This has to be taken in context. In my first jobs I have maybe many linear feet of bookshelves, a work table table that was maybe 100 square feet itself, separate telephone, separate fax, large space for computers. The office was maybe 400 square feet. Pretty quickly that moved to a fewer books and small computer. Office shrank to maybe than 200. I recall one place where the office would have been huge except I had a big printer in it. By the time the late 90's hit my required reference and reading shrunk what would on my desk. By 2000 I basically just needed a laptop with a internet connection.
Office space is money. One issue with business is that money is wasted on real estate instead of filling core objectives, such as providing quality products. Instead profits have to be jacked up to pay for real estate, which means less ability to compete with more agile firms. I never had an office of 500 square feet. Maybe that is because I have tended to work for small competitive firms, rather than large in efficient corporations. And just to head off the wasteful government kick, the people I know in government have cubicle that are around 50 square feet.
forgot step zero:
Fox News releases news Amazon serving WIkileaks to it's persistently scared viewers who then cry to all who can hear that the sky is falling. So much for free speech. Only for rich people.
One reason MS Windows got called on the carpet was that so many things were hacked on and bloated., Recall that MS Windows could not change screen setting without a reboot. They added that feature but also other less useful things. When hacking on security MS fought between making users machines accessible to legitimate third parties and keeping it secure from less legitimate third parties. In the end, since security wasn`t designed into the product, security for all intents and purposes did not exist.
Accessibility has to be designed in. It is like multiple language capability in software. With the right design, it is easy. With the wrong design one will always have little places where words are not properly transited. If MS did not design accessibility into the basics of MS Windows 7,if they have to design it in after the fact, they lost an incredible opportunity.
Gates is in education to direct money. The latest study from the gates institute is that adolescent perform better on tests if they like their teachers. This is exactly what some in education want to hear as it minimizes objective measurements like experience, education, and certification and maximizes non-objective measures like "relationship". Although the study attempts to relate adolescent random emotions to thing like classroom control, the reality is that ineffective teacher can often maintains control by matching the workload to the students expectation, while the effective teacher often sacrifices some classroom control to maximize the workload and learning of the students. It is also true that students that are going to do well on tests are also those that have good classroom habits, and require little or no external control.
Of couse as Gates is able to keep his money, he is able to direct it towards personal projects. One seems to be destroying the profession of teaching and replacing it with an elite corps of of recently post-adolescents that are paid in forgiveness of student loans rather than a professional rate of pay. This of course will minimize taxes, and consequently minimize the chances that we will have a strict inheritance tax. Gates, of course has no concern that urban public education will be decimated as he, and the foreseeable generations of his offspring, will never have to be educated in such an environment.
Except that all too often he says one thing, but votes another. Let's take earmarks. Paul is quoted as saying that earmarks do not increase spending, as the simply direct budgeted amounts. The problem is that when budgeted amounts are spent, then they get budgeted again in the next cycle, with increases, which increases the size of government and increases the government distortion on the free market. This distortion goes beyond the budgeting cycle.
Look at one example where Ron Paul demanded that 3/4 of million dollars be used for a bus stop. If the money had not be spent, this could have been cut from the next budget. Furthermore, the bus stop distorts the free market by forcing the taxpayer rather than the individual to cover the individuals commuter costs. Some would say that by building a bus statin we don't have to build freeways, but that assumes we have to build freeways to reduce congestion, which we do not. We can allow the free market to operate. If people can't get to work, then they will find other jobs. If they can't find a job, then they will move to a location where they can find a job. Individuals are no entitled to a lake front home or a high paying job, and Paul should not take from the the taxpayer cover these individual expenses. This is the way that the free market operates. Not by government subsiding infrastructure that favors certain individuals, but by individuals making choices of how to use their personal resources in a most efficient fashion.
Then, of course, there is conservative get-out-of-jail-free card that even he uses. Out of the 17 million dollars he stole from taxpayers, mostly for gifts to his buddies in the name of socialist job creation for his constituents. Almost 10 million went to defense contractors. For those who do not know, firms go into defense contracting when they cannot run a legitimate free market business
It is also interesting to note, that as far as I can tell, while he gave huge sums to the dying petrochemical industry, he did not earmark a penny to help NASA and the space industry, something that could help his district in a post-oil world.
