Because WalMart is practically in bed with Microsoft, and Tesco is not?
If Tesco had the sort of "relationship" that Walmart does, and were making as much money off of selling MS software to begin with, they wouldn't bother cooking up their own 'Tesco Office' to sell.
If Walmart wanted to do something like this, they could probably muscle MS into making them a Walmart-branded version of Office and sell it. Apparently they don't want to associate their company name with computer software (something that many Americans associate with obnoxiousness), and they're content to just sell the MS-branded boxes.
You don't "insource" when you're making perfectly good money selling the other guy's stuff already. That Tesco is doing this indicates to me that they aren't as cozy with MS as the U.S. retailers are.
You can use GMail just fine without JavaScript. It complains and writes you a message at the bottom of every page saying something like 'To take full advantage of Gmail, use a supported browser...'
So the question becomes irrelevant. The storing of personal data (including search queries) isn't the issue. They can store what they like.
To the user it shouldn't matter whether Amazon is retaining their searches or not, in terms of their privacy from the government. The government should be constrained enough that it would only go after the stored information after demonstrating probable cause and getting a warrant -- assumedly the same standards that would be required to search your house and take your computer directly.
However, even if the government is trustworthy and goes through proper channels, the company might not want to retain data anyway. Not because they want to hide anything, but just because getting subpoenaed is a real PITA, and it's a lot easier to just not have any records. That way when the cops come knocking (with a warrant) asking what Joe User bought last year, you can truthfully say that you don't know, and tell them to go ask Joe if they want to figure it out.
Any half-decent lawyer is going to tell you not to retain information that you don't need to keep, longer than you're legally obligated to retain it. For a company to retain data, and thus make itself a destination for government officials (with or without warrants), is obnoxious. If there's no direct benefit as a result of keeping the data, get rid of the stuff. It doesn't do you any good to have federal agents constantly coming over and asking to sit with your employees and get in their way and generally interrupt business; why would you want to encourage that unless you really had to?
There are valid reasons for not retaining data, even in an ideal case where the government was trustworthy. In today's world, where I think most people don't think that the government is necessarily that trustworthy, there are even greater reasons for not keeping stuff around that you don't need.
Not sure what you've been using, but I've used a variety of Motorola phones and they all seem to "just work" fine. Address Book sync, Object transfer for photos and video... getting it working as a data modem was a bit of a pain but 95% of that was T-Mobile's fault; the phone talked to the Mac from the first moment onwards without problems. The computer doesn't give me crap about using some crummy generic USB BT dongle, either. (Unlike Windows where I'd need to install vendor-supplied drivers.)
Then again, the phone has also worked pretty well with my IBM laptop and its BT implementation, so maybe more credit is due to Motorola than Apple.
In either case, the whole system worked well enough to convince me that my next computer will be a Mac, and my next phone will be a Motorola.
I'm not totally sure here, but it's my understanding that the "chipset" may (depending on context) not include the radio.
So saying that it uses the same radio as Bluetooth may not mean that it's just a drop-in software change; the chipset which actually decodes what the radio recieves and does useful things with it, may be totally different.
I assume that the radios are basically off-the-shelf items; I'm sure you can go to any number of manufacturers and get them (Motorola, Analog Devices, National, etc.); the chipset is probably where most of the design work, and the intellectual property / patents, goes.
If we think of a wireless device as a chain, going (antenna) -> (radio) -> (decoding chipset) -> (computer), they are using the same antenna and radio, which are basically generic, and inserting their proprietary gear instead of the BT parts behind it.
Analogy works; not the way you think.
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Actually I think your gunshot metaphor isn't making the point you think it is.
Let's say there are two people, Joe and Bob. Joe has a sucking chest wound. Bob has a bad stomach bug from some questionable Chinese food. They both want to go to the hospital, and there are two methods of getting there: the high-priority route, which involves calling 911 and getting taken there in an ambulance to a special door, and directly in to see the doctor; then there's a low priority route where you take a car, stand around in line with the rest of the walking wounded, etc.
There's nothing preventing Bob from calling 911; assuming they have the ambulance to spare, the EMTs will still pick him up and drag his ass to the hospital. Why doesn't he? Because it's really freaking expensive, that's why. Nobody takes that route if they can possibly avoid it, because if you get caught doing it when you weren't actually in trouble, you get the bill. The guy with the sucking chest wound doesn't give a damn about how much it's going to cost, so he's going to be calling 911 regardless. Thus the prioritization is done by the users, and there's a strong disincentive to abuse it. (There are other disincentives too besides cost, but I'm simplifying here.)
Taking this back to the matter at hand, the solution is really just to make people pay for the level of prioritization they want to have, on the packets they want to put it on. For most people, this probably means paying extra for their VOIP packets to go "real time," but not for their WoW packets to get the same treatment. But hey, if you want to pay for your WoW/porn/bittorrent to get flagged as "needs real time" and "needs high throughput" or whatever else, you're more than welcome to if you can put your quarter on the bar. That seems fair to me: everybody who pays the same, gets the same service. If we both pay for nothing but bulk-packet, 'best effort' delivery with no prioritization, then neither of us should get it. If you pay more, you should get more.
The only issue with this is making sure that ISPs don't use the monopoly power they currently hold to price gouge: the price for packet prioritization should be determined by something akin to the actual cost to deliver "one more packet" with the higher priority versus the lower, not the maximum that someone is willing to pay for it. (That's the difference between the competitive-market price for a good and the monopoly-market price; micro-econ 101 if I remember correctly.) If we can make the market competitive and thus not allow it to turn into screw-the-consumer day at the cableco and telco office, that's probably the most fair outcome.
Any system which depends on the end users to be trustworthy is inherently flawed. The internet is riddled with the corpses of protocols and systems that depended on the good nature or trustworthiness of end-users not to abuse them (*cough* Usenet *cough*); it would be a giant and indefensible mistake to create such a situation with that in hindsight. Any system that is being designed today should take on premise that its users will, if given the opportunity, attempt to manipulate the system to their own advantage at the expense of others, as far as they are allowed to do so without a strong and direct disincentive.
