It is 802.11, but different countries have different radio restrictions. The protocols and general operation are identical, it's just the frequency bands and power levels that change.
I think the big difference is a cop doesn't expect a taser to kill, whereas any sane human knows a well-aimed gunshot is most likely fatal, as your humorous retort underlined. The reality is these less-lethal weapons are still way more powerful than they need to be, and far more complex than the average uniform-wearing non-EE meatbag could ever comprehend.
A previous poster said it best: tasers should only be used as a substitute for a gun shot. If the situation does not call for deadly force, then the taser should not be used, otherwise they will only fuel the arms race between police and non-compliant citizens (which eventually can mean anyone with an opinion).
Apple charge high prices because that's what their target market is willing to pay. That said, even if the price of an iPhone or iPad were to go up $20-40 to cover non-slave labour, I don't think it would affect sales much at all.
People complaining about the price are irrelevant. You either want one, or you don't. If the iPad is $599 with slave labour, it might be what... $699 with non-slave labour ? Is that really going to destroy your beloved economy ?
The people don't really "choose" to work in sweatshops. They have no other sane choice, it's either work your ass off 18 hours a day and get micropaid, or not work and not get paid at all. There is no "work a little, live a little" option because the people who own and operate the factories do not offer it. They could easily increase their fees and pass it on to their workers as sustainable wages, but they choose not to.
I think it's a question of magnitude. If someone calls you a stupid moron, well that person is an immature prick but it's not worth wasting a whole court-full of people's time over. Tell them to eat a bag of dicks and get on with your life. They are only empty words in the air. People need to spend less time bickering over the little things, and more time enjoying life.
I just posted a rather flamey rant over at Kongregate, blasting the recent flood of "pay to pwn" games that directly encourage players to drop tens to hundreds of dollars on in-game items and perks, as was once contained to the mental diarrhea that is Second Life. I find the whole concept very offensive, to bring real money into what is supposed to be a fantasy escape from the daily pressures of reality. Doubly offensive that it is happening on a site that thrives on indie game developers and experimental/emergent gameplay, where the micropayments are supposed to be for "tipping" the developers, not funneling huge sums of money to scammy asian game houses.
Buying a game: fine. Paying a fixed monthly fee for an MMO: fine. Allowing those with too much disposable income to shit on everyone else's game progression: dirty.
The only thing this "clientless Flash video codec" does is remux the FLV video into a Quicktime or MPEG container. It's like taking an HTML page, adding an XML doctype to the top and calling it an "HTML to XML gateway". Yeah ok, not rocket science.
You're right, big blockbusters cost a ton of money to make. Do they need to ? Where does the money go ? Is it really that expensive to put Robert Downey Jr. in a big dorky metal suit and draw laser beams shooting from every appendage ? Does a 200 million dollar movie entertain more people to a higher level of satisfaction than a 2 million dollar movie ?
I get more painful laughs out of cheaply-made South Park and Family Guy episodes than the average Hollywood comedy.
As someone who's laid hands on more diverse hardware than all of Dell's assembly techs combined, I stand firm. PC-style hardware is universally sloppy. It is thrown together by the lowest bidder, QA typically consists of a 5-minute "does it boot" test in XP SP2, and driver development is a fire-and-forget task. The fact that anything works with anything else is an everyday miracle.
What, did you honestly believe your $40 router was lovingly engineered by the brightest minds in the industry ? No, it was prototyped by some kid in Japan, the board laid out by an integration shop in India, and the actual product manufactured by laymen in Malaysia. Anything other chain would drive the costs up tenfold.
Now, that said, would it have been reasonable for Apple to loosen up the tolerances on their WiFi chipset ? Of course. If they want to play nice with PC hardware, they need to accommodate the entire range of 3rd party gear from best to worst.
