Your analogy is entirely flawed. If you sell guns to the government, you expect them to be used in a war (police action, call it what you will). If you sell computers to a TLA, they're going to use it for spying.
It's not like they came to HP and said - we need to monitor every private citizen's communication in a way the is highly illegal and intrusive - what can you sell us for that? They said "we need X machines, it's a black project, can you deliver?"
I gave up on using hosts - well, pi-hole actually, but the same thing - blocking at the DNS level. Frankly, it's a huge headache to keep up on either blocking all the site you want to block, or constantly having to manually update whitelists to get through when you do want to see that gets axed by the major aggregators (like blocking all of microsoft.com by default), and there are some ads on site I prefer to go to that simply don't get blocked because they're self-served (i.e. Google, Facebook).
The government calls up your company for a big order of you product, and you make it happen and get the product delivered, and now you're going to crucified for it?
Carly was a horrible CEO and I want to see her ripped to pieces by rabid monkeys and dance about on the incinerated remains of her entrails. But I'm having a hard time seeing how - as a businesswoman - delivering a product for money makes her somehow worse because she happened to sell to the NSA. I'll still hate/mistrust her for the moral support of the questionable practices of the spook community in the 00s, but not for selling stuff.
You know, it didn't even need a "slot". An internal - can't-be-easily-user-replaced SD slot would be fine just so that you could buy your phone and the amount of storage you need; even if it means replacing requires a special software procedure.
I think I've taken the SD card out of my G3 once - to replace the 64GB card (96GB total) with a 128GB card (160GB total) when I needed more space.
It's not unreasonable to estimate that a major space undertaking will be an order of magnitude larger by the time things are done. I could be shy by 20-30%, but I think 2 Trillion is a fair over-under cost.
It will never happen with the current budgets. Even if you stripped out all the pet projects and tail chasing and gave over all the launch vehicle research to private industry you'd still only have 3-5 Billion to spend. There are many technical challenges which exist which still need to be solved in parallel for this to happen, and my predicted $2T isn't going to happen at $5B/yr.
The second mission to Mars will be quite a bit easier, and the 100th will be as simple as putting a comm satellite in GEO. Note that GEO is still a wickedly expensive endeavor, but it's so routine now that private industry can do it. It is worth noting, however, that supersonic flight - though pretty much perfected by the government, still isn't practical or affordable for commercial use.
You want to go to Mars? How about Saturn? Or a neighboring star or galaxy? Maybe even skip to an alternate universe all together?
Hollywood does it every year for $50-200M a pop. Most of the people in this country believe all the impossible stuff they do in the movies is real anyway, and couldn't tell if even the basic physics was so screwed up as to be laughable. Heck, even the school systems and police - you know, the "smart ones" we let teach our kids and the experts on explosives - get all their bomb identification training from Hollywood.
You want these people to fork over real money for real science when fake science that makes them feel good can be had for $11.50 a seat and a $4 soda?
Yes, but you've made the classic error of starting a land war in...no, wait, the classic error of equating capacity with value, and initial cost with lifetime cost.
If you're application is operation-bound, you have to stripe or partition hundreds of spinning disks to get the same performance as an SSD. It's like owning a UPS van vs a fleet of motorcycles to deliver packages. The truck is by far the most efficient for carrying lots of packages, but if you have to deliver 1000 boxes an hour, you'd much rather have 100 motorcycles delivery than a single truck, even though the truck would cost less.
Plus SSDs take less power to run - less than 10% at idle (though enterprise drives rarely idle), and less than 25% at full tilt. It may not seem like much, but for a data center, you have the direct cost of power, and then an equivalent amount of cooling to remove the heat from the building, so the cost is doubled. It won't make up for the cost difference by itself, but in combination with the speed advantage it could easily pay back in less than a year or two.
When you can strip a corporation of it's right to operate in it's current market segment, and put the corporation in jail (mothball all assets for, say 10-50 years), or kill a corporation altogether (forfeiture of all assets, permanent ban of the reuse and licencing all corporation names, trademarks, IP, and assets, banning of the current registered corporate officers from ever being a registered corporate officer in the future), then we can talk about being accountable as a corporation.
They didn't game the test. They violated the rules while nobody was looking.
It would be like letting the air out of the footballs so that the ball was more grippable and throwable for only one team in a championship game. And we know how that turned out. Oh, wait...that's a bad example.
