I think you missed the lack of a wall part... in the search engine, just go to another search engine, or enter the URL manually.
In the apple app store just go to another app store... oh wait, you can't... well that's fine, just load the app manually... oh wait, can't do that either.
See, they both have curated gardens, but only one has a wall around it.
I'm too lazy to dig up the study right now, but there have been more than one that show that talking on a cell phone is significantly more annoying to other people in the vicinity than talking to another person who is there. It's something to do with the way the mind parses hearing only one side of a conversation. If you can hear both sides of a conversation you can tune it out, hearing only one side you end up having to listen to each time the person starts talking again and can't tune it out as easily.
I think Tata was being used as an example of an incumbent this law might help (by stifling the competition) rather than an example of a startup that might try to compete with it and get hurt by this...
I don't think apple has ever been accused of taking a walled garden approach to their web browser, so the fact you can access porn on it isn't really relevant to the discussion. The "walled garden" criticism is referring specifically to their method of application loading on stock iphones and ipads. And there is where the obvious difference lies. Both Apple and Google curate their respective "gardens" (marketplaces) however Google doesn't force you to use their marketplace, or even use any marketplace at all if you want to install your own applications. (A garden without walls, come and go as you please) Contrast with Apple who build walls around their garden to try to prevent users from installing any application not in the "garden" (the fact that some people have found holes in the wall (jailbreaking) does not negate the fact that the wall was built in the first place)
so you have 2 different people call a ground controller. Not hard to figure out. (not that any post-takeoff communication would be needed in a well planned situation anyway)
The last flight I was on had them, that was about 6 months ago. I don't see those going away any time soon, or at least not until they allow another method of communication on the plane.
Was any followup ever done on any of those 35 cases to see if the cell phones were actually the cause of the interference?
Incident reports of that form are simply "the crew says this happened"... it would be a lot more convincing if some followup was done to see if it was actually cell phone interference, or other interference that just happened to abate some time after a known cell phone was turned off.
It should be noted that the study linked stated that they weren't able to reproduce the results. Additionally the test they did that did show some interference had several unlikely assumptions. First of all, the equipment they used was that used in general aviation, not commercial aviation. It was also all old and outdated equipment unlikely to be in use on any airliner. Additionally the cell phone had to be on maximum power (I'm also not sure where they found a cell phone with a maximum power of 2 watts! I haven't seen one that powerful since the old brick phones of the late 1980s!) and less than 30cm from the equipment before it caused any interference.
Hardly a reliable study for the current situation we are discussing.
Interesting, but it brings up more questions than it answers. It says there were approximately 75 cases in the past 7 years where a pilot reported something suspicious that *may* have been the result of personal electronics interfering with systems. But no information on any followup to see if that was actually the case.
I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be a link (though other articles from the same source do...) I'm just saying that it sounds like no real followup was ever done on those cases to see if they were coincidence, pilot error, equipment malfunction (on either the personal electronics, or aircraft systems) or any other cause. Seems to me that this would have been of great interest to the whole aviation industry?
In small planes you certainly do, I've talked on a cell phone from within a cessna, and many headsets designed for small aircraft have bluetooth to connect to your cell phone (older ones had connectors for the wired jack on cell phones) so that you can talk on your cell phone despite the loud environment. When I last flew on a military aircraft the flight engineer was talking on his cell phone to communicate with the rescue coordination centre when the HF radio failed.
Cell towers do aim somewhat downward, but at altitude you have nothing to block your signal, so they often work anyway.
That said, if cell phones were permitted on planes, you can bet the wireless carriers would rush to sign contracts to install small cell sites inside the planes. works better with their network, and you can bet they'd find a way to add a premium "airplane roaming charge" of some form.
In a perfect world I'd like to see it where you are allowed to use your cell phone all you want on a plane, as long as you don't talk on it. Texting and data are fine, but please don't chat on your phone for the whole flight, out of courtesy to the rest of the passengers!
The thing about google's "walled garden" is that it doesn't have any walls, sure they curate what they deem to be actual content instead of spam ridden ad farms. But there's nothing to stop you from going to the span ridden link farm if you so choose.
Compare that to other well known "walled garden" approaches that prevent you from accessing/installing specific content, even if you specifically choose to do so, and the difference should be obvious.
