Yup - the only reason most of the over-the-counter remedies in your local drugstore are legal is tradition. If a Pharma company invented any of them today there is no way they'd even be allowed for use with a prescription, let alone stocked in 500-count bottles on shelves in the local Walmart.
Granted, their downsides are much better understood than with many of the newer drugs. The fact that acetaminophen is so dangerous is actually half the reason it is formulated into so many pills. Can't have junkies getting high on codeine - better to have them dead instead...
Re 1), the aim would be to either encourage service providers who make use of something like Affero, or to simply reverse the regression to mainframes:P.
Sure, though I'm not sure I'd consider the movement towards SaaS as a regression. The problem is the control issue, not the concept of centralized services with less reliance on clients.
Give somebody the ability to run their own server and you get all the advantages of both the cloud and FOSS. Why would I want to use an X11-only application like OpenOffice if I had a web-based application I could self-host that was just as capable?
I think that FOSS is really missing the boat on the cloud and SaaS.
There is nothing wrong with the cloud per-se - it is just a hosting model. The problem is that our typical licenses allow cloud providers to benefit from FOSS without giving back. FOSS authors tend not to spend much time writing cloud-ready software as a result.
If i want to use a web-based email client there really aren't any decent FOSS options available to me. They all are VERY weak in comparison to something like Gmail, and lack all the Android integration/etc. There is no reason that somebody couldn't create an FOSS version of Android that syncs to servers the user can control (or where the user gets a choice in what servers they use if they don't want to run their own). There is no reason that services like Gmail, Google Docs, etc couldn't be in competition with FOSS alternatives. Again, you don't have to run your own servers - as with Wordpress you can run your own blog, or host it with any of 400 companies that will run it for you, and as the user you have power because you can take your data and move it around.
I have no problems with hosting my own software, or setting up something in EC2 or a VPS. Others might want to pay others to handle things for them, perhaps with advertising. However, none of this is possible when FOSS effort goes almost exclusively into applications that only work over X11. We're still fighting against the Microsoft of the 90s and the world has moved on...
Well, duh. If your business model is to use FOSS code and not share your changes, then the last thing you're going to do is choose a license that requires you to share your changes.:)
It deals with the problem in part. You can't know what other software is making use of data you give to them. However, it does give you the ability to just clone their service and modify it to suit your own purposes and host it on your own server.
3) other FSF licences are extremely popular
This really isn't a shortcoming in the Affero license. It is likely the reason that nobody uses it though. Proprietary companies will always take BSD code over GPL code as it places fewer constraints on them, and they're clearly going to take GPLv2 over GPLv3 over Affero GPL for the same reason.
Now, if you're donating to the community then a large variety of motivations will apply, but self-interest should probably tell you to prefer the licenses in the reverse order, as using the more copyleft-style licenses increases the utility of the effort others expend to extend your work.
Yup. Main issue with GPLv3 is that nobody uses it, because, well, they like their walled gardens.
Also worth nothing that most of the software on the walled gardens tends to avoid even GPLv2 for the same reason. About the only thing in Android that is GPLv2 is the Linux kernel.
Businesses are pretty brutal at negotiation - at least the big ones are.
You can charge $100/copy for Windows retail, and those who aren't pirating it will probably pay it. When you go to some fortune-500 company they probably get $100/employee for Windows+office+sharepoint+all the licenses needed to run every windows-based server in the company. If MS gives them too hard a time they can talk about Samba and get taken seriously, and the negotiating is done by professionals. They also keep track of their licenses and they're not going to pay you for an extra one every time they replace a hard drive or whatever.
The business is also more demanding - they're going to expect 10 yrs of security updates, and they'll drop you like a hot potato if you don't keep up.
Consumers do things like throw out a perfectly good cell phone every two years, and buy tablets/etc on top of that. They're also much more susceptible to advertising. So, consumers are a good growth market.
That said, there is plenty of money to be made in the enterprise. They just buy different features.
Hardly. In a consignment model the customer hands over the cash and walks out with the item. They're selling SUBSCRIPTIONS for the delivery of items in the future.
AMC didn't promise them anything, and doesn't owe them anything. If I pre-order a book from Amazon and the author gives up and never publishes it, then Amazon owes me money because they sold me something that didn't exist.
You just contradicted yourself. If Apple didn't promise 16 episodes, then who did?
