all machines, though replacing anything would be 10% the cost of the machine, so many opted to buy a new machine, or get Apple Care for 15% of the machine and have Apple fix it for three years, which would mean a four year lifetime.
But then no one cared preferring to buy a cheaper machine even though it was less elegant to upgrade.
The Simpsons is probably going going to pass 500 episodes, but I don' know if there are 10 I would wach repeatedly. Fawlty Towers is 12 episodes, each perfect, each one I have watched serveral times. Yes, Minister 22 episodes, not all perfect, but quite wonderful.
Safari on iPad has the URL bar goes away when not in use.
The only reason to have the URL off by default is to prevent the user from 'hacking' it. The downside is that it is more difficult to check on phishing attacks. Exposing people to hacking may be something Google is willing to do to force more traffic.
This loss of trust is really a want for privacy and self sufficiency, something that most teenagers do not even make an attempt to achieve, rather blaming the parents for unfair rules while enjoying shelter, water, power, cable, broadband, and all ther luxuries that are paid for the parents. In such a case, a loss of trust is not that big a deal because what is the kid going to do, give up a cell phone and cable because they can't pay for it? Not likely.
The real issue is the trust of the parent. Most parents will give give trust to the kids within the parents personal moral code. If a parent believes a behavior is acceptable, then as long as the parent trusts the kid the kid is free to engage in such behavior as long as it is responsible. A benign example is playing games on the computer. If a parent believes that playing games all the time is acceptable, then the kids can do that. If the parent thinks that time should be spent studying and reading and not playing games then they put blocks on the computer. The kid circumvent those blocks, and key logger can be useful to show how that happens. Now this is breaking the trust of the kid, but the kid is also breaking the trust of the parent. To the parents it is expected that the kid will fight these boundaries, and the same might be true for the kid, as kids will often test boundaries but will often feel secure when they find they still exist. In any case such cases might lead to a choice bettween key logger and no computer in the bedroom, which might even include the android phone.
What many people do not realize is that this can get really serious. Some parents don't play. I have seen kid thrown out at sixteen because they did not play by the parents rules. No food, no shelter, no nothing. I think it was the wrong thing for the parents to do, but also always wonder why the kid did not compromise to meet parent expectations until the kid was able to fend for themselves. Of course everything seems so real and overwhelming when one is a kid, everything seems so end of the world. Which is why sometimes the only countermeasure might be a keylogger.
I don't know if asking for a face book login is right or wrong. I know civil servants are often have much less privacy than a privately employed person, which is the way it should be. We certainly don't want to to encourage people to think that government money is easy money. We want to encourage people to go out and start businesses in which their personal privacy, and what they do with their personal money, is basically afforded the maximum protection. Everyone else has to trade privacy for some other benefit.
I would say that PCWorld is more expensive than the paper it is printed on. I can but a ream of paper for a four dollars, enough to publish several issues of PC World. It seems that since PC World is not counted value added to the raw product, they should be selling magazines for the cost of paper.
Take a look at this image of the earth at nigh It shows the same trend as the bradband map.
Frankly when one goes east, the population density decreases, and we must assume the level of service to do so as well. I don't see broadband like I do land telephone. I hope over time we will see some cost saving, and decrease in taxes on communications, by encouraging individuals to cover more of the costs. For instance in some countries no physical lines are run to places with low population density. They are expected to use mobile phones. Furthermore, the coverage is not that good, and many people are required to buy home booster units if they want cell service. It is simply not fair to charge other customers high rates or taxes so that one person can use a phone. This type of thing can also deliver broadband to low density areas. New cell technology seems to able to cover 5 square miles, which in the case of Arizona would be 150 people, maybe enough to justify a station.
Maybe an acid etch instead of smashing. Hard disk is mechanical, so smashing will destroy the components. But SSD are electrical, so have to destroyt the components. Maybe a day in battery acid to remove the packaging, a day in PC Board cleaner to remove any copper, a day in HF wheel cleaner to destroy the silicone and gates.
