Are we really so weak that we absolutely cannot do without a smart phone until manufacturers actually start giving us what we want? I mean, we're the goddamn customers. Vote with your feet.
And who says Motorola isn't giving me exactly what I want - a phone that works and does the tasks I demand of it.
Some company's going to do the right thing and that's the phone you buy.
For the vast majority of their customers, Motorola *is* doing the right thing. You're a tiny, almost unoticeable minority. Grow and deal with it rather than whining your every whim isn't being catered to.
So 1000000 users can't view Yahoo's Web server... And nothing of value was lost.
Maybe nothing of value was lost to you, but (though you may not realize this) the universe doesn't revolve around you. Not being able to access my email, or my portfolio's, or the mailing lists I administer on Yahoo - that's things of considerable value lost to me.
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
Yeah. They've never released the Bible in the common tongue. They've never held mass in the common tongue either. Oh, wait. Hell, the Catholic Bible itself isn't even a millenia old.
I was raised devout Catholic. I got over it.
So was, and did, I. But unlike you, I didn't take that as a reason to be grossly ignorant of the Church and it's history.
BBC News, however, reports that US government officials have intervened, and Kernell has begun serving time at federal correctional institute in Ashland, Kentucky.
When most people think of an ideal criminal justice system, they think of judges and juries, not government officials. This system does not seem to be a well-oiled machine
Then 'most people' need to get their heads out of clouds and learn a) the difference between an 'ideal' system and one that must function in the real world, and b) how the real systems works. (And it actually does work very well.)
Not to mention the summary and article are vastly misleading - if you read just the summary or the first part of the article, you'll be wrongly outraged. The truth of the matter is, he was sentenced to imprisonment and (drum roll please!) he was duly imprisoned. The judge's recommendations ('wishes') that he spend his time in a half way house have zero legal force or standing. The only 'intervention' by the 'officials' was to obey the (legally binding) result and sentence handed down by the court.
Well, those of us who understand science and engineering understand that there are applications where radio waves can cause interference with other things. So yeah, that difference is important.
But keep pluggin' away kid, soon you'll learn these things too.
Assuming you use SMS (I don't, quite a few of the older people I know don't but do use Facebook), or are on the road where a sign happens to be (all three of them in my county, precisely none anywhere I normally drive)...
Putting them on Facebook (which I'm already logged in on) in a GUI I already use (and is thuse hardly 'in the way') isn't a waste of time, it's a good thing. (Or, less charitably, don't use a good thing as a springboard for a rant against Facebook.)
We used to live in a society where a comment like 'Oh, but why would they look at you if you're unimportant?' would have been valid, but with the ever-encroaching nemesis of data mining and algorithmic analysis making itself part of our daily lives you have to assume that, at any moment, every transaction you make is being scrutinized.
Sure, if your tinfoil hat has the shiny side the wrong way 'round. But when you think about it, you're talking about 300 million Americans with the number of daily transactions probably running into the tens of billions when you include businesses... That's a lot of data to analyze for just a fishing expedition. So, such an assumption if you're 'not important' is more than a bit of a stretch.
However, the funding machine (which, if anything, is the really interesting thing about CERN) continues to grind on under its own momentum.
That said, if LHC fails to find the Higgs then, that is very interesting indeed. Sort of like the MMX. However, the MMX was built from scraps by a couple of guys in a basement and upset all of physics forever.
Yep, and even though it upset all of physics forever, the funding mechanism still ground on for nearly a century - the last date I can find of someone trying to refine the results of the MMX is in the 1970's.
Because it's an absolute SIN that they charge the same or more than the dead tree version of the product. The costs are so much less compared to physical books -- no distribution costs, printing costs, materials cost, less middle men costs, etc.
The problem is, the costs you cite don't account for more than a fraction of the total cost of the book. The absolute sin here is being studiously and willfully ignorant of the publishing industry.
Recently three authors wrote an ebook and self-published at ~$3, they all made the same amount of money they made with a publisher.
That sounds really impressive, so long as you concentrate on soundbite and don't think to hard about the reality. The reality is they made less than they would have made with a publisher - because all the things a publisher does, they now had to do for themselves.
