In the Treyvon Martin case it was the "liberals" that were knee-jerk racists, and it was the "conservatives" (including Fox News to their credit) that were saying we should actually look at the facts.
Really? It was the liberals that said there shouldn't be a trial and that Zimmerman was acting in self-defense, and Fox News who was demanding he be put in trial because it was clear he initiated the conflict after stalking Martin in a very obviously threatening way?
Could have fooled me. Or perhaps Fox News fooled you.
Cellular cells have control channels. The control channel is used to transmit texts. It's also used to set up calls. It's also a fixed size and has limited capacity.
I don't know where this myth comes from that SMS messages are "free" (ie do not take bandwidth), but let me posit an obvious point: if they were, wouldn't the inventors of GSM have routed all voice calls over specially encoded SMS packets instead?
Prior to LTE, all networks used technologies that made heavy distinctions between packet switched data, voice, and control/signalling. Generally speaking, the available bandwidth (not to be confused with spectrum) is split into fixed-width channels. In TDMA this is done via frequencies and time slots, in CDMA (not to be confused with IS-2000) this is done using a coding system for each bit, with a different code assigned to each channel. But either way, that was the result: each voice call/direction was generally allocated a channel to itself, data was generally allocated channels, and so on.
The most "expensive" is actually the system everyone thinks is the cheapest - SMS. Generally SMS goes on the signalling channel, the channel you use to set up and tear down calls. You can actually take down a cell tower by getting a handful of phones to constantly transmit SMS messages.
So yeah, given they use bandwidth in slightly different ways, you'd expect different charging models.
On top of that, bear in mind that LTE or not different applications have different usage scenarios. You generally expect a heavy voice user to use it for two or three hours a day, at most. At around 2k per second, that's only about 400-700 megabytes of data per month. The original "Unlimited" data plans were propsed when carriers actually expected data usage to be a fraction of that, because people would just be checking their email and browsing mobile websites, and, given users could expect a lower quality of service for that data, it was kinda assumed by carriers that giving someone unlimited data wouldn't actually result in significantly more network use.
I'm pretty sure you're talking out of your ass. If Google was upset about AOSP-based phones, they could simply cut off the oxygen and end AOSP.
I have absolutely no idea what the write-up is about. At a guess, I'd assume they're concerned about "cross platform" crap that isn't, but I'll wait for Google to actually state their intentions. What I can absolutely rule out is the notion that this is about Android being FLOSS (Google could end this at any time), or about sticking it to Amazon (the Fire's OS is OSS Android (ie just Android, not Android+Google proprietary apps) with a custom launcher and a few custom apps, it's not in any way a fork, or any of the other nonsense people here are speculating on.
This is why I like Woz, even if, based upon previous cases where he supposedly dared say something ungood about Apple, it'll probably turn out his actual views were exaggerated in the write-up. But not the views that matter to me.
Gingerbread's going to be around for a while and I think most developers know that. Gingerbread has significantly lower hardware requirements, which means you'll see lower end phones standardize on it for the next year or so before "low end" phones become powerful enough to easily run the post-4.0 branch.
I suspect, by this time next year, ICS will have a tiny share, with Gingerbread and Jellybean (4.1 and 4.2 together) dominating the figures.
A cheap unlocked Android phone would be a Nexus 4, which is within $50 of that price, and does, indeed, run the latest version of the OS.
And can we give it a rest with the "latest version" crap? The 3GS version of iOS doesn't have the same operating system level features as the iPhone 5 version. The version number in iOS's case simply refers to a bundling of a specific API with certain libraries, not a common OS across multiple platforms differing only by device drivers.
If Microsoft offered something called "Windows 8" that ran on 80386 CPUs, and used cooperative multiple tasking, lacked the Explorer, requiring you use progman.exe instead, and wouldn't address more than four megs of RAM, we wouldn't say it was the "same version" as the version on your funky Surface tablet.
Oh. My. God. I just used a computer analogy. Woah. On Slashdot. Not a car analogy, a computer analogy. One something involving computers. That's just not right.
Oh my hell, you Apple fanbois are in so much denial. It's because of China? Really?