Luckily for me, my current slate of sites is all highly specialized and catering to people who are specifically sent to the site from other places (usually not online) and not to people who need to search for them.
The last site I ran that had any reliance on search engines showed up in the top 5 results for the appropriate search terms, and that was strictly through content and proper tagging (nothing shady at all) Mind you that was also about 5 years ago, so who knows if the same would be true today. I wasn't gaming the system, but I was using it to full advantage (if talking about a specific subject, make sure that subject is a keyword even if the text misses that specific word, make sure all images have proper alt text, and there's text describing the scripts, etc.)
If I had mod points this would be +1 Funny... SEO is the business of circumventing the proper weighting of search results by "dodgy techniques", it always has been, and always will be. SEO didn't exist until people realized that bots had specific things they were looking for, and people started putting only those things in instead of writing good content that happened to include those things (what the bot writers originally assumed would be found) I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.
The problem is that there is no way for googlebot to know what "good content" is. SEO isn't some magic thing that makes bad content appear as good to a search engine, instead it's a way of gaming the mechanism that the bots use to try to determine genuinely good content (which is what the bot really is trying to find, it's just not smart enough to know the difference). The only solution is a smarter google-bot, and this is something that I think google really needs to work on, (and this seems to be the first step) I look forward to the day when the only way to game the system is to make a page that ends up being useful to your human visitors too...
It used to be that good content was what search engines were looking for. And by producing good (and well organized) content you automatically ended up at the top of the search rankings. Unfortunately search bots don't actually know what "good content" is, so all they can do is try to work with the bits that they can figure out, and that led to SEO which really ONLY exists to game those algorithms. This is a good move on google's part. I think one of the big failings of all search engines recently is that they have mostly been accepting SEO rather than fighting it. This leads to lots of garbage sites with good SEO grabbing all the top spots, and makes it very difficult to find really good sites. The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...
This is actually something that happened to my father quite a few years ago. He bought a computer from a private sale in the local classifieds, talking to the seller everything seemed to be in order, but just to be safe he called the police and asked if they could check the serial number against reportedly stolen ones, they took down the serial number and told my father that the computer did not appear to be reported stolen. My father paid and took the computer home.
A few months later he took the computer to a local shop to get more RAM installed, no incident immediately, but a couple days later the police showed up on the doorstep asking to see the computer. Turns out that the computer had originally been stolen from the same shop that my father had taken it to to be serviced, they had never noticed it missing from inventory until it was brought in for the upgrade with an inventory tracking tag still attached.
The police were actually quite good about the whole thing, they looked at the computer, confirmed it was the one in question, and said they needed to take it in to evidence, my father explained that all his data was on it and he needed a backup, they offered to go away and get a warrant, he stated that a warrent wouldn't be necessary, he believed them, he just needed some time. They then told him to just bring it by the station in a couple of days.
Unfortunately he ended up out the computer, but because he cooperated with the police, had a reciept from the seller, and had otherwise appeared to act in a reasonable manner, they didn't charge him with anything and gave him time to get his backup. Later he sued the original seller in small claims court and recovered the cost of the computer, and the shop was pretty good about it too and gave him a new computer at their cost because he was cooperative.
I know people on here frequently talk about NEVER cooperating with the police, always making sure they get a warrant, and you get a lawyer, etc. but had he followed that advice he would not have had time to get the backup, would have been dragged through the courts on a posession of stolen property charge (and possibly convicted as there wasn't much doubt about the fact it was stolen) and been out a fortune in legal fees. As it was he was simply out a bit of inconvenience, and a few hours in small claims court. (in fact I think the new computer the shop sold him ended up costing less than the previous one, and was higher spec, so in some ways he even came out ahead)
Why try again? they got everything they actually wanted, AND made people think that they didn't. It's win-win for everyone... well, except the general population, but we don't count anymore.
This is classic, they ask for a thousand things, and settle for 500, meanwhile the media reports how the grassroots campaigns won and that consumers "only" lost half their rights. That's not a victory for us!
It matters not what I think. The question isn't whether or not it interferes with the free market (The fact is that breaking up a monopoly DOES interfere with the free market, as by definition any and all regulation on the market is interference.) The question is whether or not we SHOULD interfere with the free market. In many cases the answer to that is yes, we should.