Yes, this is a different business model as the publisher does provide some value add services, and these three authors were already known authors but the point still stands as to the costs of middle men and old distribution models.
So if it's a different business model, you're openly admitting to comparing apples to oranges in order to prop up your argument about pomegranates. When we're being polite, we call that intellectual dishonesty.
You also point out, inadvertently, the game breaking flaw in your 'model' - it only works for known authors or (very) niche markets.
Well, elite military units are fault tolerant in direct proportion to their size - an airplane can tolerate virtually none, a SEAL team just a wee bit, a submarine crew quite a bit more (but still not very much by conventional standards). So you're definitely onto something there.
But my central point still stands - how do you screen? In the elite units there are trainers* and exercises that slowly put the pressure on without excessive risk to real assets, but I don't see any clear way to do so for this type of mission.
*I still remember the first time we went into the 'get wet' damage control trainer in sub school. The instructor was very clear - we were there because we weren't putting a real boat at risk, but we could hurt or kill ourselves. (And that failing the DC block because of poor safety practices could mean being bounced from the school.)
Does the US government want discussions about whether "private armies" are a good idea?
If there were private armies, you'd have a point. But the forces in question aren't private armies (that is armies that answer to an authority other than the government), they're contracted security forces. The problem isn't their existence, it's inadequate training, supervision, and accountability.
Sadly, the interests of the people and their governments are not the same.
Sadly? Hell, I'd be frightened out of my boots if they were the same. They shouldn't be the same because they don't operate at the same level, let alone in the same sphere. Most people are interested in themselves and their short term interests - the government is responsible for protecting me from the fallout of that and ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number even if it causes inconvenience and pain to a small number. *Somebody* has to take the broader and longer term view.
Really, the reaction to Wikileaks has been so dramatic that I have to think that they have something really really damaging on somebody that they haven't released yet.
Dramatic? Really? Apart from some tempests-in-a-teapot drummed up by attention whores (of which the summary above is a prime example), the reaction has mostly been non-existent. No governments have fallen. No politician has resigned. Nobody has been arrested, let alone arraigned. Etc... etc... Don't confuse internet karma whoring with real life.
And it has to be more damaging than evidence of war crimes, because when Dick Cheney proudly stated that he ordered waterboarding (which was a war crime when the US accused the Japanese of doing it) on national TV, not much happened.
There can't be a war crime when the war isn't being conducted between signatories of the Geneva Convention. (That's not to say it's not distasteful as hell, as well as a huge civil rights/human rights violation.) And that's exactly *why* nothing much happened - those opposed to war and to the Bush administration (the two sets were not in 100% overlap) couldn't gain any traction because they'd already shot themselves in the foot. Right from Day One they so amped up the noise and hype and so lowered the level of discourse that when the real transgressions started to come to light, they'd numbed everyone because they'd cried wolf so loud and so long.
I know there are many people who would volunteer for such a trip - I certainly think it would be pessimistic to think that we couldn't find several thousand people who are qualified and capable of making the trip.
The problem isn't finding volunteers, or finding qualified volunteers - it's the last one ("capable") that's the real problem.
Just in the US Navy we have decades of experience in screening volunteers for elite and semi elite forces (SEALS, Submarines, Naval Aviators), not just psychological screening - but academics, motivation, medical, etc... Yet *still* we get it wrong an uncomfortably large percentage of the time. In the case of a one-way trip to Mars, we don't even know what to screen *for*. How do you really know the volunteer can actually handle it? There's not really any way to test, and unlike the elite services you can't rely on discovering it during training, the volunteer not completely wigging out, or on their being enough others around to carry the load when he does.
It'd be far better if we abolished the "direct election" of the US Senate and re-instituted state legislature appointment or even better, turned the Senate into a parliamentary body where the smaller parties (green, libertarian, etc) could actually get a minority voice with real representation present for debate.
It would be even better if the smaller parties stopped trying to leap tall buildings in a single bound when they are barely capable of stepping over a wad of gum on the sidewalk.
Seriously, 90% of the reason the smaller parties can't get any traction is that they over reach every time. They appear from nowhere with no experience and no track record and insist they be considered for the top job(s). Try getting a track record - run for city council, mayor, the state legislature, etc... etc... build an actual party rather than insisting they be treated as one when they blatantly aren't.