All this wasteful spending, which by itself is not a huge problem, has be to be taken in the context of his contempt for the IRS. I know of at least one case where the IRS tried to collect from a family in which all indicators suggested that they were tax cheats. Paul's office helped them, and it turned out they probably not tax cheats, but Paul gave no credit to the IRS. Now, if Paul were not building million dollar bus stops and paying 3 million dollars to his friends for 'defense' such attack on the IRS would be ok. But rational people understand that many of our current deficit problems result from offering services that every agrees we need, like payments to the old, defense, etc, while not taxing for those services. Taxing the families in Pauls districts under the pre-bush-era tax cuts would more than cover the bribes that Paul gives his friends through earmarks, but without these taxes we go into debt. Going into debt for bribes is the reason so many want earmarks to go away.
Also, it seems that years ago there was talk about scanning actors bodies and then using them in animated form. That way actors that for some reason could no longer physically act could still generate a revenue stream.
I believe one issue with this is the creepiness when an animated character is almost 100% realistic, but not quite. We have been told in test screening viewers don't want that, and so the realism has to be pulled back. I think even the marionettes in Team America had to have the mouth movements not so realistic.
This will certainly extend to cutting and pasting old footage. It will be close, but the viewers will be distracted by the slight imperfections, like in the old films where one could see every cut. If the film were about the technology, and some successful films are, like LOTR, them that would be ok. But if they are making a serious film, it wil be a bust.
I do like is the apparent pay as you go, if the prices are not too high. $10 is ok for the day pass. I wish ATT would let us buy data on a as used basis instead of every month, and pay for even if you did not use the it. I suspect Verizon is going to charge at least $20 for a gigabyte, which would be high but in some ways better than ATT subscription model.
So it is like a typewriter. Some houses had them, some didn't. Most businesses had them. If a household did have a typewriter, it was often not regularly replaced.
I think what we are talking about is households upgrading PCs for personal use. A family may have one or more PCs, but they will upgrade less often. I myself have been upgrading every couple years, but my workhorse machine is likely not going to be upgraded in the near future as I buy mobile devices.
In that way the era of selling huge number of PCs, and the race to add features to PCs to encourage families to upgrade, may be over. We may be seeing the same thing with consoles. It may be that families will concentrate on personal portable devices that can do 80% of what a PC can do. Sort of like when we moved from desktop to laptop machine, but much more drastic as the technology backbone is likely to be more dramatically effected.
To me this is simply aobut displacement of the established phone OEM. This, combined with the prevailing mobile phone model in the US, meant that the US market was stagnant. For instance, most of the cool stuff that Nokia was doing was unavailable and Motorola not doing that many cool things. The Mobile operators were not going to let cool things happen unless it was outlandishly profitable.
The reaction to this displacement was, of course, an attempt to stop the firms causing the displacement. Therefore Apple is sued. Google, who is work more within the status quo, is less venerable.
So there are legitimate benefits on all sides. Apple is closed, but requires the networks to open up. Android is open, but allows the networks to remain closed. Apple has a closed App store which provides security to the networks, while Android has an open App store, but networks can close their phones.
The only bad outcome is the prevailing model that exists a few years ago is allowed to return. That is ringtones that cost a $1, clips that can only be stream through mobile providers at an inflated charge set by the the network, and content that is comletely unavailable if the network operators are not going to make a mint.
To me the subscription model is dead due to cost and quality. I have one subscription through an app on the iOS, and that is pretty much a donation sort of thing. I would not mind having a subscription to a Linux magazine, but they want a huge amount of money. Ditto for Financial Times, WSJ, and most other subscriptions.
To me the whole thing is silly. These people have been complaining for years that paper and distribution costs are killing them, and that circulation is in the decline. Here is a model in which they can keep the ads but increase the number of adds as there is no incremental costs for ads in terms of delivery and paper costs, while increasing distribution. While I get annoyed that Architectural Digest has the first third of the magazine as ads, it is still a deal at less than $2 an issue. OTOH, They could have many more ads on iOS, linked to the advertiser, sell it for a dollar, and I would not be annoyed.
It seems this is second opportunity to traditional media to monetize on the web. Offer digital products, mostly supported by advertising, reduct traditional ineffecient infrastructure, and offer a product at a price that attracts new consumers.
Apple might be a driver in the process, like they were with music. Or the media companies could resist, as they did with movies which lead to distribution companies like Netflix making the profits at the expense of the media companies. At this point it can go either way.
