Cmon, editors, you need to think about these stories before you blindly post them with stupid, uninformed headlines.
Apple dictating to its retailers what prices to offer for their own manufactured phones is not "price fixing". Price fixing in the traditional sense is when competitors in a market collude to artificially set the price of a good that they otherwise should be competing on, which deprives the free market of alternatives.
This is a case of Apple setting its own product's pricing. And something is being lost from the Russian story and what they mean by things like Recommended Retail Price / MSRP, but this is not "price fixing". Please use some judgment before using inflammatory / inflated headlines.
Have they successfully built / connected any curved sections yet? I would imagine that's an important proof of concept at the technical level... just to be able to get the components sourced with the required tolerances and joined seamlessly....
Tech companies seem to want to push the point of on-demand services to the ridiculous edge.
People, there's a reason that you go to the mechanic's shop, or the doctor's office, etc. etc. It's because their time is quite valuable and the equipment they use is specialized.
Making someone whose time is of high value travel unnecessary distances (i.e. a low value use of time) will make them have to charge higher prices for that unnecessary time, compared to if you yourself can bring the car to them.
Maybe for people who can afford to pay for a mechanic's travel time will opt for this (or whose time is more valuable than the mechanic's), or in markets where mechanics are underemployed. But for the majority of people, I think this will be expensive.
Just as an example, if a mechanic's time is ordinarily $100/hour (fully utilized), and they work an 8 hour day for $800 -- now if they have to travel to you for 30 min before each 1.5 hour job (and set up equipment, pack up equipment, etc), instead of 5.3 jobs per day they can only do 4 jobs per day (6 hours work instead of 8 hours) and they would have to charge $133 per hour. Are you willing to pay?
The failure here isn't mostly that a card was designed wrong - that could happen for anyone briefly given the task of designing and printing up cards.
The travesty is that a company that is presumably being paid MILLIONS of $ to do this job, was skating by with non-thinking process and doing deliberate testing and rethinking of the card design. They got lazy and assumed that every year, nothing goes wrong, so we don't need to be checking or improving what we do. (with regard to the actual big night's event, not saying there's not other work that goes into it)
If something is that important, imagine what you should do to make it as bulletproof as possible - like you're designing cards that hold the nuclear launch codes upon which millions of lives depend. You would create a design and testing process that:
- tested what would happen if some element of the card delivery / reading chain failed or was accidentally broken - tested different card typography and layout designs - tested the kinds of people who would be involved in delivering and reading the cards (e.g. blind people, old people, nearsighted people, drunk people, anyone who you'd likely encounter on the night) - etc, etc, etc.
They got by for years without being rigorous about this part of their job, and this time it bit them in the ass. Don't get complacent.
ok, so you're going to require manufacturers to make repair manuals and parts available to the general public. What's to stop them from writing in the manual, "purchase and install Comprehensive Assembly #012934" and selling that part which is basically a replacement for the entire unit? Who's to contradict them if they say that the unit is not serviceable?
Don't read this story as a ruling against the police / government being allowed to compel individuals suspected of criminal activity to be forced to give fingerprints. That is not what's at issue here, and the decision doesn't affect that.
This story is that the wholesale screening of individuals that the police have no otherwise suspicion of a crime, shotgun style, is being ruled against. Just like the case several years ago when police sought to have an entire small town's male population give DNA samples to match some evidence they had of a sex crime. The judge in this case tossed out the willy nilly use of police power to compel people wholly unrelated to the issue, not under suspicion at all, from having to give evidence.
When you're suspected of something specifically, you can definitely still be compelled. Just like being compelled to give a breathalyzer, or DNA when a court orders you to.
But as a more practical matter anyway, 10 tries of different people's fingerprints, and the phone will be wiped regardless... so there's a limit to how useful the technique would've been to begin with.
As much as I'm a supporter of personal privacy rights and data privacy, Amazon is way off with this argument. It is so clearly an attempt to forestall future insistence / requests by authorities for Amazon to be involved in extracting data and having to devote resources to this kind of request. Kind of like Apple with the iPhone but for less believable reasons.