The other 9.999% of the reason is the smaller parties are often single plank/narrow philosophy.
But that won't happen because the republicrats and demicans (who the fuck can tell them apart most days anyways while they betray their constituents?) don't want to give up their institutional stranglehold on the election process.
It won't happen because doing so is Very Hard Work and will take years if not decades to do. The Libertarian party lacks the structure, vision, and will to take on the task.
The Internet 10 years ago was a very different place from the Internet today, and I'm not sure the AOL case generalizes to FB (unfortunately).
Indeed. AOL died because the 'real' internet offered a superset of what AOL offered. Once AOL had nothing exclusive left, and no longer had a lock on acess to content, they died.
I'm not at all certain that's even possible with Facebook. I'm not even what would be comparable for Facebook.
What has been lost with Facebook is the spirit of social networking. It's more a site where you add all your friends or people you have met in real life. Other sites allowed you to make new connections with people you didn't know.
Um... Adding and relating to people you know in real life is what social networking *is*.
I'd really like to see the demographic of the msot active accounts. Just from my own anecdotal evidence. the vast majority of facebook users seem to be teen girls. Most adults I know use Facebook as a specific tool; to get name recognition for an election, to spread word of an art show, etc.
From my anecdotal evidence, the vast majority of the users are adults - all the way from young adults like my twenty something nieces to senior citizens like my seventy something grandmother. And the adults are using Facebook in the way it's meant to be used (for social networking purposes) rather than as an advertising platform.
The teen girls seem to use it for social networking the most. Teen girls grow up, get boyfriends, move on.
Moving on doesn't mean moving away from Facebook - it means adding college friends and later work friends to your circle.
The vendor who built this system should have used an encoded PIN to tie the SIM to the embedded system it was built into. That way the SIM on it's own is fairly useless without the rest of the electronics.
Assuming the vendor provided the sim, rather than (and far more likely) the JRA.
They also should have had a 'phone home' facility so that whoever is monitoring the system would have noticed when the systems were compromised.
SIM cards with a 'phone home' facility? That would be a neat trick.
Fitting tamper switches to the enclosure (door opened, removed from pole, etc would have been smart.
And expensive. And prone to failure.
Checking the bills on the cards to see where they are calling, how much has been spent, etc would have been smart
Reading TFA is seems that's exactly what they did.
This really sounds like a system built by the cheapest tenderer - not unusual for a government organisation.
Nah, sounds more like a typical mindless comment by a typical Slashdot jackass know-it-all.
I was thinking much the same thing... There probably is a happy medium, but it's going to be really really hard to hit.
Sitting a monitoring console hour after hour, day after day, is very tiring and wearing. So systems that monitor for trends and alert the operator are very valuable for cutting through that. But on the flip side, it becomes very easy to depend more and more on the automated systems and less and less on knowledge of the system, environment, and equipment. TAANSTAFL.
Disclaimer: Unlike many Slashdotters, I've actually sat roughly this kind of console, though mine was attached to strategic missiles rather than an oil well. And since I was aboard an SSBN rather than an oil rig, I've done the isolation bit as well.
Though the usual Slashdot chorus of Monday Morning Quarterbacks (read: "I'm a computer geek and thus an expert on everything, regardless of experience") will soon chime in, I'll state from actual experience that being such an operator isn't nearly as easy as you think it is.
It's fairly trivial to design a vehicle to create the 'hole' - the problem is that the 'hole' is fairly narrow and always pointed to where you're coming from. This isn't always a useful direction.
Really? What kind of bandwidth does one need to send power usage information?
Not much per customer. Scale it up across the 300k odd people (no idea of the actual number of residences/businesses), and I'd imagine it adds up to quite a bit. Doubly so if the link is two way.
Slashdot Mirror
And who says Motorola isn't giving me exactly what I want - a phone that works and does the tasks I demand of it.
For the vast majority of their customers, Motorola *is* doing the right thing. You're a tiny, almost unoticeable minority. Grow and deal with it rather than whining your every whim isn't being catered to.
