The fatal flaw in your argument is your unspoken assumption that a specific type of hardware owned by the provider is necessary to implement this scenario.
The fatal flaw in your argument is your unspoken assumption that Kindle's book reading goodness is only available for a specific hardware platform.
Over here in reality, Kindle works fine on my iPod Touch. An Android version is said to be in the works. There is also a PC version, a Mac version, an incarnation for Blackberry, and of course it works fine on an iPad and iPhone.
The real issue for me is that I have no desire to buy any hardware device with such a tight tie to a single vendor. If (when) I ever decide to buy an e-book reader to supplement my netbook, I'll be looking for one that is vendor agnostic to the greatest extent possible. I like having a lot of choice in who I buy from.:)
Let us not fog this discussion with dismissives about hardware ownership, for this really has nothing to do with that. Instead, this about how companies treat the data you create. And let me just say that there's are some useful aspects to having Amazon keep your data for you.
Suppose I have a Kindle (or, say, one of the requisite apps on some other hardware platform), and I've bought a few books for it that I've noted and highlighted. Suppose, then, that I lose my Kindle. Or it gets run over by a bus. Or stolen. Or dunked in a hot tub. Or whatever.
All I have to do is procure/install a new Kindle, enter the appropriate account identification, and my books and notes are transferred to the new device.
Which, you must admit, is pretty cool. (Hey luddites! The cloud has uses!)
So, instead, please: Let's simply discuss the implications of Amazon sharing your highlights with others. (This is a matter that I really don't have any opinion on in this instance, but I guess I'll don my flamesuit anyway...)
I've done 17 miles at 5.7GHz with Motorola Canopy, legally, without bending any Part 15 rules, using reflectors that are only a couple of feet across. It's been working for years.
802.11x shouldn't behave much differently.
(Disclaimer: Mostly flat terrain. Radios at 150-200 feet above ground at each end. Etc. But, still...)
Right now I'd say I'm more worried about what the government or my ISP will do with my private information than I am by what Google will do with it.
Remember, kids: Any information that Google has about you is only a subpoena or warrant away from being in the hands of a third party. So don't forget to toss your cookies, wash your cache, and renew your IP.
For most practical purposes, 60GHz signals don't penetrate anything. They just bounce around like light.
This stuff might be good for fixed point-to-point links, but that's about it.
I've worked a bit with existing 60GHz products, and while they're generally faster than greased shit, the alignment of them is typically very critical and, sometimes, even seasonal. This isn't the sort of product that would be useful for municipal wifi, except perhaps as a backhaul between 802.11 radios.
Of course, like any new product where there's money to be made, the marketers will claim that it slices, it dices, and it makes Julienne fries. Caveat emptor, etc. (But wait! There's more! If you act now, the sky will always be blue, you'll always be young, and you'll ejaculate rainbows.)
Back in the day, I used to have a set of cron jobs that would record programs from NPR over an antenna. It worked very well. Things would get recorded as PCM, which would get encoded as VBR MP3 once the program had finished. I ran it on a K6-2 350, which was nowhere near fast enough to encode with my settings in real time, and would sometimes have 3 or 4 nice'd encoder processes running at once... Not that FreeBSD gave a shit about that.:)
It was absurdly reliable, and with NTP, the timing was eerily dead-on. Appropriately named and timestamped MP3s would land in appropriately named directories, and every now and then I'd just go through and either delete or archive them to CD-R. During all of this, the box was also doing everything from multilink PPP with a handful of 56k modems, to dealing with printers, to downloading porn from usenet, to...you get the picture.
The script first would set the record level on the sound card (just in case it'd changed for some reason). Then, it'd fire up brec (which has a FIFO buffer in RAM in case the disk is hogged up doing something else) to a raw PCM file (no need for WAV headers), LAME would encode it into an MP3 in the correct directory with the correct filename (formed using an appropriately-formatted date command), and the original file was then deleted. IIRC, I used mid-side encoding (like FM uses), and 44.1KHz with a ~16KHz lowpass filter to get rid of any aliasing or encoding of unwanted noise (FM doesn't go up higher than 15KHz).
I used an old Kenwood standalone digital tuner and a rooftop antenna as a source. It worked without any glitch at all for a couple of years, and it always sounded great. I used it until I moved to an apartment where I couldn't get radio reception, the BSD box died, and I lost interest.
I mention this because these days, I'm using podcasts a lot (especially in the car with my Droid), and find them to be very unreliable and of generally poor quality -- plus, a lot of stuff (All Things Considered) isn't available through official channels at all. You seem to be in about the same boat.