First of all, the 1st Amendment protection is about the right to speak and publish opinions, or the right not to be forced to speak or publish opinions. Neither Amazon's nor the victim's right to speak or right not to be required to speak a certain message is at stake when the Alexa recording's history is discovered. The same would hold for your or my browser history being subpoenaed as evidence. That is a privacy issue, not a free speech issue, and nowhere in the Constitution is privacy an enshrined right, much as even I would like to believe.
These would be much more plausible arguments for Amazon to take:
- That the government has not demonstrated that delving into the user's private search history is relevant or may advance the case at all, - That the data is not the property of the individual but rather a trade secret, or - That Amazon is an unrelated 3rd party and should not be compelled to cooperate in something which it is peripherally related.
I actually think Amazon might fail on all of these fronts, because if the Alexa can record things like the sounds of a crime or victim asking for help, it's pretty plausible that they could be compelled to do so for multiple good arguments. It's not even like the data is being heavily shielded or stored securely as a selling point, as Apple's was. The very purpose of Alexa's data is to make purchasing and buying things from Amazon easier! It would be like Nest saying that the video it recorded in someone's home who got murdered was private and subject to free speech protections. Because no one shares videos, right?
My first question is why this has to be a bill, when through the normal course of judicial process such evidence would be tossed out by courts for being improperly obtained.
Then I remembered that in the area of national security and border / immigration enforcement, the executive branch has pushed their own discretion so far that Congress / courts really do have to put protections like this into law for it to be heeded. Basically they have been cut out of the loop of immigration and border enforcement as just bystanders, because the executive branch has all the guns, and it only comes to Congress/courts' attention when someone makes it in (and isn't kicked out immediately) and survives long enough to file a habeus petition.
The real check and balance needed would be for border agents and officials who abuse their authority to be penalized for it.
I do not believe Apple will find it cost effective or find it tolerable to build phones in India to the same quality as it is used to. Now, of course they will have done their own extensive analysis, but I imagine the following issues in plenty (even just supplying phones to the domestic Indian market): - unreliable electric power (could be mitigated with huge backup generators) - unreliable / poor quality road transport - much less extensive or linked supply chain - related to this, lower general quality of contributing required parts - manufacturing and trade zone subsidies less transparent, more bribery - more political interference at all levels of government interaction - simply refer back to the requirements to sell in India to begin with
I predict, and I would love to be shown wrong, that Apple will find this environment to be frustrating to no end. There are reasons that major electronic hardware manufacturers do not have world leading operations out of India.
Well, the testimonial privilege on statements you give you your spouse, doctor, priest, etc. is about protecting them from having to testify about private information given in confidence, where to break that confidence would breach a trust between two people with an obligation.
This is about a device that produces data no matter what, and there is no presumption of privacy or confidentiality. Very different.
The 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination is, to the actual letter of the law, that someone "shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself". Which the intent was that no person shall be forced to give testimony or make forced confessions or possibly have their words manipulated to be used against him/her. Testimony is the act of the person saying or asserting things.
A lot of people confuse this with things that they operate or own to be used as evidence against them. The protection against self-incrimination does not mean that no evidence can be produced to be used against you. And the data from your pacemaker hardly qualifies as you being forced to testify.
No, he was just following the rules and rights one expects of the laws of the US and most US states.
The problem is that he did not realize that Hawaii is a place where normal rule of law is not really obeyed, or it is ignored depending on if you are a certain color/race, and you cannot depend on your rights being upheld because you'll get yelled at for antagonising other certain colors/races -- which you cannot defend against out loud because it's politically incorrect.
Am I such a strange outlier from the general population that all of Amazon's devices/interfaces to make buying things easier seem strange to me?
Is it odd that I am not really on the lookout for ways to make it easier for me to be parted with my money? Maybe I'm just cheap, but I tend to think a bit before spending money, and not just want to press a button and have $ disappear from my bank account.
Highly unlikely for this to happen (at least in any meaningful numbers for the average person).
If you think about the level of safety performance required for aircraft today to be approved, and the inspections that have to be conducted before every single flight ---
Just imagine, those same regulations that govern aircraft would permit a road vehicle (which gets beaten up by road hazards, rattled around by potholes, and is built to consumer automotive safety multiples of reliability) to just fly at a moment's notice? With people at the wheel who get driver's licenses by barely missing some traffic cones?