How to guess someone's password, in three easy steps:
1. Find out the name of their youngest non-estranged child. If there is a tie, pick the one with the shorter name. (e.g. Cody) 2. Take today's date, and subtract from it the lesser of the employee's start date, or the implementation of the password expiration policy (Apr 13th 2010 - Apr 1st 2009 = 12 months) 3. Divide the result of step 2 by the password expiration window (say 3 months)
As someone who took the SSD plunge a few months ago, I can tell you that the performance delta entirely depends on two things: your multitasking habits, and the quality of the SSD controller chipset. Some are only good at sequential read/write (like conventional drives), but the better ones are also good at random access, and these are the ones that make your machine zippy. On a spinning platter hard drive, if you have two apps accessing the disk simultaneously, it has to seek back and forth between the two files, reading a little piece each time, and this literally decimates your throughput because the drive spends more time moving the magnetic heads than actually transiting data. This seek time is nil on an SSD, so you regain the full read/write speed, even if you're accessing 100 files in random order. This is what makes the desktop so much faster, because no matter which app you launch, it's always just a microsecond away.
Windows boots in about 10 seconds, apps pop up almost instantly, large compilation jobs finish in a third of the time. I don't run benches but if my boot drive has slowed down in the 4-5 months since I bought it, I haven't noticed at all. I also have four of them in a RAID-0, and I still hit the 700mb/sec writes I've enjoyed since day one. The only detail I still worry about is reliability / longevity. These consumer-grade SSDs are still very new, and we don't yet have any good empirical data on how likely they are to die, or what the real-world wear-out period looks like. I know I beat the crap out of mine, with an inordinate amount of churn these days as I'm ripping thousands of CDs and DVDs back into images for archival, but that's what warranties are for.
So... they left Activision to go to EA. That's like dumping one psycho murderous crackwhore for her live-in sister who has super-AIDS. If they were trying to escape the shameless greed and sweatshop tyranny in search of artistic freedom and a healthier career path, they fucked up BIG TIME.
They have the track record, couldn't they have found more respectful backers to start their own game house ?
A photographer with a certificate in Tactile Graphics from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
I hate to poke fun at these serious handicaps, but does one really need to be certified to be able to turn image outlines into crude heightmaps ? Do the people making those raised letters on book covers hold a degree in tactile typography ?
FFS, we did this sort of thing in kindergarten. Chicky needs to get a real job. You want tactile porn ? Go to a strip club. Even blind people can enjoy tits in their face.
If that is the truth, then why do we need witnesses for fender benders ? According to your naïve interpretation of the law, it should be an astoundingly simple matter: he whose front bumper is damaged would be responsible, 100% of the time.
If you are being tailgated by some jerk, and you have the option of safely going through a yellow-to-red light but consciously choose to slam the brakes, causing accident and injury, you will soon be needing a lawyer, because you can bet your crumpled ass the guy behind you will be suing you for negligence and reckless endangerment. The jerk's speeding or tailgating ticket will be peanuts compared to your legal bills, because you had the option to safely continue driving, and chose not to take it. A reasonable person does not react to another person's traffic violations by causing an accident.
Here in Canadia our red light cams snap two pictures in rapid succession, one before you enter and one after. Source: http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/onthemove/driving/road_safety/motorists/red_light_cameras_en.html Now given our current leaders' abhorrent love for all things American, I wouldn't be surprised if those cameras came from the U.S. in the first place, so you might have the same systems down there.
The biggest issue with red light cameras is they don't actually help with safety. Unless the driver notices the two flashes, the offending driver is not aware of their misbehaviour, and since they get the ticket anywhere from a few days to several weeks later in the mail, they're not going to stop doing it. At least when the cops pull over those goddamned white trash Gatineau street racers, there is an element of deterrence that just might help the Civic-driving imbecile slow it down a bit, especially if it's the fifth time that week and monkey boy has his license suspended, something a camera ticket cannot do since it's not "legal enough" to be worth demerit points.
Put another way: the roads were fine ten, twenty, even fifty years ago. Assume any technological development since then has been in the name of profit. In a world where our municipalities spend more money on traffic cams than road repair, it's not all that difficult to connect the dots.