Don't forget to mention some totally irrelevent fact like "Oh yeah, but most of those phones aren't running the latest version althoughactuallyios6ononeiphoneisntthesameasios6onanother!" or "Well I'm a developer and iOS makes me so much more money I stopped even bothering to support Android a few years ago andhavenoideawhatthesituationwouldbeifididsupportitnow."
Here's the deal: Android is leading the way making smartphones available to everyone. Proper smartphones. Y'know, that conform to the original definition before Jobs changed it to "A phone with a PDA built-in that the manufacturer has complete control over."
I think that's fantastic. I have issues with modern smartphones, not least the stupid battery lives, but I think it's great that such a fantasticly useful tool is in the hands of almost everyone these days. That's worth celebrating. If you happen to like some rival to Android, and the figures don't seem to suggest that they're the ones putting smartphones in people's hands, take it up with them. Stop dissing the one group that's got it right.
We lack an infrastructure for exchanging keys as easily as email addresses, and where sending and receiving encrypted emails is as easy to do as sending and receiving ordinary unencrypted email today.
I'm not sure we'll ever have that infrastructure either.
This isn't about the theory, it's about people. Arguing that every private discussion must be public is a little like arguing that we'd know more about the Libya incident before the election if only we had pictures of President Obama in the nude.
It does not help us understand AGW in any way to veer from the published documentation of the theory itself into discussions about whether Michael Mann had a tiff with a fellow scientist in 1992.
The UK has a constitution, every governed country has a constitution. In the UK's case it's not written down in a single document, but spread across a variety of charters, precedents, etc.
The only way to avoid this tax is to do something that will probably cost more than the tax, so most of those effected will almost certainly choose to pay the tax.
Wait, what?
- The way to avoid this tax is to buy something that you almost certainly need anyway. Most people already buy it, even without the penalty.
- Most people who are not already buying health insurance are doing so because it costs too much, not because it costs more than a penalty that hasn't been levied yet. Those people will receive subsidies of up to 100% to ensure they can afford it. This will be lower than the tax, so yes, it will be in their best interests for multiple reasons to buy insurance, even if they believe they'll never need it.
- Most medium and large employers will be required to chip in a third of the cost, or else pay fines of up to $2,000 per full time employee, which will further reduce the cost of getting health insurance vs paying the tax, even for those who don't receive large enough subsidies to pay the difference.
Basically you're looking at a minority of people who can afford to buy health insurance, but don't, because they'd rather declare bankrupcy if, in future, they're involved in an accident or contract cancer than be responsible adults now, who'll see paying the tax as a better option than buying insurance. Most Americans don't fit into that category.
Well, sure, but CBS, NBC, ABC, and even Fox are regulated, and thus beholden, to the state too.
It would be a mistake to suggest that the BBC is particularly beholden to government simply because it's funded by the TV licence fee rather than advertising. It's placing weight on a somewhat dubious fact that implies something that isn't the case.
Technically true but fairly meaningless. When I bought a laptop two years ago, Ubuntu didn't support the graphics card. But I was able to download the standard drivers from Nvidia, and install them, and then my Ubuntu system was fine.
Just like in Windows, the fact the OS "vendor" doesn't ship the drivers doesn't mean you're out of luck.
(And before we get the usual "But... Linux suxors because nobody cares about making their drivers available!!?! - there are only three graphics card makers in the world as far as PC makers are concerned right now. AMD, NVidia, and Intel. All three have strong Linux support. No, they're not perfect, but I suspect Steam going GNU/Linux is going to be a major kick in the pants to encourage them.)
From a political consultant's point of view a vote for a third party candidate is a vote that could have been won by your candidate had you more in common with them.
If Obama had lost, and the socialist candidate at this election had picked up 5% of votes in each state, do you think the Democratic candidate in four years would be to Obama's left or right?
If the Constitution Party's candidate had picked up 5% of votes in each state in this election, do you think the Republican candidate in four years will be to Mitt's left or right?
Oh, and if the socialist candidate at this election had picked up 5% of votes in each state, Obama has won, and the Constitution Party hasn't won anything, do you think both the Democratic and Republican candidates in four years will be to the left or right of the two that ran this year? Likewise, run the same thought experiment with the Constitution Party winning lots of votes and the Socialists winning zero.