Methinks you got a bad machine. Good that it was under warranty, though.
I've had more than a few crappy machines that I've run at 100% utilization for months or in one case years on end, without catastrophic failures, so I don't think that any consumer machine is "not built for constant processor work." I suspect that there is a higher rate of manufacturing defects in el cheap consumer machines versus higher-end ones because of more lax quality control, but I don't think they're designed that poorly with certain exceptions (ones that have known overheating issues).
Not that I would recommend that anybody actually purchase one, but if I was going to get a $500 OfficeDepot "blue light special," one of the first things I'd want to do to it would be to put Boinc on and peg the processor and GPU at 100% for however long the return policy on the machine was, just to see if I could find any manufacturing defects. If it incinerates itself, back to the store and get a new one -- it was probably defective. Repeat until one survives, and more likely than not it'll probably still work when you decide to recycle it for something new.
Just as an anecdote, I have an old Compaq 600MHz Celeron that's been running at 100% for several years, with the same uptime as the power company (probably not 'five nines,' but not totally third-world either). At any given time the whole case will be rather hot to the touch. Hasn't failed yet. Admittedly, back when this was being used as a desktop computer, I think it went through a motherboard, two hard drives, and a cooling fan -- pretty much everything in it besides the floppy drive and the PSU crapped out -- so I think it's been exorcised of any defective components.
I really am convinced that the price you pay for better hardware -- and for high quality parts in general -- are less changes to the inherent design, but better quality control and a lower overall defect rate.
A computer that does some task today, should -- assuming it wasn't designed to be flawed or have a fixed life expectancy from the very beginning -- still be capable of doing that task in ten years. And for the most part I think this is true; it will.
Most computers that are 10 years old still run fine today (ones that were well-made in the first place); the problem is more one of finding a purpose for them, and then finding software to run on them, then getting them to start. Actually, I would wager that lots of computers that are 20+ years old would still run fine today, depending on how they've been stored and taken care of in the interim.
The problem isn't that machines really "wear out" all that quickly; with some exceptions few do. It's more the relentless drive of increasing expectations that puts working equipment in the landfill. At least for home users; commercial users have their support contracts to worry about, so it's slightly more complicated.
Case in point: I have an Apple IIc in my closet right now, which I know for a fact works fine. I could take it out tomorrow, set it on my desk, put in Apple Write, fire it up and start typing away. Somewhere around I even have a dot-matrix serial printer that I could use to output from it. Everything that Apple advertised that computer as capable of doing, it is just as capable of doing today as it was twenty-one years ago. So why am I not using it? Why am I sitting here with a computer that's only four years old, when I have a perfectly functional computer from 1984 in my closet? It's not because I like spending money. It's because I want to do things that I can't do on an old computer. There are a lot of things that I consider necessities, or at least things that are nice enough to have that I'm willing to pay for them, that weren't possible or even considered more than a few years ago.
If you honestly think that what you can do with a computer today is all you're ever going to want to do -- that you won't see some neat feature on your friend's box in 2014 and decide that you need to have it -- then you're absolutely correct; the computer you have now is the last one you ought to ever have to buy. Realistically though, most people aren't like this; they know that the computer they have today isn't going to be something they're going to want in five or ten years, and they're not willing to pay for a machine that's built to last longer than that.
The things that people use home computers for has changed, and will continue to change, and the tasks that people want to use their computers for will drive the upgrade cycle far faster than the breakdown rate of the components does.
I don't know about the math per se, but if you view the your computer as a 'black box,' and just look at what's going into and what's coming out of it, there's little actual work being done in the physical sense, aside from heat production and some air movement due to the cooling fans. (And some photons from lights and some magnetic flux if it's not well shielded.)
I suspect that a good model for its energy consumption would just be a big resistive along with some capacitive and inductive load (I'm not really sure what those switching supplies "look like" from upstream in the power grid). It doesn't send out a whole lot more electricity via its network connections than it receives in from them, so they're basically a zero-sum.
Information theory is not really my area but I think if you want to try to measure or think about the "work" done by a computer, you might be best trying to think about it in terms of information entropy. I guess one could almost think of a computer as a converter, which uses physical (usually electrical) energy and does work by changing the information entropy of the system around it. There seem to be various hypotheses as to links between thermodynamic entropy on the microscopic scale and information entropy, although I'm not sure if any of them are really applicable to your question. (There is a WP article on the subject but it is in rather poor shape: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodyna mics_and_information_theory )
In classical terms however, I think it's safe to say that your computer is just a very expensive space heater. It takes in electricity from the mains plug, and produces heat (and light, and sometimes some other trivial outputs); the tough question is that in doing so, does it do something else that is worth to you, the cost of the electricity? Since you're reading this, I think it's a good assumption that the answer is yes.
Agreed. And this is why they're going to come down hard on Jon, not because they really care that much about the iTMS, but because it might encourage sales of other MP3 players at the expense of the iPod.
If Apple really was interested in running an online music venture and making their money there -- as in, really having that be their core business -- they would have tried to license out FairPlay as widely as possible and make it a de facto standard. (Which it already practically is, without licensing; given that the iPod is the de facto standard MP3 player.)
However, since the iTMS is really only there to grant legitimacy to the iPod as a device (does anyone remember how the music industry was screaming bloody murder about iPods being "piracy machines" back before the music store existed?), it makes no sense for them to share this "excuse" with anyone else's MP3 players. They benefit more from a consumer who buys an iPod than they do from a consumer who buys a few iTMS songs -- you'd have to buy a LOT of music to give Apple the same amount of profit that they get from a single iPod, and most people don't buy that much.
I think you'll see Apple go after this in the courts if it can, or just start a vicious cycle of "upgrades" and "enhancements" to the format if it can't.