It is always the government versus the people. That is why the Bush administration told all departments to ignore, as much as possible, all freedom of information requests.
Governments, overall, are not innovative, and tend to make two mistakes. One to assume that the world still works as a zero sum game. With the advance of technology and the free market, this is no longer true. In spite of this governments still insist on using tools that assume the zero sum, such as war. Huge deficits have been built up over the past 10 years due to war expenditures at expense of the free market. Although private enterprises do thrive in war, these tend to be government proxies, such as Haliburton, rather than free agents.
The second thing governments do, which is more relavent to the current situation, is security through obscurity. At one time this was a reasonable endeavor, in our process oriented world it is not reasonable. Profit cannot be dependent on the arbitrage of knowing something a little before someone else knows it. Power cannot be maintained by simply keeping information from other people.
These are both pre-democracy pre-free-market ideals that are too long held by the elite. At most they want an ancient republic where only they hold power, and the majority is held hostage by the fact they do not have the secrets of power rather than a modern democracy where the freedom of information and commerce insure the most efficient use of resources so that the maximum number of people benifit.
Years ago cigarette companies conducted a survey of doctors and brands they preferred. They advertised the brand they preferred as doctor recommended. I was not so much that doctors necessarily preferred any of the brands, but if one does a survey and sorts the results, one will have top and a bottom, though it may have no statistical or physical meaning.
This is a fiction put forth by 'Fox News' and others that want to promote the lie that Obama did not win the election. There is a very small number of Americans that potentially vote on the person, most vote on the party. Of those, only a percentage goes and votes. This results in a small margin in popular votes. The reality is that the McCain/Palin ticket lost and lost big. The reality is that Palin and the Tea Party lost Republicans the chance to take over the Senate, and was not even able to get a congressperson elected from het own state.
Obama gained over 52% of the popular votes. I am not sure that any non-sitting president has gotten elected with this margin in 50 years. Bush I did but he was following Reagan. Even getting a simple majority is a significant event for a democrat. The only reasonable conclusion, given the McCain was a very popular candidate, and many independents wanted to vote for him, and a large number of Americans seem to hate Obama, is that Palin killed the ticket.
The sad thing is that so many people base conclusion on faith, not facts.
This is the best thing we could do. It means that the governments will attack unrelated targets, and Wikileaks will remain unscathed. He will be safe to do as he pleased and post other materials. Now if he Palin were going after him like he was Obama, then there might be some worry. But even then she would probably endorse some wako for the job who be so distracted with the Aqua Buddha, or who was doing what in the privacy of their own home, or would mistakenly travel to Sweden instead of Switzerland, or not realize that US laws did not apply in Europe.
For Amazon, they likely subsidize the cost of the cell service with ebooks. The costs of device is like the cost of the device, even if it only covers fixed cots.
The reader is only part of the equation. One can perfectly well buy eBook from Amazon, for example, without paying for a Kindle. Amazon ebooks can be read on any number of devices. The same may be true for Nook. It is not so true for media sold through Apple.
The point of an eBook reader is so the consumer buys ebooks. Without a reader, there would be much less of a market. Money is invested in the tech so that people will buy books. It is like saying Google subsidizes computers or phones so that people will search. Clearly the $500 android phone is not subsidzied.
The iPhone was meant to be able to browse the whole wave, with the exception of Flash pages. So why to banks and vendors push the iPhone to a mobile site? Why don't they have a uniform site that can be accessed by any browser? Why do the engage in less secure behavior? For example, Wells Fargo encourages users to sign in on the home page(which is lately secure), uses interstitials at sign in, and also has a mobile site. Much of the lack of security comes from the habits encouraged by the financial institution, and the browser can only do so much.
For instance, by allowing sign in on an home page, which at one was not secure, the user got used to not looking for the lock. Therefore hackers could register wellfargo.com, or wellsfargo.net, or a million variations and harvest usernames and passwords. Clearly URL spoofing did not play a part. Few people look closely at the URL.
Which is to say that Safari allowing URL spoofing is a concern, but I do not see it as dramatic. The URL is not really visible all the time n the iPhone. My real concern is that banks, and stores such as Amazon, have mobile sites instead of just designing one site that will work for all users. This creates a precendent that the look and feel of a vendor is not unifrom, and provides opening for those that want to spoof sites.
On this Black Friday 2010, they actually took pictures of you, and your rush to
So you are telling me that a group of people renowned for hiding in parent's basement with the technological knowledge to shop online willing went out into the deathtrap that was black friday.