I didn't vote third party this year, but I was on the verge of doing so. The problem is that the Republicans are so bat-shit crazy at the moment I couldn't take the risk.
Staggeringly enough, we don't consider non-sentient land to be the basis of a democracy. Instead we count votes from people.
If you're saying the election is rigged because it counts people in each state, rather than square feet of land, then well, I guess you're right, but you probably need a refresher course in civics.
No, but I can blame the BBC for the things I blamed the BBC for. Namely:
- Claiming a conservative politician is a pedophile (they absolutely did.)
- Using dubious evidence to make that claim, not even investigating their own witnesses
- Not even contacting the person they were making the claims about as part of the investigation into the story.
- Not understanding the modern world enough to know that the obvious result of their claim would be the resurrection of a sick, twisted, homophobic conspiracy theory that implicated more than just McAlpine.
Political opportunism? You mean it's political opportunism for a party that's accused of harboring pedophiles to get upset about it?
Quite honestly, until the resignation of the DG I actually half thought this was the BBC attempting to slime the conservatives in an attempt to get the heat off over the Saville affair. The story was obviously flawed from the beginning.
The BBC didn't name him, but the journalist who was working on the story claimed, on Twitter, a few hours prior to broadcast that they planned to name a major Conservative politician. Ironically, McAlpine isn't - and never was - a major politician by most standards (he did at one point "lead" the Conservative Party, but that's more of a fund raising position), and hasn't been a Conservative for about a decade.
To make matters worse, the story was shoddy journalism to begin with. Leaving aside the fact that at least one of the witnesses does, actually, have a credibility problem (see if you recognize any names in this 1999 New Statesman article, appropriately about another dubious bit of journalism: http://t.co/eZ1drMcV), there was no attempt to even contact McAlpine beforehand.
(It doesn't help that the BBC, by both bringing it up while not naming names also managed to reserrect an awful conspiracy theory from the homophobic pen of Simon Regan, which added virtually anyone rumored to be homosexual in the Conservative Party to a giant fictional pedophile ring headed by McAlpine himself. It's this rumor that actually ended up on the Twitters. Much as I don't like the victims of the smear, it was a nasty attempt to equate homosexuality with pedophilia, and frankly I'm glad Regan is dead.)
Also: if you're going to lock the user out after three bad attempts anyway (and therefore already have a mechanism in place to deal with external dictionary attacks), there's no good reason for that "Oh, you entered it wrong? Here, let me wait for 30 seconds before I tell you" delay that just fucking pisses people off rather than helps. I just thought I'd mention it, it's another pet peeve.
Actually, there's no need to lock after three bad attempts, just make the delay ONE TENTH OF A SECOND. That'll be long enough to foil virtually every dictionary attacker while short enough to not be irritating to end users.
Also, what's the deal with caps lock? Why the hell is that key still on the keyboard? NOBODY uses it and... I've gone waaaaaaaaaaay off-topic haven't I? I'll shut up and let the rest of the post be insightful.
I'm wrong that this device by a satellite operator only, as advertised, fast forwards through ads on the broadcast stations because you don't own an antenna? Oh, and you use it with your cable service?
I think you missed something somewhere, or else have really, really, badly worded your correction.
I see... so you're saying we'll see land shifting (perhaps some kinda of movement of tectonic plates) as well as temperature and weather pattern shifting, thus all balancing everything out? How does that work then, does the tectonic plate system integrate with the climate, or are we expecting hurricanes to just blow the land to the "right" places? Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
Is that trying to source the components, and then solder them together, is just not possible for the vast majority of open source and free software enthusiasts.
Have you ever opened up a smartphone? A handful of relatively specialist chips, all with connectors to the motherboard that would require a soldering iron held by fingers the size of human hairs.
I don't know, I think Republicans, reknowned for their respect for nerds, are capable of producing useful, eye catching, state of the art, web sites when they try: http://unskewedpolls.com/
Slashdot Mirror
Really? It was the liberals that said there shouldn't be a trial and that Zimmerman was acting in self-defense, and Fox News who was demanding he be put in trial because it was clear he initiated the conflict after stalking Martin in a very obviously threatening way?
