fewer astroturfers invest the time in complete reviews
I look for reviews that include both positives and negatives. Nothing is perfect, and most good reviewers will find at least one drawback or limitation in the object being reviewed. Reviews that are nothing but positives I don't give a lot of credit to - eve if they are real, they're probably not being objective.
I know anytime I write a review, I give a quick breakdown, hit the positives, hit the negatives, and close with a summary. (a lot of professional review sites, sites that review a large number of entrants in a particular field, do the same, look at for example independent hard drive reviews) I wish more others would do the same.
Until they patch it, yes. That itself is SOP industry-wide. It only attracts criticism when they drag their feet patching it, which Apple isn't known for.
Most firmware flashing requires the root password to perform, so I'm assuming that unless you're talking about removing the battery from the computer. So at least authentication is required for this, which lessens the threat considerably.
However, this is a very interesting angle. I can somewhat see where there's a password required for access, but it's more to keep the battery secure than the computer. Or possibly to prevent cycle-count tampering to get around warranty claims on consumed batteries that are still in warranty by calendar days.
So any bets how many days it takes Apple to push a security update that changes the password on any battery it sees? I can't imagine them letting this stand, and the password (on the battery end) is almost certainly in the firmware, so it should be changeable.
also look at how quickly apple dropped serial ports. small appliances (high end routers etc) still come with serial ports instead of usb, they need to get with the picture.
[Apple] is considering giving up on NFC altogether, a technology embraced by all of its rivals
Apple isn't known for giving a crap what their competition is embracing. (that's MS's gig) I think the basic ideas is "why have a feature that everyone else has, giving the consumer a choice between our product and a dozen competitors, when we can offer an appealing feature that we have a large portion of the market on"?
Makes perfect sense really. Hype something that you, and everyone else, is offering, or hype something that they can only buy from you? That's just smart business.
Now of course this relies on the market adopting it if it's a compatibility thing, but then if you've already established yourself as the representative for the feature, you've accomplished your goal and it's ok for the competition to run up into the back of the pack with support too and their support for "your feature" just works to your advantage then.
or "rogue planet". So if a planet was in orbit around a star, and the star went nova, (and the planet survived the event) then it would lose its status as a planet? seems odd.
"The movie and music industry think pirates are criminals and parasites who cost both industries billions of dollars in lost sales.
No, and yes.
They aren't the idiots that they play themselves to be, that are blindly trying to sue everyone and don't understand how things should work. They are completely aware of the situation, and understand that they are playing the game in the most profitable way possible, and have absolutely no reason to change their ways.
But yes they do recognize pirates (and customers, and little green men, and everyone else on and off the planet) as a threat to their bottom line, and will take any action they can find that will further to maximize their profit. Be it legal or illegal, moral or immoral, sensible or nonsense. They'll run the numbers and follow the compass to the $outh, past whatever it leads them through.
Can't blame them really. They're experts at their job, and I'm sure their shareholders would agree, they're doing quite well at their job. (otherwise they'd have been fired long ago)
It's been my observation that the quality of the "geniuses" at the Apple stores varies wildly. Some of them are quite clueless. I work at an AASP, and we have repeatedly had a "genius" tell a customer they could bring their ipod in for a warranty repair, or that they could bring their iMac back they bought online back to us for a full refund.
1. It's a REALLY bad idea to try and extort criminals.
It's also a really bad idea to do something that lands a $250k bounty on your head. But they do it anyway because it's get-rich-quick. Besides, it's going to be more criminals doing the extorting, they're used to shady, dangerous deals.
It'll happen. Or it'll get tried. Probably more than once. At the very least, it'll raise the herder's paranoia a notch or two. (and I mean in the plural, these nets aren't being run by some recluse in his basement, these are like little sweatshops with a dozen+ involved) Even that alone could help - you get a group of 4 or 5 already nervous criminals a bit more on edge and there's bound to be some paranoia-driven backstabbing getting kicked up. And that can only help resolve the problem more quickly.
I was thinking the same question. Stone and masonry can hold both heat and cold, it's a matter of which they're exposed to longer. The idea is to have it carry you through a shorter period of undesired temperatures. Brick in a fireplace radiating heat after the fire dies down and is out for the night, or cool concrete walls keeping the living room pleasant for the few hours direct light is shining in through the main windows.
The provided picture shows shade over the tubes - I'd expect if you can keep them shaded they would work well to keep the temps inside a fair amount below outdoor temps. You'd want them facing north-south too, to prevent morning/evening sun from coming directly in on the ends. I'm assuming they took this into consideration.