To put it in a car analogy way, imagine if you calculated your fuel economy numbers but only took data when you were headed downhill on at least a 1% grade. You would technically be calculating the fuel economy of the car, but it wouldn't represent the actual average fuel economy. That's pretty much what they did. And is both unethical and illegal.
This is what happens when you exempt corporate engineers from licensing standards. There are no repercussions, no sense of proper conduct, and no accountability?
Would you allow your doctors to skip board certification but still practice medicine if they worked for a healthcare company? Would you allow lawyers to skip the bar but still bring court cases if they worked for a corporation?
Why do we allow engineers to practice engineering without a license if they work for a corporation? As with all the professions above, engineers must be registered and licensed to perform engineering work for the public - why does this change if there is an intermediary corporation who takes than work and then sells it to the public?
Apple makes things simple. That means vertical integration with their own products and barely passable with others. Apple makes things slick and pretty. That's a big part of what makes people choose a car.
What if your car had perfect integration with your iDevices - unlock, start, network, communication, navigation. Now fast forward to self-driving technology. Not necessarily park to park, but lane following, adaptive cruise, and integration with your route. As you pull onto the free way, "Siri, take me to mom's house" and the car takes over until it's time to exit to surface roads. The car automatically takes you to gas stations or - better yet - drives right into and docks with a (partner) iCharger spot at the upper class restaurant you selected from Siri's options as you approached dinner time. You get out, you eat, you pay, your car pays, you get back on the road without ever having to take out your wallet or phone. Need a coffee - Siri will find the nearest Starbucks, order your usual, drive through the pickup window and roll down the window to let the barista hand you your drink before whisking you off to your destination.
Apple will make the interface so that you don't have to look at the road most of the time. And the driving experience will be tailored just to you. And you'll never have to wonder why your phone isn't pairing with your headunit again.
He could have at least thrown in that he didn't believe the law was just, and simply followed the lead of the political right in the US in ignoring the requirements.
Anything within the limits of physics is possible if you have enough money.
When BA/AF said there was essentially no way to get parts to maintain the aircraft, what they meant was that there was no *economical* way to get those parts. Anything can be fabricated as a one-off part, it will just cost several hundred or thousands of dollars more than a mass-produced part. Send a drawing with the proper specifications and GDT to a well operated machine shop and they'll turn out nearly any part you need. Something more complicated simply takes more time and setup. It is possible you could have to pay to construct an entire facility to make a custom set of turbine blades, make ten, test 8, and have only two for spares? Sure. Again - it's only money.
Whether they will be able to make such a venture possible given schedules and maintenance requirements of modern aircraft is simply an exercise in capital funding and cash flow. If Virgin can take you to space for $200k, you can probably rehabilitate the Concord and offer seats on a flight for no more than half that.
Apple can't make a claim to the basic feature, they didn't even invent it.
So Apple can't claim it is unique, good. That makes it essentially unprotectable under pretty much all IP laws except - possibly - as a registered trademark.
But they can say samsung used a similar feature and the placement of this feature was identical.
Wait - WTF? So what they have isn't theirs - they didn't invent it - but because Samsung put something like what they had in a similar place on their device makes Samsung somehow an infringing act? That they chose the same, pretty much logical (from a thumb accessibilty standpoint) place to put it?
i7 series parts top out at $1000, Xeon E5-4xxx series parts start at $1000
Why would you want your cheap consumer grade hardware cannibalizing your bread and butter business chips? The large cloud providers have already shifted to "consumer" hard drives to save money, knowing that their failure rates will be more than compensated for by lower unit costs.
hint #1: professors don't just get paid for the 3 hours a week they attend lectures. hint #2: lecture space is not free. you should go price a lecture hall some day.
Woe be unto you should you ever have to pay for a professional training seminar. The hourly rate just might kill you.
Removable storage on an iPhone would be the death of it.
iPhones are easy.
uSD cards are hard. They have to be unmounted, there has to be a mechanism for partitioning the storage so that certain things which mush remain on the phone can stay on the phone, and things which can be removed or swapped can be removed or swapped. That means the asking the user where they want to store things, either once (and risk things being put in the wrong place if the user changes his or her mind) or every.single.time. And then there's the question of how you get things on and off a uSD card for an iPhone. There is no official mechanism for direct storage or retreival in iOS - it's all managed by the OS and blocked from the user. Are you really going to do checking every single time a card is inserted? How many people are going to screw that up (answer: most of them)? Do you have any idea how long it takes to load a large uSD card and then parse it in a phone (answer: a LONG time when counted in phone seconds)?