I said that AMC didn't promise them anything, not that Apple didn't promise them anything. Apple promised them a full season.
Of course I would - if they sell a full season to customers and deliver only half a season. What makes you think I'm interested in picking on Apple?
Because every single thing you've said was against Apple. You haven't acknowledge the simple fact that all vendors of "Season 5" are in the same boat..
Of course they're all in the same boat. I've pointed this out several times:
At this point we're basically just repeating the same arguments over and over. You're entitled to your opinion, however wrong it may be. The court will issue theirs, and then we can argue again about whether they got it right or not...:)
And AMC and any content producer would agree that Apple holds onto their money for over a year, why? And I'm pretty sure there laws against a blanket contract where one party can hold onto money past 60 days in a consignment model.
It isn't their money, because they didn't deliver any product. I'd be perfectly fine with an arrangement that bills the consumer per-episode in which case nobody is holding any money.
Basically the consumer paid Apple to deliver a TV show, and Apple subcontracted AMC to actually produce it. I don't get how that would be illegal.
Vendors agree to not be paid until they deliver their goods all the time. If AMC doesn't like the terms then they can avoid selling on iTunes, Amazon, and everybody else who gets sued over this nonsense. I doubt they get paid in advance by the cable networks either.
But the thing is which you're refusing to acknowledge: AMC says Season 5 is 8 episodes and they are the copyright holders.
I hereby acknowledge that AMC says that Season 5 is 8 episodes and they are the copyright holders. Happy?
Not sure what that has to do with anything. The people filing the lawsuit never paid a dime to AMC, and never were in communication with AMC. AMC didn't promise them anything, and doesn't owe them anything. If I pre-order a book from Amazon and the author gives up and never publishes it, then Amazon owes me money because they sold me something that didn't exist.
Would you suggest the same thing to Best Buy and Amazon.
Of course I would - if they sell a full season to customers and deliver only half a season. What makes you think I'm interested in picking on Apple?
I really don't see any way to regulate this except at the point of sale. They're the ones posting descriptions of what they're selling and collecting money. That's how it works in every other industry as well. No reputable vendor lets companies sell products on their website and then not make good on them...
Keeping around obsolete companies isn't the solution.
However, the problem doesn't go away by ignoring it either. The real issues aren't that 10k people will lose their jobs, but rather: 1. Modern workers are highly specialized and can't command the same wage at just any job. 2. Modern employers still tend to employ a geographically-localized workforce. 3. #2 means that when a company dies you end up with 10k specialists in a particular area without jobs. 4. #1 means that there probably aren't 10k jobs in that same area to accommodate everybody who lost a job. 5. The utter lack of societal safety nets means no-job-your-sick-wife/parent/etc-dies, your kids sleep on the floor of some apartment, and so on. 6. The combination of #1 and #5 mean that re-training just isn't a practical option. Training is too expensive, and takes a long time during which you remain unemployed. 7. Sure, people can move, but that isn't very practical for families, and even for individuals it is highly disruptive to social networks (which are important - people aren't machines).
As a result there is a lot of political pressure to prop up dying companies. If we fixed the problems that make losing your job such a horrible event then perhaps we'd be more willing to kill off poor performing companies and let the workers spend their time someplace more useful.
.. and that's why Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nuked? =P, all the military activity and factories?
Hiroshima and Nagaskai were not what I would call nuclear war scenarios. That was a conventional war ended by the use of nuclear weapons. That scenario only works when one side in a war has nuclear weapons - it isn't too likely to be repeated.
If nuclear weapons start flying in WWIII they'll be used by both sides, and that would be a war the US could very well "lose" (the terms win/lose get a bit muddled when you're talking about a long-term where everybody is living in bronze-age conditions for the next century or so). In such a scenario you want to expend your non-bronze-age weapons with maximum effect during the hour-long period when you actually still have them to use, and you want to make sure that your enemy isn't left with too many ships/bombers/tanks to use against your spear-wielding militia.
Well, if you're in a nuclear war scenario your goal isn't to kill off everybody a few days later, but to wipe them out RIGHT NOW before they start shooting back. Military troops presumably are going to shelter against fallout or move away from it, and they're really the main targets, along with things like bridges/dams/etc which don't care a whit about fallout.