Meanwhile, screen burn is still an issue. I installed a nice, professional Panasonic plasma for security monitoring a little over a year ago. Even with the brightness turned way, way down (it was a fairly dark room), and pixel shifting enabled, it was noticeably burned within a month of 24x7 usage.
No, I don't mean it was just a temporarily retained image (which pixel-shifting will resolve very well, automatically). I mean areas where the pixels had prematurely lost some easily-visible portion of their luminance in a permanent fashion.
Within 720 hours.
Now, granted, in that application screen burn isn't a big deal -- the images are mostly static, unless there's something happening. I expected the display to burn, and it did.
So, why didn't I select an LCD for that job? Viewing angle was more important for this place than screen burn. It's all tradeoffs.
I understand a thing or two about color space, too. With both set up properly, the 52" LCD in my living room has colors to rival the IPS-panel NEC monitor on my desk, which in turn has much wider gamut than the Trinitron-tubed Viewsonic that it replaced.
The room with the big TV at my house has windows to the west, so it's very bright during peak video game time. This necessitates changing the brightness from our normal vampire-like settings all the way up to torch mode. And, when the boy was hooked on GTA IV, you can bet he'd have burned the hell out of a plasma.:)
That said, I like plasma. I like the contrast. I like the speed of it. I'm bothered sometimes by what I perceive to be a bit of a flicker on some specific colors on some sets, and I don't like the ubiquity of the shiny screens, but generally it's very good.
However, when I bought my 52" LCD a couple of years ago, all of the plasma sets available to me had less than 1080p pixel resolution. But, boy, were the plasma sets cheap. But I wanted a nice TV that would stay nice (I can replace the boards and tubes in my LCD myself, and the high-voltage circuits are simple and not very HV anyway) with high resolution and a non-glossy screen, and the wife wanted a big TV. And we both wanted a TV today, since the previous 32" Sony 1080i CRT (which was also the best tradeoff when it was purchased) had just died.
All said, for what I'm doing, I haven't regretted making the decision that I made at the time I made it for even an instant. Nowadays, I might make a different choice, but it'd probably be something closer to both a daytime LCD and a good DLP projector than any single solution.
Ouch. That doesn't sound all that good... or did I misunderstand?
Perhaps. I guess I wasn't very clear. I've done work for both sides of the spam war, but not at the same time. The first real, steady job I had, in fact, was based around helping folks send spam...way back when. Nowadays I wear a hat of a different color, but I keep my options open: I'm anyone's whore.:)
Your commentary about the Chinese firewall is interesting. I guess if attrition were higher here in the States (due to the law, the MPAA, or whatever), things would be forced to evolve more quickly than they have in the past.
So, all said, I think you're probably right. Easy-to-use steganography with sliding-scale efficiency would be a good tool to have available.
I'd like to think that you're right, but if fighting the War On Spam from both sides in various capacities over the past 12 years has taught me anything, it is this: Don't underestimate your opponent.
In this particular context, I'd like to suggest that the MAFIAA grows more cunning by the day, and that available CPU work is still increasing at Moore's Law rates at the present time while also being astoundingly cheap at the moment.
So, no: ROT13'ing data (or the moral equivalent thereof) isn't good enough to stay ahead in that particular battle. P2P standards have a huge amount of inertia, and it takes -years- before folks move onto something "better." So, whatever you do, you want "better" to be as strong as possible, not "just enough for today."
Like chess, one has much better odds of success if they're thinking several moves ahead of what their opponent is considering.
I fully support OP's idea of steganography on the basis that it works. I simply discount it, as a whole, on the basis that it's inefficient, and is thus very easy to spot. After that, applying substantial resources toward figuring out some of what's going on is trivial, since they've already got a select list of targets.
It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results. Sun Tzu
And there's many places where the opposite is true: At the last house I owned, I never locked the door. Ever. I didn't even carry a key for it for something like three years, having somehow lost it not long after we moved in.
The only single negative consequence of this was that, one time, my wife and I were watching TV at night in the front room. I saw an an older and apparently inebriated gentleman stumbling down the sidewalk along the street. He then turned, and stumbled up to my porch. He opened the door with a little effort, and walked right in like he was visiting a friend.
Once inside, he looked around for a few seconds and said "Whoa. I don't belong in here."
Without even bothering to get up, I calmly said "I think you're right."
