Chickens, Pigs, and Humans. In some parts of the world, they are in close proximity to each other. The influenza variants that can attack either of these three animals are very similar to each other, but not identical. So, normally a bird flu only affects birds, for example. However, flu viruses are extremely mutagenic, and in reality mutate constantly. A problem with flu vaccines is they must be made from a strain that exists in early summer (to have time to make enough) but there is a strong chance that the virus will have mutated enough by the winter that the vaccine is not as effective, or has no effectiveness. Every once in a while, because of the similarity, a mutation will happen that allows that particular strain to cross a barrier; a bird flu might mutate into one that can infect pigs, for example. Or a swine flu may mutate to one that can infect humans. Since it is a new strain, no-one has antibodies to fight it. The 1918/1919 strain killed between 2 and 20% of those infected. A normal flu fatality rate is about 0.1%. Similarly, the 1918/1919 strain tended to fell healthy adults under 65 with a majority between 20 and 40, and not those under 2 or over 70 who comprise the majority of more ordinary strains' fatal victims. It is this tendency that is most alarming with the current outbreak. A mutation of the 1918/1919 variant is called "swine flu" and is common in pigs today. That particular strain cannot infect humans. It was previously believed that the 1918/1919 strain was originally a swine flu, but recent research suggests it mutated from a bird flu. No one really knows for sure, however. The country that best handled the risk in 1918/1919 was Japan, who issued strict travel limits, and had a mortality rate of just over twice the normal at 0.425%. Island nations who did not do so suffered fatality rates of 5% and more.
"... If you are running a 100Mbit/s network on old CAT 5, can that affect performance?..." Yes. "... Do CAT 5(e) cables get old?..." Yes. Questions you didn't ask: Q: Are old cables bad cables? A: By themselves, no. CAT 5 is made of high quality copper with a PTFE (Teflon) dielectric and protected by a reasonably robust PVC jacket that is rated for in-wall use, a high specification to begin with. They are essentially made of materials selected from the list of the best appropriate materials generally used for any cable need, and better than most of the cable in your home, your car, etc Q: Does it degrade slowly over time? A: Yes, in the sense that everything does, and no in the sense that either it's broken or it's not broken. Q: How will I know if it's broken? A: It won't work, and that includes intermittently not working. Q: Can cables break? A: Yes. If they do, replace or repair them. Q: Should I replace my Cat5 cables with Cat6? A: Probably not. Q: Is the shininess and newness of my cables the most important part? A: No, the shininess and newness is relatively unimportant. The corrosionlessness and unbrokenness is fairly important, as is the competenceness of the installer, the appropriateness of the grade of original cabling and connectors, and the qualityness of any work by the installer. Q: Is it easy to screw up a Cat5/5e/6 installation. A: Yes. Having said all that, CatX cable is remarkably resilient and amazingly tolerant of pathetic, shoddy and downright incompetent installation. Take comfort in that. Q: What if I'm not getting the speed I should be from my network? A: Test the cables for integrity, and if you find you need to replace all the cabling, start on page one and decide what to replace it with and what your future needs will be. Keep in mind the goal is "future interconnection" and not "replace the Cat5 with Cat6" (even though that might be the proper conclusion). Whatever your answers, install it all at the same time.
"... Have you estimated the land use for uranium mining, tailings piles, waste storage, etc.?..."
I fly over said Uranium Mines all the time; the area required is not large, this includes the tailings ponds (not piles; water is an excellent barrier to radiation) and could be compared to the land used by a small city's airport. These particular mines currently supply 35% of world demand; less than the current US demand.
Currently, worldwide, spent nuclear waste is stored at the power reactor's site, again under water, and the assumption in the industry is that will never change, simply because a long-term solution is, for many reasons, not likely to arrive anytime soon. So, there is always room for all anticipated waste on site, and there is no additional land use penalty beyond the reactor site itself for waste storage.
You misunderstand the meaning of "Real Property", and in fact are using the legal description of "Personal Property" in your argument.