What you propose is really difficult to enforce. For BB, there was more than a year between the two parts. Apple can't hold onto AMC's money for more than a year. Nor can they not pay AMC for product that was delivered to a customer. Most states have laws against the longest I've seen is 60 days delay. The only party that loses is Apple...Now Apple could put it into a contract but they would have to write one for every season pass for every show.
It would be simple to enforce. They only need one contract, which would be binding on all shows distributed under the terms of the contract.
There are a bunch of ways of handling it. Maybe give the studio a choice of terms.
One example could be a time box - the studio agrees that a season is all epsiodes that air within a certain time period (set longer than the planned season length). Another example could be a set number of episodes. Whatever the studio sets gets advertised by Apple.
Regarding payments the solution is simple - pro-rate the payments. I pay $20 for 10 episodes. Each time the studio delivers an episode Apple gives them $2/subscriber the next day (minus whatever their cut is). If the studio fails to deliver Apple refunds the balance to the consumer. If you pay by time then just pro-rate the payments over time. If the consumer has paid for a calendar year then they get a calendar year, regardless of how long the season stretches out. If they pay for a calendar year and the show stops airing episodes then consumers probably should have the right to cancel.
There are lots of ways to make what is being sold transparent and that would be a win for consumers. None of this is particularly onerous for the studio or Apple - these are the sorts of arrangements any subscription-based service manages.
Good question, wonder what happens if the Belgian police issues an EAW, does the GCHQ operators have immunity for their crimes in the UK? Does the EAW apply in this case; in my mind it should, it would put some needed control over this crap.
I would think that as long as they violated a law in Belgium that meets the EAW requirements and there is probable cause they could issue one. I'm not an expert in European law, but it seems like part of the deal in becoming a part of the EU is that you lose your sovereignty to protect your spies who are breaking laws in other member nations. One would think that in joining an alliance like the EU that you're supposed to stop treating other member states like enemies. If they needed to tap a cell phone in Belgium for a legitimate purpose one would think that the EU would have a mechanism for asking the Belgian authorities to do so.
Maybe if the GCHQ workers were recognized as diplomats by Belgium then they'd be safe via their immunity.
"Hmm, send a human to fix that stuck rover, or send a few dozen more rovers?"
That was my thought as well. If it costs 100x the cost of a mission to fix it, redundancy is a better solution. For what we spent on missions to maintain the Hubble, how many Hubbles could we have launched?
BYOD may be nice for small companies, but not major ones. Especially if the major companies want to stay major companies, device security and data security will remain essential... which is why Blackberry devices will still be around for a while.
So, as long as major companies aren't run by short-sighted cost-cutters Blackberry will do just fine?
Good luck with that business plan. My Fortune-500 employer went to BYOD ages ago, and it isn't likely to change that policy anytime soon. I think a few employees still have Blackberries, somewhere. Many employees simply don't check their emails unless they're at their desk, since they choose not to buy devices supported by the BYOD policy.
Up until recently I worked at a global company that still held a strict blackberrry only policy (expect for upper execs who could push to have their iPhones).
I think the problem is that most of those big companies also moved to eliminate phones entirely for anybody but execs, and everybody else had to bring-their-own. Well, how many employees are going to go spend their OWN money to buy a blackberry? Now IT is under pressure by local managers who have no power to buy phones but want their workforce to still be connected, and thus the enterprise features just weren't as high a priority.
The term unitarity is not mentioned at all in that article. I see nothing in the article that suggests (to a layman) that the probabilities of all possible outcomes wouldn't add up to one. If they didn't, they wouldn't be probabilities.
I'm perfectly fine with idea that a theory might not account for all possible events and thus is flawed. That isn't saying that unitarity is broken - only that the theory doesn't correspond to reality.
What would it even mean for probabilities to not add up to one? They have to add up to something, so just stick the something in the divisor and magically they add up to one now. Or is the proposal that on an unlucky die roll we just kill the scientist so that he doesn't report his results? Of course, you could just state that as one more possible outcome.:)
Apple loses market share in the spring and summer, when their handset is getting stale and everyone knows the new one is coming in a few months. Additionally, most of the Android market share gains are in the developing world (cough, China).
Sure, but even in the US Apple is still 12% behind Android. App vendors largely target Apple because Apple buyers have already shown that they're willing to spend money on an expensive device when a cheaper one is readily available that is comparable in features, and if you want to sell a $5 app in a sea of free ones that is a good target audience.