Could have fooled me. Or perhaps Fox News fooled you.
That's completely untrue.
Cellular cells have control channels. The control channel is used to transmit texts. It's also used to set up calls. It's also a fixed size and has limited capacity.
I don't know where this myth comes from that SMS messages are "free" (ie do not take bandwidth), but let me posit an obvious point: if they were, wouldn't the inventors of GSM have routed all voice calls over specially encoded SMS packets instead?
Prior to LTE, all networks used technologies that made heavy distinctions between packet switched data, voice, and control/signalling. Generally speaking, the available bandwidth (not to be confused with spectrum) is split into fixed-width channels. In TDMA this is done via frequencies and time slots, in CDMA (not to be confused with IS-2000) this is done using a coding system for each bit, with a different code assigned to each channel. But either way, that was the result: each voice call/direction was generally allocated a channel to itself, data was generally allocated channels, and so on.
The most "expensive" is actually the system everyone thinks is the cheapest - SMS. Generally SMS goes on the signalling channel, the channel you use to set up and tear down calls. You can actually take down a cell tower by getting a handful of phones to constantly transmit SMS messages.
So yeah, given they use bandwidth in slightly different ways, you'd expect different charging models.
On top of that, bear in mind that LTE or not different applications have different usage scenarios. You generally expect a heavy voice user to use it for two or three hours a day, at most. At around 2k per second, that's only about 400-700 megabytes of data per month. The original "Unlimited" data plans were propsed when carriers actually expected data usage to be a fraction of that, because people would just be checking their email and browsing mobile websites, and, given users could expect a lower quality of service for that data, it was kinda assumed by carriers that giving someone unlimited data wouldn't actually result in significantly more network use.
I'm pretty sure you're talking out of your ass. If Google was upset about AOSP-based phones, they could simply cut off the oxygen and end AOSP.
I have absolutely no idea what the write-up is about. At a guess, I'd assume they're concerned about "cross platform" crap that isn't, but I'll wait for Google to actually state their intentions. What I can absolutely rule out is the notion that this is about Android being FLOSS (Google could end this at any time), or about sticking it to Amazon (the Fire's OS is OSS Android (ie just Android, not Android+Google proprietary apps) with a custom launcher and a few custom apps, it's not in any way a fork, or any of the other nonsense people here are speculating on.
This is why I like Woz, even if, based upon previous cases where he supposedly dared say something ungood about Apple, it'll probably turn out his actual views were exaggerated in the write-up. But not the views that matter to me.
Woz appreciates good engineering and says so.
Gingerbread's going to be around for a while and I think most developers know that. Gingerbread has significantly lower hardware requirements, which means you'll see lower end phones standardize on it for the next year or so before "low end" phones become powerful enough to easily run the post-4.0 branch.
I suspect, by this time next year, ICS will have a tiny share, with Gingerbread and Jellybean (4.1 and 4.2 together) dominating the figures.
A cheap unlocked Android phone would be a Nexus 4, which is within $50 of that price, and does, indeed, run the latest version of the OS.
And can we give it a rest with the "latest version" crap? The 3GS version of iOS doesn't have the same operating system level features as the iPhone 5 version. The version number in iOS's case simply refers to a bundling of a specific API with certain libraries, not a common OS across multiple platforms differing only by device drivers.
If Microsoft offered something called "Windows 8" that ran on 80386 CPUs, and used cooperative multiple tasking, lacked the Explorer, requiring you use progman.exe instead, and wouldn't address more than four megs of RAM, we wouldn't say it was the "same version" as the version on your funky Surface tablet.
Oh. My. God. I just used a computer analogy. Woah. On Slashdot. Not a car analogy, a computer analogy. One something involving computers. That's just not right.
Oh my hell, you Apple fanbois are in so much denial. It's because of China? Really?
Don't forget to mention some totally irrelevent fact like "Oh yeah, but most of those phones aren't running the latest version althoughactuallyios6ononeiphoneisntthesameasios6onanother!" or "Well I'm a developer and iOS makes me so much more money I stopped even bothering to support Android a few years ago andhavenoideawhatthesituationwouldbeifididsupportitnow."
