In many states, they can collect against the minor's parents.
Or else wait until the minor has a paying job, and garnish their wages just like they'd do with a person who couldn't pay back taxes, or child support.
Believe me, the court system has many ways to wring the money out of you. Just because the person is underage or dead won't stop them.
It mentioned somewhere on the site (I believe in the FAQ) that it is capable of WiFi via a SD-to-802.11b adaptor, but there are currently not any Linux drivers for these.
So the answer is currently no, but it seems that if the device sells well, that it won't be too long before someone comes up with a driver for the adaptors.
I admit, integrated WiFi in an open source type device like this would really be killer.
I wonder whether you can plug a bluetooth adaptor into the USB port and use that? In some older games it's not at all inconceivable to do multiplayer via BT.
As other people have noted, this device doesn't compete with the PSP.
Although the markets might have some overlap, they're not the same; the PSP has a fairly wide audience and is going to be sold in large numbers, its capabilities for the price are determined by a huge economy of scale. This device is aimed not at "kids," but at people who have a big interest in computers and Linux in general -- basically script kiddies, hackers, people who read Slashdot, etc. The numbers they seem to be going for in terms of sales are big for an open-source product, but they're a drop in the bucket for Sony.
Also, I think it will appeal a lot to people who otherwise have no interest in a handheld gaming system. Speaking just for myself, I have no interest in a PSP. Perhaps if someone gave me one for free I'd play around with it, but it doesn't interest me all that greatly. (Moreover the prospect of giving any amount of money to Sony is a disincentive.) However this thing does appeal to me, because I can see a lot of old emulated games being made available for it, as well as non-game-related hacks and modifications.
I'm only one person, but I don't think I'm that uncommon a consumer, in an admittedly narrow demographic.
I agree with you on everything but point C. Real MMC cards were pretty much killed by the switchover to SD cards. I don't know of anyone that's manufacturing them anymore.
I believe the deal was that no plain-vanilla MMC cards would be manufactured with a capacity greater than either 128 or 256MB. I don't know if that was a tacit agreement on the manufacturers' parts, or if that was just the point in the product's life when they switched over to SD... but I've never seen a large MMC card.
On the MMC Association website's FAQ, there is a line regarding capacity which states: Q: What is the largest amount of memory I can buy in a MultiMediaCard today? A: MultiMediaCards with up to 128Mbytes of memory are available now. 256Mbytes version will be available in 2003.
I'm kind of wondering the same thing, but based on context and the photos of the device, I think he means its "desktop" type file manager / graphical OS. Like the Finder on a Mac, I think.
Impossibly-stuck-together bricks wasn't limited to the bootleg LEGOs, though, it happened with the real ones too.
The best accessory LEGO ever brought out, imo, was a little grey plastic lever type device called the "Brick Puller." It let you pry apart two even severely stuck bricks or plates, without hurting your fingers or breaking your own / parent's fingernails.
The second best was the 'BrickVac,' a device for picking up loose parts scattered across a floor that worked sort of like a carpet cleaner. Really cut down on those stepping-on-a-brick-in-the-middle-of-the-night incidents.
If you read the CNet article, one of the LEGO execs talks about what seems to be a plan of theirs to (I'll summarize here rather than quote directly) 'let the customers run the company.' Not literally of course, but rather than just have the 100 in-house, presumably full time designers that they have right now making their boxed sets which are the company's bread and butter, they can use the LEGO Factory as a source for new product ideas.
There's an example in the article of a kid who won a contest to design a novel kit, and now it's being sold by LEGO for about $70. A big focus of the Factory concept seems to be the ability to upload and share your designs. I assume that when you upload and share them, you give LEGO permission to use and market them as kits if they want to.
So really, what they're hoping for is a sort of 'open source' model for their kit design. One big centralized repository for people's cool design ideas, complete with parts lists, and their in-house people can comb through them and try and pick the best out to market in stores / online.
I have no idea whether it will work in terms of saving the company from bankruptcy -- and honestly I think that has a lot more to do with management and corporate finance than marketing -- but it does seem to have an intriguing concept at its core.
Ok, color me stupid, but has anyone yet found the link to the hacked version of the program where you can get the parts list itemized out in bags? All I've seen is the official LEGO download for the Factory, which just tells you which "palettes" to buy.
All this discussion of this "hack," and I can't seem to find the link to it.