There really isn't anything in your reply that wasn't in your previous replies, and I doubt I have anything new to add.
You think the fact that Apple never claimed Season 5 was 16 episodes long absolves them of liability, and that AMC is the only one at fault.
I think the fact that Apple never claimed Season 5 was 8 episodes long makes them liable, and that they should either distribute all 16 to anybody who paid for the season or refund their money. In the future they should ensure their contracts with contract providers ensure they don't get burned when providers play tricks (if they pay as episodes are delivered or after the whole season is delivered they're covered, as they can refund the season to the purchasers, the purchasers already got to see 8 episodes for free, and the content provider loses all their money for playing games).
It's pretty easy to show up, put your hand on the scanner, and half-ass it all day long. Do you want clean tubes? Or do you want employees who make sure to put their hand on the scanner at the right time?
Are you suggesting pay for the job to some level of quality vs for time spent on the job? Good luck getting that past the union - if you think they complain about biometric time clocks just wait until you propose performance-based pay.
That's why companies outsource this kind of stuff and why government operations have a reputation for inefficiency. If this were a private company they'd outsource to a janitorial service. The janitorial service would use biometrics on timeclocks, would do spot checks of work and fire you without even bothering to hear your side of the story if they didn't like what they found, and would fire anybody who even talked about starting a union. If somehow a union did form the company would just fire the janitorial service and hire a new one, and the owners of the janitorial service would cash out and declare bankruptcy and start a new service.
I'm fine with reasonable protections for workers so that we're not in a race to the bottom, but the whole reason time-based-pay took off was because of the abuses of performance-based systems. It is only fair that workers in a time-based employment arrangement actually clock in/out on time. Such a system also protects them - the manager who is having budget problems can't go around clocking people out early either.
The killer feature of the iPhone is no longer its looks, or its browser. It's the apps.
Uh, Apple has been marketing iPhones based on the apps forever, and yet it is still losing ground to Android. The app situation has only gotten better on Android the whole while.
iOS is mainly ahead in niche areas where people spend a lot of money and thus the price of phones is less of a concern. At least, that is my perception of the app situation.
Whatever. The point is that either way Apple is clearly missing the boat on people who don't want to pay $550+ for a phone (whether via a contract, up-front, whatever). You can argue that they mis-executed on China, or they don't care about China, or whatever, but the bottom line is that they won't be selling many phones in China for $550. No doubt they'll make a lot of money on the phones they do sell though, which has really been the Apple strategy of selling premium products.
However, I'm not sure they'll be able to maintain the premium position against Android forever. They were able to do that on desktops vs MS, in part because MS is, well, MS. The competition on mobile devices is a lot stronger as their competitors haven't been resting on their laurels.
Yup, kind of like the labs and offices in CSI. I doubt the CEO in my company has an office as large as some of those. The labs certainly don't have glass walls covered in LCD displays.
I think the question is what the purpose of the room is.
In a warship during combat the success of the mission relies on the person making the decisions having a complete understanding of the tactical situation and their instructions being quickly relayed. Time is of the essence.
I could see the value in a similar room design for a manually-fought-in-realtime cyber-warfare action. What I would question is whether there would ever be a manually-fought-in-realtime cyber-warfare action. There would be tons of planning which would happen in cube farms and such (just like military planning), and then somebody would push a button and the mission would succeed or fail in a matter of milliseconds.
Maybe if the mission was to hack into some server and do espionage you might have a room like this, so that you could coordinate the use of pre-developed tools but react to what you find. The initial intrusion would be pre-planned, but once you're in you need to look around and find stuff, and likely have SMEs who can interpret what you find (the programmers can retrieve the nuclear weapon plans, but it would be good to have a nuclear weapon designer on-hand to tell you what to grab and where to go next).
However, that would be about running an individual operation, not the entire NSA. Generals don't sit in fancy bridges - that is for Captains. They certainly have situation rooms, and the NSA would probably do better to imitate one of those if they want to have some general solution for large-scale info-warfare operation coordination.
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Yup - the only reason most of the over-the-counter remedies in your local drugstore are legal is tradition. If a Pharma company invented any of them today there is no way they'd even be allowed for use with a prescription, let alone stocked in 500-count bottles on shelves in the local Walmart.