What you say is true, but the reality is that small companies usually can't justify the overhead (lack of dedicated resources), and the larger companies have much bigger cracks for good intentions to fall into.
#1: sometimes (most of the time) when you ask the questions like "does anything else depend on X", you get no answer, or worse: an incorrect answer. You go ahead, pull the plug, then get yelled at for not knowing the information people withheld from you.
#2: Payroll is not a highly critical task, unless your company is in the business of payroll outsourcing such as ADP. For everyone else, it's one of the many administrative overheads. If payroll screws up, you can always print a cheque.
#3: What usually happens is the person's primary account is disabled immediately, but any unrelated (or shared) accounts remain active. SSH keys, server passwords, boss' password that was known to his assistant... the bottom line is that exploiting any such holes for monetary gain is fraud, and should be treated as such. Don't blame your I.T. staff because an ex-employee is retaliating for HR's tactless firing, or for hiring a skeevy person in the first place.
#4: If I get run over by a bus, well I'm the only "real" Unix guy here, so my boss will have to get up to speed real quick, or find another Linux geek. If my boss gets run over by a bus, the company's pretty much done. The remaining guys are perhaps less "keystoney", but in the end it boils down to not having the resources to justify redundancy, for our small company.
Worse. They could have negotiated an educational discount, and given the sheer volume I'm sure they would have paid less than 1/4 of retail, or gotten site-wide licenses for even less. I am personally on the fence about piracy (see my other posts), but still this type of infringement seems inexcusable.
Slashdot Mirror
Or hide it where the sun don't shine ?
Edgy, I like it.
I mostly think the customs officer(s) wanted a free iPad.
It is 802.11, but different countries have different radio restrictions. The protocols and general operation are identical, it's just the frequency bands and power levels that change.
Or.... maybe the customs officials really wanted one. I mean, really, what can an average citizen do to stop them ?
I think the big difference is a cop doesn't expect a taser to kill, whereas any sane human knows a well-aimed gunshot is most likely fatal, as your humorous retort underlined. The reality is these less-lethal weapons are still way more powerful than they need to be, and far more complex than the average uniform-wearing non-EE meatbag could ever comprehend.
A previous poster said it best: tasers should only be used as a substitute for a gun shot. If the situation does not call for deadly force, then the taser should not be used, otherwise they will only fuel the arms race between police and non-compliant citizens (which eventually can mean anyone with an opinion).
Apple charge high prices because that's what their target market is willing to pay. That said, even if the price of an iPhone or iPad were to go up $20-40 to cover non-slave labour, I don't think it would affect sales much at all.
People complaining about the price are irrelevant. You either want one, or you don't. If the iPad is $599 with slave labour, it might be what... $699 with non-slave labour ? Is that really going to destroy your beloved economy ?
The people don't really "choose" to work in sweatshops. They have no other sane choice, it's either work your ass off 18 hours a day and get micropaid, or not work and not get paid at all. There is no "work a little, live a little" option because the people who own and operate the factories do not offer it. They could easily increase their fees and pass it on to their workers as sustainable wages, but they choose not to.
I think it's a question of magnitude. If someone calls you a stupid moron, well that person is an immature prick but it's not worth wasting a whole court-full of people's time over. Tell them to eat a bag of dicks and get on with your life. They are only empty words in the air. People need to spend less time bickering over the little things, and more time enjoying life.
I just posted a rather flamey rant over at Kongregate, blasting the recent flood of "pay to pwn" games that directly encourage players to drop tens to hundreds of dollars on in-game items and perks, as was once contained to the mental diarrhea that is Second Life. I find the whole concept very offensive, to bring real money into what is supposed to be a fantasy escape from the daily pressures of reality. Doubly offensive that it is happening on a site that thrives on indie game developers and experimental/emergent gameplay, where the micropayments are supposed to be for "tipping" the developers, not funneling huge sums of money to scammy asian game houses.
