...neither did you sign a contract to receive the services which are paid for by those tax dollars...but you use them anyway.
"Insightful"? Please. You need a valid contract (including meeting of the minds, non-duress, etc.—no, the "social contract" is not a real contract and does not count) to claim someone else's property as payment for services rendered. You do not need a contract to accept what someone else gives you, unsolicited and without any voluntary agreement to pay on your part. Such gifts incur no obligation to reciprocate. If you want someone to pay up for services rendered you need to enter into a contract before providing the service—at least an implied contract where the other party is free to decline without penalty.
There is also the small matter of the State using force to prevent anyone else from providing the same services on equal terms, either through direct monopolies or tax subsidies. Yes, there are things like private toll roads, but in general it is impossible to compete with someone who subsidizes their own service with taxes. Any customers you might manage to attract are forced to pay for the public service in addition to your private offering, automatically making your private service twice as expensive. The fact that some private operators manage to make it work anyway it a resounding testament to government inefficiency.
The Irish government allowed Apple to think such provisions existed but the EU have now ruled the arrangement constituted illegal state aid. Consequently the EU is leaning on Ireland to collect the taxes it should rightly have collected in the first place.
So, logically, in a sane world, the Irish government, as the party which most directly messed up here, owes Apple compensation for the losses Apple incurred through its reasonable reliance on Ireland's material misrepresentation of EU tax laws and its own ability to enter into the tax agreement, neatly cancelling out any extra back-taxes Ireland would otherwise have collected... Apple pays Ireland what the EU claims was actually owed, then Ireland pays Apple back the same amount to settle the debt it incurred by defrauding Apple in the first place with its (in effect) bait & switch tax policy. Everyone goes home happy except the overbearing EU bureaucrats.
The "fruits of our planet" immediately available for our direct use are extremely meager—breathable air, potable (but rarely pure) water in select areas. Some unimproved caves for natural shelter. If you don't want to starve, someone has to put in the effort to identify edible animals and plants and actually do the messy work of hunting and/or gathering, cooking, preservation, etc. The same goes for every other non-abundant economic good.
What you are speaking of distributing is not the fruit of the planet, but rather the fruit of human labor combined with deliberate saving and investment over a very long period of time. The fruits of those efforts fairly belong to the specific humans that sacrificed their own time and effort and resources to earn them, not the human population as a whole.
LG devices have standard connectors, microSD cards, removable batteries, and best of all: they are well supported by Cyanogenmod. My devices are always up-to-date and functional the way I want them.
So what you are saying is that you don't even EXPECT the phone's OEM to support their POS phone; bug rather have to depend on the largesse of coders working for a company who has absolutely NO accountability if something goes wrong with an update.
Are you insane?
I expect the phone's OEM to support their hardware, to make it standards-compliant, well-documented, and compatible with the most common phone operating system(s), one of which should come pre-installed. I expect them to leave the software to the experts in that field who are developing usable mobile operating system software suitable for all phones, and not try to force users to deal with their own idiosyncratic, buggy, advertisement-laden Android offshoot. Let the best smartphone and the best mobile operating system win—separately!
The OEM should be accountable only for the hardware and whatever OS they choose to pre-install. You should be able to install AOSP with full hardware support through open-source drivers. If you prefer to have someone to hold accountable for software updates and support, you should be able to select the most suitable hardware for your needs and an operating system (perhaps based on AOSP) with a paid service contract designed to run on any smartphone, just like you can buy a commercially-supported operating system like RHEL or Windows and run it on any standards-compliant PC.
You are speaking about a simple backdoor, while I was speaking about a whole system of systems of "clever checks, balances, and safeguards".
Doesn't make any difference. Under all these overly-clever "safeguards" there must exist a "simple backdoor" to actually bypass the encryption, and that backdoor will not remain protected forever.
Correct; it should not be my call to make.... A similar [Slashdot-like metamoderation] system could rate law enforcement officials, to determine who would be most worthy -- after obtaining a legitimate warrant -- of access to private information.
You misunderstand me. It isn't their call to make, either—and a collective right does not suddenly spring into existence just because you brought together a bunch of people who would not have that right individually. The only one with the right to decide to whom their secrets should be entrusted is the one holding the secrets.
I'm not sure the 5th works either since they're not "taking" the property they're just restricting what you can do with it.
A legal technicality. Mere possession is perhaps the least significant part of ownership. The essence of a property right is that the owner gets to decide how the property will be used. Of course, others get to decide how their property is used, so whatever action you want to take has to satisfy the rights of everyone whose property is involved, not just your own. However, when some authority figure tells you that you aren't allowed to use your property in a way which would not infringe on anyone else's rights, they are misappropriating your rights as the property owner for themselves. That is a "taking", and if the impact to the value of the property to the owner is significant enough (50% for sure; perhaps even less) it should be treated as a form of confiscation of the property for public use.