The only other building toy that I was ever particularly fond of as a kid (Fisher Price Construx) had problems that Legos never had. Specifically, their pieces wore out like crazy. I've never been sure whether this was a materials issue, or a design issue, or some of both. But after a particular part had been snapped together a bunch of times, you could feel it start to get weak. The feeling was just like the stiffness-before-breaking that you get before a thin piece of metal snaps.
Since a lot of the Construx sets I had were bought used at yard sales (they were getting hard to find by the end of the time I was using them) this might not have been as much of an issue for others, but it was for me, especially on the "special" parts (e.g. spaceship windshields were a big one that seemed to break a lot).
On the plus side though, I got really good with a toothpick and some cyano-acrylate glue to put the more valuable ones back together when they broke. In retrospect that might have been the most valuable part of the whole experience.
Speaking as someone who was rather fond of construction toys of all sorts, I definitely always wished that more toys were interoperable. I used to find ways to 'kitbash' them together though, with aforementioned CA glue: one easy way was to take the thin 1 by x lego bricks or plates, and glue them on to Construx parts. Then you could use the Construx to make vehicle 'frames' and put the details on with the much smaller legos.
Something which many people here on Slashdot have difficulties grasping, it seems.
So true. I was going to make a point earlier in the thread about the "reasonable and prudent person" standard, but realized that it's probably only a minority of Slashdot readers who, at least when it comes to buying a computer at a suspiciously low price, would act in either a reasonable or prudent manner.
They're almost certainly not arresting him just for this. Even if the laptop was obviously stolen they probably wouldn't set the bail that high just for one incident.
In fact I know some people who had a similar thing happen to them, where they bought two laptops that were very obviously hot goods, with the idea of reselling them on eBay and they were pretty quickly tracked down by the cops when the fence got pinched.
Both of them got about six months of probation. Certainly no $20k bail. So it's not just this one laptop. This guy is described as someone who "makes a living" doing this -- so whatever he's doing, he's trying to make a profession out of it. Based on the size of the bail, which is not huge but not insignificant either, the cops probably think he's a professional fence.
A lot of people are acting as if this guy was just trolling Craigslist one day and picked up a really great deal on a laptop for himself. That's not how it sounds to me at all: this guy was trafficking in hot goods as a job, buying them from dodgy characters at suspiciously low prices in cash, wiping the drives and selling them over the internet.
It's not like we have access to all the information but this guy was not your typical retailer.
In your last paragraph you actually make the most salient point I've seen so far in this discussion: what a "reasonable" person would do.
I think this is the best point so far, because (at least where I live, and have been advised on good authority) it's how the law works. If a reasonable and prudent person would have had good reason to suspect that the goods were stolen, then you're in trouble. If not, then no harm done.
It's to combat the old scenario of a police officer catching someone who just bought a VCR out of the back of a truck and saying "well gee, officer, I didn't think they were stolen!" Yeah right. So you throw the case in front of a jury box and see what a few more-or-less randomly selected people think. Generally it's not hard to predict which way they'll go.
If you're buying something at significantly less than the prevailing market price, in cash without a receipt, anonymously, chances are something is wrong either with the situation or the item in question. Not always, but usually.
In this case, I'm immediately suspicious because the police chose to arrest this guy, but not the end buyer (the dude who called IBM's support line). Obviously they think something's hinky with him. Unless he pleads out, it'll be between him and his lawyer and the prosecutor and the jury to figure out whether he should have known better.
I find it endlessly ironic that at some of the most expensive and most elite private schools in the country -- the ones that the true elite send their kids to -- many of the teachers aren't certified. They're professionals, in some cases quite fresh out of whatever occupation they're actually trained in, taking a break for a while to teach. Or in other cases they're not certified, but they've been teaching kids for so long that it's irrelevant.
I think the theory with the non-certified teachers is that by being able to cast a wider net in terms of finding staff, they can actually get people who are a better match to the institution and students. Versus a public school facing a shortage of certified teachers, who may have to basically take anybody who comes in the door with a certificate, no matter how otherwise inept they may be. Also, private schools can get rid of teachers who don't cut it. Plus, they offer fringe benefits (often free or subsidized housing) that in some cases let them draw people that they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford.
The education unions have a point that systems like this might not scale too well to the public education system as a whole, but it's interesting food for thought that the more you pay, the fewer "educators" you get, versus people who may have actually had a prior career in the subject area.
I think that your conclusion -- that there might be some significant privacy applications here -- is correct, but your examples are weak.
I see no reason why aggregate, anonymized call origination data couldn't be used by police. In particular the example about police noticing an inordinate amount of calls from a location where there normally aren't any. I don't see any privacy violation in this.