Buying a game: fine. Paying a fixed monthly fee for an MMO: fine. Allowing those with too much disposable income to shit on everyone else's game progression: dirty.
IM is appreciated when people have a set amount of work that isn't time-based.
Face time is preferred when no one gives a shit and you just want to not sit at your desk for an hour.
The only thing this "clientless Flash video codec" does is remux the FLV video into a Quicktime or MPEG container. It's like taking an HTML page, adding an XML doctype to the top and calling it an "HTML to XML gateway". Yeah ok, not rocket science.
You're right, big blockbusters cost a ton of money to make. Do they need to ? Where does the money go ? Is it really that expensive to put Robert Downey Jr. in a big dorky metal suit and draw laser beams shooting from every appendage ? Does a 200 million dollar movie entertain more people to a higher level of satisfaction than a 2 million dollar movie ?
I get more painful laughs out of cheaply-made South Park and Family Guy episodes than the average Hollywood comedy.
If we ever do invent a positronic brain, I fear its first thought will be to destroy humankind for being such idiots.
As someone who's laid hands on more diverse hardware than all of Dell's assembly techs combined, I stand firm. PC-style hardware is universally sloppy. It is thrown together by the lowest bidder, QA typically consists of a 5-minute "does it boot" test in XP SP2, and driver development is a fire-and-forget task. The fact that anything works with anything else is an everyday miracle.
What, did you honestly believe your $40 router was lovingly engineered by the brightest minds in the industry ? No, it was prototyped by some kid in Japan, the board laid out by an integration shop in India, and the actual product manufactured by laymen in Malaysia. Anything other chain would drive the costs up tenfold.
Now, that said, would it have been reasonable for Apple to loosen up the tolerances on their WiFi chipset ? Of course. If they want to play nice with PC hardware, they need to accommodate the entire range of 3rd party gear from best to worst.
How to guess someone's password, in three easy steps:
1. Find out the name of their youngest non-estranged child. If there is a tie, pick the one with the shorter name. (e.g. Cody)
2. Take today's date, and subtract from it the lesser of the employee's start date, or the implementation of the password expiration policy (Apr 13th 2010 - Apr 1st 2009 = 12 months)
3. Divide the result of step 2 by the password expiration window (say 3 months)
The password is cody4
For those of you who didn't know where the hunter2 joke was from, get off mah interwebs.
As someone who took the SSD plunge a few months ago, I can tell you that the performance delta entirely depends on two things: your multitasking habits, and the quality of the SSD controller chipset. Some are only good at sequential read/write (like conventional drives), but the better ones are also good at random access, and these are the ones that make your machine zippy. On a spinning platter hard drive, if you have two apps accessing the disk simultaneously, it has to seek back and forth between the two files, reading a little piece each time, and this literally decimates your throughput because the drive spends more time moving the magnetic heads than actually transiting data. This seek time is nil on an SSD, so you regain the full read/write speed, even if you're accessing 100 files in random order. This is what makes the desktop so much faster, because no matter which app you launch, it's always just a microsecond away.
Windows boots in about 10 seconds, apps pop up almost instantly, large compilation jobs finish in a third of the time. I don't run benches but if my boot drive has slowed down in the 4-5 months since I bought it, I haven't noticed at all. I also have four of them in a RAID-0, and I still hit the 700mb/sec writes I've enjoyed since day one. The only detail I still worry about is reliability / longevity. These consumer-grade SSDs are still very new, and we don't yet have any good empirical data on how likely they are to die, or what the real-world wear-out period looks like. I know I beat the crap out of mine, with an inordinate amount of churn these days as I'm ripping thousands of CDs and DVDs back into images for archival, but that's what warranties are for.
So... they left Activision to go to EA. That's like dumping one psycho murderous crackwhore for her live-in sister who has super-AIDS. If they were trying to escape the shameless greed and sweatshop tyranny in search of artistic freedom and a healthier career path, they fucked up BIG TIME.