The bottom and top of the tube could also be used for cooling, vent the top much like you vent the attic in a house, and draw in cool air on the bottom, maybe even through a vent that runs a distance underground to cool the air before it comes into the tube. Such a system would be powered by convection and probably wouldn't even require a fan. Storing water in the space in the lower portion of the tube could further aid in keeping it cool during the day.
In a pure economy, you can't spend money you don't have. But in a credit-economy, that unfortunately doesn't hold true. So cutting taxes by itself doesn't stop the blockheads from charging it and increasing national debt. That generally only works so long though before they start cutting back spending. But governments in general are notorious for loose spending, since the ones cutting the checks are not dealing with their own money. So it all tends to boil down to lack of fiscal responsibility. (which Greece is finally reaching the end of their rope on)
Getting partisan, it's generally safe to say that republicans lower taxes and raise national debt, democrats raise taxes and lower national debt. It's "seesaw economics". People get tired of high taxes so they vote in republicans who lower taxes, raise debt, and depress the economy. People get tired of high debt and poor economy and vote in democrats that raise taxes, lower debt, and recover the economy. Rinse and repeat. The voters drive the cycle.
I really don't have a stance on whether taxes need to be raised or lowered. It really doesn't matter, one way or another, every dollar the government spends needs to be paid for, either now, or later. So many people just don't understand/realize that. Spending is the true issue, and we the people generally have very little say in that. If you lower the spending, you can lower the taxing, it's just that dead simple. All we can do is vote for congresscritters that we hope will be more sensible with the spending, but it never seems to materialize. It all comes down to greed really, every representative tries to get things for their state, leading to pork. But it's not just one or two or ten of them doing it, they pretty much all do it. And once you get into that situation, the only "losers" are the few that don't do it, so the result is, nobody wants to stop. And so it never ends, or at least not until you can get just about everyone to agree on fixing it at once, which is really hard to do.
The whole issue of "pork" comes down to compromise, need, and greed. If group A has a legitimate need for X, they can't get it without "compromise", which often means giving group B their Y as well, which very often is an unnecessary luxury. Group B is being greedy, and can get away with it because group A requires their help to get what they need. As a result we all are forced to pay for the unnecessary Y. That's the essence of pork. Find a way to fix that, and you can actually lower taxes without raising debt and damaging the economy.
Also, trying to simply say "taxes create jobs" ignores that circle of finance, specifically "jobs pay taxes". It doesn't make money, it just moves it around. The only way for a country to actually make money is by clearing a higher margin on exports than it loses on imports. (again money only moves, but from outside the country to inside it)
Nothing like a fine which is probably about.001% of what better customer service would cost them to implement. Hooray for justice.
Read the judgement before commenting further - there were a total of 10 different factors used by the judge to weigh and adjust the civil penalty. Her situation being unique (rather than chronic), and the amount being small led to the judge approving an identical penalty to another similar case with a different defendant. This may seem like a pittance to fine them, but it puts them on the books, and the next penalty will likely be higher as a result.
Just because the defendant is wealthy does not by itself justify a higher penalty. This unfortunately may result in more abuses before the penalties reach a sufficient level to adjust their attitude, but they're a bigger entity and as such it's natural to require more to motivate them to change.
The founding fathers weren't big on massive amounts of written law. There's a reason the constitution is so short. They believed in simple laws that were unambiguous, and preferred to err on the side of freedom. The sheer number of laws themselves they would be opposed to. They believed the average person should be able to reason out what was illegal using common sense or a very minimal guidance. Nowadays the laws are so complex and so vague that its provably impossible for the average person to work out whether many things are illegal or not.
But they have so much experience in this area? I mean, identifying a popular new market after it's already been filled in with developed competitors, making a late entrance into a mature market with a rough beta, with the only distinguishing features being things nobody wants or likes, and withdrawing from the market a few yrs later after nonstop negative returns.
Somewhat unrelated but still worth a look, the difference between a successful market entry, and what MS will try: MS Redesigns iPod Package
I'm kind of honestly baffled that somebody would need more than one ISP at home
I run a variety of small services at my home, have done so for 15 yrs. Mail and web for example. I have DSL and cable. My DSL just recently upgraded to 1up/7down from 1up/1.5down (umm thanks for the DOWNstream bump... not), and the cable is now at 2up/25down. Obviously cable is the better performer, but it's also less reliable/consistent and doesn't offer static IP addresses. And my cable speeds can really dip badly during prime time when everyone is netflix'ing. DSL is fairly stable any time of the day.