Like I said, that's a wholly different discussion from what I was trying to get at in my post; you're correct that infrastructure investments often pay dividends that are not easily quantifiable or taxable -- by lowering the cost of transportation you increase the amount and variety of goods that can be sold; the increase in economic activity benefits virtually everyone. This isn't a new concept, and it's been the motivation for public works projects for generations (I first read about it being used to justify canal projects in the 18th century but I doubt it originated there).
The same logic that you use to justify public funding of the Interstates, though (and canals, and the Federal Air Traffic Control System, or any other piece of big infrastructure) could also be used to justify some amount of public funding for the railroad right-of-ways. Particularly since railroads are a more efficient way to move bulky or heavy cargo, it would make sense to encourage their use -- they have less negative externalities associated with them than over-the-road trucks do, per cargo-ton-mile carried. Rather than what amounts to a subsidy for the use of the Interstates versus the railroads (because truckers get their infrastructure virtually for free, while the railroads have to pay for their own land and maintenance), I would see more economic justification for a subsidy on railroad cargo, if we can't just have a flat playing field.
In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to the anti-globalization movement, and whole argument in general, in the past several years is its association with leftist fringe groups and sometimes-violent street protests. The first thing that many people think of today when they hear the words "anti-globalization" is a rioter, and this doesn't do very much to help it be taken seriously. Those protests, at least in the U.S., ended much real discussion about globalization by turning the whole thing into a farce. All people had to do was look on the news and see that it was the forces of rationality and authority versus the lunatic fringe, and that was it. (Granted, a lot of media outlets were only happy enough to portray it this way, with various levels of subtlety, but this should be expected.) Whatever salient points the argument might have had, evaporate when you're perceived as being mainly supported by bored college students with nothing better to do than go protest something.
If you want to garner support from blue-collar, red-state America now, you can't say "globalization," you have to say "outsourcing" or "offshoring." That's because the g-word has a strong association with protesters and radical fringe groups; no sane middle-class gainfully-employed person wants to associate themselves with anything "anti-globalization" anymore, lest they end up on some sort of FBI watch list. It's that 'blue collar' crowd who should really be the major backers of anti-globalization, but to date they have been notably absent; I think this is because of a large reluctance on many people's part to do anything that reeks of "dirty hippies." And it's tough to get deeper in hippie territory right now than "anti-globalization."
Violent protests may have been effective in the 60s but today they're cliche; I can't think of a faster way to let your opponents marginalize and demonize you in the press, and frankly to have the general public revel in watching you get tear gassed on TV. Average people don't have much tolerance or sympathy for rioters, regardless of the motivation or politics; it's no longer an acceptable mode of political discourse. This situation may be different in other countries -- it seems like riots and mass demonstrations are accepted by the public rather differently in some European countries. But here in the U.S., riots don't play in Peoria. They're counterproductive.
I tried to explain the anti-globalization position to too many people over the last few years to and have had more people pipe up "hey, aren't those the folks who were causing riots down in New York?" to think that those protests can possibly be constructive. It doesn't matter whether it's the protesters or the cops who start the escalation; if you have a protest and it turns into chaos -- particularly televised chaos -- then you and any arguments or positions that you might be associated with lose a lot of credibility.
The "rads" might think that they've won now, but really, I think that the logic that globalization might not be such a hot thing, has finally come into the light despite the efforts of fringe groups, certainly not because of them.
At least the BBC is worth something. BBC is the most reliable news source for me here in the US.
I agree. As someone not paying into the system at all -- at least not directly (I assume the U.S. media outlets which transmit BBC material are paying some sort of licensing fee), I think it's pretty sweet.
I'm just saying that if I were the guy getting shaken down for the "TV Tax" that's used to pay for it, I might feel differently.
Just as an example, right now I send a contribution every year to NPR, voluntarily. It's probably not quite equivalent to what the U.K.-style TV Tax would be for me, because I own a couple of TVs (it's a per-screen tax, right?), but it's not totally trivial. I figure it's fair, for listening to Garrison Keillor and Car Talk and the occasional news program. In other words, while I don't agree with everything they do or say, I don't complain too much. I'm glad they're around and I'll do my small part to support them.
Now, if NPR was sending people around to shake me down for cash and asking about how many receivers I had, and there was a stiff fine for not paying them, I'd probably hold them to a whole lot higher standard. In fact, they could probably broadcast the very voice of God twice daily, and I'd still be peeved at them.
My point mainly was that I think most people hold a service that they're being forced to pay for (particularly one that you have to pay for whether you use it or not), to a much higher standard than one that they choose to pay for. At least, I do, and would.
If I were in the U.K., I'd probably be making sure that when the BBC engages in these sort of contracts with multinational corporations, that they're squeezing the corps. for the greatest amount of cash possible, and using that cash to subsidize the tax bills of the people paying for the system -- in maintaining the BBC system, people in the U.K. are doing an unquestionable favor to the world, and at no small personal expense. I envy their generosity, but not their tax bill.
The problem with Amtrak is that the U.S. government insists on running a railroad, when what they ought to be doing is just maintaining the right-of-ways.
Congress also spends billions of dollars on the Interstate Highways, yet they don't monopolize over-the-road trucking; truckers use the infrastructure and theoretically pay taxes to do so (levied on diesel fuel). We all know that they don't come close to paying for the damage they do to the infrastructure...but that's a different discussion.
If Congress tried to create Amtruck, I can guarantee you that it would be as much of a gigantic cockup as Amtrak is -- probably worse.
The best thing they could do now would be to take over the rail infrastructure and manage it just like the interstate highways are managed, and then let the railroads use them in the same way that truckers use the roads. The same arguments that are used for subsidization of the Interstates would apply in equal or greater strength to railroads -- particularly considering the price of energy and the inherent efficiency of rail for moving heavy loads around. Encouraging the use of the rail network by paying for its maintenance would have both economic and environmental benefits.
The problem with Amtrak is that it's micromanaged, and thus it's doomed almost from the beginning not to failure, but mediocrity.