Nice idea, but never going to happen. Or at least the sci-fi future that people envision with a car extending some wings and taking off from the highway -- laughable.
I am continually surprised by those who are not knowledgeable about (or misattribute) the bigger macroeconomic factors that have driven our prosperity. The American economic miracle, the American dream, is largely a by-product of a brand new territory, open for expansion, a growing population whose material needs and wants grew to match the space for it. And where demand for services and goods made by those people exceeded the supply of labor to produce it. Not to mention 2-4 major wars and post-war booms that produced a huge demand for labor and the attendant growth of wages that comes with.
So for 6-7 generations, we came to associate American success with hard work, determination, education -- where I would argue that yes, while these factors have something to do with it, we were just mainly beneficiaries of a great macro situation. Factories, heavy equipment, washing machines, cars, steel -- these were the things we needed as a society that we would pay for, and they were produced here by labor that couldn't be substituted.
Now, we find that our post-war boom is over, the demographic curve has to support an increasing number of people who are no longer in their prime productive years, and a global market for the best / traditional jobs that has sapped the domestic demand for labor physically based in the US.
And so parents look at their kids and ask, "hey, why aren't you out there getting a job and using your skills like we did, after all that college and education?" Well, Dad, I can't get a job the way you did, because people aren't hiring hand over fist just because they need bodies to fill an assembly line because people want to buy washing machines as they move into their newly constructed 3 bedroom house in Levittown.
The harsh truth many are waking up to is that not everything grows forever, and perhaps this is the aftereffect of what happens when a society stabilizes, and other peoples/countries around the world start to experience the growth that we once had (and of course helped by the internet, trade, and information).
Good point -- and I think there will be a segmentation of who adopts this satellite technology - between airlines that are purely domestic / continental US and those that go international (where, if you're going to equip a plane for international satellite internet, you're not going to carry 2 systems).
Actually, I am not familiar with the charged $/mb rates or royalty/license to the airline of ATG versus the satellite technology, but it would be interesting to know what numbers the airlines are weighing whether to do the retrofit.
Certainly trustworthy! "Since no one but people at Adobe designed this, certainly no one in the wide world of hackers, exploit finders, and data sifters would ever be able to decipher and extract anything interesting from this data. I mean, we're just sending this meaningless data back to Adobe for shits and giggles, it's useless information! By the way, I heard that anonymous means that we just don't record your IP address right?"
For those who want to understand why this is happening now, it's because JetBlue a few years ago chose to install in its planes the next generation of satellite-based internet onboard wifi systems. This is instead of what some earlier adopter airlines chose - namely air to ground (you may commonly know providers such as GoGo/Aircell in this category - which generally serves only the continental US footprint). ATG was cheaper and developed a bit faster because its infrastructure was cheaper to build, so naturally it took hold first for many airlines. Satellite internet at that time (Ku band and those older generations) struggled to offer a reasonable price, at a time when user adoption was not as strong as now (recall Boeing's failed Connexion offering).
Now the cost and weight of the receivers and onboard systems for satellite internet are dropping, and more airlines are seeing it as a beneft/potential revenue center.
And of course, when you have a satellite connection, you don't have to be above a certain altitude before the reception of ground signals works reliably.
ViaSat (the provider of JetBlue's systems on their A320/321s) claims that every passenger could have 12Mbps bandwidth, though I'm sure in practice not quite that much -- and definitely blocked for voice calls.
As always, the other airlines which had installed ATG now face the cost of having been early adopters to a technology that is now being displaced, and since there is a heavy $ to refitting passenger aircraft with new hardware, it will take a while for them to change out the old systems for newer satellite based technologies.
I agree with much of what you said except iPhone's network effect. There is a huge factor in my continuing to use it, which is iMessage, Find My Friends, and iCloud sync. Pity the friend who isn't on iPhone and breaks every text conversation because it separates out the thread into green SMS chat. And being able to stay in sync with family members is huge.
I can give a very direct example of prohibited discriminatory speech, even if no actual discrimination in the proposed underlying commercial transaction has yet happened: housing law. You may not post apartment rental listings that state that certain races, sexes, national origins are not allowed.
