I'm a bit baffled - $25, less packaging and shipping, on a $500 item (even at wholesale, say $400) means a payback period of no less than 24 months.
The $25 subscription fee doesn't cover the purchase price of the device. It only covers the trial of it (and potentially the trial of other devices). If you decide to keep your iPad after one month, then you would buy it at their full listed price (with no discounts).
Also, it's a subscription fee, so after you've tried out the iPad and a couple of other gadgets after a couple of months, they intend to keep on charging you that $25 a month even if you don't order any other new items.
I have no love for AT&T and I'm glad the guy won, but if one of my customers sued me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat!
But that's the thing, they're not dropping him, they're only threatening to drop him if he doesn't settle with them. A settlement in this case probably means that they want to keep him quiet, because he has already won his case anyhow.
And dropping him would only add fuel to the fire if you ask me (the guy said he doesn't care if he gets dropped), my guess is that they wanted to give the guy an extra couple of thousands of dollars on top of the money he already made in exchange for him to keep quiet. In the end, AT&T may end up losing millions because this guy is refusing to shut up about his little victory in Small Claims court.
Google Street View is the only other light field camera I know of that I've actually seen sample pictures from. And I've tried looking through the article, but there were no samples, nor were there any links to any samples or any technology demos as such.
And if this type of light field technology demo supposedly allows you to click on a fire hydrant or a building, I wonder what it does after you've clicked on each one of those objects?
Android does the same thing, except it did it long before 2011.
Google Voice for instance can do data sms, but it can also intercept standard sms messages that arrive on your phone -- thereby centralizing every type of SMS you send or receive through one single unified interface. And it's not just Google Voice that can do this, any third party app on the Android Market can do the same on Android.
There is also the simple fact that Apple not only loaded it on a hundred million iPhone users through an OS Update, but they enabled said service automatically using your phone number as your "contact name", thereby immediately sidestepping the carriers, even on existing devices.
And on Android, the same kind of integration is done on the Address book level, but not just from gmail contacts, or your phone address book, but facebook contacts, linkedin contacts, etc. Texting someone on Android is super easy. The person receiving the text doesn't even need a mobile phone. Worst case scenario, it will just call the person up, and a robotic voice will read the text outloud to him/her. And the reverse is also true, someone can just call my phone number from a landline, leave a voice mail and Google Voice can just SMS/email me a transcript of what was said.
iMessage gives you ease of use - I don't have to care whether the person I am messaging has iMessage or not, the messaging app works it out for me without any input from me at all on the matter. This way, I don't have to treat one block of contacts different to any other, it just happens.
You mean like Google Voice and several other third party applications on Android that can do the exact same thing (assuming you're wiling to let them take over control of your standard sms inbox)?
May be, that's the problem. You have an iPhone and I have an Android phone. I guess the iPhone probably didn't allow full programmatic access to the default SMS functionality and notifications to third party developers (like Android does).
That means the probability is directly proportional to the dose. [...] So if 1000 doses given to one mouse causes cancer, then it's likely that 1 dose given to each of 1000 people will cause one case of cancer.
Your equation doesn't balance out. Shouldn't it be instead:
"So if 1000 doses given to one mouse causes cancer, then it's likely that 1 dose given to each of 1000 [mices] will cause one case of cancer [in one mouse]."
After all, "proportional" doesn't mean that a mouse has the same proportion as a man.
Everybody knows that everything causes cancer in California.
True story! These labels are a total joke here - seems like every building...
This is true. It would be a lot more helpful if those warnings came with actual percentages, or actual numbers. Then, there would be an actual basis for comparison and for shopping around. As it stands, those warnings are completely counter-productive.
It's called "implied consent," which means that, as a condition of having a driver's license, you automatically consent to the cop's request for a breathalyzer or other test. A lawyer friend explained it to me like this. Driving is a privilege, not a right (there's no Constitutional right to drive a car). As such, you are bound to follow all of the laws which govern that privilege. One of the laws is implied consent. You are, of course, allowed to refuse to take the breathalyzer test (that is your right), but the law states that refusal to do so results in the severe penalties they enumerate.