Granted, their downsides are much better understood than with many of the newer drugs. The fact that acetaminophen is so dangerous is actually half the reason it is formulated into so many pills. Can't have junkies getting high on codeine - better to have them dead instead...
Re 1), the aim would be to either encourage service providers who make use of something like Affero, or to simply reverse the regression to mainframes :P.
Sure, though I'm not sure I'd consider the movement towards SaaS as a regression. The problem is the control issue, not the concept of centralized services with less reliance on clients.
Give somebody the ability to run their own server and you get all the advantages of both the cloud and FOSS. Why would I want to use an X11-only application like OpenOffice if I had a web-based application I could self-host that was just as capable?
I think that FOSS is really missing the boat on the cloud and SaaS.
There is nothing wrong with the cloud per-se - it is just a hosting model. The problem is that our typical licenses allow cloud providers to benefit from FOSS without giving back. FOSS authors tend not to spend much time writing cloud-ready software as a result.
If i want to use a web-based email client there really aren't any decent FOSS options available to me. They all are VERY weak in comparison to something like Gmail, and lack all the Android integration/etc. There is no reason that somebody couldn't create an FOSS version of Android that syncs to servers the user can control (or where the user gets a choice in what servers they use if they don't want to run their own). There is no reason that services like Gmail, Google Docs, etc couldn't be in competition with FOSS alternatives. Again, you don't have to run your own servers - as with Wordpress you can run your own blog, or host it with any of 400 companies that will run it for you, and as the user you have power because you can take your data and move it around.
I have no problems with hosting my own software, or setting up something in EC2 or a VPS. Others might want to pay others to handle things for them, perhaps with advertising. However, none of this is possible when FOSS effort goes almost exclusively into applications that only work over X11. We're still fighting against the Microsoft of the 90s and the world has moved on...
1) Few service providers have adopted Affero
Well, duh. If your business model is to use FOSS code and not share your changes, then the last thing you're going to do is choose a license that requires you to share your changes. :)
2) It doesn't deal with the problem of lack of "control over the computing the server does for them. It also does not tell them what other software may be running on that server, examining or changing their data in other ways."; yet
It deals with the problem in part. You can't know what other software is making use of data you give to them. However, it does give you the ability to just clone their service and modify it to suit your own purposes and host it on your own server.
3) other FSF licences are extremely popular
This really isn't a shortcoming in the Affero license. It is likely the reason that nobody uses it though. Proprietary companies will always take BSD code over GPL code as it places fewer constraints on them, and they're clearly going to take GPLv2 over GPLv3 over Affero GPL for the same reason.
Now, if you're donating to the community then a large variety of motivations will apply, but self-interest should probably tell you to prefer the licenses in the reverse order, as using the more copyleft-style licenses increases the utility of the effort others expend to extend your work.
Yup. Main issue with GPLv3 is that nobody uses it, because, well, they like their walled gardens.
Also worth nothing that most of the software on the walled gardens tends to avoid even GPLv2 for the same reason. About the only thing in Android that is GPLv2 is the Linux kernel.
Yup, as I recall Wordperfect for Windows actually bundled its own printer drivers...
Businesses are pretty brutal at negotiation - at least the big ones are.
You can charge $100/copy for Windows retail, and those who aren't pirating it will probably pay it. When you go to some fortune-500 company they probably get $100/employee for Windows+office+sharepoint+all the licenses needed to run every windows-based server in the company. If MS gives them too hard a time they can talk about Samba and get taken seriously, and the negotiating is done by professionals. They also keep track of their licenses and they're not going to pay you for an extra one every time they replace a hard drive or whatever.
The business is also more demanding - they're going to expect 10 yrs of security updates, and they'll drop you like a hot potato if you don't keep up.
Consumers do things like throw out a perfectly good cell phone every two years, and buy tablets/etc on top of that. They're also much more susceptible to advertising. So, consumers are a good growth market.
That said, there is plenty of money to be made in the enterprise. They just buy different features.
The Apple store model is a consignment model.
Hardly. In a consignment model the customer hands over the cash and walks out with the item. They're selling SUBSCRIPTIONS for the delivery of items in the future.
AMC didn't promise them anything, and doesn't owe them anything. If I pre-order a book from Amazon and the author gives up and never publishes it, then Amazon owes me money because they sold me something that didn't exist.