My point wasn't that the free market is the ideal we should strive for. My point was that we need to know what a free market is before we start talking about whether or not we want one. Don't advocate a free market when you want government intervention, and conversely don't blame a free market for things that were caused by government interference. How can we ever hope to improve our current system if we don't even understand what it is?
What I said was not a value judgment about whether a free market would be a better or worse thing than the current system, only that what we have now is by definition not a free market.
People blame the "free market" for today's woes, when in fact the market is not free. How can we ever hope to improve upon what we have now if we don't even recognize what it truly is?
Personally I don't support gun ownership (though that has no bearing either way on the current discussion), nor do I support a 100% free market. But I also realize that we must recognize what the market is or is not before we attempt to change it, for if we do not understand our starting point we risk making things worse rather than better when we make changes.
Maybe, maybe not. The point still stands that government meddling in the economy is precisely the opposite of the definition of a free market.
A free market may, or may not, be better than the current system, but you can't call the current system a free market.
Free markets never have government bailouts, regardless of the reason. A truly free market would not have the concept of copyright, patents, or trademarks.
People frequently blame our current situation on the free market, but that's not what we have right now. I'm not saying that the free market is the solution to our problems. But if we don't even understand what our current system is, or what the problems really are, how can we ever hope to improve upon it?
Increased density would be nice, but isn't even required at this point. The important part now is reduced cost, and that's not related to any of what you said.
The frustrating part is that we've been reading about huge breakthroughs in the cost of making solar panels for 15 years or more now, and while prices have come down a little bit in that time, the spectacular new methods proposed never seem to make it to market.
I'm ok with them not getting any more efficient, as long as they get to a point where I can afford them.
We actually have one one of those plants not far from me, it appears to be a water tower at the top of a hill and a pumping/generating station at the bottom, when the local area has excess generating capacity they pump water up to the tower, and when they have excess draw they let it flow back down through the generators.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed the lack of a wall part...
in the search engine, just go to another search engine, or enter the URL manually.
In the apple app store just go to another app store... oh wait, you can't... well that's fine, just load the app manually... oh wait, can't do that either.
See, they both have curated gardens, but only one has a wall around it.
I'm too lazy to dig up the study right now, but there have been more than one that show that talking on a cell phone is significantly more annoying to other people in the vicinity than talking to another person who is there. It's something to do with the way the mind parses hearing only one side of a conversation. If you can hear both sides of a conversation you can tune it out, hearing only one side you end up having to listen to each time the person starts talking again and can't tune it out as easily.
I think Tata was being used as an example of an incumbent this law might help (by stifling the competition) rather than an example of a startup that might try to compete with it and get hurt by this...
I don't think apple has ever been accused of taking a walled garden approach to their web browser, so the fact you can access porn on it isn't really relevant to the discussion. The "walled garden" criticism is referring specifically to their method of application loading on stock iphones and ipads. And there is where the obvious difference lies. Both Apple and Google curate their respective "gardens" (marketplaces) however Google doesn't force you to use their marketplace, or even use any marketplace at all if you want to install your own applications. (A garden without walls, come and go as you please)
Contrast with Apple who build walls around their garden to try to prevent users from installing any application not in the "garden" (the fact that some people have found holes in the wall (jailbreaking) does not negate the fact that the wall was built in the first place)
so you have 2 different people call a ground controller. Not hard to figure out. (not that any post-takeoff communication would be needed in a well planned situation anyway)
The last flight I was on had them, that was about 6 months ago. I don't see those going away any time soon, or at least not until they allow another method of communication on the plane.
Was any followup ever done on any of those 35 cases to see if the cell phones were actually the cause of the interference?
Incident reports of that form are simply "the crew says this happened"... it would be a lot more convincing if some followup was done to see if it was actually cell phone interference, or other interference that just happened to abate some time after a known cell phone was turned off.
It should be noted that the study linked stated that they weren't able to reproduce the results. Additionally the test they did that did show some interference had several unlikely assumptions. First of all, the equipment they used was that used in general aviation, not commercial aviation. It was also all old and outdated equipment unlikely to be in use on any airliner. Additionally the cell phone had to be on maximum power (I'm also not sure where they found a cell phone with a maximum power of 2 watts! I haven't seen one that powerful since the old brick phones of the late 1980s!) and less than 30cm from the equipment before it caused any interference.
Hardly a reliable study for the current situation we are discussing.