"... In the common law, real property (or realty) refers to one of the two main classes of property, the other class being personal property (personalty). Real property generally encompasses land, land improvements resulting from human effort including buildings and machinery sited on land, and various property rights over the preceding...."
In other words, ship the land your house sits on to another country, then. IP is the same in law.
Copyright, Trademark and Patent laws are all forms of property rights. That they are artificial property, as compared to real property (real estate), is interesting but otherwise essentially irrelevant. What matters is like all real property, these other property rights are national, not international, in scope. Copyright exists in one nation, and is created by an act of law and under the laws of that nation, alone.
For residents of some other country, the copyrights reside with some other entity (which is to say that entity might be the same, but it's an instance of owning two things by the same party, not the same thing by the same party).
There might be treaties, there might be agreements, there might be a lot of things, but the copyrights are sovereign things and are the business of the soverign authority. They cannot move across borders anymore than your acre of land can move across a border.
This is just a simple drawing back from a technically illegal sales model to a system of perfectly legal sale. Can't blame them.
"... Log out and you will not be redirected, regardless of where in Canada you live...."
Sorry, should have tested it a bit more. Once you log in, the first time you go to a Google search page, it's saved in your Google cookies, so that after that instance, whether you are logged in or not, the redirection persists.
I never remain logged into my Google account, and therefore have never tried to search while logged in, which is why it did not redirect me, ruling out geolocation (because by definition that means it would redirect based on IP alone for everyone).
Once I logged in once, and went to Google dotcom, it redirected me during and after I logged out, hinting that it's saved in a cookie.
Sure enough, deleting cookies reverted to the standard behaviour; if I entered dot com I went to dot com, if I entered dot ca I went to dot ca.
"... The simplest explanation, without getting into conspiracy theories, is that Google does that at least for some regions, and that they use geolocation to do so...."
I appreciate your confidence in the face of evidence to the contrary, but none the less you are wrong. I have, however, found out the answer.
You are being redirected because you remain logged into your Google account (gmail, etc), and Google is using the preferences you have saved with your Google account. Log out and you will not be redirected, regardless of where in Canada you live.
I do not doubt that you are being redirected. My point is it's not Google.
"... regardless of whether I set preferred language to "en-US" or "en-CA" in browser setting..."
Were that the only way to determine where you were, you would be on to something. But, alas, no self-respecting application or entity is going to rely on something so easily altered by the user.
Anyone online can determine your location via your IP address, which is assigned based on what country you are in, for one, and assigned to an ISP, probably, for two. When I was on sat in a remote region of northern Canada, banner ads from the usual dating sites insisted I was in New York, USA, because that's where the uplink dish is. That's an obvious proof that they use simple scripts and read it from the IP address; see (Scroll down for the info they read from your ISP).
However, that's not the only place an app resident on your machine can look. Generally they can read the address info you entered when your registered your Operating System, if you're on Windows or a Mac. Windows does not use this info when it does validation, but it none the less is stored and is available for all non-validation or OS update tasks. This is generally stored in a hidden file; on MacOS you can check what is available by looking at your Address Book. Everything will show up in the entry for "Me" with your login icon; you need to edit this info via the Terminal if you want to change or delete it.
However, it need not be as sinister as all that. If you registered Opera, then Opera may be doing it. If not, your ISP might be doing it.
I can tell you that this is a fairly commonly reported issue but that there does not seem to be any definitive answer to solving (or changing) it... some people report being redirected to Google Spain or Google Germany or Google Egypt from Canada, and that the behaviour will suddenly stop or start abruptly, persist for a while, and then go away by itself. Others delete Cookies; some say what you enter in the Google preferences page (and will be stored in your Google cookies) has an effect on it.
To me that means it's not something Google does as a matter of course.
Clearly you have never been to "English Canada", and for proof, I offer your silly, sweeping "observation". Although I will admit that, since the bar in the very research park in my city only allows staff and invited guests access, it's possible that they told you there was no bar. No idea why.
"... "is exchanging a robot arm for a ride on a spaceship a good deal?"..."
I appreciate your on-topic answer. I too think that trading something of value for another thing of value is a decent way to save a few bucks.