To put this in the form of a reducto ad absurdum: One could restrict the use of property to the point where the nominal "owner's" only legal options are to leave the property to rot (while still paying property taxes and other fees on it) or "donate" it to the government. Legal semantics aside, how would that be any different from simply taking the property? Lesser restrictions are merely a difference of degree, not kind; a partial taking is still a taking.
That means if the FBI wants me decrypt any of my documents they can show my lawyer a search warrant otherwise they can FUCK OFF.
Even with a warrant, it has never been the case that a person could be compelled to translate the content of a document (a journal, for example) written in a private code. If you possess some form of codebook then they can force you to produce it with a subpoena, but that's pretty much as far as it goes.
A search warrant means they get to search your property, with or without your permission. You have no obligation to help them find what they're looking for, much less help them make sense of it once it's been found.
In any case this is less about individual warrants and more about preventing the manufacturers of popular electronics and software from making truly secure storage of personal data easy and ubiquitous. Encryption by default represents significant security benefits for the population at large, whereas its absence will have little or no impact on actual criminals beyond a bit of inconvenience. I can only conclude that the FBI is, perhaps unwittingly, taking the criminal's side on this issue—criminals stand to benefit more than anyone else from insecure systems.
The best possible permutation is where criminals are in total darkness, while the most incorruptible members of law enforcement, after obtaining a legitimate warrant, are in a brightly-lit room.
Even assuming you could find such a paragon of virtue to trust with everyone's secrets, which I highly doubt—and which is not your call to make—this has been tried. Many times. It simply does not work. If there is a back door into everyone's encrypted data, it will be available not only to these impractically idealized members of law enforcement for the objectively reasonable and impartial enforcement of universally agreed-upon laws, but also to criminals and others with less noble intentions. It's much the same problem as a large conspiracy: the more people that have access, the easier it for the back door to fall into the "wrong" hands; and a back door you can never use for reasons of security might as well not exist. It will get used, frequently, and it will leak, and when it does it will put everyone's private data in jeopardy. (Except for the real criminals, of course, who took care to speak in their own private code and/or encrypt all their data with an unbreakable and trivial-to-implement one-time pad—which won't be discovered until after the warrant has been issued to decrypt the files with the government's master key.)
Do you even think it's reasonable to prioritize your torrent packets the same as your neighbors VOIP traffic?
Generally speaking: yes. Two customers with the same service plan shouldn't be treated differently based on the content (or port numbers) of their packets.
With that said, if the ISP wants to give each customer a limited amount of dedicated high-priority bandwidth based on the DiffServe IP header field, and let customers decide for themselves how to allocate it, that would be perfectly fine.
ISPs are not all equivalent. AT&T is a telephone company, and the telephone companies have always been considered common carriers, even when they branched out into providing DSL, and later fiber. Cable companies, on the other hand, are not traditional common carriers, and that status, too, has carried over into their respective Internet services.
Being a common carrier does not mean that the ISP cannot make a distinction between local and non-local traffic. This is not that different from charging extra for long-distance service, which was very common among the common-carrier phone companies before VoIP made most voice calls "too cheap to meter". It does mean that the ISP does not get to pick and choose the type of traffic they will carry, which should rule out things like DPI filtering or restrictions against running servers.
Yeah, they're perfectly free to go back to dire poverty and hunger if they want.
No, they're free to provide for themselves without any help or hindrance from Apple or Pegatron. If that means "dire poverty and hunger" that is only because this is the natural state of the universe; if you want anything else you have to provide it for yourself, either individually or working together with others voluntarily for mutual benefit.
If they choose to work at Pegatron they do so because, despite what anyone else might say about the pay or conditions, they feel that this is their best option. Pegatron has no inherent responsibility to provide for anyone beyond what they mutually agreed to in the terms of employment. The workers' conditions—in the aggregate, including any who were laid off—would not be improved by Pegatron (or Apple) losing customers due to non-competitive pricing, or by losing investors due to non-competitive returns.
If really you want to improve their lot, the most effective strategies would be to increase competition for workers by reducing (not increasing!) the barriers to entry for new businesses, to encourage free trade, and to lift the restrictions on immigration to areas with higher standards of living.
This is more a matter of how the phrase should be read, as jargon, and not how the phrase will be (mis-)understood by the general public in casual conversation.