Yep, but I'm willing to bet that most Slashdotters aren't old enough to remember that the Post Office was at certain points in the not-too-distant past, a real mess.
They've gotten better and better the further they've gotten out from under the boot of Congress. I think they'd maybe almost survive in the open market today.
The BBC is funded by the "TV Tax"... if you own a television and live in the U.K., you don't really have a choice.
Although I suppose you could put it in a faraday cage in your basement and just evade the tax -- I heard once that they used to drive around in detection vans, listening for the RF signals of TVs, and then compare that to the list of people who paid. Rather creepy, if you ask me.
I wonder how they would deal with a computer that had a TV tuner card installed? You could definitely 'watch TV' without owning a TV these days... a HTPC with a tuner card, and then just use a suitably big monitor, or a DLP projector. No TV, just a computer, but you'd have all the capabilities.
I enjoy the programming created by the BBC, but I also don't live there or pay into the system. If I did, I might feel differently about the whole scheme.
He would never have shot them if he didn't have access to the gun either. Simply put, since gun makers aren't accountable for unintended actions carried out with their products, neither are game makers.
That would certainly make sense, were it true. Unfortunately, common sense is all but dead in this country, buried under too many ideological struggles.
However, the same sort of reasoning that's letting folks legislate away violent video games has also been used -- and frankly I'd argue was brought to near-perfection by -- the anti-gun lobby in its crusade to drive gun manufacturers into bankruptcy. After all, if you can't make something illegal by way of the legislative branch (democracy is such a pain in the ass, isn't it?), well there's always tort law.
Basically, the various anti-gun groups, assisted by the Attorneys General of various cash-strapped locales, attempted to do exactly what you're claiming is so ridiculous: take firearms manufacturers to court and win huge judgments against them, because of the ways that their legitimate products had been misused by criminals.
To be quite frank, except that the pro-gun lobby in the U.S. is better funded and better organized than the anti-gun one, I think they probably would have been successful; and from there, it's nothing but a downward slide into the pit of strict liability. If you thought that there were an obscene number of warning labels and disclaimers on products now, when you remove any sense of logic for placing blame for an incident on the person who actually made the choice to commit the crime, and instead just get judgments from anyone whose products or services might have been even peripherally involved, I can only imagine we'd end up living in a world of soft rubber hammers, dull knives, and safety scissors.
The only reason that the firearms industry didn't get itself ruined by such "strict liability" nonsense, is because (principally through the efforts of the NRA and its members) Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents suits from being brought against a legitimate firearms manufacturer for relief against harm committed by others.
The problem is that video game companies don't have friends like the NRA, at least not yet. They also don't have the public goodwill and support that firearms do. A whole lot of people will show up at the polls if the vote is going to significantly impact their ability to own or buy guns -- more than a few elected officials have ended up on the wrong side of some issue, and found themselves out of office. Like it or not, it's a major political force. And why shouldn't it be -- it has 4.3 million members and has been around in various incarnations for over a hundred years (although admittedly its role as a PAC doesn't date back that far). There is nothing close to that scale to protect the rights of computer users or gamers, although the EFF is probably the most likely candidate and they do try hard. But they're just not big enough yet.
Frankly, I think we need something like the PLCAA universally. The doctrine of strict liability has gone too far, and it's too dangerous to let go unchecked. Suits like this could easily have bankrupted and paralyzed an entire industry (they were meant to), and it's not as though they could only be brought against gun companies. We need protections like this across the board. If you manufacture and sell your product in compliance with the laws of the United States, and a do not attempt to actively mislead consumers or hide the risks of using a product from them, so that a reasonable consumer acting with reasonable prudence, could learn the risks of the product if they chose to care, then you should be exempted from liability springing from that individual's misuse of your product, if they end up harming themselves or others.
People need to start taking responsibility for their own actions. They shouldn't
The DARPA funded BLEEX [berkeley.edu] was prototyped to allow soldiers to carry 70 pound packs across flat and sloped terrain with hopes of 150 pound capacity in the next 6 monthes.
Having been in that business... that's a little weak on the specifications. Soldiers already carry 70 pound packs across flat and sloped terrain (and swamps, and mountains, and everything else). 150 pounds is definitely getting up into the range of severe unpleasantness, but it's not that far out of the realm of possibility for a fit man to carry around. Actually, when you add everything up, some guys -- like those in a machine-gun or Mk. 19 team -- might be carrying close to that with a standard load of ammo. Not something you'd want to run a marathon carrying, but I haven't seen an augmentation system that could run a marathon, either.
1. What could possibly go wrong? 2. I for one welcome our new power-suited overlords! 3. Does it transform into a semitruck? 4. Put Rico's Roughnecks on standbye. 5. Now we need to find a whining Japanese teenage boy who will be required to share living quarters with lots of hot girl and who be the only one who can pilot the mech to save the world. 6. All hail our giant cyborg President! May death come quickly to his enemies!
Actually this is a premise to a series of ecological disasters described in the Reality Dysfunction series of SF books by Peter F. Hamilton.
It's mentioned only peripherally, but the general idea is that the widespread use of fusion power and the vastly increased energy consumption, combined with population and other types of biosphere-bashing, have led to super-storms that basically scour anything in their path.
A little farfetched at present, but an interesting scenario. You'd really have to have "Mr. Fusions" on every car/truck/bus/lawnmower/house, all consuming gigawatts of power, before you would start to come anywhere near to the amount of heat the Earth takes in (and consequently radiates back out, since it stays at a basically fixed average temperature) from the Sun.
However if you did manage to produce some sort of limitless energy source, and just started using it everywhere, it doesn't seem physically impossible that the average temperature of the planet would go up. It would have to -- it's a simple Newton's Law of Cooling problem. The temperature would increase until the energy flowing out into space equaled the energy flowing in from the sun and from other sources; given that the energy flows out at a rate that's proportional to the difference in temperature between the planet and the surrounding space.