Qwest's DSL in my area (read STATE) was down for over two entire weeks because the clowns built both of their regional NOCs 100ft from the same river. MediaCrap just goes down whenever a fly in Kenya farts, but it's always back up again in an hour or less. (usually happens early in the AM, guessing that's when they move their patch cables around? *shrug*) Neither of them are in any hurry to provide me with better upstream speeds or more reliable service, such is my fate in an area that lacks choices/competition.
That "east district" in texas where all the trolls file their suits, doesn't that require a business to have a "presence" in texas, and thus jurisdiction? So maybe this is a good thing?
And you'd think it would also have the side-effect of a lot of companies leaving texas, leaving their server farm behind, to shed the liability of not only sales tax, but also patent troll targeting?
If she had calmly stood her ground the worst that would have happened
Eventually, the worst that does happen is the worst that can happen. So we look at the "worst case scenario" with laws to see if they go too far. Gets back to that "better to let 9 guilty go free than convict 1 innocent". You shouldn't make a law that assures conviction of all 9 guilty at the expense of risking conviction of 1 innocent.
"Disorderly Conduct". "Disturbing the Peace". "Interference with Official Acts", "Failure to Obey an Officer of the Law".
As long as they have those on the books, they can arrest you anytime they damn well please, regardless of how passive you are. Even if you are doing nothing. Those are wildcard laws that were basically made by stupid people that, at the time, believed they needed to give an officer a power to control some difficult-to-define act of civil disobedience. Since they couldn't define it properly, they made a very loosely-worded law that would include it, and it's been getting used to make totally unrelated things illegal ever since. That's the worst possible way to make a law. They like to justify it by saying "it's ok, they won't apply it except where necessary". And that's cutting the officers a blank check. All open-ended laws are bad laws.
I got a ticket once for "improper use of median". improper? Really? so, where do I look to read about what's "proper"? They didn't have an answer for that other than (off the record) "whatever we say is improper". Lovely.
MAC filtering is 99% worthless. It takes one command in terminal to change your ethernet or wifi MAC to anything want, good till reboot.
And afaik MAC addresses are sent in the clear so a packet sniffer would instantly have a valid usable MAC when someone logged in legitimately. Just a matter of waiting for them to put their computer to sleep, as more than one computer with the same MAC tends to make the router go skitzo.
Slashdot Mirror
And lets not completely forget the so much less likely "infertility" angle of adoption...
I look for reviews that include both positives and negatives. Nothing is perfect, and most good reviewers will find at least one drawback or limitation in the object being reviewed. Reviews that are nothing but positives I don't give a lot of credit to - eve if they are real, they're probably not being objective.
I know anytime I write a review, I give a quick breakdown, hit the positives, hit the negatives, and close with a summary. (a lot of professional review sites, sites that review a large number of entrants in a particular field, do the same, look at for example independent hard drive reviews) I wish more others would do the same.
Until they patch it, yes. That itself is SOP industry-wide. It only attracts criticism when they drag their feet patching it, which Apple isn't known for.
You might want to read up on Apple Security
Most firmware flashing requires the root password to perform, so I'm assuming that unless you're talking about removing the battery from the computer. So at least authentication is required for this, which lessens the threat considerably.
However, this is a very interesting angle. I can somewhat see where there's a password required for access, but it's more to keep the battery secure than the computer. Or possibly to prevent cycle-count tampering to get around warranty claims on consumed batteries that are still in warranty by calendar days.
So any bets how many days it takes Apple to push a security update that changes the password on any battery it sees? I can't imagine them letting this stand, and the password (on the battery end) is almost certainly in the firmware, so it should be changeable.
also look at how quickly apple dropped serial ports. small appliances (high end routers etc) still come with serial ports instead of usb, they need to get with the picture.
Apple isn't known for giving a crap what their competition is embracing. (that's MS's gig) I think the basic ideas is "why have a feature that everyone else has, giving the consumer a choice between our product and a dozen competitors, when we can offer an appealing feature that we have a large portion of the market on"?
Makes perfect sense really. Hype something that you, and everyone else, is offering, or hype something that they can only buy from you? That's just smart business.
Now of course this relies on the market adopting it if it's a compatibility thing, but then if you've already established yourself as the representative for the feature, you've accomplished your goal and it's ok for the competition to run up into the back of the pack with support too and their support for "your feature" just works to your advantage then.
or "rogue planet". So if a planet was in orbit around a star, and the star went nova, (and the planet survived the event) then it would lose its status as a planet? seems odd.
No, and yes.
