We found a good way to solve that at my workplace.
Sheet-metal building facade. Wire mesh structure for interior panels. Like working in a faraday cage.
You want to BYOD? Well, you're not getting a mobile connection, and you're not getting on our network without begging before the judgemental gods of the IT team.
It is when you're relying on market segmentation. Enterprise customers have deeper pockets than individuals and OEMs. If Windows RT or the Home edition windows that comes with every PC were good enough for the enterprise, why would they pay extra for a Windows Professional license?
I view it in terms of the two types of sandwich line on sale at the shop I pass on the way to work: A budget sandwich, and a luxury sandwich. There is no doubt a higher margin on the latter, as well as using higher quality ingredients to justify the price. But it puts the shop in the odd position of having to make sure their budget sandwich isn't too high quality - if they made a really delicious sandwich at that price, there would be no reason for anyone to buy the more profitable luxury sandwich. By segmenting the market they make sure that people pay as much as they can afford to pay.
Too lazy to research, but to submit some unfounded guessing, I imagine that it would vary greatly between fields. Probably with medicine the area that benefits most from patents - drugs companies do spend a lot of money on R&D, even if they do have a habit of not publishing a lot of it. And probably software as the area in which patents provide the least benefit.
Patents are not a fundamentally bad idea - they encourage research. Some new technology costs so much to develop that it just won't happen without some way to ensure a return on investment. Drug development, for example. The problem is that the patent system as it currently exists is terribly broken. Patents are ridiculously easy to get over even the most trivial things, to the point that it's almost impossible to work in technology without infringing on something, and when a patent case can easily involve hundreds of claims it is often decided by who can afford to throw the most money away in legal costs.
ZTE is state owned. Huawei is officially private, but the Chinese government is still certainly a major influence on the company, enough that the US government is concerned about espionage. This is akin to the time Fox News threatened sue another Fox division over a parody of their copyrighted ticker style. Except in the Fox case, someone higher up the chain quickly took notice and told the offending executive to knock it off and play nice with their ally before it went to court.
Interlacing was around long, long before digital. It needs only moderatly complicated analog electronics. It wasn't possible to do a full frame fifty (Or sixty, for those in the US) times a second - it would have exceeded the acceptable bandwidth, in the analog sense. So the options were to either halve the frame rate, or halve the number of lines. Flickery, or blury. Interlacing solves the problem - send alternating lines each frame. You get all the benefits of the full line count on still images, and all the smoothness of full frame rate on motion. Best of both.
I work at a school. We block all TCP and UDP traffic except port 80, which transparently redirects to a filter proxy. We use one of the best network filters on the market (Smoothwall). We have DNS filtered, HTTPS blocked. The stations are locked down, the list constantly updated, and on a semi-regular basis a technician (me) rummages through every image in every student area.
It already is blocked. That's one of the arguments that proponents of the blocking are using: ISPs have blocked child porn, which proves that they do have the ability to block things, thus they should have no reason to refuse.
Some of his views are very debatable, but he is still a reasonably accomplished engineer. He may not be bringing about the revolution he wants, but he should be able to recognise good directions to spend resources to achieve more immediate goals. I know that Google has been very interested in machine learning applied to language translation - just the sort of field Kurzweil should have some familiarity with. It'll even satisfy his ambition to change the world - bring down the language barriers, and you've just made a significent step towards world peace. It's much harder to justify a war when the populations of both sides are in constant communication and have established social relationships over the internet.
With one slight problem: There will be almost no motion blur at all. Motion blur is both a camera artifact and a desired visual effect, aiding the brain in performing that unconscious process of allowing a series of still images to be perceived as motion. Watch the film without motion blur and people will get the feeling something is 'wrong.' They may not be able to tell what, unless they are experienced in video production, but they'll pick up on it. The video will look strangely jerky, or animated.
Interlacing was a wonderful thing in the analog days. TV would have looked (literally) half as good without it. But those days are passed: It is time to let interlacing die. It just gets in the way now and complicates things needlessly.
A 48KHz sampling rate can handle all the frequency range humans can hear, even children, with a nice margin for less-than-ideal filtering. Even a sixteen-bit sample provides reproduction indistinguishable from the original, if the equipment is properly configured*. Tubes aren't inherently better: It's just that a lot of digital audio processing and transistor amplification is done really badly, by people who don't know how to use the equipment properly.
*Yet it's amazing how many audio signals, even on profesionally-made and published media, seem to think a peak volume of about -12db is appropriate.
I can see it happening to hobbyists and those on budget so tight they are using point-and-shoot consumer gear, but any professional camera operator should be familiar with the correct use of shutter speed.
Practicality. When talking about energy consumption, it's usually given in watts because the practical implications are time-dependant. You've got to account for the time it takes to run the calculations (which may be time-critical - you don't want your amalgamated radar data on a five-minute delay) and need to know the wattage to calculate cooling requirements. While operations/joule and flops/watt are equivilent, it's easier to think in terms of the former.