The federal Fair Housing Acts apply to all aspects of the landlord-tenant relationship. A landlord may not:
advertise or make any statement that indicates a limitation or preference based on race, religion, or any other protected category... https://www.nolo.com/legal-enc...
My surprise is that anyone is still surprised. Since the dawn of any kind of technology, people you didn't expect have taken it for the purpose of achieving the same thing that you have achieve - financial gain and security. Whether it's a person, company, university, or country. Is it really surprising that all of our innovations around knowledge work, IT, etc are being consumed by other more eager people to find jobs that they can fill for lower cost than we desire?? If anything, the new part of it is the kind of jobs that are at stake, but even that's not worth reacting to.
I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago, and is left to ride a fad of a few hipsters / nostalgic fans who will provide some short-lived interest for an old product (an admittedly good one, in its day). Perhaps it will gain a small cult following, or sustained dedicated small fan base.
But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.
Heck, I (and every other smartphone user) can re-create every film response I want with Instagram or Photoshop. That was Instagram's whole point originally. Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film? Followed by scanning in the photo to post it on Facebook? Real analog there, huh?
I am as moderate as they come, and I do not believe that this is a blatant overstep of authority. There are many reasons why Congress can choose to not allow recording of their proceedings. The federal judiciary does not allow it, just to provide comparison. Now, whether this is being invoked for political convenience or as a reasoned policy, is another matter.
Sometimes, you should not wish for everything to be broadcast, recorded, and open for all to see. You may find that some things get done faster, and better, when they are not being aired for all to hear. I could argue that congressional matters, being broadcast for all to see, has resulted in congressmen playing to the cameras, holding hearings that are often public theater, taking extreme positions for publicity, voting nonsensically and against better judgement so that their constituents see them doing so. A lot more work could be done behind closed doors, where representatives don't feel the need to be so extreme for the cameras, and so shallow on real issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Cmon, editors, you need to think about these stories before you blindly post them with stupid, uninformed headlines.
Apple dictating to its retailers what prices to offer for their own manufactured phones is not "price fixing". Price fixing in the traditional sense is when competitors in a market collude to artificially set the price of a good that they otherwise should be competing on, which deprives the free market of alternatives.
This is a case of Apple setting its own product's pricing. And something is being lost from the Russian story and what they mean by things like Recommended Retail Price / MSRP, but this is not "price fixing". Please use some judgment before using inflammatory / inflated headlines.
What problem? I'm glad to not have to have these damn kids on my lawn spamming me with celebrity gossip through Snapchat and Instagram!
Have they successfully built / connected any curved sections yet? I would imagine that's an important proof of concept at the technical level... just to be able to get the components sourced with the required tolerances and joined seamlessly....
Tech companies seem to want to push the point of on-demand services to the ridiculous edge.
People, there's a reason that you go to the mechanic's shop, or the doctor's office, etc. etc. It's because their time is quite valuable and the equipment they use is specialized.
Making someone whose time is of high value travel unnecessary distances (i.e. a low value use of time) will make them have to charge higher prices for that unnecessary time, compared to if you yourself can bring the car to them.
Maybe for people who can afford to pay for a mechanic's travel time will opt for this (or whose time is more valuable than the mechanic's), or in markets where mechanics are underemployed. But for the majority of people, I think this will be expensive.
Just as an example, if a mechanic's time is ordinarily $100/hour (fully utilized), and they work an 8 hour day for $800 -- now if they have to travel to you for 30 min before each 1.5 hour job (and set up equipment, pack up equipment, etc), instead of 5.3 jobs per day they can only do 4 jobs per day (6 hours work instead of 8 hours) and they would have to charge $133 per hour. Are you willing to pay?
The failure here isn't mostly that a card was designed wrong - that could happen for anyone briefly given the task of designing and printing up cards.
The travesty is that a company that is presumably being paid MILLIONS of $ to do this job, was skating by with non-thinking process and doing deliberate testing and rethinking of the card design. They got lazy and assumed that every year, nothing goes wrong, so we don't need to be checking or improving what we do. (with regard to the actual big night's event, not saying there's not other work that goes into it)
If something is that important, imagine what you should do to make it as bulletproof as possible - like you're designing cards that hold the nuclear launch codes upon which millions of lives depend. You would create a design and testing process that:
- tested what would happen if some element of the card delivery / reading chain failed or was accidentally broken
- tested different card typography and layout designs
- tested the kinds of people who would be involved in delivering and reading the cards (e.g. blind people, old people, nearsighted people, drunk people, anyone who you'd likely encounter on the night)
- etc, etc, etc.