As a writer, if you can't count on a technically-minded audience, you're (unfortunately) best served by avoiding relative multiples entirely, as well as relative percentages at or above 100%. Unlike "two times faster" or "330% faster", there is no confusion, generally speaking, about how to read "three times as fast" or "430% as fast".
As a reader, in the absence of evidence of the author's intent to the contrary, if you encounter the phrase "X times faster" or "X% faster" I believe you should treat it as equivalent to "(X+1) times as fast" or "(X+100%) as fast".
I understand that linguistic relativism is in vogue at the moment, and even agree with it to an extent. The point of having language is to communicate, after all, which implies that the meanings and customary use of phrases are not fixed in stone; they change depending on the speaker, audience, and context. However, by the same token, I think prescriptionism is warranted in cases like this one for the sake of preserving our ability to communicate clearly and concisely. Ambiguity serves no one, and we don't need another inconsistent way to say "X times as fast", whereas maintaining the regular structure of the language ("X00% = X times" and "X faster = original speed plus X", regardless of context) helps to reduce the reader's cognitive load, leaving more energy for the real content. While there is no inherently right or wrong way to design a tool, some tool designs are more fit for purpose than others, and the same is true for the tools of communication, i.e. languages.
I understand your concerns, but these adapters are basically just wiring and physical supports. There are hardly any electronics involved (perhaps a discrete voltage regulator, judging from the images). If you would be willing to trust a non-OEM SATA cable and mounting bracket then I wouldn't see any reason not to trust a non-OEM M.2 to SATA adapter.
There are some higher-end models which provide a full 2.5" enclosure for your M.2 drive for $20-30, if you want the extra peace of mind.
Can you link to something authoritative so I can cure my ignorance?
Sorry, I didn't find anything definitive either. However, it follows from the normal use for ratios less than unity. The only difference is the magnitude. Taking "two times" to be equivalent to "200%", and "1/2 times" (or simply "1/2") to be equivalent to "50%":
50% as fast (as the original) = 1/2 (times) as fast = 0.5 * original speed
100% as fast = one times as fast = 1 * original speed
200% as fast = two times as fast = 2 * original speed
50% faster (than the original) = 1/2 (times) faster = (0.5 * original speed) + original speed
100% faster = one times faster = (1 * original speed) + original speed = 2 * original speed
200% faster = two times faster = (2 * original speed) + original speed = 3 * original speed
The expression has two parts. The first can be either "X%" or "X times", both relative to the original amount. If the second part is "as fast" or "as much" (etc.) then this is the final result. If the second part is a relative term like "faster" or "more" then this implies addition, and the first amount, after multiplication, is the difference between the result and the original amount.
Few would disagree with the statement that "50% faster" is equivalent to "150% as fast", and not "50% as fast", but for some reason many become confused by "200% faster" when the formula is exactly the same.
This raises a question: Why do astronomers use irregular units like "light years" and "parsecs" instead of the SI units and prefixes used in every other scientific discipline? Is it just a matter of custom, like the use of English(-ish) units in the U.S.? The SI units would not be any more awkward to work with, and would avoid the need for complex conversions:
distance from Earth to the Sun (1.00 AU) = 150 Gm (gigameters, G=10^9)
distance to Proxima Centauri (1.3 parsecs) = 40. Pm (petameters, P=10^15)
estimated size of the universe (46 billon light years) = 44 Ym (yottameters, Y=10^24)
Sorry, but "330% faster" is indeed 3.3 times faster, or 4.3 times as fast. "4.3 [times] faster" is actually 5.3 times as fast. You're off by one, and GP is correct.
Let's try it this way: "100% faster" and "1 times faster." Do you see how your statement is provably false, now?
Sorry, but the AC is right. "100% faster" = "1 times faster" = "2 times as fast".
"X times as fast" = X * original speed
"X times faster" = original speed + (X * original speed)
... "as slow" would seem to need to be a comparison to a value measured from a reference point...
"slowness" = 1 / "fastness" (a.k.a. speed)
Say that an object is moving at 5 meters per second. Its "slowness" is, equivalently, one second per five meters, or 0.2 seconds per meter. "50% faster" would be 50% * 5 m/s = 2.5 m/s faster than 5 m/s, or 7.5 m/s in total. "50% slower" would be 50% * 0.2 s/m = 0.1 s/m slower than 0.2 s/m, or 0.3 s/m in total, or 3.333... m/s.
(Intuitively, "50% slower" means that it takes 50% more time to cover the same distance.)
"Twice as fast" = 2 * 5 m/s = 10 m/s.
"Half as slow" = 1/2 * 0.2 s/m = 0.1 s/m, or 10 m/s.
"Half as fast" = 1/2 * 5 m/s = 2.5 m/s.