He turned around and left, shutting the door behind him. We watched him stumble down the block for a bit, and then went back to our TV-watching, and all was well. We never saw him again. *shrug*
I recognize that not all towns and neighborhoods are so friendly as this place with a population of about 40k, but that doesn't mean that every block everywhere is as bad as your aunt-in-law's. Some are just the opposite.
(Meanwhile, at my current house on the other side of the same small town, the doors and windows are always locked. I spent some time looking at shotguns at the local shop just yesterday, to supplement my Mattock pick. So, to be clear, I'm not attempting to describe some sort of Utopian image, just relaying my own historical anecdotes.)
I think he's just being deliberately vague. It's an article about HDD performance as it relates to vibration, not an in-depth comparison between them and SSD.
Taken literally, the only thing he says is that the value proposition for SSD changes. But this change could be an improvement for an application's specific needs, or a detriment -- the author does not say.
The implied message (if there even is one) is that, perhaps, one should add "mechanical vibration" to their list of things to consider when selecting between hard disks and SSD.
Your scheme, while brilliant, is inefficient to such excess that it is self-defeating.
To perform steganography effectively (read: "undetectably"), one must bury the data within normal-looking noise. The amount of adjustable noise required increases proportionately with the amount of desired steganogaphically-encoded data. So, to encode a Big Thing (a movie, say), you need Lots Of Noise, or rather, a substantially larger amount of adjustable normal-looking data than that which you intend to send.
This makes the steganographical usage you describe very easy to classify: Those who aren't using it for a given task are going to consume (just to throw some numbers out there) 1x bandwidth. Those who ARE using it for the same task are going to consume, say, 10x.
If this attempt to screw The Man ever became common enough to be useful, The Man would simply counter with appropriately-higher fees for high-bandwidth users, or worse.
Steganography is indeed very useful for transferring some quantity of relatively small data in an undetectable fashion. But, in this context, it doesn't seem that the parties are concerned with relatively small bits of data -- they're more worried about bulk. So, by increasing bulk through steganography usage, one makes them self stand out even more in a non-neutral network than they would have by not bothering with such charades to begin with.
My history is obviously vague, but: The first Palm Pilot was a US Robotics product.
"Palm," as an independant entity, didn't exist until some years later (not until after 3com absorbed USR, and then spun off Palm).
So: Assuming you're correct (and I don't remember enough to assume otherwise), was this cross-platform Graffiti an independent creation of a startup, or just another product of US Robotics?
It makes perfect sense if you've ever in your entire life loaded film into a normal 35mm SLR.
You open the back of the camera by rotating it about 180 degrees. At this point, the naked sensor will be facing you, not the lens, and can be cleaned.
The "self-cleaning" doo-dads you refer to seem to only vibrate the sensor, shaking off anything with poor adhesion. It might be a temporary improvement with some types of funk, but not all. Those looking to retrofit a half-century-old camera into a 39-megapixel beast are likely to be picky enough that such tricks aren't very interesting.
I don't understand where you were going with your last paragraph, but I can only guess that you're an engineer of the sort that cannot tolerate the existence of any extra parts or functionality unless you, yourself, both understand them and find them useful.
It would also impact your paycheck, as well as mine, as prices go up.
Meanwhile, I'm growing tired of folks bitching about what The Man (whichever Man it might be in whatever context) is doing, when they apparently don't realize that The Man is us.
Four, at least: GSM, CDMA, PCS, iDen. Interestingly, the latter two are provided by the same company. And there's still AMPS floating around in the more thinly-populated parts that still haven't been kicked to some digital format or other yet.
It's a managed forest plainly and openly maintained as a source of lumber, not a managed recreational nature preserve.
Repeat that, over and over, until you get it.
[sarcasm]In other news, I was shocked at the absolute lack of biodiversity the last time I walked through a wheat field. Imagine it: A huge field, hundreds of acres, where they've managed to grow almost nothing but wheat! What a waste.[/sarcasm]
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The fatal flaw in your argument is your unspoken assumption that a specific type of hardware owned by the provider is necessary to implement this scenario.
The fatal flaw in your argument is your unspoken assumption that Kindle's book reading goodness is only available for a specific hardware platform.
Over here in reality, Kindle works fine on my iPod Touch. An Android version is said to be in the works. There is also a PC version, a Mac version, an incarnation for Blackberry, and of course it works fine on an iPad and iPhone.