Imagine that instead of looking for cell phone calls, which are electromagnetic waves being blasted into the ether, the cops were looking for visible light. They drive by a big abandoned farmhouse and notice lots of lights on. This doesn't give them probable cause to search, but it does give them a reason to knock on the door and ask for permission to search. And if, like many abandoned buildings, the property owner has previously informed the police that the building is posted against trespassing and unoccupied, they may be within their rights to walk right in unannounced, depending on the local laws.
This is no different from the cell phone case. Only in one situation they're seeing visible light, in the other it's electromagnetic radiation produced by two-way radios (that's what your cell phone is, after all). They can't enter and search a house based ONLY on this, obviously, just like they couldn't if it was just light emanating from the building. If they then went to investigate though, and found probable cause, or were given permission to search, any resulting arrests would not be "tainted."
The only way the privacy violation would come into play would be if the police, without a warrant or wiretap order, used the unique identification number of your phone plus the network's location data to put you at a certain location at a certain time. That, I think, would be obviously inadmissible, unless the records were kept by the carrier as a matter of course and obtained by a legitimate subpoena after the fact.
The difference, imo, is when an individual is being singled out for close observation and monitoring, versus when the data is being used anonymously and in aggregate. To come back to the original example of the rave/clandestine meeting/meth lab in the abandoned building, if the police saw that suddently there were 20 active cellphones where for the last year there have been zero, and decided to drive by and check it out, that's perfectly fine. But if they come and arrest you for trespassing because YOUR cellphone was operating from within said property at 2:43 AM last night, when there wasn't a warrant or wiretap order from a judge outstanding already, that's clearly not.
I am, of course, a nobody, so there's no reason my opinion counts for anything. However based on previous rulings concerning things like infrared observation from aircraft (to look for buildings that are being used as industrial marijuana growing operations), I wouldn't be surprised if what I just outlined is how things eventually work out.
What would be really cool is if you had some kind of video matrix switcher, where you could route any of the available inputs to any of the available monitors on the fly.
Sadly they're insanely expensive for component video or VGA (probably worse still for DVI) -- for what I can afford, I'd only get composite. And really who wants to try to browse the internet via composite video.
My personal dream system would be an array of monitors not unlike yours, maybe one or two main ones with thin bezels so they're easy to use as extended desktops, plus a few others off to the side to put information or video feeds on. Plus a wall-screen projector for presenting data, watching videos, or just taking a step back and looking at something in a different way. Make all of them available to maybe 4 different computers, and you're looking at a 6x4 switch. Eek!
It's kind of the same idea, but instead of holding the email for you in a disposable mailbox, it forwards it to your real address. After a certain number of uses though, the address "shuts down" and all messages sent there are eaten. You can log into the site and control the number of messages left on a particular address, set a dedicated sender, etc.
You go to the site and make an account, which requires a username, password, and real email address. From then on you can give out any address of the form:
someword.username@spamgourmet.com
Where 'someword' can be any word. You can also make ones of form someword.x.username@spamgourmet.com, where x is a number of messages from 1-20 that the address will work for, after which it shuts off.
I've signed up for some mailing lists using spamgourmet names. Initially the address is good for 5 messages. After you get the first one from the mailing list, you log into the system and set the mailing list email as the dedicated sender. Then, you can only get messages from the mailing list to that address. All others are tranparently deleted.
It's also good if you want to put an email in an eBay auction listing. You can set the address for 20 messsages, enough to keep it working through the auction, and then once the auction's over either close it down (by setting remaining msgs =0) or wait for it to run out. I've found by looking on the status page of my account at SpamGourmet, that those addresses have received a TON of spam.
It's also great for figuring out who's selling out your email address.
The iTunes Music Store exists to provide a hook to get people to buy iPods. Not the other way around.
Frankly, I think it's biggest purpose is to provide a justification in the eyes of the music companies for MP3 players in general, the iPod in particular. It keeps them from being viewed simply as piracy devices.
The most convenient way to put music into your iTunes Music Library (and into your iPod) is the same way people have been doing it since before the Music Store existed. Stick CD into drive. Click button. Wait. Eject CD. Done.
I wouldn't call that a "hack-and-slash" method -- whatever the heck that means. Furthermore, you can put any MP3, regardless of source, into the Library just by dragging and dropping it. Have one in an email or on your desktop that you want? Drag it into your Library in your iTunes window, it's copied. Or just drag it onto the iTunes icon in the dock.