Here is a wikipedia article supporting what you've heard. But if you believe you were really driving over the legal limit, there may still be wisdom in refusing those tests as much as possible.
In my case, if I ever get stopped and tested for alcohol, (not that I even drink and drive, but let's just assume that I did for a moment), I always thought I should opt for the blood test (and refuse the Breathalyzer or the urine test). I'm such a big guy, I would think that a blood test would more accurately reflect the real concentration of my blood alcohol level than a breathalyzer (especially for tall fat people such as myself who have such small lung capacities because they exercise so little).
I'll politely hold my hands out for them to put the cuffs on me, and quietly go with them...and call my atty when I get to the police station.
"No, your honor. I didn't want to arrest him. I was just going to ask him for directions. That's when the suspect insisted I put cuffs on him, said he wasn't going to say another word, and then made his way into the back seat of my police car. "
You will spend your entire life rebuilding "plumbing" after which the hardware you've built it for is long dead while its descendents -- you cannot support.
You say this as this is a bad thing. All the developers working on OpenMoko for instance got recruited by Nokia, Palm, and eventually Android. It doesn't matter if their original vision didn't succeed. For many of them, they wouldn't have gotten that kind of unique development experience any other way.
Once again, an armchair Slashdotter proves more intelligent than dozens of scientists and engineers who, of course, never would have thought of this as a potential concern or operating constraint!
The joke is on you. This "fighting fires" with grenades sounds too good to be true. The real end goal is more likely to be about dropping robots behind enemy lines and have them throw grenades which are meant to kill people. In that regard, having the battery explode releasing toxic chemicals everywhere may just be icing on the cake for its original designers.
Free speech aside, don't you USAns have a constitutional right to not incriminate yourself ?
Yes, that twelve year old girl folded like a little girl. She's a wimp. That's mostly the parents fault of not training her properly. When I have kids, they'll be able to survive police intimidation and interrogation techniques by the time they're three years old. In fact, the first word they'll learn won't be "Mama" or "Papa", it will be "IwantMyLawyerImNotTalkingToYouPigs".
There is a chance, I couldn't guess on odds, that the guy had looked at child pornography and was concerned his details may have gotten to the police.
In my opinion, there is a higher chance that the child services worker, or that the police officer who tagged along, wanted to punish the guy for being a snitch. Police officers generally don't want to take police reports. In our society, we tend to punish the messenger. And police officers get punished all the time for taking in accurate crime reports that may tarnish their overall crime statistics.
And the other option is that the child services worker is a child abuser him/herself. It is often that child abusers are attracted to positions of authority. And whether they be Catholic priests or Irish nuns or football coaches, those in position of authority will often protect each others' back when they've been doing the same thing themselves.
*loses wallet* "Hello [$Bank]? Yes, I lost my wallet, can you cancel my card and send me a new one? A few days and it will arrive in the mail? Excellent!"
*loses phone* *logs into Apple ID from any computer* *cancels card link to lost/stolen phone* *connects card to new phone* *continues life as normal, with minimum disruption to card access*
This doesn't even need to be about Apple - NFC payments and "electronic wallets" are the future
How is picking up your new phone at an Apple store any different from picking up your new bank card at your local bank? I suppose the Apple store could also mail you the new iPhone, if that's really what you wanted.
I made a tool that can semi-automatically set the colors right in adsense ads; in about 30 seconds
What is your goal for this technology? Do you want to sell the idea? Do you want them to hire you? Do you want them to take you over? By the way, that page doesn't work in Chromium (on Ubuntu), although it worked on Firefox. I assume it probably doesn't work on Chrome (on Windows) either.
And I thought google might be interested as with their webmaster center tools, the same task takes ~30 minutes (to match the colors to the hosting web-page).
Yes, they may be interested, but one problem is that they could be liable to you if they ever implement your idea after having just seen the demo from you. And in at least one case I heard of, they weren't liable, but they got such bad press from doing something similar to an idea that was demoed to them, that they ended up abandoning the entire project as a result.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point about Google, but there is one little clarification I'd like to make.