The real issue for me is that I have no desire to buy any hardware device with such a tight tie to a single vendor. If (when) I ever decide to buy an e-book reader to supplement my netbook, I'll be looking for one that is vendor agnostic to the greatest extent possible. I like having a lot of choice in who I buy from. :)
So go download yourself a Kindle. It's free...much like Steam.
Then, who shall store it instead? And what is the "good reason" they should do so, instead of some other (perhaps first-party) entity?
Likewise, I have a cock ring, a dildo, and a bottle of lube. Why do all these devices insist on storing things on Google's cloud, or Amazon's cloud?
The answer is simple: They don't, strawman.
Good point, AC.
I'll include it in the next argument I see on this topic, if you don't mind.
Let us not fog this discussion with dismissives about hardware ownership, for this really has nothing to do with that. Instead, this about how companies treat the data you create. And let me just say that there's are some useful aspects to having Amazon keep your data for you.
Suppose I have a Kindle (or, say, one of the requisite apps on some other hardware platform), and I've bought a few books for it that I've noted and highlighted. Suppose, then, that I lose my Kindle. Or it gets run over by a bus. Or stolen. Or dunked in a hot tub. Or whatever.
All I have to do is procure/install a new Kindle, enter the appropriate account identification, and my books and notes are transferred to the new device.
Which, you must admit, is pretty cool. (Hey luddites! The cloud has uses!)
As I see it, the only problem here is if, and how, Amazon shares that data with others. It really has nothing to do with hardware ownership, which is a red herring argument at best.
So, instead, please: Let's simply discuss the implications of Amazon sharing your highlights with others. (This is a matter that I really don't have any opinion on in this instance, but I guess I'll don my flamesuit anyway...)
Hmm.
I guess you don't have any kids.
That's 1,231.48305 gigaWatts, or in layman's terms, a little more than 1,000 times as much energy flow as it takes to travel through time.
I, for one, would rather have time travel than any of this cloud-seeding nonsense.
Bill Gates, you're an asshole. Please spend less money developing such useless tech, and more money on coming up with a working flux capacitor.
Thanks.
I've done 17 miles at 5.7GHz with Motorola Canopy, legally, without bending any Part 15 rules, using reflectors that are only a couple of feet across. It's been working for years.
802.11x shouldn't behave much differently.
(Disclaimer: Mostly flat terrain. Radios at 150-200 feet above ground at each end. Etc. But, still...)
Right now I'd say I'm more worried about what the government or my ISP will do with my private information than I am by what Google will do with it.
Remember, kids: Any information that Google has about you is only a subpoena or warrant away from being in the hands of a third party. So don't forget to toss your cookies, wash your cache, and renew your IP.
For most practical purposes, 60GHz signals don't penetrate anything. They just bounce around like light.
This stuff might be good for fixed point-to-point links, but that's about it.
I've worked a bit with existing 60GHz products, and while they're generally faster than greased shit, the alignment of them is typically very critical and, sometimes, even seasonal. This isn't the sort of product that would be useful for municipal wifi, except perhaps as a backhaul between 802.11 radios.
Of course, like any new product where there's money to be made, the marketers will claim that it slices, it dices, and it makes Julienne fries. Caveat emptor, etc. (But wait! There's more! If you act now, the sky will always be blue, you'll always be young, and you'll ejaculate rainbows.)
Meh.
Back in the day, I used to have a set of cron jobs that would record programs from NPR over an antenna. It worked very well. Things would get recorded as PCM, which would get encoded as VBR MP3 once the program had finished. I ran it on a K6-2 350, which was nowhere near fast enough to encode with my settings in real time, and would sometimes have 3 or 4 nice'd encoder processes running at once... Not that FreeBSD gave a shit about that. :)
It was absurdly reliable, and with NTP, the timing was eerily dead-on. Appropriately named and timestamped MP3s would land in appropriately named directories, and every now and then I'd just go through and either delete or archive them to CD-R. During all of this, the box was also doing everything from multilink PPP with a handful of 56k modems, to dealing with printers, to downloading porn from usenet, to...you get the picture.
The script first would set the record level on the sound card (just in case it'd changed for some reason). Then, it'd fire up brec (which has a FIFO buffer in RAM in case the disk is hogged up doing something else) to a raw PCM file (no need for WAV headers), LAME would encode it into an MP3 in the correct directory with the correct filename (formed using an appropriately-formatted date command), and the original file was then deleted. IIRC, I used mid-side encoding (like FM uses), and 44.1KHz with a ~16KHz lowpass filter to get rid of any aliasing or encoding of unwanted noise (FM doesn't go up higher than 15KHz).