The web is the opiate of the masses. Control be by the firm that has customers, as they will be able to set the standards. MS set the standard for desktop and the mid web because they has the users and could deliver those user as customers to other firms.
Almost no one really knows how to use a computer. Almost no one knows how to create a domain name and create content, even using one click installs of pre fab websites. Most people do not want to learn. MS is losing market share because most firms do not want to pay licensing and skilled labour to do this work.
Whoever delivers the machines the average user need to access the web will define the way that the web pages are developed. Be it HTML 5, Flash, with a WIMP or more likely touch interface. Since Adobe does not design machines, and firms do not use flash, my money is on HTML for most things. The machines will be Apple and Google, for the average user. The lockin will be Apps and video and books. This, though, bodes well for future. Amazon has the book reader, and can be used on all devices. Video is delivered in a number of formats, again across many device, except for losers such as blockbuster. Apple is caving in cross compiled Apps, though the vendors of Android devices are likely to create incompatibility.
But if the kids grow up on facebook,and facebook can keep them, then Facebook will be the firm that dictates the general direction of the web, in much the same way Google does now.
On thing that the recent sale of the Apple 1 did was reminded the world that it allowed losers who did not have basic skills in soldering, or coding, or using a screwdriver to use a computer. This was a horrible thing because if you do not know how to solder and insert chips correctly and understand the nomenclature on chips and know how to set the pots so the floppy drive speed is correct, you really had no bussiness owning a computer. I understand all one wanted to do was run visicalc, but one does not deserve doing that unless you built the computer and typed in the code from a magazine.
When the mac came out, Apple made an equal atrocity. Underserving people were able to do complex tasks because of the WIMP interface. No longer did users have to muck about in the computer and install overly complex device drivers, because the clean interfaces meant that the machine was much more plug and play. Of couse, this meant that more underserving people had access to a comptuer.
Then came the iPad, which let people browse the web and send text messages and emails. No talk about technical details that few understands, and expansions that no one uses, just functionality. More undeserving people can use a computer. Of couse there is no phone, and the iPhone is a basd phone, but only old bussiness people and teenagers use the phone.The rest of us text. It is like people saying a computer is worthless if it does not have an ethernet connection or memory exapnsion slot. For some who are stuck in the old ways, yes. For other who embrace modern effeciencies not at all.
Recall that Google rose to power by not using the meta-tags to determine content, or importance, or any attributes. Alta Vista did do this, and fell because it was easy to spoof a meta-tag. By using graph theory they were able to make a search engine that was much more resilient to attacks.
I am not saying that there is clear case for profit via spoofing these tags, just that if there ever is profit to gain by rigging the tags, Google will be in no position to stop it. Therefore this move can be seen only as a method for Google to defend against those that says it profits from serving copyrighted content with a license. I do not see this as a problem other, except that it seem to a lot of work implementing something that probably solves nothing.
The problem is that the TSA will not hire professional staff. This would be staff trained in the art of eliciting telling responses and observing telling behavior.The reason, as has been stated, is that the TSA is a jobs program created by the Bush administration to absorb unskilled workers from the labor pool, particularly those that could not be absorbed through the existing military employment program.
The long lines are going to stay, as this gives observers time to analyze the people, and the people to get jittery. The person who checks tickets will stay, as a well trained skill worker there is the best line of defense. The current protocol is quite useless, as at least a minute of questioning will be necessary.
Bag scanners with neutron bombardement will detect explosives and weapons. We must invest in software to make these detections automatic and reliable.
Full body scanners are useless. The underwear bomber would have been caught if professionals were observing and procedures were followed. Random nuetron scans of humans will detect explosives.
If we want security, there is simple means to minimize explosions. Cargo holds can be kept in vacuum or flooded with Argon. If as the DoHS says passengers require assurances, we can all fly sedated in a 10/90% oxygen argon mixture.
Otherwise, cockpit doors must remain closed. Passengers are not going to scared by a few people with knives knowing they are going to die anyway. Small quantities of explosive may cause panic, but won't take down a plane if the pilots are secure.
Which is what I was surprised about. If I connect to company email, then the company has the right to wipe the email.
Sure, a person may have company documents on the phone, and therefore it is safest for the entire phone to wiped, but one thing mentioned in the program was that the reason they do is not only to protect against theft, but also against employee misconduct. A remote wipe does not protect insider misconduct. As long as the phone is backed up, the contents can be restored and secrets exposed.