The occasional refurbishing. The fundamental reaction is reversible, but eventually the plates become uneven and potentially short - even if the batteries are well-treated to avoid corrosion of contacts or sulfation. The lifetime of a lead-acid can still be decades though - car batteries routinely last the life of the vehicle, and those are subject to really poor environmental conditions. Compare to the leading battery tech for high-energy-density applications, li-ion: Even if you store them perfectly and don't use them, they'll lose half their capacity in three years and might as well go in the bin by ten.
Over lifetime, yes. A good-quality lead acid, well maintained, will last almost forever. It could still be running in a hundred years, good as the day it was made, with just an occasional refurbishing. Something like a li-ion will pack several times the power and energy density, but lacks long-term endurance.
Even if the stations had power, they wouldn't have fuel for long. A natural disaster means a big panic-buy, plus difficulty getting new supplies in. The working pumps will run dry quickly, and if you're lucky enough to get gas it'll cost far more than the usual price.
It'd require the customer bring their own container, and render the filling process much more time-consuming than 'insert pipe, squeeze handle.' There's also a spill hazard.
Mass-production already took jobs away. The only reason this unemployment-meltdown scenario has been avoided so far is that the typical westerner today lives a lifestyle that would have made pre-industrial kings envy them. Affordable high-speed global travel, so much food that obesity is a public health crisis, climate-controlled homes, an endless precession of technological toys and a supply of consumer goods so cheap that when clothes are torn they are thrown in the bin and new ones purchased.
But there has to be some limit to how many material goods a person can want to consume, once they become cheap enough that conspicuous consumption ceases to be a factor.
While the Supreme judges are untouchable once they get in, it isn't possible to get in without playing the political power games. They need to be appointed by a president and approved by congress, which in turn means they need political support. The easiest route is to follow one of the major party lines on most or all issues, which wins the support of that party. A judge with a history of upsetting the political leaders by, for example, following a permissive intepretation of copyright law is never going to be appointed, and wouldn't be approved even then.
That would be a very likely dystopia. Automation leading to mass unemployment, but without the foresight to shift society to a model able to operate under those conditions. The result being billions of people living in poverty because there is simply no work for them to do, while those who do control wealth have no incentive to share it freely. The only apparent solution is some sort of techno-socialism, but the S-word is considered obscene in US politics, so that isn't going to be easy.
Slashdot Mirror
I gather the Microsoft counterpart is run by a Mrs. Lovett.
We found a good way to solve that at my workplace.
Sheet-metal building facade. Wire mesh structure for interior panels. Like working in a faraday cage.
You want to BYOD? Well, you're not getting a mobile connection, and you're not getting on our network without begging before the judgemental gods of the IT team.
The iPad has been a huge commercial success. Of course Microsoft are trying to copy the business side - it has a proven history of profitability.
It is when you're relying on market segmentation. Enterprise customers have deeper pockets than individuals and OEMs. If Windows RT or the Home edition windows that comes with every PC were good enough for the enterprise, why would they pay extra for a Windows Professional license?
I view it in terms of the two types of sandwich line on sale at the shop I pass on the way to work: A budget sandwich, and a luxury sandwich. There is no doubt a higher margin on the latter, as well as using higher quality ingredients to justify the price. But it puts the shop in the odd position of having to make sure their budget sandwich isn't too high quality - if they made a really delicious sandwich at that price, there would be no reason for anyone to buy the more profitable luxury sandwich. By segmenting the market they make sure that people pay as much as they can afford to pay.
Too lazy to research, but to submit some unfounded guessing, I imagine that it would vary greatly between fields. Probably with medicine the area that benefits most from patents - drugs companies do spend a lot of money on R&D, even if they do have a habit of not publishing a lot of it. And probably software as the area in which patents provide the least benefit.
Patents are not a fundamentally bad idea - they encourage research. Some new technology costs so much to develop that it just won't happen without some way to ensure a return on investment. Drug development, for example. The problem is that the patent system as it currently exists is terribly broken. Patents are ridiculously easy to get over even the most trivial things, to the point that it's almost impossible to work in technology without infringing on something, and when a patent case can easily involve hundreds of claims it is often decided by who can afford to throw the most money away in legal costs.
ZTE is state owned. Huawei is officially private, but the Chinese government is still certainly a major influence on the company, enough that the US government is concerned about espionage. This is akin to the time Fox News threatened sue another Fox division over a parody of their copyrighted ticker style. Except in the Fox case, someone higher up the chain quickly took notice and told the offending executive to knock it off and play nice with their ally before it went to court.
Interlacing was around long, long before digital. It needs only moderatly complicated analog electronics. It wasn't possible to do a full frame fifty (Or sixty, for those in the US) times a second - it would have exceeded the acceptable bandwidth, in the analog sense. So the options were to either halve the frame rate, or halve the number of lines. Flickery, or blury. Interlacing solves the problem - send alternating lines each frame. You get all the benefits of the full line count on still images, and all the smoothness of full frame rate on motion. Best of both.