"Twice as slow" = 2 * 0.2 s/m = 0.4 s/m, or 2.5 m/s.
The only alternative that would offer searching, filtering, sorting (in general: querying) features that you need to work with raw data (or even long lists) would be Access.
Or one of the perfectly adequate free alternatives, like LibreOffice Base.
It's not generations that matter either. What matters is the hardware capabilities and the ongoing difficulty of supporting older models with significantly different hardware. (This is why support was dropped early for the Galaxy Nexus: the OEM for the SoC exited the market and made it all but impossible to get updated binary drivers for the GN hardware which would work with kernels later versions depended on.)
The reason why people are rightly upset with this decision is that there is very little hardware difference between the Nexus 5, which is not supported, and the Nexus 5X, which is, making this an arbitrary cutoff most likely motivated more by marketing and an attempt to drive people to buy newer phones (when their old ones are working just fine) than by reasonable technical constraints.
Oh well. There are always 3rd-party ROMs. As small as the hardware differences are it shouldn't take long for someone to port AOSP 7.0 to run on the Nexus 5. It would just have been nice to be able to rely on a reasonable level of ongoing support from the original vendor. Other operating systems, and especially ones based on Linux, tend to run just fine on hardware far older than three years, and smartphone specs are no longer improving at so rapid a pace that a three-year-old device can be presumed obsolete.
but it appears most modems were built without the ability to transmit at the higher rates or its disabled in the software
Well, yes. As I said, consumer-grade modems with analog interfaces weren't designed to establish 56k connections with other analog modems, no matter how good the signal might be. It wouldn't work in most cases anyway and none of the 56k protocols cover that situation. To get 56k in one direction you need the special equipment the ISPs use, which is designed to interface with the phone networks digitally.
I happen to have a PSTN simulator and I've only been able to get two modems to connect at 33.6k synchronous. Apparently I need some special hardware to get it to run in asynchronous mode.
56k connections (V.90 or V.92) only ever worked at full speed in one direction. They take advantage of the fact that the ISP is using a 64kbps DS0 digital line, so there is only one A/D conversion involved rather than the usual two. The 56k modem protocols were never intended to work with all-analog connections, and a direct link between two 56k client modems would max out at 33.6k (V.34). In theory you could get 56k or better with PCM over a suitably high-quality channel, but the protocols—and more importantly, the modems—weren't designed for that use case. To establish a 56k connection with a standard 56k modem you would need a DS0 connection and suitable ISP-grade equipment on the other side. (Sorry, I wasn't able to find any product links.)
Same goes for phones. A small minority want unbreakable encryption. The rest of people have some small number of edge cases where they really would want to be able to call up someone and get the phone unlocked.
True, but they don't necessarily want the manufacturer of the phone to be the one holding the spare key.
Also, unbreakable encryption doesn't mean that your expensive phone becomes completely and permanently useless if you forget the password. You generally just have to wipe it back to the factory defaults and start over. It's not the end of the world, especially if you store copies of the more important information somewhere other than on the phone. This is a good idea in any case, since, on the whole, forgetting your password is probably a less likely risk than simply losing the device or suffering physical damage sufficient to render the data unrecoverable.
It's conceivable that you could watermark the analog output in ways that are imperceptible to human hearing.
If any signal "imperceptible to human hearing" can survive lossy compression, the compression algorithm has some room for improvement. There are watermarks that can survive certain compression algorithms in common use today, but you can't count on it remaining that way forever.
Even if you did have an erasure-proof watermark, it wouldn't make for effective DRM so long as people can record the analogue signals and play them back through their own equipment which doesn't care about the watermark (meaning just about anything with a bit of storage and a cheap ADC).
I really don't get how all these ISPs that discriminate traffic can get away with remaining non-liable. The safe harbor is ONLY if they are unaware, thus this should be encouragement for not knowing what is happening on their network.
It's only copyright infringement if it's not fair use and you don't have a license. The ISP may be able to detect that you're transmitting certain material, but they have no way to know whether what you are doing is actually copyright infringement. That is something that could only be determined in court after the fact.
Also, there is no way that implementing a handful of automated filters equates to the ability to exercise effective editorial control over the entire Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
...neither did you sign a contract to receive the services which are paid for by those tax dollars...but you use them anyway.
"Insightful"? Please. You need a valid contract (including meeting of the minds, non-duress, etc.—no, the "social contract" is not a real contract and does not count) to claim someone else's property as payment for services rendered. You do not need a contract to accept what someone else gives you, unsolicited and without any voluntary agreement to pay on your part. Such gifts incur no obligation to reciprocate. If you want someone to pay up for services rendered you need to enter into a contract before providing the service—at least an implied contract where the other party is free to decline without penalty.