In fact, if the phone is backed up, it can potentially restored to an unfreindly device and company secrets exposed that way.
This was a mistake, but it does show a weakness in the megacorporate world. No one can trust the employees, so extreme measures must be taken. Likewise, no one can trust the faceless employers, hiding behind impersonal draconian waivers. There is no incentive to do a better job if one is just going have resources taken away, then the people responsible say they are not responsible because of some piece of paper. There is no reason for an employee to introduce effeciencies if old patterns are going to kill the effeciencies.
Absolutely. The purpose of Windows 1.0 was to keep people from ditching MS DOS. Most still ran MS DOS. By supplying MS Windows, and showing how bad it was, which was mostly due to the screwed up architecture of the machine, people could be convinced to stay with MS DOS. Most people did not know of these other products. Most people had no overwhelming need to go WIMP. Such a move was costly in term of training, and the current solutions worked.
It was fortunate that Window 3.11 came along, as at that time a failed MS Windows product might have cost MS market share. People were seeing how the WIMP interface could produce value. Of course innovative small bussiness saw this pretty early on, but the vertical market applications were not there.
Germany, and maybe some locations, in the US use a software solution to detect anomalies and produce stick figures. This is obviously a superior solution on any number of issues. First, it eliminates the uncertainty of human inspectors. While software will always mark an anomaly as an anomaly, a person's ability to do so depends on such factos such as training, amount of sleep the previous night, amount of alcohol the previous 24 hours, and interest.
The software solution is also superior as new threats can be incorporated with simple software upgrades as opposed to expensive training.
The fact that one can no longer see is either a drawback or benefit depending on one's point of view.
The only possible issue is that the software produces false positives. If the purpose of screening is to produce zero risk, this is not a issue. In such a situation, we are much more concerned with the possibility an explosive is not caught rather than the risk of additional screening. I would say if the consequence of 100 passengers not being stripped searched is that one additional passenger must be felt up, inasmuch as we condone feeling up passengers, this is a reasonable consequence
I think such software would also solve three other problems. The first if the archiving of images for training and record keeping. Since the image is just stick figure with markers, there is not issue with this. The other problem concerns certain persons feeling they are being targeted for the 'feel-up' line due to attributes that have nothing to do with the security of the plane. If, for instance, records show that a screeners is fondling passengers that showed no anomalies on the screen no anomalies, such a screener can be dismissed and evidence can be provided for a civil suit. The third problem is passengers submitting to additional searches without due cause. If the passenger can see their scan, then the fondeling will be less of an issue.
The only reason not to use this software is if, as I have always contended, the DoHS and the TSA are merely job programs for semi-skilled workers that would otherwise have trouble finding private employment. In this case the software may put screeners out of work, and this would be a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Office space is money. One issue with business is that money is wasted on real estate instead of filling core objectives, such as providing quality products. Instead profits have to be jacked up to pay for real estate, which means less ability to compete with more agile firms. I never had an office of 500 square feet. Maybe that is because I have tended to work for small competitive firms, rather than large in efficient corporations. And just to head off the wasteful government kick, the people I know in government have cubicle that are around 50 square feet.
forgot step zero: Fox News releases news Amazon serving WIkileaks to it's persistently scared viewers who then cry to all who can hear that the sky is falling. So much for free speech. Only for rich people.
Accessibility has to be designed in. It is like multiple language capability in software. With the right design, it is easy. With the wrong design one will always have little places where words are not properly transited. If MS did not design accessibility into the basics of MS Windows 7,if they have to design it in after the fact, they lost an incredible opportunity.
Of couse as Gates is able to keep his money, he is able to direct it towards personal projects. One seems to be destroying the profession of teaching and replacing it with an elite corps of of recently post-adolescents that are paid in forgiveness of student loans rather than a professional rate of pay. This of course will minimize taxes, and consequently minimize the chances that we will have a strict inheritance tax. Gates, of course has no concern that urban public education will be decimated as he, and the foreseeable generations of his offspring, will never have to be educated in such an environment.