Perhaps the submitter should have asked the question three decades ago, then, when they started doing this stuff; the Canadians began developing the Shuttle robot arms in the late 1970's; the first one was used on STS-2, the second Shuttle Mission ever, on November 13 1881.
In other words, this is very old news. What's the point of his tagline? What does it add? Did he do it just because "it sounds like something a journalist would say?" They do that to make ad money, you know. No other reason. Is Slashdot broke?
Had he left it off, you and I perhaps could be posting about NASA and some cool tech right now.
I am clearly on a Canadian IP, yet I have to specifically enter Google dot ca to go to the local site; even then, it defaults to "Search Entire Web" which is exactly the same results as Google dot com. To get the localized links (in all Google's localized incarnations) you have to click "search pages from Canada" and that's a non-sticky option.
This behaviour is consistent over 3 incompatible OS's and multiple machines from multiple ISPs. I don't, however, use IE on any of them, including the Windows XP Pro one.
I would expect that some app (probably the browser) on your system is reading your OS-wide localization settings, and doing the redirect "for you". It's definitely not Google.
If it's not enough to change key defaults on an application-by-application basis (and the Finder is an application), you can remap every key on the keyboard, see:
It even has 1-click defaults for IBM Keyboard layouts and the Happy Hacking Keyboard. It's open source, natch.
If you don't own a laptop, Mini or iMac, there are others, and other approaches, including just creating your own KB layout.
Mac System 6 and 7 and OS8 and 9 were also very easy to change key combinations by application, or system wide, or via keyboard layout. I always mapped Command-S to Shutdown in the Finder, because even though Command-S is a system-wide default for Save, there is no Save function in the Finder, so it was free to be used. One click and walk away. Trite, I know, but still my favourite mod ever. Took about 30 seconds to implement, too.
"... [Nice, thoughtful and reasonably accurate news summary aimed at people with a brain}. Fair Trade?..."
What is this, Fox News? Do you think/.'ers can't come up with a controversy and discussion themselves, unless prodded with a tagline designed to con viewers to wait for the story after these messages from our fine sponsors?
I simply do not understand the persistence by election officials to use flawed voting methods whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, this is a GO/NO GO issue. Apparently with most State Election Officials it's a GO/GO issue with no asterisk, no qualifications, nothing. This just in... you can run an election on paper if you just keep the polls a manageable size. So, there's no excuse for not having a fall back method to replace one that does not work.
Maybe they should just contact the gaming industry... they could whip up a few machines that could randomly select votes. At least then they would be contracting people with a proven track record of actually building a machine that does what it says it will.
Run 'em on TV in front of God And Everybody and declare a winner. It's essentially what's happening now, anyway.
In my case, a MicroSD 2GB flash media file, that had been in my phone and worked for a while, just stopped working period, to the point where the phone reported that it simply didn't exist. I though the phone was broken.
Nope. Popped into a known good MicroSD adapter and that into a known good multiformat flash reader, it's as if the thing simply does not exist whatsoever. An identical MicroSD card bought at the same time and installed in my Garmin GPS works fine, in the GPS, in the adapter and via the reader. I put it in my phone, and the phone saw it, although because it's full of GPS data and maps, I made no attempt to actually use it with the phone.
Died, plain and simple. Not even heavy enough to be used as a boat anchor so it's a truly useless thing.
I certainly don't have any issues with what you are suggesting. Fundamentally it's all true.
However, there is one thing that newspapers want that they don't say out loud, for fear that someone will know the secret, and that Google or any other 'net based aggregator just kills.
They want to be (you could say "need to be", if the old model is to work) the only source of your news. All of it. The only paper you read.
Reading from a number of (just for arguement's sake) perfectly good newspapers online is a direct attack on the model. They cannot get advertisers to pay them when advertisers can see that a particular paper has no exclusive eyes to offer. If they can pay someone else for those eyes, at a potentially lower cost, they will.
This is in some ways no different from the same issues TV stations faced with the rollout of cable.