I used an old Kenwood standalone digital tuner and a rooftop antenna as a source. It worked without any glitch at all for a couple of years, and it always sounded great. I used it until I moved to an apartment where I couldn't get radio reception, the BSD box died, and I lost interest.
I mention this because these days, I'm using podcasts a lot (especially in the car with my Droid), and find them to be very unreliable and of generally poor quality -- plus, a lot of stuff (All Things Considered) isn't available through official channels at all. You seem to be in about the same boat.
You sound like a sales brochure.
Meanwhile, screen burn is still an issue. I installed a nice, professional Panasonic plasma for security monitoring a little over a year ago. Even with the brightness turned way, way down (it was a fairly dark room), and pixel shifting enabled, it was noticeably burned within a month of 24x7 usage.
No, I don't mean it was just a temporarily retained image (which pixel-shifting will resolve very well, automatically). I mean areas where the pixels had prematurely lost some easily-visible portion of their luminance in a permanent fashion.
Within 720 hours.
Now, granted, in that application screen burn isn't a big deal -- the images are mostly static, unless there's something happening. I expected the display to burn, and it did.
So, why didn't I select an LCD for that job? Viewing angle was more important for this place than screen burn. It's all tradeoffs.
I understand a thing or two about color space, too. With both set up properly, the 52" LCD in my living room has colors to rival the IPS-panel NEC monitor on my desk, which in turn has much wider gamut than the Trinitron-tubed Viewsonic that it replaced.
Plasma displays still:
Which, you know, sucks once it happens.
The room with the big TV at my house has windows to the west, so it's very bright during peak video game time. This necessitates changing the brightness from our normal vampire-like settings all the way up to torch mode. And, when the boy was hooked on GTA IV, you can bet he'd have burned the hell out of a plasma. :)
That said, I like plasma. I like the contrast. I like the speed of it. I'm bothered sometimes by what I perceive to be a bit of a flicker on some specific colors on some sets, and I don't like the ubiquity of the shiny screens, but generally it's very good.
However, when I bought my 52" LCD a couple of years ago, all of the plasma sets available to me had less than 1080p pixel resolution. But, boy, were the plasma sets cheap. But I wanted a nice TV that would stay nice (I can replace the boards and tubes in my LCD myself, and the high-voltage circuits are simple and not very HV anyway) with high resolution and a non-glossy screen, and the wife wanted a big TV. And we both wanted a TV today, since the previous 32" Sony 1080i CRT (which was also the best tradeoff when it was purchased) had just died.
All said, for what I'm doing, I haven't regretted making the decision that I made at the time I made it for even an instant. Nowadays, I might make a different choice, but it'd probably be something closer to both a daytime LCD and a good DLP projector than any single solution.
Ouch. That doesn't sound all that good... or did I misunderstand?
Perhaps. I guess I wasn't very clear. I've done work for both sides of the spam war, but not at the same time. The first real, steady job I had, in fact, was based around helping folks send spam...way back when. Nowadays I wear a hat of a different color, but I keep my options open: I'm anyone's whore. :)
Your commentary about the Chinese firewall is interesting. I guess if attrition were higher here in the States (due to the law, the MPAA, or whatever), things would be forced to evolve more quickly than they have in the past.
So, all said, I think you're probably right. Easy-to-use steganography with sliding-scale efficiency would be a good tool to have available.
Oh.
I'd like to think that you're right, but if fighting the War On Spam from both sides in various capacities over the past 12 years has taught me anything, it is this: Don't underestimate your opponent.
In this particular context, I'd like to suggest that the MAFIAA grows more cunning by the day, and that available CPU work is still increasing at Moore's Law rates at the present time while also being astoundingly cheap at the moment.
So, no: ROT13'ing data (or the moral equivalent thereof) isn't good enough to stay ahead in that particular battle. P2P standards have a huge amount of inertia, and it takes -years- before folks move onto something "better." So, whatever you do, you want "better" to be as strong as possible, not "just enough for today."
Like chess, one has much better odds of success if they're thinking several moves ahead of what their opponent is considering.
I fully support OP's idea of steganography on the basis that it works. I simply discount it, as a whole, on the basis that it's inefficient, and is thus very easy to spot. After that, applying substantial resources toward figuring out some of what's going on is trivial, since they've already got a select list of targets.
It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby they achieve great results.
Sun Tzu
And there's many places where the opposite is true: At the last house I owned, I never locked the door. Ever. I didn't even carry a key for it for something like three years, having somehow lost it not long after we moved in.