Look at one example where Ron Paul demanded that 3/4 of million dollars be used for a bus stop. If the money had not be spent, this could have been cut from the next budget. Furthermore, the bus stop distorts the free market by forcing the taxpayer rather than the individual to cover the individuals commuter costs. Some would say that by building a bus statin we don't have to build freeways, but that assumes we have to build freeways to reduce congestion, which we do not. We can allow the free market to operate. If people can't get to work, then they will find other jobs. If they can't find a job, then they will move to a location where they can find a job. Individuals are no entitled to a lake front home or a high paying job, and Paul should not take from the the taxpayer cover these individual expenses. This is the way that the free market operates. Not by government subsiding infrastructure that favors certain individuals, but by individuals making choices of how to use their personal resources in a most efficient fashion.
Then, of course, there is conservative get-out-of-jail-free card that even he uses. Out of the 17 million dollars he stole from taxpayers, mostly for gifts to his buddies in the name of socialist job creation for his constituents. Almost 10 million went to defense contractors. For those who do not know, firms go into defense contracting when they cannot run a legitimate free market business
It is also interesting to note, that as far as I can tell, while he gave huge sums to the dying petrochemical industry, he did not earmark a penny to help NASA and the space industry, something that could help his district in a post-oil world.
All this wasteful spending, which by itself is not a huge problem, has be to be taken in the context of his contempt for the IRS. I know of at least one case where the IRS tried to collect from a family in which all indicators suggested that they were tax cheats. Paul's office helped them, and it turned out they probably not tax cheats, but Paul gave no credit to the IRS. Now, if Paul were not building million dollar bus stops and paying 3 million dollars to his friends for 'defense' such attack on the IRS would be ok. But rational people understand that many of our current deficit problems result from offering services that every agrees we need, like payments to the old, defense, etc, while not taxing for those services. Taxing the families in Pauls districts under the pre-bush-era tax cuts would more than cover the bribes that Paul gives his friends through earmarks, but without these taxes we go into debt. Going into debt for bribes is the reason so many want earmarks to go away.
I believe one issue with this is the creepiness when an animated character is almost 100% realistic, but not quite. We have been told in test screening viewers don't want that, and so the realism has to be pulled back. I think even the marionettes in Team America had to have the mouth movements not so realistic.
This will certainly extend to cutting and pasting old footage. It will be close, but the viewers will be distracted by the slight imperfections, like in the old films where one could see every cut. If the film were about the technology, and some successful films are, like LOTR, them that would be ok. But if they are making a serious film, it wil be a bust.
I do like is the apparent pay as you go, if the prices are not too high. $10 is ok for the day pass. I wish ATT would let us buy data on a as used basis instead of every month, and pay for even if you did not use the it. I suspect Verizon is going to charge at least $20 for a gigabyte, which would be high but in some ways better than ATT subscription model.
I think what we are talking about is households upgrading PCs for personal use. A family may have one or more PCs, but they will upgrade less often. I myself have been upgrading every couple years, but my workhorse machine is likely not going to be upgraded in the near future as I buy mobile devices.
In that way the era of selling huge number of PCs, and the race to add features to PCs to encourage families to upgrade, may be over. We may be seeing the same thing with consoles. It may be that families will concentrate on personal portable devices that can do 80% of what a PC can do. Sort of like when we moved from desktop to laptop machine, but much more drastic as the technology backbone is likely to be more dramatically effected.
The reaction to this displacement was, of course, an attempt to stop the firms causing the displacement. Therefore Apple is sued. Google, who is work more within the status quo, is less venerable.
So there are legitimate benefits on all sides. Apple is closed, but requires the networks to open up. Android is open, but allows the networks to remain closed. Apple has a closed App store which provides security to the networks, while Android has an open App store, but networks can close their phones.
The only bad outcome is the prevailing model that exists a few years ago is allowed to return. That is ringtones that cost a $1, clips that can only be stream through mobile providers at an inflated charge set by the the network, and content that is comletely unavailable if the network operators are not going to make a mint.
To me the whole thing is silly. These people have been complaining for years that paper and distribution costs are killing them, and that circulation is in the decline. Here is a model in which they can keep the ads but increase the number of adds as there is no incremental costs for ads in terms of delivery and paper costs, while increasing distribution. While I get annoyed that Architectural Digest has the first third of the magazine as ads, it is still a deal at less than $2 an issue. OTOH, They could have many more ads on iOS, linked to the advertiser, sell it for a dollar, and I would not be annoyed.
It seems this is second opportunity to traditional media to monetize on the web. Offer digital products, mostly supported by advertising, reduct traditional ineffecient infrastructure, and offer a product at a price that attracts new consumers.