There have been thousands of iPods sold, and on them are stored millions upon millions of songs. Of those only a fraction were purchased from the Music Store, despite its relative popularity. So obviously people are figuring out some way to get music to their iPods. In fact I would wager that 95% of iPod owners get their music from somewhere OTHER than the Music Store.
Frankly, I suspect you've never actually used iTunes, or an iPod, and are laboring under some sort of misunderstanding about how it works and the formats it supports. Or perhaps you're just a troll and I've gone for it. Whatever. If that's the case, then you need to get a hobby.
You might have had a valid point about Apple's tendencies to monopolize (or at least control) a market, but it was horribly marred by your inaccurate comments regarding iTunes. Get some facts and then try again.
Consider the two options. One, they could have played it safe, stuck with the iPod Mini through Christmas.
This way they stay right on current expectations for earnings, expenditures, etc. They don't have to sign any new contracts for parts. Their biggest worry is making sure they have enough of the silly things to stock stores in November and December, and providing technical support in January for the clueless. It's safe, it's simple. It's the textbook business case of 'if it ain't broke...'.
The other option, and the one they took, required them to do several things simultaneously. Firstly, they had to wind down production of the Mini. This means they had to stop buying parts, but assemble all the ones they had already bought or committed to buying. They had to meet all their commitments to stores, but also not leave retailers with big stocks of them (which would almost immediately become unwanted 'clearance items' when the Nano was revealed). That in itself is a big supply chain problem. Shutting down a supply chain can sometimes be as much of an issue as starting one up.
On top of that, they had to build up an entirely new supply chain, of new components and manufacturing, for this new Nano product. They had to be able to deliver on the initial rush of orders after the announcement, and they have to be able to push them out the door constantly until Christmas, when the next rush occurs. To do this they'll have to sign big agreements with suppliers and manufacturers (which will bankrupt them or nearly so if the product flops), not to mention retailers and distributers. Add to this the fact that the new product isn't as profitable as the old one, and doesn't reuse any existing parts or tooling.
Oh, and did I mention they have to keep the whole thing under wraps until the big launch date?
Believe me, for a manager in a big company, that took balls. I can only imagine what would happen if someone tried to do that where I work -- they'd probably have a mutiny.
It's worth noting that if you bought the iPod during one of the special periods from the Apple Store when they were offering free laser engraving, that they will take the old back-panel from your iPod and put it onto the new one. So you get to keep your engraving, scratches and all.
I was a little concerned about this when I heard about their exchange program. Getting rid of scratches is nice, except when the scratches are in a very precise laser-applied pattern, that you happen to be fond of.
Yes, well I'm sure Jobs was going to express its weight as a fraction of a typical beaver pelt, but he was afraid that some rabid PETA freak would throw red paint on him and hit the Precious by mistake.
What would you have preferred? Wampum? Gold bullion? Salt?
Does anyone know what the consequences would be if HP just packed up its bags and left? Just completely closed up shop, or liquidated the French corporation under whatever equivalent they have of Chapter 11, until there was nothing left to pay out these giant severance packages? I doubt the workers would suffer, undoubtedly the French govt would end up holding the bag -- as they should, since it's their regs that are so onerous.
Frankly if the government over there is as much of a pain in the ass to deal with as it seems, I'd be thinking hard about just pulling the plug on them as a market. Go elsewhere -- Asia is where your big market for the future is, who cares about France. It's too expensive to develop or manufacture anything there, and they give preference to domestic products anyway when purchasing, so why bother?
Maybe the management should demonstrate that at the end of the day, you can only jerk a company around so hard before they just take their ball and find somewhere else to play.
While this isn't precisely on topic, I'd like to see this modded up. The current system really does just feed into our growing dependence on some sort of 'higher authority,' be it corporate or governmental, to take care of us because we're too stupid to do it on our own.
And look where it's gotten us. By making companies pay for health insurance, it's nearly impossible for an individual to buy it on the open market at a reasonable rate. We've tried to make the companies serve us with all these cushy benefits so we wouldn't have to think about them ourselves, and instead we get into situations where we're afraid to leave a job because we'll be unable to get insurance otherwise.
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In many states, they can collect against the minor's parents.
Or else wait until the minor has a paying job, and garnish their wages just like they'd do with a person who couldn't pay back taxes, or child support.
Believe me, the court system has many ways to wring the money out of you. Just because the person is underage or dead won't stop them.