The world is different now, so it's not a perfectly transferable analogy, but none the less it's a fundamentally valuable analogy. And newspapers need to make a change in the business model that is in essence as radical as the changes TV had to make during the late 1970's and 1980's, and continue to do; we must not forget that they continued to adapt during the 1990's and in this decade.
"... One thing to remember about the newspaper business: The home delivery subscriber is *not* the customer. The advertiser is...."
There is a great deal of truth in that, but it's not the whole picture, or a completely illustrative analogy. If the advertiser is the customer, then the home delivery subscriber is the product (the subscriber's eyes are what is sold to the customer). Yet, there is another layer that needs to be accounted for. The news and editorial content is also the product, and the home delivery subscriber is also the customer.
That complex relationship, where each depends on the other, is the crux of the problem newspapers face. Each element of their business model affects the other when the status quo is altered. It's that complexity with the relationships that makes it more difficult to know what is broken, what needs fixing, and how to fix it, or what new business method might supplant the old if it can't be fixed.
In reality, they don't really know the answers to any of those problems, and can only guess at solutions, or use a try-it-and-see approach.
Slashdot Mirror
Chickens, Pigs, and Humans. In some parts of the world, they are in close proximity to each other.
The influenza variants that can attack either of these three animals are very similar to each other, but not identical.
So, normally a bird flu only affects birds, for example.
However, flu viruses are extremely mutagenic, and in reality mutate constantly.
A problem with flu vaccines is they must be made from a strain that exists in early summer (to have time to make enough) but there is a strong chance that the virus will have mutated enough by the winter that the vaccine is not as effective, or has no effectiveness.
Every once in a while, because of the similarity, a mutation will happen that allows that particular strain to cross a barrier; a bird flu might mutate into one that can infect pigs, for example.
Or a swine flu may mutate to one that can infect humans. Since it is a new strain, no-one has antibodies to fight it.
The 1918/1919 strain killed between 2 and 20% of those infected. A normal flu fatality rate is about 0.1%.
Similarly, the 1918/1919 strain tended to fell healthy adults under 65 with a majority between 20 and 40, and not those under 2 or over 70 who comprise the majority of more ordinary strains' fatal victims. It is this tendency that is most alarming with the current outbreak.
A mutation of the 1918/1919 variant is called "swine flu" and is common in pigs today. That particular strain cannot infect humans. It was previously believed that the 1918/1919 strain was originally a swine flu, but recent research suggests it mutated from a bird flu. No one really knows for sure, however.
The country that best handled the risk in 1918/1919 was Japan, who issued strict travel limits, and had a mortality rate of just over twice the normal at 0.425%. Island nations who did not do so suffered fatality rates of 5% and more.
" ... but it is better to over-react than to under-react and end up with a huge world-wide influenza epidemic such as occurred in 1918. ..."
And that epidemic was caused by ... wait for it ... swine flu.
This whole thing is a moving target.
Anything your algorithm can do, my algorithm can do too.
Might work for a while, though, but then again, so did CAPTCHAs.
Wait, did I just say "so did CAPTCHAs"? What I meant was, so are CAPTCHAs, because everyone is still using them, even though they don't work.
Which is the real problem ... not only is the whole thing a moving target, but tackling the problem only works when everyone actually moves.
Remember, it's measure --> countermeasure.
All this really means is now everyone gets to live like we really are in a 1960's spy movie. Sure hope that's what everyone wanted.
" ... If you are running a 100Mbit/s network on old CAT 5, can that affect performance? ..." ... Do CAT 5(e) cables get old? ..."
Yes.
"
Yes.
Questions you didn't ask:
Q: Are old cables bad cables? A: By themselves, no. CAT 5 is made of high quality copper with a PTFE (Teflon) dielectric and protected by a reasonably robust PVC jacket that is rated for in-wall use, a high specification to begin with. They are essentially made of materials selected from the list of the best appropriate materials generally used for any cable need, and better than most of the cable in your home, your car, etc
Q: Does it degrade slowly over time? A: Yes, in the sense that everything does, and no in the sense that either it's broken or it's not broken.