Apple might be a driver in the process, like they were with music. Or the media companies could resist, as they did with movies which lead to distribution companies like Netflix making the profits at the expense of the media companies. At this point it can go either way.
Governments, overall, are not innovative, and tend to make two mistakes. One to assume that the world still works as a zero sum game. With the advance of technology and the free market, this is no longer true. In spite of this governments still insist on using tools that assume the zero sum, such as war. Huge deficits have been built up over the past 10 years due to war expenditures at expense of the free market. Although private enterprises do thrive in war, these tend to be government proxies, such as Haliburton, rather than free agents.
The second thing governments do, which is more relavent to the current situation, is security through obscurity. At one time this was a reasonable endeavor, in our process oriented world it is not reasonable. Profit cannot be dependent on the arbitrage of knowing something a little before someone else knows it. Power cannot be maintained by simply keeping information from other people.
These are both pre-democracy pre-free-market ideals that are too long held by the elite. At most they want an ancient republic where only they hold power, and the majority is held hostage by the fact they do not have the secrets of power rather than a modern democracy where the freedom of information and commerce insure the most efficient use of resources so that the maximum number of people benifit.
Years ago cigarette companies conducted a survey of doctors and brands they preferred. They advertised the brand they preferred as doctor recommended. I was not so much that doctors necessarily preferred any of the brands, but if one does a survey and sorts the results, one will have top and a bottom, though it may have no statistical or physical meaning.
Obama gained over 52% of the popular votes. I am not sure that any non-sitting president has gotten elected with this margin in 50 years. Bush I did but he was following Reagan. Even getting a simple majority is a significant event for a democrat. The only reasonable conclusion, given the McCain was a very popular candidate, and many independents wanted to vote for him, and a large number of Americans seem to hate Obama, is that Palin killed the ticket.
The sad thing is that so many people base conclusion on faith, not facts.
This is the best thing we could do. It means that the governments will attack unrelated targets, and Wikileaks will remain unscathed. He will be safe to do as he pleased and post other materials. Now if he Palin were going after him like he was Obama, then there might be some worry. But even then she would probably endorse some wako for the job who be so distracted with the Aqua Buddha, or who was doing what in the privacy of their own home, or would mistakenly travel to Sweden instead of Switzerland, or not realize that US laws did not apply in Europe.
The reader is only part of the equation. One can perfectly well buy eBook from Amazon, for example, without paying for a Kindle. Amazon ebooks can be read on any number of devices. The same may be true for Nook. It is not so true for media sold through Apple.
The point of an eBook reader is so the consumer buys ebooks. Without a reader, there would be much less of a market. Money is invested in the tech so that people will buy books. It is like saying Google subsidizes computers or phones so that people will search. Clearly the $500 android phone is not subsidzied.
For instance, by allowing sign in on an home page, which at one was not secure, the user got used to not looking for the lock. Therefore hackers could register wellfargo.com, or wellsfargo.net, or a million variations and harvest usernames and passwords. Clearly URL spoofing did not play a part. Few people look closely at the URL.
Which is to say that Safari allowing URL spoofing is a concern, but I do not see it as dramatic. The URL is not really visible all the time n the iPhone. My real concern is that banks, and stores such as Amazon, have mobile sites instead of just designing one site that will work for all users. This creates a precendent that the look and feel of a vendor is not unifrom, and provides opening for those that want to spoof sites.
So you are telling me that a group of people renowned for hiding in parent's basement with the technological knowledge to shop online willing went out into the deathtrap that was black friday.
Almost no one really knows how to use a computer. Almost no one knows how to create a domain name and create content, even using one click installs of pre fab websites. Most people do not want to learn. MS is losing market share because most firms do not want to pay licensing and skilled labour to do this work.
Whoever delivers the machines the average user need to access the web will define the way that the web pages are developed. Be it HTML 5, Flash, with a WIMP or more likely touch interface. Since Adobe does not design machines, and firms do not use flash, my money is on HTML for most things. The machines will be Apple and Google, for the average user. The lockin will be Apps and video and books. This, though, bodes well for future. Amazon has the book reader, and can be used on all devices. Video is delivered in a number of formats, again across many device, except for losers such as blockbuster. Apple is caving in cross compiled Apps, though the vendors of Android devices are likely to create incompatibility.
But if the kids grow up on facebook,and facebook can keep them, then Facebook will be the firm that dictates the general direction of the web, in much the same way Google does now.