It mentioned somewhere on the site (I believe in the FAQ) that it is capable of WiFi via a SD-to-802.11b adaptor, but there are currently not any Linux drivers for these.
So the answer is currently no, but it seems that if the device sells well, that it won't be too long before someone comes up with a driver for the adaptors.
I admit, integrated WiFi in an open source type device like this would really be killer.
I wonder whether you can plug a bluetooth adaptor into the USB port and use that? In some older games it's not at all inconceivable to do multiplayer via BT.
As other people have noted, this device doesn't compete with the PSP.
Although the markets might have some overlap, they're not the same; the PSP has a fairly wide audience and is going to be sold in large numbers, its capabilities for the price are determined by a huge economy of scale. This device is aimed not at "kids," but at people who have a big interest in computers and Linux in general -- basically script kiddies, hackers, people who read Slashdot, etc. The numbers they seem to be going for in terms of sales are big for an open-source product, but they're a drop in the bucket for Sony.
Also, I think it will appeal a lot to people who otherwise have no interest in a handheld gaming system. Speaking just for myself, I have no interest in a PSP. Perhaps if someone gave me one for free I'd play around with it, but it doesn't interest me all that greatly. (Moreover the prospect of giving any amount of money to Sony is a disincentive.) However this thing does appeal to me, because I can see a lot of old emulated games being made available for it, as well as non-game-related hacks and modifications.
I'm only one person, but I don't think I'm that uncommon a consumer, in an admittedly narrow demographic.
I agree with you on everything but point C. Real MMC cards were pretty much killed by the switchover to SD cards. I don't know of anyone that's manufacturing them anymore.
... but I've never seen a large MMC card.
I believe the deal was that no plain-vanilla MMC cards would be manufactured with a capacity greater than either 128 or 256MB. I don't know if that was a tacit agreement on the manufacturers' parts, or if that was just the point in the product's life when they switched over to SD
On the MMC Association website's FAQ, there is a line regarding capacity which states:
Q: What is the largest amount of memory I can buy in a MultiMediaCard today?
A: MultiMediaCards with up to 128Mbytes of memory are available now. 256Mbytes version will be available in 2003.
And more's the irony, with all their talk about open formats, they release a video that's a WMV.
What the hell -- are they not capable of producing an MP4? Or how about a good old AVI?
The one saving grace is that they don't use that abominable WMV3 codec, but still, the use of the format is completely unnecessary.
I'm kind of wondering the same thing, but based on context and the photos of the device, I think he means its "desktop" type file manager / graphical OS. Like the Finder on a Mac, I think.
Impossibly-stuck-together bricks wasn't limited to the bootleg LEGOs, though, it happened with the real ones too.
The best accessory LEGO ever brought out, imo, was a little grey plastic lever type device called the "Brick Puller." It let you pry apart two even severely stuck bricks or plates, without hurting your fingers or breaking your own / parent's fingernails.
The second best was the 'BrickVac,' a device for picking up loose parts scattered across a floor that worked sort of like a carpet cleaner. Really cut down on those stepping-on-a-brick-in-the-middle-of-the-night incidents.
If you read the CNet article, one of the LEGO execs talks about what seems to be a plan of theirs to (I'll summarize here rather than quote directly) 'let the customers run the company.' Not literally of course, but rather than just have the 100 in-house, presumably full time designers that they have right now making their boxed sets which are the company's bread and butter, they can use the LEGO Factory as a source for new product ideas.
There's an example in the article of a kid who won a contest to design a novel kit, and now it's being sold by LEGO for about $70. A big focus of the Factory concept seems to be the ability to upload and share your designs. I assume that when you upload and share them, you give LEGO permission to use and market them as kits if they want to.
So really, what they're hoping for is a sort of 'open source' model for their kit design. One big centralized repository for people's cool design ideas, complete with parts lists, and their in-house people can comb through them and try and pick the best out to market in stores / online.
I have no idea whether it will work in terms of saving the company from bankruptcy -- and honestly I think that has a lot more to do with management and corporate finance than marketing -- but it does seem to have an intriguing concept at its core.
Ok, color me stupid, but has anyone yet found the link to the hacked version of the program where you can get the parts list itemized out in bags? All I've seen is the official LEGO download for the Factory, which just tells you which "palettes" to buy.
All this discussion of this "hack," and I can't seem to find the link to it.
What am I missing?
