So to get the site to display correctly without having to deal with malware and privacy breaches the browser has to:
1. Run in a sandbox where all of the downloaded content can run riot (and be allowed to report back to the website/adware/malware sites so that the content you actually want can finally be sent).
2. Block display of all the ads you just downloaded - except the ones you need to click to access part of the site
3. Destroy cookies a few minutes as soon as you don't need them to view the site
4. Scramble the user agent string often enough to block tracking through browser footprinting
5. Rotate through some proxies to keep them from associating you with an IP address.
I really love the idea of value-added metrics at the school level. Unfortunately they get the most attention at the classroom/teacher level, where the signal to noise ratio is too low for them to be very useful.
I'd say on the whole peers are just as influential as parents. If your friends do their homework and pay attention during class, for whatever reason, chances are you will do more or less the same.
Um, we do that here already. Condoms and free birth control pills are ridiculously easy to get.
Um, define here?
The states in that table with the lowest averages tend to make getting birth control pills, emergency contraception, and abortions difficult or expensive, especially for teenagers.
the good public schools already attract parents who want the best for their kids
The good public schools attract the parents who can afford to live near them. FTFY. For the rest: it's the kids' faults for not choosing better parents.
As usual, only the wealthy will be able to evade some of the taxation. The little people will still be taxed no matter what. If not on transactions, then on possessions.
Yep it would provide a way to launder capital so as to avoid taxes. For the non super rich, cryptocurrencies offers small online businesses the same opportunity to avoid taxes that is currently exploited by small brick and mortar businesses that handle a lot of cash. If you know three owners of stores with cash registers you probably know at least two tax cheats.
Same goals and same result as the redesign of Slate.com. Let me guess how this will look two weeks after CES: all stories will show up in three different places on the page under at least two different headlines. Headlines themselves will be clickbait, stories will be recycled from other sites.
He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used.
Only one way this would happen: You install a software suite on all of the devices you use to buy/watch/communicate: it destroys cookies, browser footprints, spoofs the IMEI and all other data that apps receive about you on your phone, etc. It basically makes you worthless to marketers (and google). Then you hand over the right to collect and distribute all of that information to the maker of the suite. In turn they split the revenue they get from selling your data and serving you targeted ads 50:50. The more info you share with them (credit history, home ownership, credit card transactions, etc) the more your profile is worth and the easier it is for them to realize you are an actual consumer and not a fake account: so you get paid more.
A lab I used to work in had (probably still has) an API mass specrometer that runs of off Mac Quadras with... OS 7? Quadras plural because the cards for the mass spec tend to kill them after a couple of years. Option 1: buy a new quadrupole mass spec: $100k and up. Option 2: buy a license and card so it could run on a newer computer: $10k+. Option 3: buy a stash of Quadras on ebay: $200.
XP is fine for PCs that run expensive old equipment. If it's a choice between spending tens of thousands of dollars on an upgrade or having to keep the machine off the internet to keep it secure, just keep it off the internet.
Do you find OS X intuitive? They've had hot corners for a very long time and everyone keeps raving on how intuitive their OS is..
Yep, and for the last 9 years I've always turned off all but one of the corners on Macbooks because having to close accidentally triggered features takes up too much time. I like features like those and edge swipes for touch screen interfaces, but for trackpads the false positive rate is just waaay to high for me. So now I'm turning off most of those features in Win8.1. Problem solved.
The under the hood improvements are much appreciated, but one visible thing 8.1 is groping toward is handling touchscreens and scaling issues with high resolution displays. I agree the interface shifts are still annoying, but convertibles may end up a significant part of the laptop market so they need to come up with a decent way to use a business laptop in tablet mode. I'd just like to see the emphasis be on optimizing windows for touch as opposed to optimizing windows for touch on a phone screen.
By "Time Warner owns a lot of cable stations" I mean Time Warner owns HBO, CNN, HLN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, etc. You're right, should have said channels or networks. Together, the carriage fees TW gets for those channels/networks have a bigger impact on TW's bottom line than HBO does. If TW cut HBO loose, two things would happen: 1. They would have less power when negotiating those per-subscriber carriage fees; 2., there would be fewer subscribers for those per-subscriber fees. Any win for HBO would have to outshine the lose-lose for a larger part of TW. It would have to charge subscribers a lot more for its content or get a lot more subscribers. More likely, they'd have to do both.