Q: How will I know if it's broken? A: It won't work, and that includes intermittently not working.
Q: Can cables break? A: Yes. If they do, replace or repair them.
Q: Should I replace my Cat5 cables with Cat6? A: Probably not.
Q: Is the shininess and newness of my cables the most important part? A: No, the shininess and newness is relatively unimportant. The corrosionlessness and unbrokenness is fairly important, as is the competenceness of the installer, the appropriateness of the grade of original cabling and connectors, and the qualityness of any work by the installer.
Q: Is it easy to screw up a Cat5/5e/6 installation. A: Yes. Having said all that, CatX cable is remarkably resilient and amazingly tolerant of pathetic, shoddy and downright incompetent installation. Take comfort in that.
Q: What if I'm not getting the speed I should be from my network? A: Test the cables for integrity, and if you find you need to replace all the cabling, start on page one and decide what to replace it with and what your future needs will be. Keep in mind the goal is "future interconnection" and not "replace the Cat5 with Cat6" (even though that might be the proper conclusion). Whatever your answers, install it all at the same time.
" ... Have you estimated the land use for uranium mining, tailings piles, waste storage, etc.? ..."
I fly over said Uranium Mines all the time; the area required is not large, this includes the tailings ponds (not piles; water is an excellent barrier to radiation) and could be compared to the land used by a small city's airport. These particular mines currently supply 35% of world demand; less than the current US demand.
Currently, worldwide, spent nuclear waste is stored at the power reactor's site, again under water, and the assumption in the industry is that will never change, simply because a long-term solution is, for many reasons, not likely to arrive anytime soon. So, there is always room for all anticipated waste on site, and there is no additional land use penalty beyond the reactor site itself for waste storage.
You misunderstand the meaning of "Real Property", and in fact are using the legal description of "Personal Property" in your argument.
" ... In the common law, real property (or realty) refers to one of the two main classes of property, the other class being personal property (personalty). Real property generally encompasses land, land improvements resulting from human effort including buildings and machinery sited on land, and various property rights over the preceding. ..."
In other words, ship the land your house sits on to another country, then. IP is the same in law.
Copyright, Trademark and Patent laws are all forms of property rights.
That they are artificial property, as compared to real property (real estate), is interesting but otherwise essentially irrelevant.
What matters is like all real property, these other property rights are national, not international, in scope.
Copyright exists in one nation, and is created by an act of law and under the laws of that nation, alone.
For residents of some other country, the copyrights reside with some other entity (which is to say that entity might be the same, but it's an instance of owning two things by the same party, not the same thing by the same party).
There might be treaties, there might be agreements, there might be a lot of things, but the copyrights are sovereign things and are the business of the soverign authority. They cannot move across borders anymore than your acre of land can move across a border.
This is just a simple drawing back from a technically illegal sales model to a system of perfectly legal sale. Can't blame them.
" ... "...Teksavvy has informed it's customers that were this to go through the current monthly cap would be quartered ..."
WHO did WHAT now? Isn't Bell supposed to be in there somewhere?
" ... Log out and you will not be redirected, regardless of where in Canada you live. ..."
Sorry, should have tested it a bit more. Once you log in, the first time you go to a Google search page, it's saved in your Google cookies, so that after that instance, whether you are logged in or not, the redirection persists.
I never remain logged into my Google account, and therefore have never tried to search while logged in, which is why it did not redirect me, ruling out geolocation (because by definition that means it would redirect based on IP alone for everyone).
Once I logged in once, and went to Google dotcom, it redirected me during and after I logged out, hinting that it's saved in a cookie.
Sure enough, deleting cookies reverted to the standard behaviour; if I entered dot com I went to dot com, if I entered dot ca I went to dot ca.
" ... The simplest explanation, without getting into conspiracy theories, is that Google does that at least for some regions, and that they use geolocation to do so. ..."
I appreciate your confidence in the face of evidence to the contrary, but none the less you are wrong. I have, however, found out the answer.
You are being redirected because you remain logged into your Google account (gmail, etc), and Google is using the preferences you have saved with your Google account. Log out and you will not be redirected, regardless of where in Canada you live.