They got by for years without being rigorous about this part of their job, and this time it bit them in the ass. Don't get complacent.
ok, so you're going to require manufacturers to make repair manuals and parts available to the general public. What's to stop them from writing in the manual, "purchase and install Comprehensive Assembly #012934" and selling that part which is basically a replacement for the entire unit? Who's to contradict them if they say that the unit is not serviceable?
Don't read this story as a ruling against the police / government being allowed to compel individuals suspected of criminal activity to be forced to give fingerprints. That is not what's at issue here, and the decision doesn't affect that.
This story is that the wholesale screening of individuals that the police have no otherwise suspicion of a crime, shotgun style, is being ruled against. Just like the case several years ago when police sought to have an entire small town's male population give DNA samples to match some evidence they had of a sex crime. The judge in this case tossed out the willy nilly use of police power to compel people wholly unrelated to the issue, not under suspicion at all, from having to give evidence.
When you're suspected of something specifically, you can definitely still be compelled. Just like being compelled to give a breathalyzer, or DNA when a court orders you to.
But as a more practical matter anyway, 10 tries of different people's fingerprints, and the phone will be wiped regardless... so there's a limit to how useful the technique would've been to begin with.
As much as I'm a supporter of personal privacy rights and data privacy, Amazon is way off with this argument. It is so clearly an attempt to forestall future insistence / requests by authorities for Amazon to be involved in extracting data and having to devote resources to this kind of request. Kind of like Apple with the iPhone but for less believable reasons.
First of all, the 1st Amendment protection is about the right to speak and publish opinions, or the right not to be forced to speak or publish opinions. Neither Amazon's nor the victim's right to speak or right not to be required to speak a certain message is at stake when the Alexa recording's history is discovered. The same would hold for your or my browser history being subpoenaed as evidence. That is a privacy issue, not a free speech issue, and nowhere in the Constitution is privacy an enshrined right, much as even I would like to believe.
These would be much more plausible arguments for Amazon to take:
- That the government has not demonstrated that delving into the user's private search history is relevant or may advance the case at all,
- That the data is not the property of the individual but rather a trade secret, or
- That Amazon is an unrelated 3rd party and should not be compelled to cooperate in something which it is peripherally related.
I actually think Amazon might fail on all of these fronts, because if the Alexa can record things like the sounds of a crime or victim asking for help, it's pretty plausible that they could be compelled to do so for multiple good arguments. It's not even like the data is being heavily shielded or stored securely as a selling point, as Apple's was. The very purpose of Alexa's data is to make purchasing and buying things from Amazon easier! It would be like Nest saying that the video it recorded in someone's home who got murdered was private and subject to free speech protections. Because no one shares videos, right?
My first question is why this has to be a bill, when through the normal course of judicial process such evidence would be tossed out by courts for being improperly obtained.
Then I remembered that in the area of national security and border / immigration enforcement, the executive branch has pushed their own discretion so far that Congress / courts really do have to put protections like this into law for it to be heeded. Basically they have been cut out of the loop of immigration and border enforcement as just bystanders, because the executive branch has all the guns, and it only comes to Congress/courts' attention when someone makes it in (and isn't kicked out immediately) and survives long enough to file a habeus petition.
The real check and balance needed would be for border agents and officials who abuse their authority to be penalized for it.
I do not believe Apple will find it cost effective or find it tolerable to build phones in India to the same quality as it is used to. Now, of course they will have done their own extensive analysis, but I imagine the following issues in plenty (even just supplying phones to the domestic Indian market):
- unreliable electric power (could be mitigated with huge backup generators)
- unreliable / poor quality road transport
- much less extensive or linked supply chain
- related to this, lower general quality of contributing required parts
- manufacturing and trade zone subsidies less transparent, more bribery
- more political interference at all levels of government interaction - simply refer back to the requirements to sell in India to begin with
I predict, and I would love to be shown wrong, that Apple will find this environment to be frustrating to no end. There are reasons that major electronic hardware manufacturers do not have world leading operations out of India.