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Because WalMart is practically in bed with Microsoft, and Tesco is not?
If Tesco had the sort of "relationship" that Walmart does, and were making as much money off of selling MS software to begin with, they wouldn't bother cooking up their own 'Tesco Office' to sell.
If Walmart wanted to do something like this, they could probably muscle MS into making them a Walmart-branded version of Office and sell it. Apparently they don't want to associate their company name with computer software (something that many Americans associate with obnoxiousness), and they're content to just sell the MS-branded boxes.
You don't "insource" when you're making perfectly good money selling the other guy's stuff already. That Tesco is doing this indicates to me that they aren't as cozy with MS as the U.S. retailers are.
You obviously don't use GMail,
You can use GMail just fine without JavaScript. It complains and writes you a message at the bottom of every page saying something like 'To take full advantage of Gmail, use a supported browser...'
It does however still work just fine without it.
So the question becomes irrelevant. The storing of personal data (including search queries) isn't the issue. They can store what they like.
To the user it shouldn't matter whether Amazon is retaining their searches or not, in terms of their privacy from the government. The government should be constrained enough that it would only go after the stored information after demonstrating probable cause and getting a warrant -- assumedly the same standards that would be required to search your house and take your computer directly.
However, even if the government is trustworthy and goes through proper channels, the company might not want to retain data anyway. Not because they want to hide anything, but just because getting subpoenaed is a real PITA, and it's a lot easier to just not have any records. That way when the cops come knocking (with a warrant) asking what Joe User bought last year, you can truthfully say that you don't know, and tell them to go ask Joe if they want to figure it out.
Any half-decent lawyer is going to tell you not to retain information that you don't need to keep, longer than you're legally obligated to retain it. For a company to retain data, and thus make itself a destination for government officials (with or without warrants), is obnoxious. If there's no direct benefit as a result of keeping the data, get rid of the stuff. It doesn't do you any good to have federal agents constantly coming over and asking to sit with your employees and get in their way and generally interrupt business; why would you want to encourage that unless you really had to?
There are valid reasons for not retaining data, even in an ideal case where the government was trustworthy. In today's world, where I think most people don't think that the government is necessarily that trustworthy, there are even greater reasons for not keeping stuff around that you don't need.
Not sure what you've been using, but I've used a variety of Motorola phones and they all seem to "just work" fine. Address Book sync, Object transfer for photos and video ... getting it working as a data modem was a bit of a pain but 95% of that was T-Mobile's fault; the phone talked to the Mac from the first moment onwards without problems. The computer doesn't give me crap about using some crummy generic USB BT dongle, either. (Unlike Windows where I'd need to install vendor-supplied drivers.)
Then again, the phone has also worked pretty well with my IBM laptop and its BT implementation, so maybe more credit is due to Motorola than Apple.
In either case, the whole system worked well enough to convince me that my next computer will be a Mac, and my next phone will be a Motorola.
I'm not totally sure here, but it's my understanding that the "chipset" may (depending on context) not include the radio.
So saying that it uses the same radio as Bluetooth may not mean that it's just a drop-in software change; the chipset which actually decodes what the radio recieves and does useful things with it, may be totally different.
I assume that the radios are basically off-the-shelf items; I'm sure you can go to any number of manufacturers and get them (Motorola, Analog Devices, National, etc.); the chipset is probably where most of the design work, and the intellectual property / patents, goes.
If we think of a wireless device as a chain, going (antenna) -> (radio) -> (decoding chipset) -> (computer), they are using the same antenna and radio, which are basically generic, and inserting their proprietary gear instead of the BT parts behind it.
Actually I think your gunshot metaphor isn't making the point you think it is.
Let's say there are two people, Joe and Bob. Joe has a sucking chest wound. Bob has a bad stomach bug from some questionable Chinese food. They both want to go to the hospital, and there are two methods of getting there: the high-priority route, which involves calling 911 and getting taken there in an ambulance to a special door, and directly in to see the doctor; then there's a low priority route where you take a car, stand around in line with the rest of the walking wounded, etc.
There's nothing preventing Bob from calling 911; assuming they have the ambulance to spare, the EMTs will still pick him up and drag his ass to the hospital. Why doesn't he? Because it's really freaking expensive, that's why. Nobody takes that route if they can possibly avoid it, because if you get caught doing it when you weren't actually in trouble, you get the bill. The guy with the sucking chest wound doesn't give a damn about how much it's going to cost, so he's going to be calling 911 regardless. Thus the prioritization is done by the users, and there's a strong disincentive to abuse it. (There are other disincentives too besides cost, but I'm simplifying here.)
Taking this back to the matter at hand, the solution is really just to make people pay for the level of prioritization they want to have, on the packets they want to put it on. For most people, this probably means paying extra for their VOIP packets to go "real time," but not for their WoW packets to get the same treatment. But hey, if you want to pay for your WoW/porn/bittorrent to get flagged as "needs real time" and "needs high throughput" or whatever else, you're more than welcome to if you can put your quarter on the bar. That seems fair to me: everybody who pays the same, gets the same service. If we both pay for nothing but bulk-packet, 'best effort' delivery with no prioritization, then neither of us should get it. If you pay more, you should get more.
The only issue with this is making sure that ISPs don't use the monopoly power they currently hold to price gouge: the price for packet prioritization should be determined by something akin to the actual cost to deliver "one more packet" with the higher priority versus the lower, not the maximum that someone is willing to pay for it. (That's the difference between the competitive-market price for a good and the monopoly-market price; micro-econ 101 if I remember correctly.) If we can make the market competitive and thus not allow it to turn into screw-the-consumer day at the cableco and telco office, that's probably the most fair outcome.
Any system which depends on the end users to be trustworthy is inherently flawed. The internet is riddled with the corpses of protocols and systems that depended on the good nature or trustworthiness of end-users not to abuse them (*cough* Usenet *cough*); it would be a giant and indefensible mistake to create such a situation with that in hindsight. Any system that is being designed today should take on premise that its users will, if given the opportunity, attempt to manipulate the system to their own advantage at the expense of others, as far as they are allowed to do so without a strong and direct disincentive.