Which brings up market size. Cord cutters (I'm one too) are growing, but the last number I saw was 13 million, vs 100 million cable subscribers (USA). Depending on us to make up for losses on all of TW's cable/satellite channels would seriously cut into my skittles and beer budget.
I see what you mean about the advantages for ISPs: but since they are mostly affiliated with pay-TV already they would have to make more from new/upgraded broadband customers than they do from the people downgrading their $80-180 per month pay-TV habit. Plus they might have to (horror of horrors!) invest in more infrastructure in markets they already dominate, due to only currently offering "alleged" high speeds.
Next up: costs. CDN infrastructure isn't cheap. HBO-Go's current CDN is Level-3... which is partnered with Time Warner Cable. I don't think that would continue on terms favorable to HBO. Instead it would be the opposite: HBO and any CDNs it worked with would end up fighting jilted cable/broadband companies on peering, just like Netflix did. Netflix ended up building it's own CDN, and only got cable/broadband companies like Comcast to negotiate reasonable peering agreements by threatening to deny HD content to Comcast's customers. HBO's other option would be to rent CDN services from their competitors...
Then there are contract costs. HBO's current contracts stretch out for years: they won't be offering exclusive content outside of cable anytime soon without getting sued into bankruptcy. Instead there would be a long awkward period as their cable/satellite contracts petered out one by one. They could negotiate temporary contracts to fill up the gaps until they are finally legally free to launch in, say, 3 years, but cable companies wouldn't agree to give them anywhere near as much money as they receive now. TW would have to carry them while they got deeper in the red. Another thing cable/satellite companies wouldn't do: advertise for HBO. HBO as an upsell for cable means cable advertises HBO 24/7. Once that relationship stops HBO would have to depend on TW or do like other companies do: spend upwards of 30% of their revenue on marketing.
Until the cord cutter/cable subscriber balance shifts a lot further I only see one way for for it to work:
Day 1: every employee of HBO gives two weeks notice.
Day 15: every employee walks out.
Day 31: Amazon or Netflix announces an $8 a month premium channel: HB2O, and the hiring of several thousand new employees. All the old content would stay on cable.
I love the idea of buying content a la carte, but then I'm cheap, and they want profitable customers, not cheap ones. Here's what I came up with for an alternative cable tv subscription plan: I'll pay $2 per hour to watch original, first run content, $1 per hour for the rest. And that means first run anywhere, any format: movies previously shown in theatres only get $1 per hour. On the flipside I would charge them the same rate to watch ads, so a normal hour of cartoons (42 minutes show - 18 minutes ads) would net them 40 or 80 cents per hour.
And all this for acetamide, a substance you get when mixing ammonia and "non-acetone nail polish remover", not even a precursor to any drugs (although it can be used to make a precursor), and has no use in either bombs or pyrotechnics.
Seems like a quick end to a rather short-lived hobby.
Maybe it was the actual use you intended (dehydration to acetonitrile) that freaked them out, or rather the idea of someone trying to obtain acetonitrile on the sly as opposed to getting it as a side product of acrylonitrile (carpet, ABS plastic, etc) like everyone else. After all, acetonitrile = methyl CYANIDE; Acetonitrile + terrorist + google search = SARIN GAS ATTACK TOKYO...
Only time I ever had an issue with customs when ordering for a lab was a uronium salt (well, sort of an uronium salt: HBTU) from Canada, and it taking six weeks for them to realize there was no Uranium in the bottle.
A free DeepDyve account is good for that one perfect paper, and a few months subscription might be worth it for someone without university connections who wants to get caught up on a field.
You're right, I was a bit too casual insaying the FDA "shut down" 23andMe, but that really is the effect the FDA had on their business plan - unless 23andMe gets congress to change the rules.