Interesting, but it brings up more questions than it answers. It says there were approximately 75 cases in the past 7 years where a pilot reported something suspicious that *may* have been the result of personal electronics interfering with systems. But no information on any followup to see if that was actually the case.
I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be a link (though other articles from the same source do...) I'm just saying that it sounds like no real followup was ever done on those cases to see if they were coincidence, pilot error, equipment malfunction (on either the personal electronics, or aircraft systems) or any other cause.
Seems to me that this would have been of great interest to the whole aviation industry?
You think the head of the FAA flies commercial????
coordination possibilities for terrorist activities.. Think "Ackbar we're over Chicago, what do I do?"
Yes, because nobody would ever think to use the existing seat back telephones for that purpose, only a cell phone will do!
In small planes you certainly do, I've talked on a cell phone from within a cessna, and many headsets designed for small aircraft have bluetooth to connect to your cell phone (older ones had connectors for the wired jack on cell phones) so that you can talk on your cell phone despite the loud environment.
When I last flew on a military aircraft the flight engineer was talking on his cell phone to communicate with the rescue coordination centre when the HF radio failed.
Cell towers do aim somewhat downward, but at altitude you have nothing to block your signal, so they often work anyway.
That said, if cell phones were permitted on planes, you can bet the wireless carriers would rush to sign contracts to install small cell sites inside the planes. works better with their network, and you can bet they'd find a way to add a premium "airplane roaming charge" of some form.
In a perfect world I'd like to see it where you are allowed to use your cell phone all you want on a plane, as long as you don't talk on it. Texting and data are fine, but please don't chat on your phone for the whole flight, out of courtesy to the rest of the passengers!
citation please?
I've never read a documented case like that, I'm genuinely curious.
The thing about google's "walled garden" is that it doesn't have any walls, sure they curate what they deem to be actual content instead of spam ridden ad farms. But there's nothing to stop you from going to the span ridden link farm if you so choose.
Compare that to other well known "walled garden" approaches that prevent you from accessing/installing specific content, even if you specifically choose to do so, and the difference should be obvious.
Luckily for me, my current slate of sites is all highly specialized and catering to people who are specifically sent to the site from other places (usually not online) and not to people who need to search for them.
The last site I ran that had any reliance on search engines showed up in the top 5 results for the appropriate search terms, and that was strictly through content and proper tagging (nothing shady at all) Mind you that was also about 5 years ago, so who knows if the same would be true today. I wasn't gaming the system, but I was using it to full advantage (if talking about a specific subject, make sure that subject is a keyword even if the text misses that specific word, make sure all images have proper alt text, and there's text describing the scripts, etc.)
If I had mod points this would be +1 Funny...
SEO is the business of circumventing the proper weighting of search results by "dodgy techniques", it always has been, and always will be.
SEO didn't exist until people realized that bots had specific things they were looking for, and people started putting only those things in instead of writing good content that happened to include those things (what the bot writers originally assumed would be found)
I hope this is the start of a new war by google against the SEO business, one where humans benefit by being able to find sites that are actually relevant.
The problem is that there is no way for googlebot to know what "good content" is. SEO isn't some magic thing that makes bad content appear as good to a search engine, instead it's a way of gaming the mechanism that the bots use to try to determine genuinely good content (which is what the bot really is trying to find, it's just not smart enough to know the difference). The only solution is a smarter google-bot, and this is something that I think google really needs to work on, (and this seems to be the first step)
I look forward to the day when the only way to game the system is to make a page that ends up being useful to your human visitors too...
It used to be that good content was what search engines were looking for. And by producing good (and well organized) content you automatically ended up at the top of the search rankings.
Unfortunately search bots don't actually know what "good content" is, so all they can do is try to work with the bits that they can figure out, and that led to SEO which really ONLY exists to game those algorithms.
This is a good move on google's part. I think one of the big failings of all search engines recently is that they have mostly been accepting SEO rather than fighting it. This leads to lots of garbage sites with good SEO grabbing all the top spots, and makes it very difficult to find really good sites. The smarter they can make GoogleBot the better, I long for a day when the only way to do SEO has the side effect of having to make useful information for human visitors too...
This is actually something that happened to my father quite a few years ago. He bought a computer from a private sale in the local classifieds, talking to the seller everything seemed to be in order, but just to be safe he called the police and asked if they could check the serial number against reportedly stolen ones, they took down the serial number and told my father that the computer did not appear to be reported stolen. My father paid and took the computer home.