You just contradicted yourself. If Apple didn't promise 16 episodes, then who did?
I said that AMC didn't promise them anything, not that Apple didn't promise them anything. Apple promised them a full season.
Of course I would - if they sell a full season to customers and deliver only half a season. What makes you think I'm interested in picking on Apple?
Because every single thing you've said was against Apple. You haven't acknowledge the simple fact that all vendors of "Season 5" are in the same boat. .
Of course they're all in the same boat. I've pointed this out several times:
I'd be fine with every one of them being sued, if they all engaged in this behavior.
Amazon and MS should do the same, assuming they don't also want to get sued.
At this point we're basically just repeating the same arguments over and over. You're entitled to your opinion, however wrong it may be. The court will issue theirs, and then we can argue again about whether they got it right or not... :)
And AMC and any content producer would agree that Apple holds onto their money for over a year, why? And I'm pretty sure there laws against a blanket contract where one party can hold onto money past 60 days in a consignment model.
It isn't their money, because they didn't deliver any product. I'd be perfectly fine with an arrangement that bills the consumer per-episode in which case nobody is holding any money.
Basically the consumer paid Apple to deliver a TV show, and Apple subcontracted AMC to actually produce it. I don't get how that would be illegal.
Vendors agree to not be paid until they deliver their goods all the time. If AMC doesn't like the terms then they can avoid selling on iTunes, Amazon, and everybody else who gets sued over this nonsense. I doubt they get paid in advance by the cable networks either.
But the thing is which you're refusing to acknowledge: AMC says Season 5 is 8 episodes and they are the copyright holders.
I hereby acknowledge that AMC says that Season 5 is 8 episodes and they are the copyright holders. Happy?
Not sure what that has to do with anything. The people filing the lawsuit never paid a dime to AMC, and never were in communication with AMC. AMC didn't promise them anything, and doesn't owe them anything. If I pre-order a book from Amazon and the author gives up and never publishes it, then Amazon owes me money because they sold me something that didn't exist.
Would you suggest the same thing to Best Buy and Amazon.
Of course I would - if they sell a full season to customers and deliver only half a season. What makes you think I'm interested in picking on Apple?
I really don't see any way to regulate this except at the point of sale. They're the ones posting descriptions of what they're selling and collecting money. That's how it works in every other industry as well. No reputable vendor lets companies sell products on their website and then not make good on them...
Keeping around obsolete companies isn't the solution.
However, the problem doesn't go away by ignoring it either. The real issues aren't that 10k people will lose their jobs, but rather:
1. Modern workers are highly specialized and can't command the same wage at just any job.
2. Modern employers still tend to employ a geographically-localized workforce.
3. #2 means that when a company dies you end up with 10k specialists in a particular area without jobs.
4. #1 means that there probably aren't 10k jobs in that same area to accommodate everybody who lost a job.
5. The utter lack of societal safety nets means no-job-your-sick-wife/parent/etc-dies, your kids sleep on the floor of some apartment, and so on.
6. The combination of #1 and #5 mean that re-training just isn't a practical option. Training is too expensive, and takes a long time during which you remain unemployed.
7. Sure, people can move, but that isn't very practical for families, and even for individuals it is highly disruptive to social networks (which are important - people aren't machines).
As a result there is a lot of political pressure to prop up dying companies. If we fixed the problems that make losing your job such a horrible event then perhaps we'd be more willing to kill off poor performing companies and let the workers spend their time someplace more useful.
.. and that's why Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nuked? =P, all the military activity and factories?
Hiroshima and Nagaskai were not what I would call nuclear war scenarios. That was a conventional war ended by the use of nuclear weapons. That scenario only works when one side in a war has nuclear weapons - it isn't too likely to be repeated.
If nuclear weapons start flying in WWIII they'll be used by both sides, and that would be a war the US could very well "lose" (the terms win/lose get a bit muddled when you're talking about a long-term where everybody is living in bronze-age conditions for the next century or so). In such a scenario you want to expend your non-bronze-age weapons with maximum effect during the hour-long period when you actually still have them to use, and you want to make sure that your enemy isn't left with too many ships/bombers/tanks to use against your spear-wielding militia.