23andMe was selling Class II or III medical devices, which has nothing to do with the AMA but does fall under regulation and an approval process at the FDA. Disclaimers saying "this medical test is not a medical test" didn't get them out of it. But 23andMe's business plan was never about selling individuals reports on their SNPs for $99: that is a loss leader. 23andMe's business plan has always been to create a huge database of people's DNA and personal/family medical histories to rent out for private research. They've also said they can use their data to sell targeted advertising for medical services to their participants. For this to work they need a lot of people to contribute not just their DNA but also their medical histories and medical histories for as many members of their families as possible. People willingly go the extra mile when it helps interpret the report they get back (i.e. it's utilized in their own medical tests), but few people will bother if they are getting no diagnostic information back from 23andMe. That is why I think 23andMe has been "shut down" by the FDA: people will no longer contribute to their database.
They have four ways forward, only one will work:
1. Lobby congress for a DTC genetic test exemption. Pretty much their only hope.
2. Meet the FDA's requirements. This would blow their operating costs through the roof and delay their operation for years, so it's not going to happen.
3. Depend on an "independent" organization that interprets SNPs for free, and thus stays exempt from FDA regulation. This could get people to keep using 23andMe to get their raw data, but wouldn't provide the medical histories 23andMe needs for the database. If the independent organization collected medical histories and then passed them back to 23andMe they would no longer be independent, and down comes the FDA hammer again.
4. Scrape personal/family medical history data of its less forthcoming participants from other sources (facebook, patientslikeme.com, whatever it can tease out through loopholes in HIPAA from medical providers, etc). Google can get away with collating data on everyone from everywhere; I don't think 23andMe could survive if they did that and it leaked to the public.
Personally I think 23andMe is in a position to help move the field of medicine forward as a whole on many fronts. Whether it does this at the expense of many peoples privacy, most of whom never actually bought anything from 23andMe, is another question.
You're leaving out the part about human trials and uBiome, which skirted FDA rules about IRB approval. If you heard about 23AndMe being shut down by the FDA last month: part of the reason was similar concerns about the use of their samples.
There's a little train in the Wild Animal Park north of San Diego, it was accidentally named WGASA by an employee:
Snopes:
Some years ago, the famous San Diego Zoo opened a second, larger branch called the San Diego Wild Animal Park. The Park is built around an enormous open-field enclosure where the animals roam free. To see the animals, visitors ride on a monorail called the Wgasa Bush Line which circles the enclosure. Here's the true story of how the Wgasa Bush Line got its name.
They wanted to give the monorail a jazzy, African sounding name. So they sent out a memo to a bunch of zoo staffers saying, "What shall we call the monorail at the Wild Animal Park?" One of the memos came back with "WGASA" written on the bottom. The planners loved it and the rest is history. What the planners didn't know was that the zoo staffer had not intended to suggest a name. He was using an acronym which was popular at the time. It stood for "Who Gives A Shit Anyhow?"
I can't find a detailed budget for Minneapolis, but fare costs for other cities are always over 85% (for cities I've looked at to date) and can be higher than 100% in some cases. BTW, fares account for only 15% of the Minneapolis light rail revenue (source).
The difference is explained in that article: fares only account for 15% of the total cost for Minneapolis light rail, not 15% of the total revenue. Most cities only talk about fares collected vs operating expenses; they don't include capital expenditures and debt service, which together can be larger than operating expenses.
Kind of an aside from the topic, but, If I am paying more for an education than a house, I AM THE ONE who had better be giving orders to professors
Actually this is on topic as long as you view your professors as prostitutes (discussed upthread).
Anyway, I'd worry less about your professor ordering you to use a free service than your university ordering your professor to choose course materials which return the greatest revenue to the university, and ordering you to buy them from the school bookstore or Amazon affiliate link in order to stay registered in your classes.
Slashdot Mirror
So to get the site to display correctly without having to deal with malware and privacy breaches the browser has to:
1. Run in a sandbox where all of the downloaded content can run riot (and be allowed to report back to the website/adware/malware sites so that the content you actually want can finally be sent).