The only single negative consequence of this was that, one time, my wife and I were watching TV at night in the front room. I saw an an older and apparently inebriated gentleman stumbling down the sidewalk along the street. He then turned, and stumbled up to my porch. He opened the door with a little effort, and walked right in like he was visiting a friend.
Once inside, he looked around for a few seconds and said "Whoa. I don't belong in here."
Without even bothering to get up, I calmly said "I think you're right."
He turned around and left, shutting the door behind him. We watched him stumble down the block for a bit, and then went back to our TV-watching, and all was well. We never saw him again. *shrug*
I recognize that not all towns and neighborhoods are so friendly as this place with a population of about 40k, but that doesn't mean that every block everywhere is as bad as your aunt-in-law's. Some are just the opposite.
(Meanwhile, at my current house on the other side of the same small town, the doors and windows are always locked. I spent some time looking at shotguns at the local shop just yesterday, to supplement my Mattock pick. So, to be clear, I'm not attempting to describe some sort of Utopian image, just relaying my own historical anecdotes.)
I think he's just being deliberately vague. It's an article about HDD performance as it relates to vibration, not an in-depth comparison between them and SSD.
Taken literally, the only thing he says is that the value proposition for SSD changes. But this change could be an improvement for an application's specific needs, or a detriment -- the author does not say.
The implied message (if there even is one) is that, perhaps, one should add "mechanical vibration" to their list of things to consider when selecting between hard disks and SSD.
Your scheme, while brilliant, is inefficient to such excess that it is self-defeating.
To perform steganography effectively (read: "undetectably"), one must bury the data within normal-looking noise. The amount of adjustable noise required increases proportionately with the amount of desired steganogaphically-encoded data. So, to encode a Big Thing (a movie, say), you need Lots Of Noise, or rather, a substantially larger amount of adjustable normal-looking data than that which you intend to send.
This makes the steganographical usage you describe very easy to classify: Those who aren't using it for a given task are going to consume (just to throw some numbers out there) 1x bandwidth. Those who ARE using it for the same task are going to consume, say, 10x.
If this attempt to screw The Man ever became common enough to be useful, The Man would simply counter with appropriately-higher fees for high-bandwidth users, or worse.
Steganography is indeed very useful for transferring some quantity of relatively small data in an undetectable fashion. But, in this context, it doesn't seem that the parties are concerned with relatively small bits of data -- they're more worried about bulk. So, by increasing bulk through steganography usage, one makes them self stand out even more in a non-neutral network than they would have by not bothering with such charades to begin with.
My history is obviously vague, but: The first Palm Pilot was a US Robotics product.
"Palm," as an independant entity, didn't exist until some years later (not until after 3com absorbed USR, and then spun off Palm).
So: Assuming you're correct (and I don't remember enough to assume otherwise), was this cross-platform Graffiti an independent creation of a startup, or just another product of US Robotics?
The Newton had handwriting recognition, not Graffiti.
It makes perfect sense if you've ever in your entire life loaded film into a normal 35mm SLR.
You open the back of the camera by rotating it about 180 degrees. At this point, the naked sensor will be facing you, not the lens, and can be cleaned.
The "self-cleaning" doo-dads you refer to seem to only vibrate the sensor, shaking off anything with poor adhesion. It might be a temporary improvement with some types of funk, but not all. Those looking to retrofit a half-century-old camera into a 39-megapixel beast are likely to be picky enough that such tricks aren't very interesting.
I don't understand where you were going with your last paragraph, but I can only guess that you're an engineer of the sort that cannot tolerate the existence of any extra parts or functionality unless you, yourself, both understand them and find them useful.
What kind of person am I?
It would also impact your paycheck, as well as mine, as prices go up.
Meanwhile, I'm growing tired of folks bitching about what The Man (whichever Man it might be in whatever context) is doing, when they apparently don't realize that The Man is us.
Four, at least: GSM, CDMA, PCS, iDen. Interestingly, the latter two are provided by the same company. And there's still AMPS floating around in the more thinly-populated parts that still haven't been kicked to some digital format or other yet.
It's a managed forest plainly and openly maintained as a source of lumber, not a managed recreational nature preserve.
Repeat that, over and over, until you get it.
[sarcasm]In other news, I was shocked at the absolute lack of biodiversity the last time I walked through a wheat field. Imagine it: A huge field, hundreds of acres, where they've managed to grow almost nothing but wheat! What a waste.[/sarcasm]