There is also the small matter of the State using force to prevent anyone else from providing the same services on equal terms, either through direct monopolies or tax subsidies. Yes, there are things like private toll roads, but in general it is impossible to compete with someone who subsidizes their own service with taxes. Any customers you might manage to attract are forced to pay for the public service in addition to your private offering, automatically making your private service twice as expensive. The fact that some private operators manage to make it work anyway it a resounding testament to government inefficiency.
The Irish government allowed Apple to think such provisions existed but the EU have now ruled the arrangement constituted illegal state aid. Consequently the EU is leaning on Ireland to collect the taxes it should rightly have collected in the first place.
So, logically, in a sane world, the Irish government, as the party which most directly messed up here, owes Apple compensation for the losses Apple incurred through its reasonable reliance on Ireland's material misrepresentation of EU tax laws and its own ability to enter into the tax agreement, neatly cancelling out any extra back-taxes Ireland would otherwise have collected... Apple pays Ireland what the EU claims was actually owed, then Ireland pays Apple back the same amount to settle the debt it incurred by defrauding Apple in the first place with its (in effect) bait & switch tax policy. Everyone goes home happy except the overbearing EU bureaucrats.
fairly distributing the fruits of our planet
The "fruits of our planet" immediately available for our direct use are extremely meager—breathable air, potable (but rarely pure) water in select areas. Some unimproved caves for natural shelter. If you don't want to starve, someone has to put in the effort to identify edible animals and plants and actually do the messy work of hunting and/or gathering, cooking, preservation, etc. The same goes for every other non-abundant economic good.
What you are speaking of distributing is not the fruit of the planet, but rather the fruit of human labor combined with deliberate saving and investment over a very long period of time. The fruits of those efforts fairly belong to the specific humans that sacrificed their own time and effort and resources to earn them, not the human population as a whole.
LG devices have standard connectors, microSD cards, removable batteries, and best of all: they are well supported by Cyanogenmod. My devices are always up-to-date and functional the way I want them.
So what you are saying is that you don't even EXPECT the phone's OEM to support their POS phone; bug rather have to depend on the largesse of coders working for a company who has absolutely NO accountability if something goes wrong with an update.
Are you insane?
I expect the phone's OEM to support their hardware, to make it standards-compliant, well-documented, and compatible with the most common phone operating system(s), one of which should come pre-installed. I expect them to leave the software to the experts in that field who are developing usable mobile operating system software suitable for all phones, and not try to force users to deal with their own idiosyncratic, buggy, advertisement-laden Android offshoot. Let the best smartphone and the best mobile operating system win—separately!
The OEM should be accountable only for the hardware and whatever OS they choose to pre-install. You should be able to install AOSP with full hardware support through open-source drivers. If you prefer to have someone to hold accountable for software updates and support, you should be able to select the most suitable hardware for your needs and an operating system (perhaps based on AOSP) with a paid service contract designed to run on any smartphone, just like you can buy a commercially-supported operating system like RHEL or Windows and run it on any standards-compliant PC.
You are speaking about a simple backdoor, while I was speaking about a whole system of systems of "clever checks, balances, and safeguards".
Doesn't make any difference. Under all these overly-clever "safeguards" there must exist a "simple backdoor" to actually bypass the encryption, and that backdoor will not remain protected forever.
Correct; it should not be my call to make. ... A similar [Slashdot-like metamoderation] system could rate law enforcement officials, to determine who would be most worthy -- after obtaining a legitimate warrant -- of access to private information.
You misunderstand me. It isn't their call to make, either—and a collective right does not suddenly spring into existence just because you brought together a bunch of people who would not have that right individually. The only one with the right to decide to whom their secrets should be entrusted is the one holding the secrets.
I'm not sure the 5th works either since they're not "taking" the property they're just restricting what you can do with it.
A legal technicality. Mere possession is perhaps the least significant part of ownership. The essence of a property right is that the owner gets to decide how the property will be used. Of course, others get to decide how their property is used, so whatever action you want to take has to satisfy the rights of everyone whose property is involved, not just your own. However, when some authority figure tells you that you aren't allowed to use your property in a way which would not infringe on anyone else's rights, they are misappropriating your rights as the property owner for themselves. That is a "taking", and if the impact to the value of the property to the owner is significant enough (50% for sure; perhaps even less) it should be treated as a form of confiscation of the property for public use.
To put this in the form of a reducto ad absurdum: One could restrict the use of property to the point where the nominal "owner's" only legal options are to leave the property to rot (while still paying property taxes and other fees on it) or "donate" it to the government. Legal semantics aside, how would that be any different from simply taking the property? Lesser restrictions are merely a difference of degree, not kind; a partial taking is still a taking.