Methinks you got a bad machine. Good that it was under warranty, though.
I've had more than a few crappy machines that I've run at 100% utilization for months or in one case years on end, without catastrophic failures, so I don't think that any consumer machine is "not built for constant processor work." I suspect that there is a higher rate of manufacturing defects in el cheap consumer machines versus higher-end ones because of more lax quality control, but I don't think they're designed that poorly with certain exceptions (ones that have known overheating issues).
Not that I would recommend that anybody actually purchase one, but if I was going to get a $500 OfficeDepot "blue light special," one of the first things I'd want to do to it would be to put Boinc on and peg the processor and GPU at 100% for however long the return policy on the machine was, just to see if I could find any manufacturing defects. If it incinerates itself, back to the store and get a new one -- it was probably defective. Repeat until one survives, and more likely than not it'll probably still work when you decide to recycle it for something new.
Just as an anecdote, I have an old Compaq 600MHz Celeron that's been running at 100% for several years, with the same uptime as the power company (probably not 'five nines,' but not totally third-world either). At any given time the whole case will be rather hot to the touch. Hasn't failed yet. Admittedly, back when this was being used as a desktop computer, I think it went through a motherboard, two hard drives, and a cooling fan -- pretty much everything in it besides the floppy drive and the PSU crapped out -- so I think it's been exorcised of any defective components.
I really am convinced that the price you pay for better hardware -- and for high quality parts in general -- are less changes to the inherent design, but better quality control and a lower overall defect rate.
You make a very good point.
A computer that does some task today, should -- assuming it wasn't designed to be flawed or have a fixed life expectancy from the very beginning -- still be capable of doing that task in ten years. And for the most part I think this is true; it will.
Most computers that are 10 years old still run fine today (ones that were well-made in the first place); the problem is more one of finding a purpose for them, and then finding software to run on them, then getting them to start. Actually, I would wager that lots of computers that are 20+ years old would still run fine today, depending on how they've been stored and taken care of in the interim.
The problem isn't that machines really "wear out" all that quickly; with some exceptions few do. It's more the relentless drive of increasing expectations that puts working equipment in the landfill. At least for home users; commercial users have their support contracts to worry about, so it's slightly more complicated.
Case in point: I have an Apple IIc in my closet right now, which I know for a fact works fine. I could take it out tomorrow, set it on my desk, put in Apple Write, fire it up and start typing away. Somewhere around I even have a dot-matrix serial printer that I could use to output from it. Everything that Apple advertised that computer as capable of doing, it is just as capable of doing today as it was twenty-one years ago. So why am I not using it? Why am I sitting here with a computer that's only four years old, when I have a perfectly functional computer from 1984 in my closet? It's not because I like spending money. It's because I want to do things that I can't do on an old computer. There are a lot of things that I consider necessities, or at least things that are nice enough to have that I'm willing to pay for them, that weren't possible or even considered more than a few years ago.
If you honestly think that what you can do with a computer today is all you're ever going to want to do -- that you won't see some neat feature on your friend's box in 2014 and decide that you need to have it -- then you're absolutely correct; the computer you have now is the last one you ought to ever have to buy. Realistically though, most people aren't like this; they know that the computer they have today isn't going to be something they're going to want in five or ten years, and they're not willing to pay for a machine that's built to last longer than that.
The things that people use home computers for has changed, and will continue to change, and the tasks that people want to use their computers for will drive the upgrade cycle far faster than the breakdown rate of the components does.
I don't know about the math per se, but if you view the your computer as a 'black box,' and just look at what's going into and what's coming out of it, there's little actual work being done in the physical sense, aside from heat production and some air movement due to the cooling fans. (And some photons from lights and some magnetic flux if it's not well shielded.)
a mics_and_information_theory )
I suspect that a good model for its energy consumption would just be a big resistive along with some capacitive and inductive load (I'm not really sure what those switching supplies "look like" from upstream in the power grid). It doesn't send out a whole lot more electricity via its network connections than it receives in from them, so they're basically a zero-sum.
Information theory is not really my area but I think if you want to try to measure or think about the "work" done by a computer, you might be best trying to think about it in terms of information entropy. I guess one could almost think of a computer as a converter, which uses physical (usually electrical) energy and does work by changing the information entropy of the system around it. There seem to be various hypotheses as to links between thermodynamic entropy on the microscopic scale and information entropy, although I'm not sure if any of them are really applicable to your question. (There is a WP article on the subject but it is in rather poor shape: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodyn
In classical terms however, I think it's safe to say that your computer is just a very expensive space heater. It takes in electricity from the mains plug, and produces heat (and light, and sometimes some other trivial outputs); the tough question is that in doing so, does it do something else that is worth to you, the cost of the electricity? Since you're reading this, I think it's a good assumption that the answer is yes.
Agreed. And this is why they're going to come down hard on Jon, not because they really care that much about the iTMS, but because it might encourage sales of other MP3 players at the expense of the iPod.
If Apple really was interested in running an online music venture and making their money there -- as in, really having that be their core business -- they would have tried to license out FairPlay as widely as possible and make it a de facto standard. (Which it already practically is, without licensing; given that the iPod is the de facto standard MP3 player.)
However, since the iTMS is really only there to grant legitimacy to the iPod as a device (does anyone remember how the music industry was screaming bloody murder about iPods being "piracy machines" back before the music store existed?), it makes no sense for them to share this "excuse" with anyone else's MP3 players. They benefit more from a consumer who buys an iPod than they do from a consumer who buys a few iTMS songs -- you'd have to buy a LOT of music to give Apple the same amount of profit that they get from a single iPod, and most people don't buy that much.
I think you'll see Apple go after this in the courts if it can, or just start a vicious cycle of "upgrades" and "enhancements" to the format if it can't.