Well, the testimonial privilege on statements you give you your spouse, doctor, priest, etc. is about protecting them from having to testify about private information given in confidence, where to break that confidence would breach a trust between two people with an obligation.
This is about a device that produces data no matter what, and there is no presumption of privacy or confidentiality. Very different.
The 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination is, to the actual letter of the law, that someone "shall not be compelled to be a witness against himself". Which the intent was that no person shall be forced to give testimony or make forced confessions or possibly have their words manipulated to be used against him/her. Testimony is the act of the person saying or asserting things.
A lot of people confuse this with things that they operate or own to be used as evidence against them. The protection against self-incrimination does not mean that no evidence can be produced to be used against you. And the data from your pacemaker hardly qualifies as you being forced to testify.
No, he was just following the rules and rights one expects of the laws of the US and most US states.
The problem is that he did not realize that Hawaii is a place where normal rule of law is not really obeyed, or it is ignored depending on if you are a certain color/race, and you cannot depend on your rights being upheld because you'll get yelled at for antagonising other certain colors/races -- which you cannot defend against out loud because it's politically incorrect.
Am I such a strange outlier from the general population that all of Amazon's devices/interfaces to make buying things easier seem strange to me?
Is it odd that I am not really on the lookout for ways to make it easier for me to be parted with my money? Maybe I'm just cheap, but I tend to think a bit before spending money, and not just want to press a button and have $ disappear from my bank account.
Highly unlikely for this to happen (at least in any meaningful numbers for the average person).
If you think about the level of safety performance required for aircraft today to be approved, and the inspections that have to be conducted before every single flight ---
Just imagine, those same regulations that govern aircraft would permit a road vehicle (which gets beaten up by road hazards, rattled around by potholes, and is built to consumer automotive safety multiples of reliability) to just fly at a moment's notice? With people at the wheel who get driver's licenses by barely missing some traffic cones?
Nice idea, but never going to happen. Or at least the sci-fi future that people envision with a car extending some wings and taking off from the highway -- laughable.
I am continually surprised by those who are not knowledgeable about (or misattribute) the bigger macroeconomic factors that have driven our prosperity. The American economic miracle, the American dream, is largely a by-product of a brand new territory, open for expansion, a growing population whose material needs and wants grew to match the space for it. And where demand for services and goods made by those people exceeded the supply of labor to produce it. Not to mention 2-4 major wars and post-war booms that produced a huge demand for labor and the attendant growth of wages that comes with.
So for 6-7 generations, we came to associate American success with hard work, determination, education -- where I would argue that yes, while these factors have something to do with it, we were just mainly beneficiaries of a great macro situation. Factories, heavy equipment, washing machines, cars, steel -- these were the things we needed as a society that we would pay for, and they were produced here by labor that couldn't be substituted.
Now, we find that our post-war boom is over, the demographic curve has to support an increasing number of people who are no longer in their prime productive years, and a global market for the best / traditional jobs that has sapped the domestic demand for labor physically based in the US.
And so parents look at their kids and ask, "hey, why aren't you out there getting a job and using your skills like we did, after all that college and education?" Well, Dad, I can't get a job the way you did, because people aren't hiring hand over fist just because they need bodies to fill an assembly line because people want to buy washing machines as they move into their newly constructed 3 bedroom house in Levittown.
The harsh truth many are waking up to is that not everything grows forever, and perhaps this is the aftereffect of what happens when a society stabilizes, and other peoples/countries around the world start to experience the growth that we once had (and of course helped by the internet, trade, and information).
They forgot to add that after the 18 months are over, they'll invoke the elastic job scaling script:
workforceSize.reduce(-100,000,'salary15.00')
Good point -- and I think there will be a segmentation of who adopts this satellite technology - between airlines that are purely domestic / continental US and those that go international (where, if you're going to equip a plane for international satellite internet, you're not going to carry 2 systems).
Actually, I am not familiar with the charged $/mb rates or royalty/license to the airline of ATG versus the satellite technology, but it would be interesting to know what numbers the airlines are weighing whether to do the retrofit.