No - a uSD slot is not for the casual user *unless* it's a (nearly) single purpose item - like camera storage. And even then it makes for an unsightly gash in the pristine envelope of a device which is, admittedly, bought for it's looks.
FWIW, I switched from iOS to Android and have a phone with replaceable battery and SD card. I would probably never recommend my parents get a phone that has a SD slot, or if they had it I'd recommend they not use it.
Which means that if it were a gun, every American would be allowed to jailbreak/root their phone by birthright and protected by the constitution.
Instead, it's mere control of your personal property, and therefore owned by the corporations. Individuals should never be allowed to wield such power - they simply can't be trusted not to infringe on the profits of the corporate elite.
Jose Parra 2621 W. Airport Freeway Irving, TX 75062
Perhaps they just haven't seen many before, and it would be helpful if we all mailed Dr. Parra a clock so that he could have a baseline for what a clock might look like. Breadboard or wire-wrapped versions preferred.
No, after being ostracized and emotionally harmed by the people he's supposed to trust, he'll
1) turn inward 2) He'll learn to hate the system 3) He'll distrust anyone in authority 4) He'll find his friends turn against him 5) Those that don't he'll stop confiding in or trusting 6) He'll latch on to any group which accepts him and shares his hatred for the current authority 7) He'll vow revenge 8) He'll make a real bomb to show them all
And the self-fulfilling prophesy will be complete.
If we can't have terrorists to scare the people, we'll figure out a way to make them. For we need to be scared to be controllable.
Standard government procedure for dealing with potential explosives.
All those >3oz bottles of liquid which can be used to take down a modern airliner that get confiscated at the TSA go into a regular trash can which is directly adjacent to the screeners and lines of hundreds of people waiting to be screened. Not into a bomb-proof container. Not taken to a remote location. Not handled with any kind of care or security.
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Your analogy is entirely flawed. If you sell guns to the government, you expect them to be used in a war (police action, call it what you will). If you sell computers to a TLA, they're going to use it for spying.
It's not like they came to HP and said - we need to monitor every private citizen's communication in a way the is highly illegal and intrusive - what can you sell us for that? They said "we need X machines, it's a black project, can you deliver?"
I gave up on using hosts - well, pi-hole actually, but the same thing - blocking at the DNS level. Frankly, it's a huge headache to keep up on either blocking all the site you want to block, or constantly having to manually update whitelists to get through when you do want to see that gets axed by the major aggregators (like blocking all of microsoft.com by default), and there are some ads on site I prefer to go to that simply don't get blocked because they're self-served (i.e. Google, Facebook).
The government calls up your company for a big order of you product, and you make it happen and get the product delivered, and now you're going to crucified for it?
Carly was a horrible CEO and I want to see her ripped to pieces by rabid monkeys and dance about on the incinerated remains of her entrails. But I'm having a hard time seeing how - as a businesswoman - delivering a product for money makes her somehow worse because she happened to sell to the NSA. I'll still hate/mistrust her for the moral support of the questionable practices of the spook community in the 00s, but not for selling stuff.
You know, it didn't even need a "slot". An internal - can't-be-easily-user-replaced SD slot would be fine just so that you could buy your phone and the amount of storage you need; even if it means replacing requires a special software procedure.
I think I've taken the SD card out of my G3 once - to replace the 64GB card (96GB total) with a 128GB card (160GB total) when I needed more space.
Apollo: 25B
STS: $200B
It's not unreasonable to estimate that a major space undertaking will be an order of magnitude larger by the time things are done. I could be shy by 20-30%, but I think 2 Trillion is a fair over-under cost.
It will never happen with the current budgets. Even if you stripped out all the pet projects and tail chasing and gave over all the launch vehicle research to private industry you'd still only have 3-5 Billion to spend. There are many technical challenges which exist which still need to be solved in parallel for this to happen, and my predicted $2T isn't going to happen at $5B/yr.
The second mission to Mars will be quite a bit easier, and the 100th will be as simple as putting a comm satellite in GEO. Note that GEO is still a wickedly expensive endeavor, but it's so routine now that private industry can do it. It is worth noting, however, that supersonic flight - though pretty much perfected by the government, still isn't practical or affordable for commercial use.