2. Block display of all the ads you just downloaded - except the ones you need to click to access part of the site
3. Destroy cookies a few minutes as soon as you don't need them to view the site
4. Scramble the user agent string often enough to block tracking through browser footprinting
5. Rotate through some proxies to keep them from associating you with an IP address.
It's enough to make me give up ceiling cat.
Hide My Adblocker extension for Chrome.
I really love the idea of value-added metrics at the school level. Unfortunately they get the most attention at the classroom/teacher level, where the signal to noise ratio is too low for them to be very useful.
I'd say on the whole peers are just as influential as parents. If your friends do their homework and pay attention during class, for whatever reason, chances are you will do more or less the same.
They don't cherry pick the students, the students cherry pick the school. .
So parents with a severely autistic kid can just pick the school and the school will pick up the up to $80k cost per year?
Um, we do that here already. Condoms and free birth control pills are ridiculously easy to get.
Um, define here? The states in that table with the lowest averages tend to make getting birth control pills, emergency contraception, and abortions difficult or expensive, especially for teenagers.
the good public schools already attract parents who want the best for their kids
The good public schools attract the parents who can afford to live near them. FTFY. For the rest: it's the kids' faults for not choosing better parents.
As usual, only the wealthy will be able to evade some of the taxation. The little people will still be taxed no matter what. If not on transactions, then on possessions.
Yep it would provide a way to launder capital so as to avoid taxes. For the non super rich, cryptocurrencies offers small online businesses the same opportunity to avoid taxes that is currently exploited by small brick and mortar businesses that handle a lot of cash. If you know three owners of stores with cash registers you probably know at least two tax cheats.
What's wrong with taxes?
Or are you one of those people who think that roads, sewers, police, and fire departments are unnecessary for civilization?
Of course they are necessary. I just think that someone else should pay for them.
Honest. Irresponsible, but honest.
Same goals and same result as the redesign of Slate.com. Let me guess how this will look two weeks after CES: all stories will show up in three different places on the page under at least two different headlines. Headlines themselves will be clickbait, stories will be recycled from other sites.
He envisions a different kind of digital economy, in which creators of content — whether a blog post or a Facebook photograph — would receive micropayments whenever that content was used.
Only one way this would happen: You install a software suite on all of the devices you use to buy/watch/communicate: it destroys cookies, browser footprints, spoofs the IMEI and all other data that apps receive about you on your phone, etc. It basically makes you worthless to marketers (and google). Then you hand over the right to collect and distribute all of that information to the maker of the suite. In turn they split the revenue they get from selling your data and serving you targeted ads 50:50. The more info you share with them (credit history, home ownership, credit card transactions, etc) the more your profile is worth and the easier it is for them to realize you are an actual consumer and not a fake account: so you get paid more.
A lab I used to work in had (probably still has) an API mass specrometer that runs of off Mac Quadras with ... OS 7? Quadras plural because the cards for the mass spec tend to kill them after a couple of years. Option 1: buy a new quadrupole mass spec: $100k and up. Option 2: buy a license and card so it could run on a newer computer: $10k+. Option 3: buy a stash of Quadras on ebay: $200.
XP is fine for PCs that run expensive old equipment. If it's a choice between spending tens of thousands of dollars on an upgrade or having to keep the machine off the internet to keep it secure, just keep it off the internet.
Do you find OS X intuitive? They've had hot corners for a very long time and everyone keeps raving on how intuitive their OS is. .
Yep, and for the last 9 years I've always turned off all but one of the corners on Macbooks because having to close accidentally triggered features takes up too much time. I like features like those and edge swipes for touch screen interfaces, but for trackpads the false positive rate is just waaay to high for me. So now I'm turning off most of those features in Win8.1. Problem solved.
What's on your 10 minute list for 8.1?
The under the hood improvements are much appreciated, but one visible thing 8.1 is groping toward is handling touchscreens and scaling issues with high resolution displays. I agree the interface shifts are still annoying, but convertibles may end up a significant part of the laptop market so they need to come up with a decent way to use a business laptop in tablet mode. I'd just like to see the emphasis be on optimizing windows for touch as opposed to optimizing windows for touch on a phone screen.