They have the track record, couldn't they have found more respectful backers to start their own game house ?
Usually after three beer.
A photographer with a certificate in Tactile Graphics from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
I hate to poke fun at these serious handicaps, but does one really need to be certified to be able to turn image outlines into crude heightmaps ? Do the people making those raised letters on book covers hold a degree in tactile typography ?
FFS, we did this sort of thing in kindergarten. Chicky needs to get a real job. You want tactile porn ? Go to a strip club. Even blind people can enjoy tits in their face.
If that is the truth, then why do we need witnesses for fender benders ? According to your naïve interpretation of the law, it should be an astoundingly simple matter: he whose front bumper is damaged would be responsible, 100% of the time.
If you are being tailgated by some jerk, and you have the option of safely going through a yellow-to-red light but consciously choose to slam the brakes, causing accident and injury, you will soon be needing a lawyer, because you can bet your crumpled ass the guy behind you will be suing you for negligence and reckless endangerment. The jerk's speeding or tailgating ticket will be peanuts compared to your legal bills, because you had the option to safely continue driving, and chose not to take it. A reasonable person does not react to another person's traffic violations by causing an accident.
Here in Canadia our red light cams snap two pictures in rapid succession, one before you enter and one after. Source: http://www.ottawa.ca/residents/onthemove/driving/road_safety/motorists/red_light_cameras_en.html Now given our current leaders' abhorrent love for all things American, I wouldn't be surprised if those cameras came from the U.S. in the first place, so you might have the same systems down there.
The biggest issue with red light cameras is they don't actually help with safety. Unless the driver notices the two flashes, the offending driver is not aware of their misbehaviour, and since they get the ticket anywhere from a few days to several weeks later in the mail, they're not going to stop doing it. At least when the cops pull over those goddamned white trash Gatineau street racers, there is an element of deterrence that just might help the Civic-driving imbecile slow it down a bit, especially if it's the fifth time that week and monkey boy has his license suspended, something a camera ticket cannot do since it's not "legal enough" to be worth demerit points.
Put another way: the roads were fine ten, twenty, even fifty years ago. Assume any technological development since then has been in the name of profit. In a world where our municipalities spend more money on traffic cams than road repair, it's not all that difficult to connect the dots.
My answer to all your points:
What you say is true, but the reality is that small companies usually can't justify the overhead (lack of dedicated resources), and the larger companies have much bigger cracks for good intentions to fall into.
#1: sometimes (most of the time) when you ask the questions like "does anything else depend on X", you get no answer, or worse: an incorrect answer. You go ahead, pull the plug, then get yelled at for not knowing the information people withheld from you.
#2: Payroll is not a highly critical task, unless your company is in the business of payroll outsourcing such as ADP. For everyone else, it's one of the many administrative overheads. If payroll screws up, you can always print a cheque.
#3: What usually happens is the person's primary account is disabled immediately, but any unrelated (or shared) accounts remain active. SSH keys, server passwords, boss' password that was known to his assistant... the bottom line is that exploiting any such holes for monetary gain is fraud, and should be treated as such. Don't blame your I.T. staff because an ex-employee is retaliating for HR's tactless firing, or for hiring a skeevy person in the first place.
#4: If I get run over by a bus, well I'm the only "real" Unix guy here, so my boss will have to get up to speed real quick, or find another Linux geek. If my boss gets run over by a bus, the company's pretty much done. The remaining guys are perhaps less "keystoney", but in the end it boils down to not having the resources to justify redundancy, for our small company.
An AC calling another AC a moron (or perhaps the same AC).
What is this, Digg ?
Worse. They could have negotiated an educational discount, and given the sheer volume I'm sure they would have paid less than 1/4 of retail, or gotten site-wide licenses for even less. I am personally on the fence about piracy (see my other posts), but still this type of infringement seems inexcusable.