Your mental and semantic gymnastics aside, suppliers don't typically pay retail stores. That is like Walmart charging Chinese companies and manufacturers for the privilege of selling their product. That is not how it works (kickbacks aside). Walmart pays for the product from the suppliers, and then delivers it to the consumer in their retail stores.
In the case of stores like Walmart, or supermarket chains like Safeway, some of the branded manufacturers do pay pretty significant amounts of money for good shelf space and good shelf positioning in their stores. That's really the only way to make money. I could give you some hard numbers, but those numbers are so high -- I'm not even sure you'd believe me if I told you.
And yes, there are Chinese companies and manufacturers that don't have the cash to place upfront, not for the shelving space, and not even for advertising on TV/press, and those companies end up getting squeezed by the stores in other ways -- and they're by far not the largest profit centers for those stores.
Well the US is not one of those places. People are pretty much free to quit one job and take another. Joining government might be harder.
In fact the only place I'm aware of an outright ban is France, where a three year waiting period must lapse before quitting government and joining the private sector. How one feeds himself and is family during this three years is not explained.
That's because the Wikipedia article provides an over-generalized incorrect summary (although, it does provide a direct link to the French law, so it was easy for me to find the problem -- so it's still better than most newspapers or traditional encyclopedias in that regard).
The 3-year ban only applies to the industry the government employee was supposed to be supervising/regulating, and even then, my own interpretation is incomplete, because it goes into much greater details than that, and provides for some caveats and exceptions.
This guy hasn't thought this through. This is not a battle that can be won.
Even if he were able to bypass his corporate VPN, bypass any proxy, erase/encrypt everything he did, and re-image everything, he still wouldn't be able to prevent a key logger from recording and emailing the corporate office a regular log of his activities, nor would he be able to prevent the tracking software from taking random screenshots of his favorite porn sites and sending those off as well.
And yes, he could backup and wipe his system clean as soon as he was given the laptop, and install Ubuntu or something, but I'm not sure how he would handle those secret hidden partitions that are often left there by the manufacturer, nor would he able to explain to his employer why his laptop has suddenly stopped accepting software updates, or remoting requests from IT. And yes, he could boot his laptop from a usb disk, or from a DVD, which is less risky, but that too has risks if any of the tracking is done at the hardware-level, which is done by some of the tracking products out there (so we all know this kind of tracking exists as well, and is commercially available).
What kind of threat could justify interrupting internet and cellphone services?
Let's just say that you're a Bart police officer and that you've just shot a man in the back, after you had already immobilized him on the floor. You better pray that your employer is able to kill all cell phone communications and internet traffic before any cell phone video is uploaded to Youtube, otherwise your quality of life for the next twelve months is going to be seriously threatened.
You're not understanding the context. The FCC is not the one that's shutting down communications.
Public Transit Authorities like the BART are (very stupidly) shutting down the cell networks they have on premises to disrupt the protests against them.
If you can't multiply / divide , you can't run a business.
Not exactly true. They did a study on Brazilian homeless kids who sold fruits on the streets. They couldn't formally add, subtract, or multiply, but when it came time to selling fruits, giving back change, and doing all kinds of complicated transactions, they could do all the math correctly then.
And no, I'm not trying to disagree with your main point, I just like to nitpick sometimes -- even if I agree with the person's main message.
If you don't know anything about combinatorix (odds), you get suckered by any form of gambling, including insurance, warranties and the stock market.
And yet, there are still people who know all these things rationally, but who do not act on that knowledge when making decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a bit baffled - $25, less packaging and shipping, on a $500 item (even at wholesale, say $400) means a payback period of no less than 24 months.
The $25 subscription fee doesn't cover the purchase price of the device. It only covers the trial of it (and potentially the trial of other devices). If you decide to keep your iPad after one month, then you would buy it at their full listed price (with no discounts).