They aren't the idiots that they play themselves to be, that are blindly trying to sue everyone and don't understand how things should work. They are completely aware of the situation, and understand that they are playing the game in the most profitable way possible, and have absolutely no reason to change their ways.
But yes they do recognize pirates (and customers, and little green men, and everyone else on and off the planet) as a threat to their bottom line, and will take any action they can find that will further to maximize their profit. Be it legal or illegal, moral or immoral, sensible or nonsense. They'll run the numbers and follow the compass to the $outh, past whatever it leads them through.
Can't blame them really. They're experts at their job, and I'm sure their shareholders would agree, they're doing quite well at their job. (otherwise they'd have been fired long ago)
It's been my observation that the quality of the "geniuses" at the Apple stores varies wildly. Some of them are quite clueless. I work at an AASP, and we have repeatedly had a "genius" tell a customer they could bring their ipod in for a warranty repair, or that they could bring their iMac back they bought online back to us for a full refund.
Sometimes, "genius" they aint
It's also a really bad idea to do something that lands a $250k bounty on your head. But they do it anyway because it's get-rich-quick. Besides, it's going to be more criminals doing the extorting, they're used to shady, dangerous deals.
It'll happen. Or it'll get tried. Probably more than once. At the very least, it'll raise the herder's paranoia a notch or two. (and I mean in the plural, these nets aren't being run by some recluse in his basement, these are like little sweatshops with a dozen+ involved) Even that alone could help - you get a group of 4 or 5 already nervous criminals a bit more on edge and there's bound to be some paranoia-driven backstabbing getting kicked up. And that can only help resolve the problem more quickly.
I was thinking the same question. Stone and masonry can hold both heat and cold, it's a matter of which they're exposed to longer. The idea is to have it carry you through a shorter period of undesired temperatures. Brick in a fireplace radiating heat after the fire dies down and is out for the night, or cool concrete walls keeping the living room pleasant for the few hours direct light is shining in through the main windows.
The provided picture shows shade over the tubes - I'd expect if you can keep them shaded they would work well to keep the temps inside a fair amount below outdoor temps. You'd want them facing north-south too, to prevent morning/evening sun from coming directly in on the ends. I'm assuming they took this into consideration.
The bottom and top of the tube could also be used for cooling, vent the top much like you vent the attic in a house, and draw in cool air on the bottom, maybe even through a vent that runs a distance underground to cool the air before it comes into the tube. Such a system would be powered by convection and probably wouldn't even require a fan. Storing water in the space in the lower portion of the tube could further aid in keeping it cool during the day.
No they'll send you a money order. And some recommended places to invest some of it.
I wonder if they rake in 250k a month (or week) renting such a botnet? May start leading to some entertaining extortion...
I think you meant to say "very few companies that take taxpayers to the cleaners"?
In a pure economy, you can't spend money you don't have. But in a credit-economy, that unfortunately doesn't hold true. So cutting taxes by itself doesn't stop the blockheads from charging it and increasing national debt. That generally only works so long though before they start cutting back spending. But governments in general are notorious for loose spending, since the ones cutting the checks are not dealing with their own money. So it all tends to boil down to lack of fiscal responsibility. (which Greece is finally reaching the end of their rope on)
Getting partisan, it's generally safe to say that republicans lower taxes and raise national debt, democrats raise taxes and lower national debt. It's "seesaw economics". People get tired of high taxes so they vote in republicans who lower taxes, raise debt, and depress the economy. People get tired of high debt and poor economy and vote in democrats that raise taxes, lower debt, and recover the economy. Rinse and repeat. The voters drive the cycle.
I really don't have a stance on whether taxes need to be raised or lowered. It really doesn't matter, one way or another, every dollar the government spends needs to be paid for, either now, or later. So many people just don't understand/realize that. Spending is the true issue, and we the people generally have very little say in that. If you lower the spending, you can lower the taxing, it's just that dead simple. All we can do is vote for congresscritters that we hope will be more sensible with the spending, but it never seems to materialize. It all comes down to greed really, every representative tries to get things for their state, leading to pork. But it's not just one or two or ten of them doing it, they pretty much all do it. And once you get into that situation, the only "losers" are the few that don't do it, so the result is, nobody wants to stop. And so it never ends, or at least not until you can get just about everyone to agree on fixing it at once, which is really hard to do.
The whole issue of "pork" comes down to compromise, need, and greed. If group A has a legitimate need for X, they can't get it without "compromise", which often means giving group B their Y as well, which very often is an unnecessary luxury. Group B is being greedy, and can get away with it because group A requires their help to get what they need. As a result we all are forced to pay for the unnecessary Y. That's the essence of pork. Find a way to fix that, and you can actually lower taxes without raising debt and damaging the economy.