You want to go to Mars? How about Saturn? Or a neighboring star or galaxy? Maybe even skip to an alternate universe all together?
Hollywood does it every year for $50-200M a pop. Most of the people in this country believe all the impossible stuff they do in the movies is real anyway, and couldn't tell if even the basic physics was so screwed up as to be laughable. Heck, even the school systems and police - you know, the "smart ones" we let teach our kids and the experts on explosives - get all their bomb identification training from Hollywood.
You want these people to fork over real money for real science when fake science that makes them feel good can be had for $11.50 a seat and a $4 soda?
Yes, but you've made the classic error of starting a land war in...no, wait, the classic error of equating capacity with value, and initial cost with lifetime cost.
If you're application is operation-bound, you have to stripe or partition hundreds of spinning disks to get the same performance as an SSD. It's like owning a UPS van vs a fleet of motorcycles to deliver packages. The truck is by far the most efficient for carrying lots of packages, but if you have to deliver 1000 boxes an hour, you'd much rather have 100 motorcycles delivery than a single truck, even though the truck would cost less.
Plus SSDs take less power to run - less than 10% at idle (though enterprise drives rarely idle), and less than 25% at full tilt. It may not seem like much, but for a data center, you have the direct cost of power, and then an equivalent amount of cooling to remove the heat from the building, so the cost is doubled. It won't make up for the cost difference by itself, but in combination with the speed advantage it could easily pay back in less than a year or two.
When you can strip a corporation of it's right to operate in it's current market segment, and put the corporation in jail (mothball all assets for, say 10-50 years), or kill a corporation altogether (forfeiture of all assets, permanent ban of the reuse and licencing all corporation names, trademarks, IP, and assets, banning of the current registered corporate officers from ever being a registered corporate officer in the future), then we can talk about being accountable as a corporation.
They didn't game the test. They violated the rules while nobody was looking.
It would be like letting the air out of the footballs so that the ball was more grippable and throwable for only one team in a championship game. And we know how that turned out. Oh, wait...that's a bad example.
To put it in a car analogy way, imagine if you calculated your fuel economy numbers but only took data when you were headed downhill on at least a 1% grade. You would technically be calculating the fuel economy of the car, but it wouldn't represent the actual average fuel economy. That's pretty much what they did. And is both unethical and illegal.
This is what happens when you exempt corporate engineers from licensing standards. There are no repercussions, no sense of proper conduct, and no accountability?
Would you allow your doctors to skip board certification but still practice medicine if they worked for a healthcare company?
Would you allow lawyers to skip the bar but still bring court cases if they worked for a corporation?
Why do we allow engineers to practice engineering without a license if they work for a corporation? As with all the professions above, engineers must be registered and licensed to perform engineering work for the public - why does this change if there is an intermediary corporation who takes than work and then sells it to the public?
Don't you believe it.
Apple makes things simple. That means vertical integration with their own products and barely passable with others. Apple makes things slick and pretty. That's a big part of what makes people choose a car.
What if your car had perfect integration with your iDevices - unlock, start, network, communication, navigation. Now fast forward to self-driving technology. Not necessarily park to park, but lane following, adaptive cruise, and integration with your route. As you pull onto the free way, "Siri, take me to mom's house" and the car takes over until it's time to exit to surface roads. The car automatically takes you to gas stations or - better yet - drives right into and docks with a (partner) iCharger spot at the upper class restaurant you selected from Siri's options as you approached dinner time. You get out, you eat, you pay, your car pays, you get back on the road without ever having to take out your wallet or phone. Need a coffee - Siri will find the nearest Starbucks, order your usual, drive through the pickup window and roll down the window to let the barista hand you your drink before whisking you off to your destination.
Apple will make the interface so that you don't have to look at the road most of the time. And the driving experience will be tailored just to you. And you'll never have to wonder why your phone isn't pairing with your headunit again.
He could have at least thrown in that he didn't believe the law was just, and simply followed the lead of the political right in the US in ignoring the requirements.
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Anything within the limits of physics is possible if you have enough money.
When BA/AF said there was essentially no way to get parts to maintain the aircraft, what they meant was that there was no *economical* way to get those parts. Anything can be fabricated as a one-off part, it will just cost several hundred or thousands of dollars more than a mass-produced part. Send a drawing with the proper specifications and GDT to a well operated machine shop and they'll turn out nearly any part you need. Something more complicated simply takes more time and setup. It is possible you could have to pay to construct an entire facility to make a custom set of turbine blades, make ten, test 8, and have only two for spares? Sure. Again - it's only money.