Maybe nothing of value was lost to you, but (though you may not realize this) the universe doesn't revolve around you. Not being able to access my email, or my portfolio's, or the mailing lists I administer on Yahoo - that's things of considerable value lost to me.
Yeah. They've never released the Bible in the common tongue. They've never held mass in the common tongue either. Oh, wait. Hell, the Catholic Bible itself isn't even a millenia old.
So was, and did, I. But unlike you, I didn't take that as a reason to be grossly ignorant of the Church and it's history.
Then 'most people' need to get their heads out of clouds and learn a) the difference between an 'ideal' system and one that must function in the real world, and b) how the real systems works. (And it actually does work very well.)
Not to mention the summary and article are vastly misleading - if you read just the summary or the first part of the article, you'll be wrongly outraged. The truth of the matter is, he was sentenced to imprisonment and (drum roll please!) he was duly imprisoned. The judge's recommendations ('wishes') that he spend his time in a half way house have zero legal force or standing. The only 'intervention' by the 'officials' was to obey the (legally binding) result and sentence handed down by the court.
Well, those of us who understand science and engineering understand that there are applications where radio waves can cause interference with other things. So yeah, that difference is important.
But keep pluggin' away kid, soon you'll learn these things too.
And why exactly should I care what Jimmy Wales thinks?
Assuming you use SMS (I don't, quite a few of the older people I know don't but do use Facebook), or are on the road where a sign happens to be (all three of them in my county, precisely none anywhere I normally drive)...
Putting them on Facebook (which I'm already logged in on) in a GUI I already use (and is thuse hardly 'in the way') isn't a waste of time, it's a good thing. (Or, less charitably, don't use a good thing as a springboard for a rant against Facebook.)
Sure, if your tinfoil hat has the shiny side the wrong way 'round. But when you think about it, you're talking about 300 million Americans with the number of daily transactions probably running into the tens of billions when you include businesses... That's a lot of data to analyze for just a fishing expedition. So, such an assumption if you're 'not important' is more than a bit of a stretch.
Do those sour grapes taste good?
The site the graphic's creators ripped off lists the Beyond Batmobile under 'Alternate Timelines'.
Yep, and even though it upset all of physics forever, the funding mechanism still ground on for nearly a century - the last date I can find of someone trying to refine the results of the MMX is in the 1970's.
The lesson hasn't been learned because it isn't a lesson - it's a childish tantrum.
The problem is, the costs you cite don't account for more than a fraction of the total cost of the book. The absolute sin here is being studiously and willfully ignorant of the publishing industry.
That sounds really impressive, so long as you concentrate on soundbite and don't think to hard about the reality. The reality is they made less than they would have made with a publisher - because all the things a publisher does, they now had to do for themselves.
So if it's a different business model, you're openly admitting to comparing apples to oranges in order to prop up your argument about pomegranates. When we're being polite, we call that intellectual dishonesty.
You also point out, inadvertently, the game breaking flaw in your 'model' - it only works for known authors or (very) niche markets.
Well, elite military units are fault tolerant in direct proportion to their size - an airplane can tolerate virtually none, a SEAL team just a wee bit, a submarine crew quite a bit more (but still not very much by conventional standards). So you're definitely onto something there.
But my central point still stands - how do you screen? In the elite units there are trainers* and exercises that slowly put the pressure on without excessive risk to real assets, but I don't see any clear way to do so for this type of mission.
*I still remember the first time we went into the 'get wet' damage control trainer in sub school. The instructor was very clear - we were there because we weren't putting a real boat at risk, but we could hurt or kill ourselves. (And that failing the DC block because of poor safety practices could mean being bounced from the school.)
If there were private armies, you'd have a point. But the forces in question aren't private armies (that is armies that answer to an authority other than the government), they're contracted security forces. The problem isn't their existence, it's inadequate training, supervision, and accountability.
Sadly? Hell, I'd be frightened out of my boots if they were the same. They shouldn't be the same because they don't operate at the same level, let alone in the same sphere. Most people are interested in themselves and their short term interests - the government is responsible for protecting me from the fallout of that and ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number even if it causes inconvenience and pain to a small number. *Somebody* has to take the broader and longer term view.