Also, it's a subscription fee, so after you've tried out the iPad and a couple of other gadgets after a couple of months, they intend to keep on charging you that $25 a month even if you don't order any other new items.
I have no love for AT&T and I'm glad the guy won, but if one of my customers sued me, I'd drop them in a heartbeat!
But that's the thing, they're not dropping him, they're only threatening to drop him if he doesn't settle with them. A settlement in this case probably means that they want to keep him quiet, because he has already won his case anyhow.
And dropping him would only add fuel to the fire if you ask me (the guy said he doesn't care if he gets dropped), my guess is that they wanted to give the guy an extra couple of thousands of dollars on top of the money he already made in exchange for him to keep quiet. In the end, AT&T may end up losing millions because this guy is refusing to shut up about his little victory in Small Claims court.
No wonder you never heard of it. It never had a free lite version to begin with.
This is an iPhone developer who thinks he can sell an Android app just like he can sell an iPhone one.
Flamebait? Thanks for answering my question guys.
Google Street View is the only other light field camera I know of that I've actually seen sample pictures from. And I've tried looking through the article, but there were no samples, nor were there any links to any samples or any technology demos as such.
And if this type of light field technology demo supposedly allows you to click on a fire hydrant or a building, I wonder what it does after you've clicked on each one of those objects?
Android does the same thing, except it did it long before 2011.
Google Voice for instance can do data sms, but it can also intercept standard sms messages that arrive on your phone -- thereby centralizing every type of SMS you send or receive through one single unified interface. And it's not just Google Voice that can do this, any third party app on the Android Market can do the same on Android.
There is also the simple fact that Apple not only loaded it on a hundred million iPhone users through an OS Update, but they enabled said service automatically using your phone number as your "contact name", thereby immediately sidestepping the carriers, even on existing devices.
And on Android, the same kind of integration is done on the Address book level, but not just from gmail contacts, or your phone address book, but facebook contacts, linkedin contacts, etc. Texting someone on Android is super easy. The person receiving the text doesn't even need a mobile phone. Worst case scenario, it will just call the person up, and a robotic voice will read the text outloud to him/her. And the reverse is also true, someone can just call my phone number from a landline, leave a voice mail and Google Voice can just SMS/email me a transcript of what was said.
iMessage gives you ease of use - I don't have to care whether the person I am messaging has iMessage or not, the messaging app works it out for me without any input from me at all on the matter. This way, I don't have to treat one block of contacts different to any other, it just happens.
You mean like Google Voice and several other third party applications on Android that can do the exact same thing (assuming you're wiling to let them take over control of your standard sms inbox)?
May be, that's the problem. You have an iPhone and I have an Android phone. I guess the iPhone probably didn't allow full programmatic access to the default SMS functionality and notifications to third party developers (like Android does).
Right now, it seems like the majority of Lytro pictures are technology demos
How does Lytro differ from Google Street View?
That means the probability is directly proportional to the dose. [...] So if 1000 doses given to one mouse causes cancer, then it's likely that 1 dose given to each of 1000 people will cause one case of cancer.
Your equation doesn't balance out. Shouldn't it be instead:
"So if 1000 doses given to one mouse causes cancer, then it's likely that 1 dose given to each of 1000 [mices] will cause one case of cancer [in one mouse]."
After all, "proportional" doesn't mean that a mouse has the same proportion as a man.
Everybody knows that everything causes cancer in California.
True story! These labels are a total joke here - seems like every building...
This is true. It would be a lot more helpful if those warnings came with actual percentages, or actual numbers. Then, there would be an actual basis for comparison and for shopping around. As it stands, those warnings are completely counter-productive.
It's called "implied consent," which means that, as a condition of having a driver's license, you automatically consent to the cop's request for a breathalyzer or other test. A lawyer friend explained it to me like this. Driving is a privilege, not a right (there's no Constitutional right to drive a car). As such, you are bound to follow all of the laws which govern that privilege. One of the laws is implied consent. You are, of course, allowed to refuse to take the breathalyzer test (that is your right), but the law states that refusal to do so results in the severe penalties they enumerate.