That means if the FBI wants me decrypt any of my documents they can show my lawyer a search warrant otherwise they can FUCK OFF.
Even with a warrant, it has never been the case that a person could be compelled to translate the content of a document (a journal, for example) written in a private code. If you possess some form of codebook then they can force you to produce it with a subpoena, but that's pretty much as far as it goes.
A search warrant means they get to search your property, with or without your permission. You have no obligation to help them find what they're looking for, much less help them make sense of it once it's been found.
In any case this is less about individual warrants and more about preventing the manufacturers of popular electronics and software from making truly secure storage of personal data easy and ubiquitous. Encryption by default represents significant security benefits for the population at large, whereas its absence will have little or no impact on actual criminals beyond a bit of inconvenience. I can only conclude that the FBI is, perhaps unwittingly, taking the criminal's side on this issue—criminals stand to benefit more than anyone else from insecure systems.
The best possible permutation is where criminals are in total darkness, while the most incorruptible members of law enforcement, after obtaining a legitimate warrant, are in a brightly-lit room.
Even assuming you could find such a paragon of virtue to trust with everyone's secrets, which I highly doubt—and which is not your call to make—this has been tried. Many times. It simply does not work. If there is a back door into everyone's encrypted data, it will be available not only to these impractically idealized members of law enforcement for the objectively reasonable and impartial enforcement of universally agreed-upon laws, but also to criminals and others with less noble intentions. It's much the same problem as a large conspiracy: the more people that have access, the easier it for the back door to fall into the "wrong" hands; and a back door you can never use for reasons of security might as well not exist. It will get used, frequently, and it will leak, and when it does it will put everyone's private data in jeopardy. (Except for the real criminals, of course, who took care to speak in their own private code and/or encrypt all their data with an unbreakable and trivial-to-implement one-time pad—which won't be discovered until after the warrant has been issued to decrypt the files with the government's master key.)
Do you even think it's reasonable to prioritize your torrent packets the same as your neighbors VOIP traffic?
Generally speaking: yes. Two customers with the same service plan shouldn't be treated differently based on the content (or port numbers) of their packets.
With that said, if the ISP wants to give each customer a limited amount of dedicated high-priority bandwidth based on the DiffServe IP header field, and let customers decide for themselves how to allocate it, that would be perfectly fine.
ISPs are not all equivalent. AT&T is a telephone company, and the telephone companies have always been considered common carriers, even when they branched out into providing DSL, and later fiber. Cable companies, on the other hand, are not traditional common carriers, and that status, too, has carried over into their respective Internet services.
Being a common carrier does not mean that the ISP cannot make a distinction between local and non-local traffic. This is not that different from charging extra for long-distance service, which was very common among the common-carrier phone companies before VoIP made most voice calls "too cheap to meter". It does mean that the ISP does not get to pick and choose the type of traffic they will carry, which should rule out things like DPI filtering or restrictions against running servers.
Yeah, they're perfectly free to go back to dire poverty and hunger if they want.
No, they're free to provide for themselves without any help or hindrance from Apple or Pegatron. If that means "dire poverty and hunger" that is only because this is the natural state of the universe; if you want anything else you have to provide it for yourself, either individually or working together with others voluntarily for mutual benefit.
If they choose to work at Pegatron they do so because, despite what anyone else might say about the pay or conditions, they feel that this is their best option. Pegatron has no inherent responsibility to provide for anyone beyond what they mutually agreed to in the terms of employment. The workers' conditions—in the aggregate, including any who were laid off—would not be improved by Pegatron (or Apple) losing customers due to non-competitive pricing, or by losing investors due to non-competitive returns.
If really you want to improve their lot, the most effective strategies would be to increase competition for workers by reducing (not increasing!) the barriers to entry for new businesses, to encourage free trade, and to lift the restrictions on immigration to areas with higher standards of living.
This is more a matter of how the phrase should be read, as jargon, and not how the phrase will be (mis-)understood by the general public in casual conversation.
As a writer, if you can't count on a technically-minded audience, you're (unfortunately) best served by avoiding relative multiples entirely, as well as relative percentages at or above 100%. Unlike "two times faster" or "330% faster", there is no confusion, generally speaking, about how to read "three times as fast" or "430% as fast".
As a reader, in the absence of evidence of the author's intent to the contrary, if you encounter the phrase "X times faster" or "X% faster" I believe you should treat it as equivalent to "(X+1) times as fast" or "(X+100%) as fast".