Dramatic? Really? Apart from some tempests-in-a-teapot drummed up by attention whores (of which the summary above is a prime example), the reaction has mostly been non-existent. No governments have fallen. No politician has resigned. Nobody has been arrested, let alone arraigned. Etc... etc... Don't confuse internet karma whoring with real life.
There can't be a war crime when the war isn't being conducted between signatories of the Geneva Convention. (That's not to say it's not distasteful as hell, as well as a huge civil rights/human rights violation.) And that's exactly *why* nothing much happened - those opposed to war and to the Bush administration (the two sets were not in 100% overlap) couldn't gain any traction because they'd already shot themselves in the foot. Right from Day One they so amped up the noise and hype and so lowered the level of discourse that when the real transgressions started to come to light, they'd numbed everyone because they'd cried wolf so loud and so long.
The problem isn't finding volunteers, or finding qualified volunteers - it's the last one ("capable") that's the real problem.
Just in the US Navy we have decades of experience in screening volunteers for elite and semi elite forces (SEALS, Submarines, Naval Aviators), not just psychological screening - but academics, motivation, medical, etc... Yet *still* we get it wrong an uncomfortably large percentage of the time. In the case of a one-way trip to Mars, we don't even know what to screen *for*. How do you really know the volunteer can actually handle it? There's not really any way to test, and unlike the elite services you can't rely on discovering it during training, the volunteer not completely wigging out, or on their being enough others around to carry the load when he does.
It would be even better if the smaller parties stopped trying to leap tall buildings in a single bound when they are barely capable of stepping over a wad of gum on the sidewalk.
Seriously, 90% of the reason the smaller parties can't get any traction is that they over reach every time. They appear from nowhere with no experience and no track record and insist they be considered for the top job(s). Try getting a track record - run for city council, mayor, the state legislature, etc... etc... build an actual party rather than insisting they be treated as one when they blatantly aren't.
The other 9.999% of the reason is the smaller parties are often single plank/narrow philosophy.
It won't happen because doing so is Very Hard Work and will take years if not decades to do. The Libertarian party lacks the structure, vision, and will to take on the task.
Indeed. AOL died because the 'real' internet offered a superset of what AOL offered. Once AOL had nothing exclusive left, and no longer had a lock on acess to content, they died.
I'm not at all certain that's even possible with Facebook. I'm not even what would be comparable for Facebook.
Um... Adding and relating to people you know in real life is what social networking *is*.
From my anecdotal evidence, the vast majority of the users are adults - all the way from young adults like my twenty something nieces to senior citizens like my seventy something grandmother. And the adults are using Facebook in the way it's meant to be used (for social networking purposes) rather than as an advertising platform.
Moving on doesn't mean moving away from Facebook - it means adding college friends and later work friends to your circle.
Assuming the vendor provided the sim, rather than (and far more likely) the JRA.
SIM cards with a 'phone home' facility? That would be a neat trick.
And expensive. And prone to failure.
Reading TFA is seems that's exactly what they did.
Nah, sounds more like a typical mindless comment by a typical Slashdot jackass know-it-all.
I was thinking much the same thing... There probably is a happy medium, but it's going to be really really hard to hit.
Sitting a monitoring console hour after hour, day after day, is very tiring and wearing. So systems that monitor for trends and alert the operator are very valuable for cutting through that. But on the flip side, it becomes very easy to depend more and more on the automated systems and less and less on knowledge of the system, environment, and equipment. TAANSTAFL.
Disclaimer: Unlike many Slashdotters, I've actually sat roughly this kind of console, though mine was attached to strategic missiles rather than an oil well. And since I was aboard an SSBN rather than an oil rig, I've done the isolation bit as well.
Though the usual Slashdot chorus of Monday Morning Quarterbacks (read: "I'm a computer geek and thus an expert on everything, regardless of experience") will soon chime in, I'll state from actual experience that being such an operator isn't nearly as easy as you think it is.
It's fairly trivial to design a vehicle to create the 'hole' - the problem is that the 'hole' is fairly narrow and always pointed to where you're coming from. This isn't always a useful direction.
Not much per customer. Scale it up across the 300k odd people (no idea of the actual number of residences/businesses), and I'd imagine it adds up to quite a bit. Doubly so if the link is two way.