A few months later he took the computer to a local shop to get more RAM installed, no incident immediately, but a couple days later the police showed up on the doorstep asking to see the computer. Turns out that the computer had originally been stolen from the same shop that my father had taken it to to be serviced, they had never noticed it missing from inventory until it was brought in for the upgrade with an inventory tracking tag still attached.
The police were actually quite good about the whole thing, they looked at the computer, confirmed it was the one in question, and said they needed to take it in to evidence, my father explained that all his data was on it and he needed a backup, they offered to go away and get a warrant, he stated that a warrent wouldn't be necessary, he believed them, he just needed some time. They then told him to just bring it by the station in a couple of days.
Unfortunately he ended up out the computer, but because he cooperated with the police, had a reciept from the seller, and had otherwise appeared to act in a reasonable manner, they didn't charge him with anything and gave him time to get his backup. Later he sued the original seller in small claims court and recovered the cost of the computer, and the shop was pretty good about it too and gave him a new computer at their cost because he was cooperative.
I know people on here frequently talk about NEVER cooperating with the police, always making sure they get a warrant, and you get a lawyer, etc. but had he followed that advice he would not have had time to get the backup, would have been dragged through the courts on a posession of stolen property charge (and possibly convicted as there wasn't much doubt about the fact it was stolen) and been out a fortune in legal fees. As it was he was simply out a bit of inconvenience, and a few hours in small claims court. (in fact I think the new computer the shop sold him ended up costing less than the previous one, and was higher spec, so in some ways he even came out ahead)
Why try again? they got everything they actually wanted, AND made people think that they didn't. It's win-win for everyone... well, except the general population, but we don't count anymore.
This is classic, they ask for a thousand things, and settle for 500, meanwhile the media reports how the grassroots campaigns won and that consumers "only" lost half their rights. That's not a victory for us!
It matters not what I think. The question isn't whether or not it interferes with the free market (The fact is that breaking up a monopoly DOES interfere with the free market, as by definition any and all regulation on the market is interference.) The question is whether or not we SHOULD interfere with the free market. In many cases the answer to that is yes, we should.
My point wasn't that the free market is the ideal we should strive for. My point was that we need to know what a free market is before we start talking about whether or not we want one. Don't advocate a free market when you want government intervention, and conversely don't blame a free market for things that were caused by government interference. How can we ever hope to improve our current system if we don't even understand what it is?
What I said was not a value judgment about whether a free market would be a better or worse thing than the current system, only that what we have now is by definition not a free market.
People blame the "free market" for today's woes, when in fact the market is not free. How can we ever hope to improve upon what we have now if we don't even recognize what it truly is?
Personally I don't support gun ownership (though that has no bearing either way on the current discussion), nor do I support a 100% free market. But I also realize that we must recognize what the market is or is not before we attempt to change it, for if we do not understand our starting point we risk making things worse rather than better when we make changes.
Maybe, maybe not. The point still stands that government meddling in the economy is precisely the opposite of the definition of a free market.
A free market may, or may not, be better than the current system, but you can't call the current system a free market.
Free markets never have government bailouts, regardless of the reason.
A truly free market would not have the concept of copyright, patents, or trademarks.
People frequently blame our current situation on the free market, but that's not what we have right now. I'm not saying that the free market is the solution to our problems. But if we don't even understand what our current system is, or what the problems really are, how can we ever hope to improve upon it?
I don't think you understand what a free market actually entails. it means NO interference from government in business.
A truly free market would require the abolition of all copyright, trademarks, and patents.
The problem here is actually the opposite of a free market, it's excessive government interference.
Increased density would be nice, but isn't even required at this point. The important part now is reduced cost, and that's not related to any of what you said.
The frustrating part is that we've been reading about huge breakthroughs in the cost of making solar panels for 15 years or more now, and while prices have come down a little bit in that time, the spectacular new methods proposed never seem to make it to market.
I'm ok with them not getting any more efficient, as long as they get to a point where I can afford them.
We actually have one one of those plants not far from me, it appears to be a water tower at the top of a hill and a pumping/generating station at the bottom, when the local area has excess generating capacity they pump water up to the tower, and when they have excess draw they let it flow back down through the generators.