Here is a wikipedia article supporting what you've heard. But if you believe you were really driving over the legal limit, there may still be wisdom in refusing those tests as much as possible.
In my case, if I ever get stopped and tested for alcohol, (not that I even drink and drive, but let's just assume that I did for a moment), I always thought I should opt for the blood test (and refuse the Breathalyzer or the urine test). I'm such a big guy, I would think that a blood test would more accurately reflect the real concentration of my blood alcohol level than a breathalyzer (especially for tall fat people such as myself who have such small lung capacities because they exercise so little).
I'll politely hold my hands out for them to put the cuffs on me, and quietly go with them...and call my atty when I get to the police station.
"No, your honor. I didn't want to arrest him. I was just going to ask him for directions. That's when the suspect insisted I put cuffs on him, said he wasn't going to say another word, and then made his way into the back seat of my police car. "
If only Timothy had posted this story, with some kind of snarky one-liner that clearly told me whether this was a good thing or bad thing!
Forget about Tim, I'll do it.
It's official. Google is evil now (they're not even going to try to hide it anymore).
It's part of their new branding strategy.
You will spend your entire life rebuilding "plumbing" after which the hardware you've built it for is long dead while its descendents -- you cannot support.
You say this as this is a bad thing. All the developers working on OpenMoko for instance got recruited by Nokia, Palm, and eventually Android. It doesn't matter if their original vision didn't succeed. For many of them, they wouldn't have gotten that kind of unique development experience any other way.
Once again, an armchair Slashdotter proves more intelligent than dozens of scientists and engineers who, of course, never would have thought of this as a potential concern or operating constraint!
The joke is on you. This "fighting fires" with grenades sounds too good to be true. The real end goal is more likely to be about dropping robots behind enemy lines and have them throw grenades which are meant to kill people. In that regard, having the battery explode releasing toxic chemicals everywhere may just be icing on the cake for its original designers.
Free speech aside, don't you USAns have a constitutional right to not incriminate yourself ?
Yes, that twelve year old girl folded like a little girl. She's a wimp. That's mostly the parents fault of not training her properly. When I have kids, they'll be able to survive police intimidation and interrogation techniques by the time they're three years old. In fact, the first word they'll learn won't be "Mama" or "Papa", it will be "IwantMyLawyerImNotTalkingToYouPigs".
There is a chance, I couldn't guess on odds, that the guy had looked at child pornography and was concerned his details may have gotten to the police.
In my opinion, there is a higher chance that the child services worker, or that the police officer who tagged along, wanted to punish the guy for being a snitch. Police officers generally don't want to take police reports. In our society, we tend to punish the messenger. And police officers get punished all the time for taking in accurate crime reports that may tarnish their overall crime statistics.
And the other option is that the child services worker is a child abuser him/herself. It is often that child abusers are attracted to positions of authority. And whether they be Catholic priests or Irish nuns or football coaches, those in position of authority will often protect each others' back when they've been doing the same thing themselves.
*loses wallet*
"Hello [$Bank]? Yes, I lost my wallet, can you cancel my card and send me a new one? A few days and it will arrive in the mail? Excellent!"
*loses phone*
*logs into Apple ID from any computer*
*cancels card link to lost/stolen phone*
*connects card to new phone*
*continues life as normal, with minimum disruption to card access*
This doesn't even need to be about Apple - NFC payments and "electronic wallets" are the future
How is picking up your new phone at an Apple store any different from picking up your new bank card at your local bank? I suppose the Apple store could also mail you the new iPhone, if that's really what you wanted.
I made a tool that can semi-automatically set the colors right in adsense ads; in about 30 seconds
What is your goal for this technology? Do you want to sell the idea? Do you want them to hire you? Do you want them to take you over? By the way, that page doesn't work in Chromium (on Ubuntu), although it worked on Firefox. I assume it probably doesn't work on Chrome (on Windows) either.