Second, IMHO, there are four audiences for films. First is the family, which is big as it can be as many as four tikets sold if one person wants to see a movie. No nudity in family movies. Second is the teenage date movie. These tend to be gross and with some nudity, but they are marketed to boys, and boys want to see teats, not penises, and also often must pass parent approval. Third are movies made for families with older teens, or adults who go and see movies, where there is something substantial in the movie. Nudity is optional, but promotion has to be done in such a way that potential viewer gets what the movie is about. Fourth is art crowd. Cinematography, story, writing is the thing. Nudity and sex is not always expected but no one is going to stay away because it is explicitly there. Budgets tend to be lower, and stories tend to be non-fantastical, at least outside the realm of believing that people with no money can afford expensive Paris flats.
When I look at watchmen I see a movie that did none of these things. It did not market outside of the group of viewers that understood it. It also feel to the current situation in which a movie that is not good, and does not do enough to promote the oening weekend, will fail because everyone who did not go the opening weekend will know it is not good and not go.
Then we do the same. The interesting results from this paper is a relationship between the spectra of the active galatic nucleus(AGN), which we infer to be a so-called black hole, the motion of the the AGN, and the geometry of the AGN. Given the inferred rotational velocity, the mass of central black-hole can be derived. If all this is true, the mass would be at most an order of magnitude less than previously thought. An order of magnitude correction is significant. It gives us something to test to confirm the assertions of the author. OTHO, I do not see that, in the absence of further work, these results are to be taken at face value that there is an order of magnitude discrepancy in the mass of these AGN.
I wonder what the ramifications are going to be. For instance, from what I can tell, most of the engines for LaTex are OSS. Does this mean that LaTex editors will not appear in the App Store. Such engines do exist in the Apple App store. This certainly will prevent Firefox, just in a different manner than Apple. Pretty much this seems to a clear means to prevent any software that competes with MS from entering the store, since almost all such software is OSS.
Off topic, I wonder if LibreOffice is going to truly innovate the Office App and write a touch interface so we can use this on the iPad.
But search is not going so well. JC Penny hacked Google for months before the NY Times called them on it, and now it is unclear if Google will or can do anything about it. JC Penny did nothing illegal. Given the current state of technology, Google no longer has a relevant search engine. It is too easily hacked. Often the top searches are ad farms that auto generate random phrases to match a search. I am more and more going to known good locations for answers. It reminds me of then the web got too big for Yahoo to hand pick sites or too popular for key words to be a honest proxy for Alta Vista to index. Google can whine that what JC Penny did was unfair, but whining is not going to fix search. Maybe MS will fix search, and Google will see ad revenue drop.
And what is my point? Instead of innovating search, Google is copying what everyone else is doing. Now, Docs might be good enough to allow Google to dominate ads, but I can see the day coming when I am going to turn off the Google cookie. Certainly checkout is not valuable enough to trade personal information. Google should fix search and not just complain that others are doing perfectly reasonable thing to maximize their profile. Link farms are not the evil. Bad Google algorithms are. And as long as Google plays me too, they will not be in the forefront. If we think this cannot happen, look at Nokia.
Even so, one issue that annoys me will still remain. On the iPad ATT plan, we are paying twice for content when downloaded through ATT. We pay for the content, and we pay ATT for the download. To be truly mobile, and fair, we should not have to pay for content downloaded from Apple. If this were the case, the 250 MB plan would be a great deal instead of a annoying necessity.
Indie Jam, OTOH, is often about creating a tension. This is good as it differentiates the bussiness from corporate, as well as provide places for people o go who don't want corporate.
What irritates me is when an indie place complains that hey are being overrun by corporate overlords when differentiation becomes dogma and hey no longer serve a profitable purpose. We have enough churches leeching off he public good will, we don't need coffe shops. What is also irritating is corporate shops pretending to be indie shops. Powell's comes to mind, as does Whole Foods, though they are becoming more honest.
The rational person who wants sales tax to succeed would set up an inland spending service. This service would monitor bank and credit cards, look at the purchases, look at the sales tax, and send a bill to residents of texas for difference. Individuals can show how the difference is non taxable, and occasional audits would keep everyone honest. There would probably be a net gain after the bureaucracy is paid for. The benefit of such a service, like NCLB and Homeland security is that it provides many opportunities for corporations who are dependent on the government purse. That such a system like sales tax hurts the small and local business is inconsequential.