Here's the deal: Android is leading the way making smartphones available to everyone. Proper smartphones. Y'know, that conform to the original definition before Jobs changed it to "A phone with a PDA built-in that the manufacturer has complete control over."
I think that's fantastic. I have issues with modern smartphones, not least the stupid battery lives, but I think it's great that such a fantasticly useful tool is in the hands of almost everyone these days. That's worth celebrating. If you happen to like some rival to Android, and the figures don't seem to suggest that they're the ones putting smartphones in people's hands, take it up with them. Stop dissing the one group that's got it right.
Well, he gave a rationale so you're apparently wrong. And nobody suggested that Installous was required for jailbreaking, so why mention that?
We lack an infrastructure for exchanging keys as easily as email addresses, and where sending and receiving encrypted emails is as easy to do as sending and receiving ordinary unencrypted email today.
I'm not sure we'll ever have that infrastructure either.
This isn't about the theory, it's about people. Arguing that every private discussion must be public is a little like arguing that we'd know more about the Libya incident before the election if only we had pictures of President Obama in the nude.
It does not help us understand AGW in any way to veer from the published documentation of the theory itself into discussions about whether Michael Mann had a tiff with a fellow scientist in 1992.
The UK has a constitution, every governed country has a constitution. In the UK's case it's not written down in a single document, but spread across a variety of charters, precedents, etc.
Wait, what?
- The way to avoid this tax is to buy something that you almost certainly need anyway. Most people already buy it, even without the penalty.
- Most people who are not already buying health insurance are doing so because it costs too much, not because it costs more than a penalty that hasn't been levied yet. Those people will receive subsidies of up to 100% to ensure they can afford it. This will be lower than the tax, so yes, it will be in their best interests for multiple reasons to buy insurance, even if they believe they'll never need it.
- Most medium and large employers will be required to chip in a third of the cost, or else pay fines of up to $2,000 per full time employee, which will further reduce the cost of getting health insurance vs paying the tax, even for those who don't receive large enough subsidies to pay the difference.
Basically you're looking at a minority of people who can afford to buy health insurance, but don't, because they'd rather declare bankrupcy if, in future, they're involved in an accident or contract cancer than be responsible adults now, who'll see paying the tax as a better option than buying insurance. Most Americans don't fit into that category.
Well, sure, but CBS, NBC, ABC, and even Fox are regulated, and thus beholden, to the state too.
It would be a mistake to suggest that the BBC is particularly beholden to government simply because it's funded by the TV licence fee rather than advertising. It's placing weight on a somewhat dubious fact that implies something that isn't the case.
Technically true but fairly meaningless. When I bought a laptop two years ago, Ubuntu didn't support the graphics card. But I was able to download the standard drivers from Nvidia, and install them, and then my Ubuntu system was fine.
Just like in Windows, the fact the OS "vendor" doesn't ship the drivers doesn't mean you're out of luck.
(And before we get the usual "But... Linux suxors because nobody cares about making their drivers available!!?! - there are only three graphics card makers in the world as far as PC makers are concerned right now. AMD, NVidia, and Intel. All three have strong Linux support. No, they're not perfect, but I suspect Steam going GNU/Linux is going to be a major kick in the pants to encourage them.)
From a political consultant's point of view a vote for a third party candidate is a vote that could have been won by your candidate had you more in common with them.
If Obama had lost, and the socialist candidate at this election had picked up 5% of votes in each state, do you think the Democratic candidate in four years would be to Obama's left or right?
If the Constitution Party's candidate had picked up 5% of votes in each state in this election, do you think the Republican candidate in four years will be to Mitt's left or right?
Oh, and if the socialist candidate at this election had picked up 5% of votes in each state, Obama has won, and the Constitution Party hasn't won anything, do you think both the Democratic and Republican candidates in four years will be to the left or right of the two that ran this year? Likewise, run the same thought experiment with the Constitution Party winning lots of votes and the Socialists winning zero.
I didn't vote third party this year, but I was on the verge of doing so. The problem is that the Republicans are so bat-shit crazy at the moment I couldn't take the risk.