When the mac came out, Apple made an equal atrocity. Underserving people were able to do complex tasks because of the WIMP interface. No longer did users have to muck about in the computer and install overly complex device drivers, because the clean interfaces meant that the machine was much more plug and play. Of couse, this meant that more underserving people had access to a comptuer.
Then came the iPad, which let people browse the web and send text messages and emails. No talk about technical details that few understands, and expansions that no one uses, just functionality. More undeserving people can use a computer. Of couse there is no phone, and the iPhone is a basd phone, but only old bussiness people and teenagers use the phone.The rest of us text. It is like people saying a computer is worthless if it does not have an ethernet connection or memory exapnsion slot. For some who are stuck in the old ways, yes. For other who embrace modern effeciencies not at all.
I am not saying that there is clear case for profit via spoofing these tags, just that if there ever is profit to gain by rigging the tags, Google will be in no position to stop it. Therefore this move can be seen only as a method for Google to defend against those that says it profits from serving copyrighted content with a license. I do not see this as a problem other, except that it seem to a lot of work implementing something that probably solves nothing.
The long lines are going to stay, as this gives observers time to analyze the people, and the people to get jittery. The person who checks tickets will stay, as a well trained skill worker there is the best line of defense. The current protocol is quite useless, as at least a minute of questioning will be necessary.
Bag scanners with neutron bombardement will detect explosives and weapons. We must invest in software to make these detections automatic and reliable.
Full body scanners are useless. The underwear bomber would have been caught if professionals were observing and procedures were followed. Random nuetron scans of humans will detect explosives.
If we want security, there is simple means to minimize explosions. Cargo holds can be kept in vacuum or flooded with Argon. If as the DoHS says passengers require assurances, we can all fly sedated in a 10/90% oxygen argon mixture.
Otherwise, cockpit doors must remain closed. Passengers are not going to scared by a few people with knives knowing they are going to die anyway. Small quantities of explosive may cause panic, but won't take down a plane if the pilots are secure.
My first thought was the renewed a-team. Templeton won't be able to be called Face anymore.
Sure, a person may have company documents on the phone, and therefore it is safest for the entire phone to wiped, but one thing mentioned in the program was that the reason they do is not only to protect against theft, but also against employee misconduct. A remote wipe does not protect insider misconduct. As long as the phone is backed up, the contents can be restored and secrets exposed.
In fact, if the phone is backed up, it can potentially restored to an unfreindly device and company secrets exposed that way.
This was a mistake, but it does show a weakness in the megacorporate world. No one can trust the employees, so extreme measures must be taken. Likewise, no one can trust the faceless employers, hiding behind impersonal draconian waivers. There is no incentive to do a better job if one is just going have resources taken away, then the people responsible say they are not responsible because of some piece of paper. There is no reason for an employee to introduce effeciencies if old patterns are going to kill the effeciencies.
It was fortunate that Window 3.11 came along, as at that time a failed MS Windows product might have cost MS market share. People were seeing how the WIMP interface could produce value. Of course innovative small bussiness saw this pretty early on, but the vertical market applications were not there.
The software solution is also superior as new threats can be incorporated with simple software upgrades as opposed to expensive training.
The fact that one can no longer see is either a drawback or benefit depending on one's point of view.
The only possible issue is that the software produces false positives. If the purpose of screening is to produce zero risk, this is not a issue. In such a situation, we are much more concerned with the possibility an explosive is not caught rather than the risk of additional screening. I would say if the consequence of 100 passengers not being stripped searched is that one additional passenger must be felt up, inasmuch as we condone feeling up passengers, this is a reasonable consequence
I think such software would also solve three other problems. The first if the archiving of images for training and record keeping. Since the image is just stick figure with markers, there is not issue with this. The other problem concerns certain persons feeling they are being targeted for the 'feel-up' line due to attributes that have nothing to do with the security of the plane. If, for instance, records show that a screeners is fondling passengers that showed no anomalies on the screen no anomalies, such a screener can be dismissed and evidence can be provided for a civil suit. The third problem is passengers submitting to additional searches without due cause. If the passenger can see their scan, then the fondeling will be less of an issue.
The only reason not to use this software is if, as I have always contended, the DoHS and the TSA are merely job programs for semi-skilled workers that would otherwise have trouble finding private employment. In this case the software may put screeners out of work, and this would be a bad thing.