The only other building toy that I was ever particularly fond of as a kid (Fisher Price Construx) had problems that Legos never had. Specifically, their pieces wore out like crazy. I've never been sure whether this was a materials issue, or a design issue, or some of both. But after a particular part had been snapped together a bunch of times, you could feel it start to get weak. The feeling was just like the stiffness-before-breaking that you get before a thin piece of metal snaps.
Since a lot of the Construx sets I had were bought used at yard sales (they were getting hard to find by the end of the time I was using them) this might not have been as much of an issue for others, but it was for me, especially on the "special" parts (e.g. spaceship windshields were a big one that seemed to break a lot).
On the plus side though, I got really good with a toothpick and some cyano-acrylate glue to put the more valuable ones back together when they broke. In retrospect that might have been the most valuable part of the whole experience.
Speaking as someone who was rather fond of construction toys of all sorts, I definitely always wished that more toys were interoperable. I used to find ways to 'kitbash' them together though, with aforementioned CA glue: one easy way was to take the thin 1 by x lego bricks or plates, and glue them on to Construx parts. Then you could use the Construx to make vehicle 'frames' and put the details on with the much smaller legos.
I'm sure that design will sell well in France.
Something which many people here on Slashdot have difficulties grasping, it seems.
So true. I was going to make a point earlier in the thread about the "reasonable and prudent person" standard, but realized that it's probably only a minority of Slashdot readers who, at least when it comes to buying a computer at a suspiciously low price, would act in either a reasonable or prudent manner.
They're almost certainly not arresting him just for this. Even if the laptop was obviously stolen they probably wouldn't set the bail that high just for one incident.
In fact I know some people who had a similar thing happen to them, where they bought two laptops that were very obviously hot goods, with the idea of reselling them on eBay and they were pretty quickly tracked down by the cops when the fence got pinched.
Both of them got about six months of probation. Certainly no $20k bail. So it's not just this one laptop. This guy is described as someone who "makes a living" doing this -- so whatever he's doing, he's trying to make a profession out of it. Based on the size of the bail, which is not huge but not insignificant either, the cops probably think he's a professional fence.
A lot of people are acting as if this guy was just trolling Craigslist one day and picked up a really great deal on a laptop for himself. That's not how it sounds to me at all: this guy was trafficking in hot goods as a job, buying them from dodgy characters at suspiciously low prices in cash, wiping the drives and selling them over the internet.
It's not like we have access to all the information but this guy was not your typical retailer.
In your last paragraph you actually make the most salient point I've seen so far in this discussion: what a "reasonable" person would do.
I think this is the best point so far, because (at least where I live, and have been advised on good authority) it's how the law works. If a reasonable and prudent person would have had good reason to suspect that the goods were stolen, then you're in trouble. If not, then no harm done.
It's to combat the old scenario of a police officer catching someone who just bought a VCR out of the back of a truck and saying "well gee, officer, I didn't think they were stolen!" Yeah right. So you throw the case in front of a jury box and see what a few more-or-less randomly selected people think. Generally it's not hard to predict which way they'll go.
If you're buying something at significantly less than the prevailing market price, in cash without a receipt, anonymously, chances are something is wrong either with the situation or the item in question. Not always, but usually.
In this case, I'm immediately suspicious because the police chose to arrest this guy, but not the end buyer (the dude who called IBM's support line). Obviously they think something's hinky with him. Unless he pleads out, it'll be between him and his lawyer and the prosecutor and the jury to figure out whether he should have known better.
I find it endlessly ironic that at some of the most expensive and most elite private schools in the country -- the ones that the true elite send their kids to -- many of the teachers aren't certified. They're professionals, in some cases quite fresh out of whatever occupation they're actually trained in, taking a break for a while to teach. Or in other cases they're not certified, but they've been teaching kids for so long that it's irrelevant.
I think the theory with the non-certified teachers is that by being able to cast a wider net in terms of finding staff, they can actually get people who are a better match to the institution and students. Versus a public school facing a shortage of certified teachers, who may have to basically take anybody who comes in the door with a certificate, no matter how otherwise inept they may be. Also, private schools can get rid of teachers who don't cut it. Plus, they offer fringe benefits (often free or subsidized housing) that in some cases let them draw people that they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford.
The education unions have a point that systems like this might not scale too well to the public education system as a whole, but it's interesting food for thought that the more you pay, the fewer "educators" you get, versus people who may have actually had a prior career in the subject area.
I think that your conclusion -- that there might be some significant privacy applications here -- is correct, but your examples are weak.
I see no reason why aggregate, anonymized call origination data couldn't be used by police. In particular the example about police noticing an inordinate amount of calls from a location where there normally aren't any. I don't see any privacy violation in this.