You want to run for office? I hear there are some tentative availabilities coming up shortly in Congress.
Like I said, that's a wholly different discussion from what I was trying to get at in my post; you're correct that infrastructure investments often pay dividends that are not easily quantifiable or taxable -- by lowering the cost of transportation you increase the amount and variety of goods that can be sold; the increase in economic activity benefits virtually everyone. This isn't a new concept, and it's been the motivation for public works projects for generations (I first read about it being used to justify canal projects in the 18th century but I doubt it originated there).
The same logic that you use to justify public funding of the Interstates, though (and canals, and the Federal Air Traffic Control System, or any other piece of big infrastructure) could also be used to justify some amount of public funding for the railroad right-of-ways. Particularly since railroads are a more efficient way to move bulky or heavy cargo, it would make sense to encourage their use -- they have less negative externalities associated with them than over-the-road trucks do, per cargo-ton-mile carried. Rather than what amounts to a subsidy for the use of the Interstates versus the railroads (because truckers get their infrastructure virtually for free, while the railroads have to pay for their own land and maintenance), I would see more economic justification for a subsidy on railroad cargo, if we can't just have a flat playing field.
In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to the anti-globalization movement, and whole argument in general, in the past several years is its association with leftist fringe groups and sometimes-violent street protests. The first thing that many people think of today when they hear the words "anti-globalization" is a rioter, and this doesn't do very much to help it be taken seriously. Those protests, at least in the U.S., ended much real discussion about globalization by turning the whole thing into a farce. All people had to do was look on the news and see that it was the forces of rationality and authority versus the lunatic fringe, and that was it. (Granted, a lot of media outlets were only happy enough to portray it this way, with various levels of subtlety, but this should be expected.) Whatever salient points the argument might have had, evaporate when you're perceived as being mainly supported by bored college students with nothing better to do than go protest something.
If you want to garner support from blue-collar, red-state America now, you can't say "globalization," you have to say "outsourcing" or "offshoring." That's because the g-word has a strong association with protesters and radical fringe groups; no sane middle-class gainfully-employed person wants to associate themselves with anything "anti-globalization" anymore, lest they end up on some sort of FBI watch list. It's that 'blue collar' crowd who should really be the major backers of anti-globalization, but to date they have been notably absent; I think this is because of a large reluctance on many people's part to do anything that reeks of "dirty hippies." And it's tough to get deeper in hippie territory right now than "anti-globalization."
Violent protests may have been effective in the 60s but today they're cliche; I can't think of a faster way to let your opponents marginalize and demonize you in the press, and frankly to have the general public revel in watching you get tear gassed on TV. Average people don't have much tolerance or sympathy for rioters, regardless of the motivation or politics; it's no longer an acceptable mode of political discourse. This situation may be different in other countries -- it seems like riots and mass demonstrations are accepted by the public rather differently in some European countries. But here in the U.S., riots don't play in Peoria. They're counterproductive.
I tried to explain the anti-globalization position to too many people over the last few years to and have had more people pipe up "hey, aren't those the folks who were causing riots down in New York?" to think that those protests can possibly be constructive. It doesn't matter whether it's the protesters or the cops who start the escalation; if you have a protest and it turns into chaos -- particularly televised chaos -- then you and any arguments or positions that you might be associated with lose a lot of credibility.
The "rads" might think that they've won now, but really, I think that the logic that globalization might not be such a hot thing, has finally come into the light despite the efforts of fringe groups, certainly not because of them.
At least the BBC is worth something. BBC is the most reliable news source for me here in the US.
I agree. As someone not paying into the system at all -- at least not directly (I assume the U.S. media outlets which transmit BBC material are paying some sort of licensing fee), I think it's pretty sweet.
I'm just saying that if I were the guy getting shaken down for the "TV Tax" that's used to pay for it, I might feel differently.
Just as an example, right now I send a contribution every year to NPR, voluntarily. It's probably not quite equivalent to what the U.K.-style TV Tax would be for me, because I own a couple of TVs (it's a per-screen tax, right?), but it's not totally trivial. I figure it's fair, for listening to Garrison Keillor and Car Talk and the occasional news program. In other words, while I don't agree with everything they do or say, I don't complain too much. I'm glad they're around and I'll do my small part to support them.
Now, if NPR was sending people around to shake me down for cash and asking about how many receivers I had, and there was a stiff fine for not paying them, I'd probably hold them to a whole lot higher standard. In fact, they could probably broadcast the very voice of God twice daily, and I'd still be peeved at them.
My point mainly was that I think most people hold a service that they're being forced to pay for (particularly one that you have to pay for whether you use it or not), to a much higher standard than one that they choose to pay for. At least, I do, and would.
If I were in the U.K., I'd probably be making sure that when the BBC engages in these sort of contracts with multinational corporations, that they're squeezing the corps. for the greatest amount of cash possible, and using that cash to subsidize the tax bills of the people paying for the system -- in maintaining the BBC system, people in the U.K. are doing an unquestionable favor to the world, and at no small personal expense. I envy their generosity, but not their tax bill.
So for those keeping track at home, if you pirate the movie, you can skip the anti-piracy warnings.
Yep -- or you can choose to keep them. I think that's the "Extra Irony" option.
The problem with Amtrak is that the U.S. government insists on running a railroad, when what they ought to be doing is just maintaining the right-of-ways.
Congress also spends billions of dollars on the Interstate Highways, yet they don't monopolize over-the-road trucking; truckers use the infrastructure and theoretically pay taxes to do so (levied on diesel fuel). We all know that they don't come close to paying for the damage they do to the infrastructure...but that's a different discussion.
If Congress tried to create Amtruck, I can guarantee you that it would be as much of a gigantic cockup as Amtrak is -- probably worse.
The best thing they could do now would be to take over the rail infrastructure and manage it just like the interstate highways are managed, and then let the railroads use them in the same way that truckers use the roads. The same arguments that are used for subsidization of the Interstates would apply in equal or greater strength to railroads -- particularly considering the price of energy and the inherent efficiency of rail for moving heavy loads around. Encouraging the use of the rail network by paying for its maintenance would have both economic and environmental benefits.