I understand that linguistic relativism is in vogue at the moment, and even agree with it to an extent. The point of having language is to communicate, after all, which implies that the meanings and customary use of phrases are not fixed in stone; they change depending on the speaker, audience, and context. However, by the same token, I think prescriptionism is warranted in cases like this one for the sake of preserving our ability to communicate clearly and concisely. Ambiguity serves no one, and we don't need another inconsistent way to say "X times as fast", whereas maintaining the regular structure of the language ("X00% = X times" and "X faster = original speed plus X", regardless of context) helps to reduce the reader's cognitive load, leaving more energy for the real content. While there is no inherently right or wrong way to design a tool, some tool designs are more fit for purpose than others, and the same is true for the tools of communication, i.e. languages.
I understand your concerns, but these adapters are basically just wiring and physical supports. There are hardly any electronics involved (perhaps a discrete voltage regulator, judging from the images). If you would be willing to trust a non-OEM SATA cable and mounting bracket then I wouldn't see any reason not to trust a non-OEM M.2 to SATA adapter.
There are some higher-end models which provide a full 2.5" enclosure for your M.2 drive for $20-30, if you want the extra peace of mind.
I get the M.2 format's advantages, but I don't understand why they wouldn't offer the same drives in SATA packaging.
If you need the SATA packaging to fit existing hardware you can get M.2 to SATA adapters for $8-10:
Oley Laptop SSD NGFF M.2 to 2.5" SATA 3 PC Converter Adapter Card
AD905A SATA III 3 to M.2 (NGFF) SSD 7+5 pin Connector Converter Adapter Card
Here's a higher-end dual-M.2 to SATA adapter with integrated hardware RAID for $40:
Ableconn ISAT-M2SR 2.5" 7mm SATA III to Dual M.2 SATA SSD Adapter with Hardward RAID
Has anyone heard of NAS or SAN devices that now feature rows of M.2 slots instead of SATA sleds?
They don't appear to be commonplace yet, but here's one example:
Qnap 4-Bay M.2 SSD NASbook with Built-In 4 Port LAN Switch
Can you link to something authoritative so I can cure my ignorance?
Sorry, I didn't find anything definitive either. However, it follows from the normal use for ratios less than unity. The only difference is the magnitude. Taking "two times" to be equivalent to "200%", and "1/2 times" (or simply "1/2") to be equivalent to "50%":
50% as fast (as the original) = 1/2 (times) as fast = 0.5 * original speed
100% as fast = one times as fast = 1 * original speed
200% as fast = two times as fast = 2 * original speed
50% faster (than the original) = 1/2 (times) faster = (0.5 * original speed) + original speed
100% faster = one times faster = (1 * original speed) + original speed = 2 * original speed
200% faster = two times faster = (2 * original speed) + original speed = 3 * original speed
The expression has two parts. The first can be either "X%" or "X times", both relative to the original amount. If the second part is "as fast" or "as much" (etc.) then this is the final result. If the second part is a relative term like "faster" or "more" then this implies addition, and the first amount, after multiplication, is the difference between the result and the original amount.
Few would disagree with the statement that "50% faster" is equivalent to "150% as fast", and not "50% as fast", but for some reason many become confused by "200% faster" when the formula is exactly the same.
This raises a question: Why do astronomers use irregular units like "light years" and "parsecs" instead of the SI units and prefixes used in every other scientific discipline? Is it just a matter of custom, like the use of English(-ish) units in the U.S.? The SI units would not be any more awkward to work with, and would avoid the need for complex conversions:
distance from Earth to the Sun (1.00 AU) = 150 Gm (gigameters, G=10^9)
distance to Proxima Centauri (1.3 parsecs) = 40. Pm (petameters, P=10^15)
estimated size of the universe (46 billon light years) = 44 Ym (yottameters, Y=10^24)
Sorry, but "330% faster" is indeed 3.3 times faster, or 4.3 times as fast. "4.3 [times] faster" is actually 5.3 times as fast. You're off by one, and GP is correct.
Let's try it this way: "100% faster" and "1 times faster." Do you see how your statement is provably false, now?
Sorry, but the AC is right. "100% faster" = "1 times faster" = "2 times as fast".
"X times as fast" = X * original speed
"X times faster" = original speed + (X * original speed)
... "as slow" would seem to need to be a comparison to a value measured from a reference point ...
"slowness" = 1 / "fastness" (a.k.a. speed)
Say that an object is moving at 5 meters per second. Its "slowness" is, equivalently, one second per five meters, or 0.2 seconds per meter. "50% faster" would be 50% * 5 m/s = 2.5 m/s faster than 5 m/s, or 7.5 m/s in total. "50% slower" would be 50% * 0.2 s/m = 0.1 s/m slower than 0.2 s/m, or 0.3 s/m in total, or 3.333... m/s.