By "Time Warner owns a lot of cable stations" I mean Time Warner owns HBO, CNN, HLN, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, TBS, Turner Classic Movies, etc. You're right, should have said channels or networks. Together, the carriage fees TW gets for those channels/networks have a bigger impact on TW's bottom line than HBO does. If TW cut HBO loose, two things would happen: 1. They would have less power when negotiating those per-subscriber carriage fees; 2., there would be fewer subscribers for those per-subscriber fees. Any win for HBO would have to outshine the lose-lose for a larger part of TW. It would have to charge subscribers a lot more for its content or get a lot more subscribers. More likely, they'd have to do both.
Which brings up market size. Cord cutters (I'm one too) are growing, but the last number I saw was 13 million, vs 100 million cable subscribers (USA). Depending on us to make up for losses on all of TW's cable/satellite channels would seriously cut into my skittles and beer budget.
I see what you mean about the advantages for ISPs: but since they are mostly affiliated with pay-TV already they would have to make more from new/upgraded broadband customers than they do from the people downgrading their $80-180 per month pay-TV habit. Plus they might have to (horror of horrors!) invest in more infrastructure in markets they already dominate, due to only currently offering "alleged" high speeds.
Next up: costs. CDN infrastructure isn't cheap. HBO-Go's current CDN is Level-3 ... which is partnered with Time Warner Cable. I don't think that would continue on terms favorable to HBO. Instead it would be the opposite: HBO and any CDNs it worked with would end up fighting jilted cable/broadband companies on peering, just like Netflix did. Netflix ended up building it's own CDN, and only got cable/broadband companies like Comcast to negotiate reasonable peering agreements by threatening to deny HD content to Comcast's customers. HBO's other option would be to rent CDN services from their competitors ...
Then there are contract costs. HBO's current contracts stretch out for years: they won't be offering exclusive content outside of cable anytime soon without getting sued into bankruptcy. Instead there would be a long awkward period as their cable/satellite contracts petered out one by one. They could negotiate temporary contracts to fill up the gaps until they are finally legally free to launch in, say, 3 years, but cable companies wouldn't agree to give them anywhere near as much money as they receive now. TW would have to carry them while they got deeper in the red. Another thing cable/satellite companies wouldn't do: advertise for HBO. HBO as an upsell for cable means cable advertises HBO 24/7. Once that relationship stops HBO would have to depend on TW or do like other companies do: spend upwards of 30% of their revenue on marketing.
Until the cord cutter/cable subscriber balance shifts a lot further I only see one way for for it to work:
Day 1: every employee of HBO gives two weeks notice.
Day 15: every employee walks out.
Day 31: Amazon or Netflix announces an $8 a month premium channel: HB2O, and the hiring of several thousand new employees. All the old content would stay on cable.
I love the idea of buying content a la carte, but then I'm cheap, and they want profitable customers, not cheap ones. Here's what I came up with for an alternative cable tv subscription plan: I'll pay $2 per hour to watch original, first run content, $1 per hour for the rest. And that means first run anywhere, any format: movies previously shown in theatres only get $1 per hour. On the flipside I would charge them the same rate to watch ads, so a normal hour of cartoons (42 minutes show - 18 minutes ads) would net them 40 or 80 cents per hour.
Plus a time share pony.
And all this for acetamide, a substance you get when mixing ammonia and "non-acetone nail polish remover", not even a precursor to any drugs (although it can be used to make a precursor), and has no use in either bombs or pyrotechnics.
Seems like a quick end to a rather short-lived hobby.
Maybe it was the actual use you intended (dehydration to acetonitrile) that freaked them out, or rather the idea of someone trying to obtain acetonitrile on the sly as opposed to getting it as a side product of acrylonitrile (carpet, ABS plastic, etc) like everyone else. After all, acetonitrile = methyl CYANIDE; Acetonitrile + terrorist + google search = SARIN GAS ATTACK TOKYO...
Only time I ever had an issue with customs when ordering for a lab was a uronium salt (well, sort of an uronium salt: HBTU) from Canada, and it taking six weeks for them to realize there was no Uranium in the bottle.