I work at a school. We block all TCP and UDP traffic except port 80, which transparently redirects to a filter proxy. We use one of the best network filters on the market (Smoothwall). We have DNS filtered, HTTPS blocked. The stations are locked down, the list constantly updated, and on a semi-regular basis a technician (me) rummages through every image in every student area.
And guess what? I still find porn.
It already is blocked. That's one of the arguments that proponents of the blocking are using: ISPs have blocked child porn, which proves that they do have the ability to block things, thus they should have no reason to refuse.
Some of his views are very debatable, but he is still a reasonably accomplished engineer. He may not be bringing about the revolution he wants, but he should be able to recognise good directions to spend resources to achieve more immediate goals. I know that Google has been very interested in machine learning applied to language translation - just the sort of field Kurzweil should have some familiarity with. It'll even satisfy his ambition to change the world - bring down the language barriers, and you've just made a significent step towards world peace. It's much harder to justify a war when the populations of both sides are in constant communication and have established social relationships over the internet.
With one slight problem: There will be almost no motion blur at all. Motion blur is both a camera artifact and a desired visual effect, aiding the brain in performing that unconscious process of allowing a series of still images to be perceived as motion. Watch the film without motion blur and people will get the feeling something is 'wrong.' They may not be able to tell what, unless they are experienced in video production, but they'll pick up on it. The video will look strangely jerky, or animated.
Interlacing was a wonderful thing in the analog days. TV would have looked (literally) half as good without it. But those days are passed: It is time to let interlacing die. It just gets in the way now and complicates things needlessly.
A 48KHz sampling rate can handle all the frequency range humans can hear, even children, with a nice margin for less-than-ideal filtering. Even a sixteen-bit sample provides reproduction indistinguishable from the original, if the equipment is properly configured*. Tubes aren't inherently better: It's just that a lot of digital audio processing and transistor amplification is done really badly, by people who don't know how to use the equipment properly.
*Yet it's amazing how many audio signals, even on profesionally-made and published media, seem to think a peak volume of about -12db is appropriate.
I can see it happening to hobbyists and those on budget so tight they are using point-and-shoot consumer gear, but any professional camera operator should be familiar with the correct use of shutter speed.
Practicality. When talking about energy consumption, it's usually given in watts because the practical implications are time-dependant. You've got to account for the time it takes to run the calculations (which may be time-critical - you don't want your amalgamated radar data on a five-minute delay) and need to know the wattage to calculate cooling requirements. While operations/joule and flops/watt are equivilent, it's easier to think in terms of the former.
The occasional refurbishing. The fundamental reaction is reversible, but eventually the plates become uneven and potentially short - even if the batteries are well-treated to avoid corrosion of contacts or sulfation. The lifetime of a lead-acid can still be decades though - car batteries routinely last the life of the vehicle, and those are subject to really poor environmental conditions. Compare to the leading battery tech for high-energy-density applications, li-ion: Even if you store them perfectly and don't use them, they'll lose half their capacity in three years and might as well go in the bin by ten.
Over lifetime, yes. A good-quality lead acid, well maintained, will last almost forever. It could still be running in a hundred years, good as the day it was made, with just an occasional refurbishing. Something like a li-ion will pack several times the power and energy density, but lacks long-term endurance.
Even if the stations had power, they wouldn't have fuel for long. A natural disaster means a big panic-buy, plus difficulty getting new supplies in. The working pumps will run dry quickly, and if you're lucky enough to get gas it'll cost far more than the usual price.
It'd require the customer bring their own container, and render the filling process much more time-consuming than 'insert pipe, squeeze handle.' There's also a spill hazard.
Trolling, but arguably with some truth. The only difference between religion and delusion is in the number of followers.
Mass-production already took jobs away. The only reason this unemployment-meltdown scenario has been avoided so far is that the typical westerner today lives a lifestyle that would have made pre-industrial kings envy them. Affordable high-speed global travel, so much food that obesity is a public health crisis, climate-controlled homes, an endless precession of technological toys and a supply of consumer goods so cheap that when clothes are torn they are thrown in the bin and new ones purchased.
But there has to be some limit to how many material goods a person can want to consume, once they become cheap enough that conspicuous consumption ceases to be a factor.
While the Supreme judges are untouchable once they get in, it isn't possible to get in without playing the political power games. They need to be appointed by a president and approved by congress, which in turn means they need political support. The easiest route is to follow one of the major party lines on most or all issues, which wins the support of that party. A judge with a history of upsetting the political leaders by, for example, following a permissive intepretation of copyright law is never going to be appointed, and wouldn't be approved even then.
That would be a very likely dystopia. Automation leading to mass unemployment, but without the foresight to shift society to a model able to operate under those conditions. The result being billions of people living in poverty because there is simply no work for them to do, while those who do control wealth have no incentive to share it freely. The only apparent solution is some sort of techno-socialism, but the S-word is considered obscene in US politics, so that isn't going to be easy.
But those are operated by companies with dedicated legal departments. Most police departments know better than to mess around with a mega-corp.