Why didn't you say the "English Canada" that you were referring to was actually The-Centre-Of-The-Universe?
That explains everything.
Sorry ... it WAS there when I previewed it, must have inadvertently edited it out.
" ... That's an obvious proof that they use simple scripts and read it from the IP address; see http://www.ip2location.com/free.asp/ (Scroll Down)
I do not doubt that you are being redirected. My point is it's not Google.
" ... regardless of whether I set preferred language to "en-US" or "en-CA" in browser setting ..."
Were that the only way to determine where you were, you would be on to something. But, alas, no self-respecting application or entity is going to rely on something so easily altered by the user.
Anyone online can determine your location via your IP address, which is assigned based on what country you are in, for one, and assigned to an ISP, probably, for two.
When I was on sat in a remote region of northern Canada, banner ads from the usual dating sites insisted I was in New York, USA, because that's where the uplink dish is. That's an obvious proof that they use simple scripts and read it from the IP address; see (Scroll down for the info they read from your ISP).
However, that's not the only place an app resident on your machine can look. Generally they can read the address info you entered when your registered your Operating System, if you're on Windows or a Mac. Windows does not use this info when it does validation, but it none the less is stored and is available for all non-validation or OS update tasks. This is generally stored in a hidden file; on MacOS you can check what is available by looking at your Address Book. Everything will show up in the entry for "Me" with your login icon; you need to edit this info via the Terminal if you want to change or delete it.
However, it need not be as sinister as all that. If you registered Opera, then Opera may be doing it. If not, your ISP might be doing it.
I can tell you that this is a fairly commonly reported issue but that there does not seem to be any definitive answer to solving (or changing) it ... some people report being redirected to Google Spain or Google Germany or Google Egypt from Canada, and that the behaviour will suddenly stop or start abruptly, persist for a while, and then go away by itself. Others delete Cookies; some say what you enter in the Google preferences page (and will be stored in your Google cookies) has an effect on it.
To me that means it's not something Google does as a matter of course.
Clearly you have never been to "English Canada", and for proof, I offer your silly, sweeping "observation". Although I will admit that, since the bar in the very research park in my city only allows staff and invited guests access, it's possible that they told you there was no bar. No idea why.
" ... November 13 1881. ..."
Or maybe a century later, say, 1981 ;-)
" ... "is exchanging a robot arm for a ride on a spaceship a good deal?" ..."
I appreciate your on-topic answer. I too think that trading something of value for another thing of value is a decent way to save a few bucks.
Perhaps the submitter should have asked the question three decades ago, then, when they started doing this stuff; the Canadians began developing the Shuttle robot arms in the late 1970's; the first one was used on STS-2, the second Shuttle Mission ever, on November 13 1881.
In other words, this is very old news. What's the point of his tagline? What does it add? Did he do it just because "it sounds like something a journalist would say?" They do that to make ad money, you know. No other reason. Is Slashdot broke?
Had he left it off, you and I perhaps could be posting about NASA and some cool tech right now.
No they don't.
I am clearly on a Canadian IP, yet I have to specifically enter Google dot ca to go to the local site; even then, it defaults to "Search Entire Web" which is exactly the same results as Google dot com. To get the localized links (in all Google's localized incarnations) you have to click "search pages from Canada" and that's a non-sticky option.
This behaviour is consistent over 3 incompatible OS's and multiple machines from multiple ISPs. I don't, however, use IE on any of them, including the Windows XP Pro one.
I would expect that some app (probably the browser) on your system is reading your OS-wide localization settings, and doing the redirect "for you". It's definitely not Google.
If it's not enough to change key defaults on an application-by-application basis (and the Finder is an application), you can remap every key on the keyboard, see:
http://www.pqrs.org/tekezo/macosx/keyremap4macbook/document.html/
It even has 1-click defaults for IBM Keyboard layouts and the Happy Hacking Keyboard. It's open source, natch.
If you don't own a laptop, Mini or iMac, there are others, and other approaches, including just creating your own KB layout.