Well, if you're in a nuclear war scenario your goal isn't to kill off everybody a few days later, but to wipe them out RIGHT NOW before they start shooting back. Military troops presumably are going to shelter against fallout or move away from it, and they're really the main targets, along with things like bridges/dams/etc which don't care a whit about fallout.
What you propose is really difficult to enforce. For BB, there was more than a year between the two parts. Apple can't hold onto AMC's money for more than a year. Nor can they not pay AMC for product that was delivered to a customer. Most states have laws against the longest I've seen is 60 days delay. The only party that loses is Apple...Now Apple could put it into a contract but they would have to write one for every season pass for every show.
It would be simple to enforce. They only need one contract, which would be binding on all shows distributed under the terms of the contract.
There are a bunch of ways of handling it. Maybe give the studio a choice of terms.
One example could be a time box - the studio agrees that a season is all epsiodes that air within a certain time period (set longer than the planned season length). Another example could be a set number of episodes. Whatever the studio sets gets advertised by Apple.
Regarding payments the solution is simple - pro-rate the payments. I pay $20 for 10 episodes. Each time the studio delivers an episode Apple gives them $2/subscriber the next day (minus whatever their cut is). If the studio fails to deliver Apple refunds the balance to the consumer. If you pay by time then just pro-rate the payments over time. If the consumer has paid for a calendar year then they get a calendar year, regardless of how long the season stretches out. If they pay for a calendar year and the show stops airing episodes then consumers probably should have the right to cancel.
There are lots of ways to make what is being sold transparent and that would be a win for consumers. None of this is particularly onerous for the studio or Apple - these are the sorts of arrangements any subscription-based service manages.
Good question, wonder what happens if the Belgian police issues an EAW, does the GCHQ operators have immunity for their crimes in the UK? Does the EAW apply in this case; in my mind it should, it would put some needed control over this crap.
I would think that as long as they violated a law in Belgium that meets the EAW requirements and there is probable cause they could issue one. I'm not an expert in European law, but it seems like part of the deal in becoming a part of the EU is that you lose your sovereignty to protect your spies who are breaking laws in other member nations. One would think that in joining an alliance like the EU that you're supposed to stop treating other member states like enemies. If they needed to tap a cell phone in Belgium for a legitimate purpose one would think that the EU would have a mechanism for asking the Belgian authorities to do so.
Maybe if the GCHQ workers were recognized as diplomats by Belgium then they'd be safe via their immunity.
"Hmm, send a human to fix that stuck rover, or send a few dozen more rovers?"
That was my thought as well. If it costs 100x the cost of a mission to fix it, redundancy is a better solution. For what we spent on missions to maintain the Hubble, how many Hubbles could we have launched?
BYOD may be nice for small companies, but not major ones. Especially if the major companies want to stay major companies, device security and data security will remain essential... which is why Blackberry devices will still be around for a while.
So, as long as major companies aren't run by short-sighted cost-cutters Blackberry will do just fine?
Good luck with that business plan. My Fortune-500 employer went to BYOD ages ago, and it isn't likely to change that policy anytime soon. I think a few employees still have Blackberries, somewhere. Many employees simply don't check their emails unless they're at their desk, since they choose not to buy devices supported by the BYOD policy.
Up until recently I worked at a global company that still held a strict blackberrry only policy (expect for upper execs who could push to have their iPhones).
I think the problem is that most of those big companies also moved to eliminate phones entirely for anybody but execs, and everybody else had to bring-their-own. Well, how many employees are going to go spend their OWN money to buy a blackberry? Now IT is under pressure by local managers who have no power to buy phones but want their workforce to still be connected, and thus the enterprise features just weren't as high a priority.
The term unitarity is not mentioned at all in that article. I see nothing in the article that suggests (to a layman) that the probabilities of all possible outcomes wouldn't add up to one. If they didn't, they wouldn't be probabilities.
I'm perfectly fine with idea that a theory might not account for all possible events and thus is flawed. That isn't saying that unitarity is broken - only that the theory doesn't correspond to reality.
What would it even mean for probabilities to not add up to one? They have to add up to something, so just stick the something in the divisor and magically they add up to one now. Or is the proposal that on an unlucky die roll we just kill the scientist so that he doesn't report his results? Of course, you could just state that as one more possible outcome. :)
Apple loses market share in the spring and summer, when their handset is getting stale and everyone knows the new one is coming in a few months. Additionally, most of the Android market share gains are in the developing world (cough, China).