Certainly trustworthy! "Since no one but people at Adobe designed this, certainly no one in the wide world of hackers, exploit finders, and data sifters would ever be able to decipher and extract anything interesting from this data. I mean, we're just sending this meaningless data back to Adobe for shits and giggles, it's useless information! By the way, I heard that anonymous means that we just don't record your IP address right?"
For those who want to understand why this is happening now, it's because JetBlue a few years ago chose to install in its planes the next generation of satellite-based internet onboard wifi systems. This is instead of what some earlier adopter airlines chose - namely air to ground (you may commonly know providers such as GoGo/Aircell in this category - which generally serves only the continental US footprint). ATG was cheaper and developed a bit faster because its infrastructure was cheaper to build, so naturally it took hold first for many airlines. Satellite internet at that time (Ku band and those older generations) struggled to offer a reasonable price, at a time when user adoption was not as strong as now (recall Boeing's failed Connexion offering).
Now the cost and weight of the receivers and onboard systems for satellite internet are dropping, and more airlines are seeing it as a beneft/potential revenue center.
And of course, when you have a satellite connection, you don't have to be above a certain altitude before the reception of ground signals works reliably.
ViaSat (the provider of JetBlue's systems on their A320/321s) claims that every passenger could have 12Mbps bandwidth, though I'm sure in practice not quite that much -- and definitely blocked for voice calls.
As always, the other airlines which had installed ATG now face the cost of having been early adopters to a technology that is now being displaced, and since there is a heavy $ to refitting passenger aircraft with new hardware, it will take a while for them to change out the old systems for newer satellite based technologies.
I agree with much of what you said except iPhone's network effect. There is a huge factor in my continuing to use it, which is iMessage, Find My Friends, and iCloud sync. Pity the friend who isn't on iPhone and breaks every text conversation because it separates out the thread into green SMS chat. And being able to stay in sync with family members is huge.
The federal Fair Housing Acts apply to all aspects of the landlord-tenant relationship. A landlord may not: advertise or make any statement that indicates a limitation or preference based on race, religion, or any other protected category... https://www.nolo.com/legal-enc...
My surprise is that anyone is still surprised. Since the dawn of any kind of technology, people you didn't expect have taken it for the purpose of achieving the same thing that you have achieve - financial gain and security. Whether it's a person, company, university, or country. Is it really surprising that all of our innovations around knowledge work, IT, etc are being consumed by other more eager people to find jobs that they can fill for lower cost than we desire?? If anything, the new part of it is the kind of jobs that are at stake, but even that's not worth reacting to.
I think this just reminds you that Kodak missed the boat a long time ago, and is left to ride a fad of a few hipsters / nostalgic fans who will provide some short-lived interest for an old product (an admittedly good one, in its day). Perhaps it will gain a small cult following, or sustained dedicated small fan base.
But any professional or even many amateurs know that given a good linear sensor and quality lens, you can recreate any color warmth or feeling of film you want, after taking the shot, and you don't have to wait 3 days of dunking film in a developing tank to find out how it turned out.
Heck, I (and every other smartphone user) can re-create every film response I want with Instagram or Photoshop. That was Instagram's whole point originally. Is it really worth it to pay $10 extra and several days wait for 36 shots, just to that broadcast to others that I still use film? Followed by scanning in the photo to post it on Facebook? Real analog there, huh?
I am as moderate as they come, and I do not believe that this is a blatant overstep of authority. There are many reasons why Congress can choose to not allow recording of their proceedings. The federal judiciary does not allow it, just to provide comparison. Now, whether this is being invoked for political convenience or as a reasoned policy, is another matter.
Sometimes, you should not wish for everything to be broadcast, recorded, and open for all to see. You may find that some things get done faster, and better, when they are not being aired for all to hear. I could argue that congressional matters, being broadcast for all to see, has resulted in congressmen playing to the cameras, holding hearings that are often public theater, taking extreme positions for publicity, voting nonsensically and against better judgement so that their constituents see them doing so. A lot more work could be done behind closed doors, where representatives don't feel the need to be so extreme for the cameras, and so shallow on real issues.
Careful what you wish for.