Staggeringly enough, we don't consider non-sentient land to be the basis of a democracy. Instead we count votes from people.
If you're saying the election is rigged because it counts people in each state, rather than square feet of land, then well, I guess you're right, but you probably need a refresher course in civics.
No, but I can blame the BBC for the things I blamed the BBC for. Namely:
- Claiming a conservative politician is a pedophile (they absolutely did.)
- Using dubious evidence to make that claim, not even investigating their own witnesses
- Not even contacting the person they were making the claims about as part of the investigation into the story.
- Not understanding the modern world enough to know that the obvious result of their claim would be the resurrection of a sick, twisted, homophobic conspiracy theory that implicated more than just McAlpine.
Political opportunism? You mean it's political opportunism for a party that's accused of harboring pedophiles to get upset about it?
Quite honestly, until the resignation of the DG I actually half thought this was the BBC attempting to slime the conservatives in an attempt to get the heat off over the Saville affair. The story was obviously flawed from the beginning.
A variety of reasons:
The BBC didn't name him, but the journalist who was working on the story claimed, on Twitter, a few hours prior to broadcast that they planned to name a major Conservative politician. Ironically, McAlpine isn't - and never was - a major politician by most standards (he did at one point "lead" the Conservative Party, but that's more of a fund raising position), and hasn't been a Conservative for about a decade.
To make matters worse, the story was shoddy journalism to begin with. Leaving aside the fact that at least one of the witnesses does, actually, have a credibility problem (see if you recognize any names in this 1999 New Statesman article, appropriately about another dubious bit of journalism: http://t.co/eZ1drMcV), there was no attempt to even contact McAlpine beforehand.
(It doesn't help that the BBC, by both bringing it up while not naming names also managed to reserrect an awful conspiracy theory from the homophobic pen of Simon Regan, which added virtually anyone rumored to be homosexual in the Conservative Party to a giant fictional pedophile ring headed by McAlpine himself. It's this rumor that actually ended up on the Twitters. Much as I don't like the victims of the smear, it was a nasty attempt to equate homosexuality with pedophilia, and frankly I'm glad Regan is dead.)
Good. Case sensitivity in passwords is stupid.
There, I said it.
Also: if you're going to lock the user out after three bad attempts anyway (and therefore already have a mechanism in place to deal with external dictionary attacks), there's no good reason for that "Oh, you entered it wrong? Here, let me wait for 30 seconds before I tell you" delay that just fucking pisses people off rather than helps. I just thought I'd mention it, it's another pet peeve.
Actually, there's no need to lock after three bad attempts, just make the delay ONE TENTH OF A SECOND. That'll be long enough to foil virtually every dictionary attacker while short enough to not be irritating to end users.
Also, what's the deal with caps lock? Why the hell is that key still on the keyboard? NOBODY uses it and... I've gone waaaaaaaaaaay off-topic haven't I? I'll shut up and let the rest of the post be insightful.
I'm wrong that this device by a satellite operator only, as advertised, fast forwards through ads on the broadcast stations because you don't own an antenna? Oh, and you use it with your cable service?
I think you missed something somewhere, or else have really, really, badly worded your correction.
I see... so you're saying we'll see land shifting (perhaps some kinda of movement of tectonic plates) as well as temperature and weather pattern shifting, thus all balancing everything out? How does that work then, does the tectonic plate system integrate with the climate, or are we expecting hurricanes to just blow the land to the "right" places? Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
Is that trying to source the components, and then solder them together, is just not possible for the vast majority of open source and free software enthusiasts.
Have you ever opened up a smartphone? A handful of relatively specialist chips, all with connectors to the motherboard that would require a soldering iron held by fingers the size of human hairs.
It's just too hard.
I did, he did however retract the comments and apologized for them. It sounds like he just got caught up in election hysteria: http://www.examiner.com/article/regarding-my-comments-about-nate-silver-s-appearance?cid=db_articles
I don't know, I think Republicans, reknowned for their respect for nerds, are capable of producing useful, eye catching, state of the art, web sites when they try: http://unskewedpolls.com/