Texas needs to do something new. Sales tax generates about 21 billion a year. The drag on the economy, which generates about 1 trillion dollars a year, is a unknown yet certainly non trivial quantity. What we know is that works out to about $2,500 a household. With a median income of 50K, a flat tax of 5% would generate that income. This is less than 6.25. While it would certainly put a significant additional burden on the low income, it would also impose a inescapable burden on the wealthy. we could help both by deducting the first, maybe, 10K of income.
The problem that this plan is meant to solve are those people who live in places that are not profitable to serve. This is the same as the land line issue. Sure it was unfair in a way. Those of us who live economically have to subsidize those who do not. Places like Arizona and Alaska that requires huge federal subsidies to survive. OTOH we in America do strive to give everyone a basic standard of living, even if they do not deserve it. So now mobile broadband is seen as a quality of life issue. For the most part in places where it is profitable it is now accesible at a price that most people can afford. So we know have to subsidize so that people who can't afford it can have it. Just like we do for land lines. Just like we do for fuel for cars.
Also, I am not sure if this is completely new. I notices when i was signing people in Google back in August that google was asking for a phone number, and people were getting texts and calls. I suppose this may have only been for registration.
I an not sure if I really want this to be standard. With paypal it is not an issue, as I only log in occasionally. For sites, like my bank, where I am on all the time it would become annoying. Likewise gmail, which is used in various production setting, might become an impediment to productivity. It might drive people to MS solutions, which generally focus a bit more on ease of use at the expense of security.
So the question becomes is she a good teacher who can be made into a better teacher of a good teacher that can no longer push foward the mission effectively. Should she be fired, or like Petraeus, reassigned in light of previous work. The kneejerk is to fire these people, but teaching is stressful. While the taxpayers have every right to demand superior performance from their employees, we must make decisions based on the mission, not personal feeling.
The six minutes, and unencrypted passwords, are important because it allows criminals to steal low or unknown value assets and crack them at a rate such that the operation might still prove profitable. Clearly if this is no longer an issue that is a good thing. But that still leaves emails, browsing history, phone numbers, and other personal data. Again this may or may not be issue with only iphone. Android is easily rooted, and anything unencrypted should theoretically be available. I doubt email is encrypted.
This may be why corporate still prefers RIM. There are no consumer based compromises made for security.
Also to be fair MS has had very few extremely great products. What they had was a closed system of interconnected adequate software products. it was cheaper for many firms to buy these parts or all of this closed system of highly integrated software and customize rather than go onto the open market and build their own. Individuals bought the stuff because the basics were cheap and they got free support and software through work. It is the same reason that small firms buy form Apple. They want an integrated systen that will let them efficiently complete a workflow. Both are 'good enough' and relatively inexpensive.
So the traditional MS business model has a limited lifetime because the gambit to continue the closed system using IE to close the internet, something that is Gates, not Ballmers, fault has failed. They are working on other closed systems of products that will provide some value. Clearly xBox is a success. OTOH, MS almost invented the smart phone, but has not been able to innovate to actual produce a product people want. If the could close the Echange barn door, they could conceivable put RIM out of business like they did to Netscape, but at the risk customers would move en mass to another platform, and MS would quickly become a shriveled husk.
MS could also try to be a services company like IBM, but that would kill the business as well. MS makes huge money allowing developers to work with it's closed system, VS with access to the database. If MS took over this business, then MS would look like the closed company it is and any positive myths would be destroyed.
So Ballmer is doing the best he can with the mess he was left with. Engineers are not going to help. Honestly might.
Then there were the people who saw school as nothing by an obstacle to be overcome. There was no sense of the wonders of the world, or the incredible creativity we call the Human Condition. They thought that all things were known and school was only there to award a sheet of paper in exchange for money. These people often cheated. And I do not think cheating is the issue. What I think is the issue that anyone who goes to college should be able to make B/C grades without cheating, and those that do cheat, even if they makes A's, should probably not be in college. This does not mean we should go around and find all the cheaters and kick them out. Rather entry standards should be set so that the student population will, in general, consist of students smart enough that they will find it easier to learn than to cheat.