(Intuitively, "50% slower" means that it takes 50% more time to cover the same distance.)
"Twice as fast" = 2 * 5 m/s = 10 m/s.
"Half as slow" = 1/2 * 0.2 s/m = 0.1 s/m, or 10 m/s.
"Half as fast" = 1/2 * 5 m/s = 2.5 m/s.
"Twice as slow" = 2 * 0.2 s/m = 0.4 s/m, or 2.5 m/s.
The only alternative that would offer searching, filtering, sorting (in general: querying) features that you need to work with raw data (or even long lists) would be Access.
Or one of the perfectly adequate free alternatives, like LibreOffice Base.
Its generations not phones that matter.
It's not generations that matter either. What matters is the hardware capabilities and the ongoing difficulty of supporting older models with significantly different hardware. (This is why support was dropped early for the Galaxy Nexus: the OEM for the SoC exited the market and made it all but impossible to get updated binary drivers for the GN hardware which would work with kernels later versions depended on.)
The reason why people are rightly upset with this decision is that there is very little hardware difference between the Nexus 5, which is not supported, and the Nexus 5X, which is, making this an arbitrary cutoff most likely motivated more by marketing and an attempt to drive people to buy newer phones (when their old ones are working just fine) than by reasonable technical constraints.
Oh well. There are always 3rd-party ROMs. As small as the hardware differences are it shouldn't take long for someone to port AOSP 7.0 to run on the Nexus 5. It would just have been nice to be able to rely on a reasonable level of ongoing support from the original vendor. Other operating systems, and especially ones based on Linux, tend to run just fine on hardware far older than three years, and smartphone specs are no longer improving at so rapid a pace that a three-year-old device can be presumed obsolete.
but it appears most modems were built without the ability to transmit at the higher rates or its disabled in the software
Well, yes. As I said, consumer-grade modems with analog interfaces weren't designed to establish 56k connections with other analog modems, no matter how good the signal might be. It wouldn't work in most cases anyway and none of the 56k protocols cover that situation. To get 56k in one direction you need the special equipment the ISPs use, which is designed to interface with the phone networks digitally.
I happen to have a PSTN simulator and I've only been able to get two modems to connect at 33.6k synchronous. Apparently I need some special hardware to get it to run in asynchronous mode.
56k connections (V.90 or V.92) only ever worked at full speed in one direction. They take advantage of the fact that the ISP is using a 64kbps DS0 digital line, so there is only one A/D conversion involved rather than the usual two. The 56k modem protocols were never intended to work with all-analog connections, and a direct link between two 56k client modems would max out at 33.6k (V.34). In theory you could get 56k or better with PCM over a suitably high-quality channel, but the protocols—and more importantly, the modems—weren't designed for that use case. To establish a 56k connection with a standard 56k modem you would need a DS0 connection and suitable ISP-grade equipment on the other side. (Sorry, I wasn't able to find any product links.)
Same goes for phones. A small minority want unbreakable encryption. The rest of people have some small number of edge cases where they really would want to be able to call up someone and get the phone unlocked.
True, but they don't necessarily want the manufacturer of the phone to be the one holding the spare key.
Also, unbreakable encryption doesn't mean that your expensive phone becomes completely and permanently useless if you forget the password. You generally just have to wipe it back to the factory defaults and start over. It's not the end of the world, especially if you store copies of the more important information somewhere other than on the phone. This is a good idea in any case, since, on the whole, forgetting your password is probably a less likely risk than simply losing the device or suffering physical damage sufficient to render the data unrecoverable.
It's conceivable that you could watermark the analog output in ways that are imperceptible to human hearing.
If any signal "imperceptible to human hearing" can survive lossy compression, the compression algorithm has some room for improvement. There are watermarks that can survive certain compression algorithms in common use today, but you can't count on it remaining that way forever.
Even if you did have an erasure-proof watermark, it wouldn't make for effective DRM so long as people can record the analogue signals and play them back through their own equipment which doesn't care about the watermark (meaning just about anything with a bit of storage and a cheap ADC).
I really don't get how all these ISPs that discriminate traffic can get away with remaining non-liable. The safe harbor is ONLY if they are unaware, thus this should be encouragement for not knowing what is happening on their network.
It's only copyright infringement if it's not fair use and you don't have a license. The ISP may be able to detect that you're transmitting certain material, but they have no way to know whether what you are doing is actually copyright infringement. That is something that could only be determined in court after the fact.
Also, there is no way that implementing a handful of automated filters equates to the ability to exercise effective editorial control over the entire Internet.