A free DeepDyve account is good for that one perfect paper, and a few months subscription might be worth it for someone without university connections who wants to get caught up on a field.
You're right, I was a bit too casual insaying the FDA "shut down" 23andMe, but that really is the effect the FDA had on their business plan - unless 23andMe gets congress to change the rules.
23andMe was selling Class II or III medical devices, which has nothing to do with the AMA but does fall under regulation and an approval process at the FDA. Disclaimers saying "this medical test is not a medical test" didn't get them out of it. But 23andMe's business plan was never about selling individuals reports on their SNPs for $99: that is a loss leader. 23andMe's business plan has always been to create a huge database of people's DNA and personal/family medical histories to rent out for private research. They've also said they can use their data to sell targeted advertising for medical services to their participants. For this to work they need a lot of people to contribute not just their DNA but also their medical histories and medical histories for as many members of their families as possible. People willingly go the extra mile when it helps interpret the report they get back (i.e. it's utilized in their own medical tests), but few people will bother if they are getting no diagnostic information back from 23andMe. That is why I think 23andMe has been "shut down" by the FDA: people will no longer contribute to their database.
They have four ways forward, only one will work:
1. Lobby congress for a DTC genetic test exemption. Pretty much their only hope.
2. Meet the FDA's requirements. This would blow their operating costs through the roof and delay their operation for years, so it's not going to happen.
3. Depend on an "independent" organization that interprets SNPs for free, and thus stays exempt from FDA regulation. This could get people to keep using 23andMe to get their raw data, but wouldn't provide the medical histories 23andMe needs for the database. If the independent organization collected medical histories and then passed them back to 23andMe they would no longer be independent, and down comes the FDA hammer again.
4. Scrape personal/family medical history data of its less forthcoming participants from other sources (facebook, patientslikeme.com, whatever it can tease out through loopholes in HIPAA from medical providers, etc). Google can get away with collating data on everyone from everywhere; I don't think 23andMe could survive if they did that and it leaked to the public.
Personally I think 23andMe is in a position to help move the field of medicine forward as a whole on many fronts. Whether it does this at the expense of many peoples privacy, most of whom never actually bought anything from 23andMe, is another question.
You're leaving out the part about human trials and uBiome, which skirted FDA rules about IRB approval. If you heard about 23AndMe being shut down by the FDA last month: part of the reason was similar concerns about the use of their samples.
Snopes:
Some years ago, the famous San Diego Zoo opened a second, larger branch called the San Diego Wild Animal Park. The Park is built around an enormous open-field enclosure where the animals roam free. To see the animals, visitors ride on a monorail called the Wgasa Bush Line which circles the enclosure. Here's the true story of how the Wgasa Bush Line got its name. They wanted to give the monorail a jazzy, African sounding name. So they sent out a memo to a bunch of zoo staffers saying, "What shall we call the monorail at the Wild Animal Park?" One of the memos came back with "WGASA" written on the bottom. The planners loved it and the rest is history. What the planners didn't know was that the zoo staffer had not intended to suggest a name. He was using an acronym which was popular at the time. It stood for "Who Gives A Shit Anyhow?"
I can't find a detailed budget for Minneapolis, but fare costs for other cities are always over 85% (for cities I've looked at to date) and can be higher than 100% in some cases. BTW, fares account for only 15% of the Minneapolis light rail revenue (source).
The difference is explained in that article: fares only account for 15% of the total cost for Minneapolis light rail, not 15% of the total revenue. Most cities only talk about fares collected vs operating expenses; they don't include capital expenditures and debt service, which together can be larger than operating expenses.
Would you blame the company if it was safety instead of money at stake?
By the time Facebook figures out how to monetize Instagram that one will be passe as well.
Kind of an aside from the topic, but, If I am paying more for an education than a house, I AM THE ONE who had better be giving orders to professors
Actually this is on topic as long as you view your professors as prostitutes (discussed upthread).
Anyway, I'd worry less about your professor ordering you to use a free service than your university ordering your professor to choose course materials which return the greatest revenue to the university, and ordering you to buy them from the school bookstore or Amazon affiliate link in order to stay registered in your classes.