Classes that involve writing should not be an issue for people who go to college, any more than math or science classes. If a person can't 100 problems in a week, then maybe they should not be in college. If a person can't write a research paper in a an evening and read a few hundred pages a week, then maybe they should not be in college. Because college is not for everyone, and these are the skills that one needs to educate oneself. College is not high school, where all you know for sure is the kid can get to class on time. A college grad should be able to learn and problem solve without supervision.
So maybe the solution to cheating is to have more alternatives to colleges. Places that smart, but not highly educable people, can be sent for training in simple tasks. That way employers can have the skills they need, but student at college who are there to learn are not disrupted by those who only wish an easy way to a job.
What is fascinating about AOL is that they use their assets to reshape the company rather than buying toys. AOL wants to increase the amount of original content and decrease the cost per item. HuffPo allows it to do exactly this. It also establishes AOL as a particular perspective on news that is different from the other major players. It is not going to be more of the same. Many companies are not so clever.
But such purchases are hard to be classified as aggregation. The barriers of entry are low so it is easy for the unpaid bloggers to move to another site. There are a few that could explode if there is mass exodus from the HuffPo.
But the fundamentalist right only cares about promoting Dogma not making America great. So they push reading programs that are ineffective. They want to close down libraries so that the kids cannot educate themselves, and all anyone has to read is a bible or quoran. In particular they push science programs that do not push science process but rather facts. It really does not matter if we talk about science or religion, as long as we teach observation, analysis, and prediction. This is what is not being taught with a faith based approach. With faith based science observation is not critical because everything we need to know is a random book written by politicians long ago. Analysis is not rigorous, merely glue that connects dispariate factoids. No prediction is neccesary become the random book contains all of the past present and future that we need to know.
The thing is that fundamentalist know that science is destroying their sad little world, but they are so spoiled with the comforts of science that they can't do anything to stop it. So they try it slow it down to a point where the death is slow but the perks are still high. One has to wonder what kind of sad backwater New Mexico would be without the likes of Los Alamos. Probably like Arizona with unemployment rate at national average instead of a point under it.
All of this stuff is basic rights, so tweaking a system to prevent this would result in a reduction of basic rights. This is not optimal because why should everyone have to suffer just because some ill bred people can't behave. Fortunately we don't have to because the laws tend to criminalize such behavior when one citizen attacks another. If I incite a murder, either with money or deeds, then I can be charged with a criminal act. If I obstruct the natural flow and refuse to move, I can be charged. These exist because they codify the means in which civilized people interact. That is so that the anti-free market people who do not trust the democratic process will not have the ability to destroy the US economy.
But let's ask the question what can be done if we are not going to reduce rights or file charges? Well the firms owner clearly has to do something to protect the value in the firm. With no legal recourse the owner might be forced into unscrupulous moves. The owner might hire prostitues to seduce the married men involved int he attack and post video to the internet. The owner might photoshop photos of the women to make them look like they are in porn pictures. The owner might hire private investigators to check into the backgrounds of all the people involved, or follow the children around. The owner might choose to shoot protestors who illegally eneter the premises or the private residence. None of these are solutions civilized person would want to use. They would be last ditch effforts against terrorists that the legal process cannot disuade.
Again, nothing these terrorists do is strictly illegal, but the effects of the DDOS attacks do have ramifications. When on attacks a firm or a government, one is depriving people of livelihoods, conforts for their children, assets for retirement, and no one is going to allow that to happen if they have a means to stop it.
Certain people have not respected IP rights and stolen work to make huge amounts for a long time. The copyleft movement resulted from firm stealing IP, reworking it, and releasing it under their copyright, thus removing the work from the public domain and destroying original authors rights.
I do publish some of my stuff as CC. I don't post this stuff on free general popular websites as I believe that such websites reduce my ownership rights of such materials. I would have little expectation that the CC is going to keep unscrupulous companies from using my work. My hope is that CC license is strong enough to keep these companies from taking copyright away from me.
My IANAL suggestion would be to retain a lawyer to send a notice to Elsevier stating the they are violating copyright. Ask them to remove the image. It could be that they do not even know the providence of the image. I suspect they will do as it should be pretty easy to get an image that is not encumbered. This is obviously not a profit situation for the person who posted the photo.