Imagine that instead of looking for cell phone calls, which are electromagnetic waves being blasted into the ether, the cops were looking for visible light. They drive by a big abandoned farmhouse and notice lots of lights on. This doesn't give them probable cause to search, but it does give them a reason to knock on the door and ask for permission to search. And if, like many abandoned buildings, the property owner has previously informed the police that the building is posted against trespassing and unoccupied, they may be within their rights to walk right in unannounced, depending on the local laws.
This is no different from the cell phone case. Only in one situation they're seeing visible light, in the other it's electromagnetic radiation produced by two-way radios (that's what your cell phone is, after all). They can't enter and search a house based ONLY on this, obviously, just like they couldn't if it was just light emanating from the building. If they then went to investigate though, and found probable cause, or were given permission to search, any resulting arrests would not be "tainted."
The only way the privacy violation would come into play would be if the police, without a warrant or wiretap order, used the unique identification number of your phone plus the network's location data to put you at a certain location at a certain time. That, I think, would be obviously inadmissible, unless the records were kept by the carrier as a matter of course and obtained by a legitimate subpoena after the fact.
The difference, imo, is when an individual is being singled out for close observation and monitoring, versus when the data is being used anonymously and in aggregate. To come back to the original example of the rave/clandestine meeting/meth lab in the abandoned building, if the police saw that suddently there were 20 active cellphones where for the last year there have been zero, and decided to drive by and check it out, that's perfectly fine. But if they come and arrest you for trespassing because YOUR cellphone was operating from within said property at 2:43 AM last night, when there wasn't a warrant or wiretap order from a judge outstanding already, that's clearly not.
I am, of course, a nobody, so there's no reason my opinion counts for anything. However based on previous rulings concerning things like infrared observation from aircraft (to look for buildings that are being used as industrial marijuana growing operations), I wouldn't be surprised if what I just outlined is how things eventually work out.
What would be really cool is if you had some kind of video matrix switcher, where you could route any of the available inputs to any of the available monitors on the fly.
4 vga&subtype=136
Something like this thing:
http://www.extron.com/product/product.asp?id=mvx4
Sadly they're insanely expensive for component video or VGA (probably worse still for DVI) -- for what I can afford, I'd only get composite. And really who wants to try to browse the internet via composite video.
My personal dream system would be an array of monitors not unlike yours, maybe one or two main ones with thin bezels so they're easy to use as extended desktops, plus a few others off to the side to put information or video feeds on. Plus a wall-screen projector for presenting data, watching videos, or just taking a step back and looking at something in a different way. Make all of them available to maybe 4 different computers, and you're looking at a 6x4 switch. Eek!
You might want to check out http://www.spamgourmet.com/ instead.
It's kind of the same idea, but instead of holding the email for you in a disposable mailbox, it forwards it to your real address. After a certain number of uses though, the address "shuts down" and all messages sent there are eaten. You can log into the site and control the number of messages left on a particular address, set a dedicated sender, etc.
You go to the site and make an account, which requires a username, password, and real email address. From then on you can give out any address of the form:
someword.username@spamgourmet.com
Where 'someword' can be any word. You can also make ones of form someword.x.username@spamgourmet.com, where x is a number of messages from 1-20 that the address will work for, after which it shuts off.
I've signed up for some mailing lists using spamgourmet names. Initially the address is good for 5 messages. After you get the first one from the mailing list, you log into the system and set the mailing list email as the dedicated sender. Then, you can only get messages from the mailing list to that address. All others are tranparently deleted.
It's also good if you want to put an email in an eBay auction listing. You can set the address for 20 messsages, enough to keep it working through the auction, and then once the auction's over either close it down (by setting remaining msgs =0) or wait for it to run out. I've found by looking on the status page of my account at SpamGourmet, that those addresses have received a TON of spam.
It's also great for figuring out who's selling out your email address.
Get a clue.
The iTunes Music Store exists to provide a hook to get people to buy iPods. Not the other way around.
Frankly, I think it's biggest purpose is to provide a justification in the eyes of the music companies for MP3 players in general, the iPod in particular. It keeps them from being viewed simply as piracy devices.
The most convenient way to put music into your iTunes Music Library (and into your iPod) is the same way people have been doing it since before the Music Store existed. Stick CD into drive. Click button. Wait. Eject CD. Done.