Whether they will be able to make such a venture possible given schedules and maintenance requirements of modern aircraft is simply an exercise in capital funding and cash flow. If Virgin can take you to space for $200k, you can probably rehabilitate the Concord and offer seats on a flight for no more than half that.
Apple can't make a claim to the basic feature, they didn't even invent it.
So Apple can't claim it is unique, good. That makes it essentially unprotectable under pretty much all IP laws except - possibly - as a registered trademark.
But they can say samsung used a similar feature and the placement of this feature was identical.
Wait - WTF? So what they have isn't theirs - they didn't invent it - but because Samsung put something like what they had in a similar place on their device makes Samsung somehow an infringing act? That they chose the same, pretty much logical (from a thumb accessibilty standpoint) place to put it?
Or they'd all call them our personal PDAs or out PDA Assistants. Just as bad.
But, seriously...you get two syllables for a marketable name. Even the acronym is three.
i7 series parts top out at $1000, Xeon E5-4xxx series parts start at $1000
Why would you want your cheap consumer grade hardware cannibalizing your bread and butter business chips? The large cloud providers have already shifted to "consumer" hard drives to save money, knowing that their failure rates will be more than compensated for by lower unit costs.
hint #1: professors don't just get paid for the 3 hours a week they attend lectures.
hint #2: lecture space is not free. you should go price a lecture hall some day.
Woe be unto you should you ever have to pay for a professional training seminar. The hourly rate just might kill you.
The top professors will be fine.
Instead you'll just see more associates bringing cat food for lunch.
Removable storage on an iPhone would be the death of it.
iPhones are easy.
uSD cards are hard. They have to be unmounted, there has to be a mechanism for partitioning the storage so that certain things which mush remain on the phone can stay on the phone, and things which can be removed or swapped can be removed or swapped. That means the asking the user where they want to store things, either once (and risk things being put in the wrong place if the user changes his or her mind) or every.single.time. And then there's the question of how you get things on and off a uSD card for an iPhone. There is no official mechanism for direct storage or retreival in iOS - it's all managed by the OS and blocked from the user. Are you really going to do checking every single time a card is inserted? How many people are going to screw that up (answer: most of them)? Do you have any idea how long it takes to load a large uSD card and then parse it in a phone (answer: a LONG time when counted in phone seconds)?
No - a uSD slot is not for the casual user *unless* it's a (nearly) single purpose item - like camera storage. And even then it makes for an unsightly gash in the pristine envelope of a device which is, admittedly, bought for it's looks.
FWIW, I switched from iOS to Android and have a phone with replaceable battery and SD card. I would probably never recommend my parents get a phone that has a SD slot, or if they had it I'd recommend they not use it.
Which means that if it were a gun, every American would be allowed to jailbreak/root their phone by birthright and protected by the constitution.
Instead, it's mere control of your personal property, and therefore owned by the corporations. Individuals should never be allowed to wield such power - they simply can't be trusted not to infringe on the profits of the corporate elite.
Jose Parra
2621 W. Airport Freeway
Irving, TX 75062
Perhaps they just haven't seen many before, and it would be helpful if we all mailed Dr. Parra a clock so that he could have a baseline for what a clock might look like. Breadboard or wire-wrapped versions preferred.
No, after being ostracized and emotionally harmed by the people he's supposed to trust, he'll
1) turn inward
2) He'll learn to hate the system
3) He'll distrust anyone in authority
4) He'll find his friends turn against him
5) Those that don't he'll stop confiding in or trusting
6) He'll latch on to any group which accepts him and shares his hatred for the current authority
7) He'll vow revenge
8) He'll make a real bomb to show them all
And the self-fulfilling prophesy will be complete.
If we can't have terrorists to scare the people, we'll figure out a way to make them. For we need to be scared to be controllable.
Standard government procedure for dealing with potential explosives.
All those >3oz bottles of liquid which can be used to take down a modern airliner that get confiscated at the TSA go into a regular trash can which is directly adjacent to the screeners and lines of hundreds of people waiting to be screened. Not into a bomb-proof container. Not taken to a remote location. Not handled with any kind of care or security.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Maybe the people educating our youth shouldn't be basing their opinion of what is and isn't dangerous from Hollywood movies? Just a thought...