Mac System 6 and 7 and OS8 and 9 were also very easy to change key combinations by application, or system wide, or via keyboard layout.
I always mapped Command-S to Shutdown in the Finder, because even though Command-S is a system-wide default for Save, there is no Save function in the Finder, so it was free to be used.
One click and walk away. Trite, I know, but still my favourite mod ever. Took about 30 seconds to implement, too.
" ... [Nice, thoughtful and reasonably accurate news summary aimed at people with a brain}. ..."
Fair Trade?
What is this, Fox News? Do you think /.'ers can't come up with a controversy and discussion themselves, unless prodded with a tagline designed to con viewers to wait for the story after these messages from our fine sponsors?
" ... Namely, Mac OS X has shortcut keys that are set in stone, much like Windows. ..."
Go to: System Preferences: Keyboard & Mouse: Shortcut Keys:
Change at will.
I simply do not understand the persistence by election officials to use flawed voting methods whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, this is a GO/NO GO issue. ... you can run an election on paper if you just keep the polls a manageable size. So, there's no excuse for not having a fall back method to replace one that does not work.
Apparently with most State Election Officials it's a GO/GO issue with no asterisk, no qualifications, nothing. This just in
Maybe they should just contact the gaming industry ... they could whip up a few machines that could randomly select votes. At least then they would be contracting people with a proven track record of actually building a machine that does what it says it will.
Run 'em on TV in front of God And Everybody and declare a winner. It's essentially what's happening now, anyway.
In my case, a MicroSD 2GB flash media file, that had been in my phone and worked for a while, just stopped working period, to the point where the phone reported that it simply didn't exist. I though the phone was broken.
Nope. Popped into a known good MicroSD adapter and that into a known good multiformat flash reader, it's as if the thing simply does not exist whatsoever. An identical MicroSD card bought at the same time and installed in my Garmin GPS works fine, in the GPS, in the adapter and via the reader. I put it in my phone, and the phone saw it, although because it's full of GPS data and maps, I made no attempt to actually use it with the phone.
Died, plain and simple. Not even heavy enough to be used as a boat anchor so it's a truly useless thing.
I certainly don't have any issues with what you are suggesting. Fundamentally it's all true.
However, there is one thing that newspapers want that they don't say out loud, for fear that someone will know the secret, and that Google or any other 'net based aggregator just kills.
They want to be (you could say "need to be", if the old model is to work) the only source of your news. All of it. The only paper you read.
Reading from a number of (just for arguement's sake) perfectly good newspapers online is a direct attack on the model. They cannot get advertisers to pay them when advertisers can see that a particular paper has no exclusive eyes to offer. If they can pay someone else for those eyes, at a potentially lower cost, they will.
This is in some ways no different from the same issues TV stations faced with the rollout of cable.
The world is different now, so it's not a perfectly transferable analogy, but none the less it's a fundamentally valuable analogy. And newspapers need to make a change in the business model that is in essence as radical as the changes TV had to make during the late 1970's and 1980's, and continue to do; we must not forget that they continued to adapt during the 1990's and in this decade.
" ... One thing to remember about the newspaper business: The home delivery subscriber is *not* the customer. The advertiser is. ..."
There is a great deal of truth in that, but it's not the whole picture, or a completely illustrative analogy. If the advertiser is the customer, then the home delivery subscriber is the product (the subscriber's eyes are what is sold to the customer). Yet, there is another layer that needs to be accounted for. The news and editorial content is also the product, and the home delivery subscriber is also the customer.
That complex relationship, where each depends on the other, is the crux of the problem newspapers face. Each element of their business model affects the other when the status quo is altered. It's that complexity with the relationships that makes it more difficult to know what is broken, what needs fixing, and how to fix it, or what new business method might supplant the old if it can't be fixed.
In reality, they don't really know the answers to any of those problems, and can only guess at solutions, or use a try-it-and-see approach.
Which is what they are doing with Google.
" ... How do I provide a workstation to last 15 years? ..."
Answer #1: Apparently you should ask your dad.
Answer #2: Look what you've done: now everybody will want one.