Sure, but even in the US Apple is still 12% behind Android. App vendors largely target Apple because Apple buyers have already shown that they're willing to spend money on an expensive device when a cheaper one is readily available that is comparable in features, and if you want to sell a $5 app in a sea of free ones that is a good target audience.
There really isn't anything in your reply that wasn't in your previous replies, and I doubt I have anything new to add.
You think the fact that Apple never claimed Season 5 was 16 episodes long absolves them of liability, and that AMC is the only one at fault.
I think the fact that Apple never claimed Season 5 was 8 episodes long makes them liable, and that they should either distribute all 16 to anybody who paid for the season or refund their money. In the future they should ensure their contracts with contract providers ensure they don't get burned when providers play tricks (if they pay as episodes are delivered or after the whole season is delivered they're covered, as they can refund the season to the purchasers, the purchasers already got to see 8 episodes for free, and the content provider loses all their money for playing games).
Eventually we'll see what the courts say...
It's pretty easy to show up, put your hand on the scanner, and half-ass it all day long. Do you want clean tubes? Or do you want employees who make sure to put their hand on the scanner at the right time?
Are you suggesting pay for the job to some level of quality vs for time spent on the job? Good luck getting that past the union - if you think they complain about biometric time clocks just wait until you propose performance-based pay.
That's why companies outsource this kind of stuff and why government operations have a reputation for inefficiency. If this were a private company they'd outsource to a janitorial service. The janitorial service would use biometrics on timeclocks, would do spot checks of work and fire you without even bothering to hear your side of the story if they didn't like what they found, and would fire anybody who even talked about starting a union. If somehow a union did form the company would just fire the janitorial service and hire a new one, and the owners of the janitorial service would cash out and declare bankruptcy and start a new service.
I'm fine with reasonable protections for workers so that we're not in a race to the bottom, but the whole reason time-based-pay took off was because of the abuses of performance-based systems. It is only fair that workers in a time-based employment arrangement actually clock in/out on time. Such a system also protects them - the manager who is having budget problems can't go around clocking people out early either.
The killer feature of the iPhone is no longer its looks, or its browser. It's the apps.
Uh, Apple has been marketing iPhones based on the apps forever, and yet it is still losing ground to Android. The app situation has only gotten better on Android the whole while.
iOS is mainly ahead in niche areas where people spend a lot of money and thus the price of phones is less of a concern. At least, that is my perception of the app situation.
Whatever. The point is that either way Apple is clearly missing the boat on people who don't want to pay $550+ for a phone (whether via a contract, up-front, whatever). You can argue that they mis-executed on China, or they don't care about China, or whatever, but the bottom line is that they won't be selling many phones in China for $550. No doubt they'll make a lot of money on the phones they do sell though, which has really been the Apple strategy of selling premium products.
However, I'm not sure they'll be able to maintain the premium position against Android forever. They were able to do that on desktops vs MS, in part because MS is, well, MS. The competition on mobile devices is a lot stronger as their competitors haven't been resting on their laurels.
Yup, kind of like the labs and offices in CSI. I doubt the CEO in my company has an office as large as some of those. The labs certainly don't have glass walls covered in LCD displays.
I think the question is what the purpose of the room is.
In a warship during combat the success of the mission relies on the person making the decisions having a complete understanding of the tactical situation and their instructions being quickly relayed. Time is of the essence.
I could see the value in a similar room design for a manually-fought-in-realtime cyber-warfare action. What I would question is whether there would ever be a manually-fought-in-realtime cyber-warfare action. There would be tons of planning which would happen in cube farms and such (just like military planning), and then somebody would push a button and the mission would succeed or fail in a matter of milliseconds.
Maybe if the mission was to hack into some server and do espionage you might have a room like this, so that you could coordinate the use of pre-developed tools but react to what you find. The initial intrusion would be pre-planned, but once you're in you need to look around and find stuff, and likely have SMEs who can interpret what you find (the programmers can retrieve the nuclear weapon plans, but it would be good to have a nuclear weapon designer on-hand to tell you what to grab and where to go next).
However, that would be about running an individual operation, not the entire NSA. Generals don't sit in fancy bridges - that is for Captains. They certainly have situation rooms, and the NSA would probably do better to imitate one of those if they want to have some general solution for large-scale info-warfare operation coordination.