And I thought google might be interested as with their webmaster center tools, the same task takes ~30 minutes (to match the colors to the hosting web-page).
Yes, they may be interested, but one problem is that they could be liable to you if they ever implement your idea after having just seen the demo from you. And in at least one case I heard of, they weren't liable, but they got such bad press from doing something similar to an idea that was demoed to them, that they ended up abandoning the entire project as a result.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point about Google, but there is one little clarification I'd like to make.
Your mental and semantic gymnastics aside, suppliers don't typically pay retail stores. That is like Walmart charging Chinese companies and manufacturers for the privilege of selling their product. That is not how it works (kickbacks aside). Walmart pays for the product from the suppliers, and then delivers it to the consumer in their retail stores.
In the case of stores like Walmart, or supermarket chains like Safeway, some of the branded manufacturers do pay pretty significant amounts of money for good shelf space and good shelf positioning in their stores. That's really the only way to make money. I could give you some hard numbers, but those numbers are so high -- I'm not even sure you'd believe me if I told you.
And yes, there are Chinese companies and manufacturers that don't have the cash to place upfront, not for the shelving space, and not even for advertising on TV/press, and those companies end up getting squeezed by the stores in other ways -- and they're by far not the largest profit centers for those stores.
Well the US is not one of those places. People are pretty much free to quit one job and take another. Joining government might be harder.
In fact the only place I'm aware of an outright ban is France, where a three year waiting period must lapse before quitting government and joining the private sector. How one feeds himself and is family during this three years is not explained.
That's because the Wikipedia article provides an over-generalized incorrect summary (although, it does provide a direct link to the French law, so it was easy for me to find the problem -- so it's still better than most newspapers or traditional encyclopedias in that regard).
The 3-year ban only applies to the industry the government employee was supposed to be supervising/regulating, and even then, my own interpretation is incomplete, because it goes into much greater details than that, and provides for some caveats and exceptions.
This guy hasn't thought this through. This is not a battle that can be won.
Even if he were able to bypass his corporate VPN, bypass any proxy, erase/encrypt everything he did, and re-image everything, he still wouldn't be able to prevent a key logger from recording and emailing the corporate office a regular log of his activities, nor would he be able to prevent the tracking software from taking random screenshots of his favorite porn sites and sending those off as well.
And yes, he could backup and wipe his system clean as soon as he was given the laptop, and install Ubuntu or something, but I'm not sure how he would handle those secret hidden partitions that are often left there by the manufacturer, nor would he able to explain to his employer why his laptop has suddenly stopped accepting software updates, or remoting requests from IT. And yes, he could boot his laptop from a usb disk, or from a DVD, which is less risky, but that too has risks if any of the tracking is done at the hardware-level, which is done by some of the tracking products out there (so we all know this kind of tracking exists as well, and is commercially available).
What kind of threat could justify interrupting internet and cellphone services?
Let's just say that you're a Bart police officer and that you've just shot a man in the back, after you had already immobilized him on the floor. You better pray that your employer is able to kill all cell phone communications and internet traffic before any cell phone video is uploaded to Youtube, otherwise your quality of life for the next twelve months is going to be seriously threatened.
You're not understanding the context. The FCC is not the one that's shutting down communications.
Public Transit Authorities like the BART are (very stupidly) shutting down the cell networks they have on premises to disrupt the protests against them.
Now, you're being silly. You should have played a lottery based in China, that's where fortune cookies originally come from.
If you can't add, you can't buy things.
If you can't multiply / divide , you can't run a business.
Not exactly true. They did a study on Brazilian homeless kids who sold fruits on the streets. They couldn't formally add, subtract, or multiply, but when it came time to selling fruits, giving back change, and doing all kinds of complicated transactions, they could do all the math correctly then.
And no, I'm not trying to disagree with your main point, I just like to nitpick sometimes -- even if I agree with the person's main message.
If you don't know anything about combinatorix (odds), you get suckered by any form of gambling, including insurance, warranties and the stock market.
And yet, there are still people who know all these things rationally, but who do not act on that knowledge when making decisions.