The problem with Amtrak is that it's micromanaged, and thus it's doomed almost from the beginning not to failure, but mediocrity.
Yep, but I'm willing to bet that most Slashdotters aren't old enough to remember that the Post Office was at certain points in the not-too-distant past, a real mess.
They've gotten better and better the further they've gotten out from under the boot of Congress. I think they'd maybe almost survive in the open market today.
The BBC is funded by the "TV Tax" ... if you own a television and live in the U.K., you don't really have a choice.
... a HTPC with a tuner card, and then just use a suitably big monitor, or a DLP projector. No TV, just a computer, but you'd have all the capabilities.
Although I suppose you could put it in a faraday cage in your basement and just evade the tax -- I heard once that they used to drive around in detection vans, listening for the RF signals of TVs, and then compare that to the list of people who paid. Rather creepy, if you ask me.
I wonder how they would deal with a computer that had a TV tuner card installed? You could definitely 'watch TV' without owning a TV these days
I enjoy the programming created by the BBC, but I also don't live there or pay into the system. If I did, I might feel differently about the whole scheme.
That would certainly make sense, were it true. Unfortunately, common sense is all but dead in this country, buried under too many ideological struggles.
However, the same sort of reasoning that's letting folks legislate away violent video games has also been used -- and frankly I'd argue was brought to near-perfection by -- the anti-gun lobby in its crusade to drive gun manufacturers into bankruptcy. After all, if you can't make something illegal by way of the legislative branch (democracy is such a pain in the ass, isn't it?), well there's always tort law.
Basically, the various anti-gun groups, assisted by the Attorneys General of various cash-strapped locales, attempted to do exactly what you're claiming is so ridiculous: take firearms manufacturers to court and win huge judgments against them, because of the ways that their legitimate products had been misused by criminals.
To be quite frank, except that the pro-gun lobby in the U.S. is better funded and better organized than the anti-gun one, I think they probably would have been successful; and from there, it's nothing but a downward slide into the pit of strict liability. If you thought that there were an obscene number of warning labels and disclaimers on products now, when you remove any sense of logic for placing blame for an incident on the person who actually made the choice to commit the crime, and instead just get judgments from anyone whose products or services might have been even peripherally involved, I can only imagine we'd end up living in a world of soft rubber hammers, dull knives, and safety scissors.
The only reason that the firearms industry didn't get itself ruined by such "strict liability" nonsense, is because (principally through the efforts of the NRA and its members) Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents suits from being brought against a legitimate firearms manufacturer for relief against harm committed by others.
The problem is that video game companies don't have friends like the NRA, at least not yet. They also don't have the public goodwill and support that firearms do. A whole lot of people will show up at the polls if the vote is going to significantly impact their ability to own or buy guns -- more than a few elected officials have ended up on the wrong side of some issue, and found themselves out of office. Like it or not, it's a major political force. And why shouldn't it be -- it has 4.3 million members and has been around in various incarnations for over a hundred years (although admittedly its role as a PAC doesn't date back that far). There is nothing close to that scale to protect the rights of computer users or gamers, although the EFF is probably the most likely candidate and they do try hard. But they're just not big enough yet.
Frankly, I think we need something like the PLCAA universally. The doctrine of strict liability has gone too far, and it's too dangerous to let go unchecked. Suits like this could easily have bankrupted and paralyzed an entire industry (they were meant to), and it's not as though they could only be brought against gun companies. We need protections like this across the board. If you manufacture and sell your product in compliance with the laws of the United States, and a do not attempt to actively mislead consumers or hide the risks of using a product from them, so that a reasonable consumer acting with reasonable prudence, could learn the risks of the product if they chose to care, then you should be exempted from liability springing from that individual's misuse of your product, if they end up harming themselves or others.
People need to start taking responsibility for their own actions. They shouldn't
Wait ... I thought that game proved that dogs were impervious to guns?
Where is the Bar association?
Um, I think they were last seen heading for the direction of the bank. Follow the laughter.
The DARPA funded BLEEX [berkeley.edu] was prototyped to allow soldiers to carry 70 pound packs across flat and sloped terrain with hopes of 150 pound capacity in the next 6 monthes.
... that's a little weak on the specifications. Soldiers already carry 70 pound packs across flat and sloped terrain (and swamps, and mountains, and everything else). 150 pounds is definitely getting up into the range of severe unpleasantness, but it's not that far out of the realm of possibility for a fit man to carry around. Actually, when you add everything up, some guys -- like those in a machine-gun or Mk. 19 team -- might be carrying close to that with a standard load of ammo. Not something you'd want to run a marathon carrying, but I haven't seen an augmentation system that could run a marathon, either.
Having been in that business
Well, does it?
Actually this is a premise to a series of ecological disasters described in the Reality Dysfunction series of SF books by Peter F. Hamilton.
It's mentioned only peripherally, but the general idea is that the widespread use of fusion power and the vastly increased energy consumption, combined with population and other types of biosphere-bashing, have led to super-storms that basically scour anything in their path.
A little farfetched at present, but an interesting scenario. You'd really have to have "Mr. Fusions" on every car/truck/bus/lawnmower/house, all consuming gigawatts of power, before you would start to come anywhere near to the amount of heat the Earth takes in (and consequently radiates back out, since it stays at a basically fixed average temperature) from the Sun.
However if you did manage to produce some sort of limitless energy source, and just started using it everywhere, it doesn't seem physically impossible that the average temperature of the planet would go up. It would have to -- it's a simple Newton's Law of Cooling problem. The temperature would increase until the energy flowing out into space equaled the energy flowing in from the sun and from other sources; given that the energy flows out at a rate that's proportional to the difference in temperature between the planet and the surrounding space.
Only the NSA would think that a spy satellite is needed in order to read a press release.