Also, trying to simply say "taxes create jobs" ignores that circle of finance, specifically "jobs pay taxes". It doesn't make money, it just moves it around. The only way for a country to actually make money is by clearing a higher margin on exports than it loses on imports. (again money only moves, but from outside the country to inside it)
Read the judgement before commenting further - there were a total of 10 different factors used by the judge to weigh and adjust the civil penalty. Her situation being unique (rather than chronic), and the amount being small led to the judge approving an identical penalty to another similar case with a different defendant. This may seem like a pittance to fine them, but it puts them on the books, and the next penalty will likely be higher as a result.
Just because the defendant is wealthy does not by itself justify a higher penalty. This unfortunately may result in more abuses before the penalties reach a sufficient level to adjust their attitude, but they're a bigger entity and as such it's natural to require more to motivate them to change.
The founding fathers weren't big on massive amounts of written law. There's a reason the constitution is so short. They believed in simple laws that were unambiguous, and preferred to err on the side of freedom. The sheer number of laws themselves they would be opposed to. They believed the average person should be able to reason out what was illegal using common sense or a very minimal guidance. Nowadays the laws are so complex and so vague that its provably impossible for the average person to work out whether many things are illegal or not.
I think the founding fathers would be horrified by >95% of current law.
But they have so much experience in this area? I mean, identifying a popular new market after it's already been filled in with developed competitors, making a late entrance into a mature market with a rough beta, with the only distinguishing features being things nobody wants or likes, and withdrawing from the market a few yrs later after nonstop negative returns.
Somewhat unrelated but still worth a look, the difference between a successful market entry, and what MS will try: MS Redesigns iPod Package
I run a variety of small services at my home, have done so for 15 yrs. Mail and web for example. I have DSL and cable. My DSL just recently upgraded to 1up/7down from 1up/1.5down (umm thanks for the DOWNstream bump... not), and the cable is now at 2up/25down. Obviously cable is the better performer, but it's also less reliable/consistent and doesn't offer static IP addresses. And my cable speeds can really dip badly during prime time when everyone is netflix'ing. DSL is fairly stable any time of the day.
Qwest's DSL in my area (read STATE) was down for over two entire weeks because the clowns built both of their regional NOCs 100ft from the same river. MediaCrap just goes down whenever a fly in Kenya farts, but it's always back up again in an hour or less. (usually happens early in the AM, guessing that's when they move their patch cables around? *shrug*) Neither of them are in any hurry to provide me with better upstream speeds or more reliable service, such is my fate in an area that lacks choices/competition.
Yep, ignorance is bliss.
I pulled off the road and parked in the median. Apparently they prefer you right on the shoulder where others can clip you.
That "east district" in texas where all the trolls file their suits, doesn't that require a business to have a "presence" in texas, and thus jurisdiction? So maybe this is a good thing?
And you'd think it would also have the side-effect of a lot of companies leaving texas, leaving their server farm behind, to shed the liability of not only sales tax, but also patent troll targeting?
Eventually, the worst that does happen is the worst that can happen. So we look at the "worst case scenario" with laws to see if they go too far. Gets back to that "better to let 9 guilty go free than convict 1 innocent". You shouldn't make a law that assures conviction of all 9 guilty at the expense of risking conviction of 1 innocent.
"Disorderly Conduct". "Disturbing the Peace". "Interference with Official Acts", "Failure to Obey an Officer of the Law".
As long as they have those on the books, they can arrest you anytime they damn well please, regardless of how passive you are. Even if you are doing nothing. Those are wildcard laws that were basically made by stupid people that, at the time, believed they needed to give an officer a power to control some difficult-to-define act of civil disobedience. Since they couldn't define it properly, they made a very loosely-worded law that would include it, and it's been getting used to make totally unrelated things illegal ever since. That's the worst possible way to make a law. They like to justify it by saying "it's ok, they won't apply it except where necessary". And that's cutting the officers a blank check. All open-ended laws are bad laws.
I got a ticket once for "improper use of median". improper? Really? so, where do I look to read about what's "proper"? They didn't have an answer for that other than (off the record) "whatever we say is improper". Lovely.
MAC filtering is 99% worthless. It takes one command in terminal to change your ethernet or wifi MAC to anything want, good till reboot.
And afaik MAC addresses are sent in the clear so a packet sniffer would instantly have a valid usable MAC when someone logged in legitimately. Just a matter of waiting for them to put their computer to sleep, as more than one computer with the same MAC tends to make the router go skitzo.