I wouldn't call that a "hack-and-slash" method -- whatever the heck that means. Furthermore, you can put any MP3, regardless of source, into the Library just by dragging and dropping it. Have one in an email or on your desktop that you want? Drag it into your Library in your iTunes window, it's copied. Or just drag it onto the iTunes icon in the dock.
There have been thousands of iPods sold, and on them are stored millions upon millions of songs. Of those only a fraction were purchased from the Music Store, despite its relative popularity. So obviously people are figuring out some way to get music to their iPods. In fact I would wager that 95% of iPod owners get their music from somewhere OTHER than the Music Store.
Frankly, I suspect you've never actually used iTunes, or an iPod, and are laboring under some sort of misunderstanding about how it works and the formats it supports. Or perhaps you're just a troll and I've gone for it. Whatever. If that's the case, then you need to get a hobby.
You might have had a valid point about Apple's tendencies to monopolize (or at least control) a market, but it was horribly marred by your inaccurate comments regarding iTunes. Get some facts and then try again.
Huh? Not at all.
Consider the two options. One, they could have played it safe, stuck with the iPod Mini through Christmas.
This way they stay right on current expectations for earnings, expenditures, etc. They don't have to sign any new contracts for parts. Their biggest worry is making sure they have enough of the silly things to stock stores in November and December, and providing technical support in January for the clueless. It's safe, it's simple. It's the textbook business case of 'if it ain't broke...'.
The other option, and the one they took, required them to do several things simultaneously. Firstly, they had to wind down production of the Mini. This means they had to stop buying parts, but assemble all the ones they had already bought or committed to buying. They had to meet all their commitments to stores, but also not leave retailers with big stocks of them (which would almost immediately become unwanted 'clearance items' when the Nano was revealed). That in itself is a big supply chain problem. Shutting down a supply chain can sometimes be as much of an issue as starting one up.
On top of that, they had to build up an entirely new supply chain, of new components and manufacturing, for this new Nano product. They had to be able to deliver on the initial rush of orders after the announcement, and they have to be able to push them out the door constantly until Christmas, when the next rush occurs. To do this they'll have to sign big agreements with suppliers and manufacturers (which will bankrupt them or nearly so if the product flops), not to mention retailers and distributers. Add to this the fact that the new product isn't as profitable as the old one, and doesn't reuse any existing parts or tooling.
Oh, and did I mention they have to keep the whole thing under wraps until the big launch date?
Believe me, for a manager in a big company, that took balls. I can only imagine what would happen if someone tried to do that where I work -- they'd probably have a mutiny.
It's worth noting that if you bought the iPod during one of the special periods from the Apple Store when they were offering free laser engraving, that they will take the old back-panel from your iPod and put it onto the new one. So you get to keep your engraving, scratches and all.
I was a little concerned about this when I heard about their exchange program. Getting rid of scratches is nice, except when the scratches are in a very precise laser-applied pattern, that you happen to be fond of.
Yes, well I'm sure Jobs was going to express its weight as a fraction of a typical beaver pelt, but he was afraid that some rabid PETA freak would throw red paint on him and hit the Precious by mistake.
What would you have preferred? Wampum? Gold bullion? Salt?
Does anyone know what the consequences would be if HP just packed up its bags and left? Just completely closed up shop, or liquidated the French corporation under whatever equivalent they have of Chapter 11, until there was nothing left to pay out these giant severance packages? I doubt the workers would suffer, undoubtedly the French govt would end up holding the bag -- as they should, since it's their regs that are so onerous.
Frankly if the government over there is as much of a pain in the ass to deal with as it seems, I'd be thinking hard about just pulling the plug on them as a market. Go elsewhere -- Asia is where your big market for the future is, who cares about France. It's too expensive to develop or manufacture anything there, and they give preference to domestic products anyway when purchasing, so why bother?
Maybe the management should demonstrate that at the end of the day, you can only jerk a company around so hard before they just take their ball and find somewhere else to play.
While this isn't precisely on topic, I'd like to see this modded up. The current system really does just feed into our growing dependence on some sort of 'higher authority,' be it corporate or governmental, to take care of us because we're too stupid to do it on our own.
And look where it's gotten us. By making companies pay for health insurance, it's nearly impossible for an individual to buy it on the open market at a reasonable rate. We've tried to make the companies serve us with all these cushy benefits so we wouldn't have to think about them ourselves, and instead we get into situations where we're afraid to leave a job because we'll be unable to get insurance otherwise.
You're right, so I did. Sorry about that. Gotta use that "Parent" button more effectively next time.
:)
At any rate, I agree with you 100%.