Apple and Microsoft control their own update process on all platforms; Google does not. It's the individual carriers who are getting in the way of Android updates.
They control the updates on the GSM Galaxy Nexus phone. It isn't getting the security patch.
My point was that it would not be microsoft's fault in this scenario, not that this scenario happened often. So maybe in the same way that people are not dumb enough to buy computers from comanies selling computers with windows XP in 2014, they should become smart enough not to buy phones with locked bootloaders (making them dependent on hardware vendors to get android updates).
So, people should be smart enough to not buy any phone that works on the Verizon network, any phone sold in an AT&T store as part of a contract, and any phone in a T-Mobile store sold under a purchase plan other than 1-2 models in the US?
You're basically saying that Android is great as long as you don't buy 99% of the devices on the market.
And even if you guy, eg, a Galaxy Nexus with an unlocked bootloader, the company that sold it to you (Google) only provided support for 1.5 years from the date the device FIRST went on sale. MS supports Windows for 10 years after the NEXT version of Windows goes on sale. That is why 95% of the PCs in businesses are STILL running Windows despite all the talk about the death of the desktop. I don't really have a problem with the death of the desktop, but businesses aren't going to buy into an alternative that isn't supported for a long time. They're fine with BYOD, since they're not the ones paying for support.
As for the costs, Cyanogen seems to prove that they can be pretty low. They support a lot of devices with very little funding to do so, partly because they are open source and rely on volunteers.
That, and their users don't seem to care if random small things break from time to time. Fortunately bluetooth stereo is much more mainstream now than it used to be, so the volunteer testers are far more likely to notice when it breaks. Back in the early days of CM it seemed like it only worked 70% of the time, but the average college student didn't use it so they didn't notice. That was before the M-series builds as well, so running "stable" meant just waiting for the next version of Android to come out so that you could use the last one, and it was basically abandonware.
Some companies pay them for support, which seems like a reasonable way to do long term updates.
As far as I've noticed, their paid firmware is just fine, probably because they actually give it serious QA, and of course it doesn't hurt that they have full access to the drivers/etc (which to be fair is a major handicap for their free efforts).
I also like that they have personally committed to updates for the phones they support, and they don't just say "it is up to your OEM." I get the impression that if a company like Oneplus folded that CM would still keep the OS updated for existing owners. Of course, they've yet to be tested on that.
Don't get me wrong, CM does great work. I just wouldn't say that they are without issue, or proof that the free software model works without any commercial ties. The areas where CM seems to go toe-to-toe with other OEMs in every regard is in the cases where they do have commercial ties.
Well, unlike the wireless phone companies, there where no vendors for the PCs that insist on putting their hands on the OS to customize the Android experience (mostly to detrimental effect, in my experience). So yes, Verizon, T-Mobile are on the hook for this one.
My plain vanilla Nexus 4 is still running fine with the latest and greatest, well latest, OS from Google. It is just staring to take some performance hits as compared to when it first came out.
Good thing you don't have a GSM Galaxy Nexus purchased directly from Google. I doubt they're patching those.
My impression is that hypotheses can very well begin with guesses, and once the guy with the guess can come up with some solid reasons for it it turns into a hypothesis.
More like once the guy with the guess can come up with an experiment that can demonstrate the falsehood (or lack thereof) of the guess it is a hypothesis.
Obviously if the guess is already inconsistent with observations then there is no need to run the experiment since it is already falsified.
A hypothesis has to make sense, has to be based on observation and/or our best current knowledge of the subject matter. Ideally it is testable somehow, even if only mathematically or theoretically.
A guess doesn't have to have any of those constraints. "Aliens did it" is a guess, but it's not a hypothesis.
Your statement should be embroidered, hung on the wall, and required reading before anyone is allowed to post on matters of science.
Way too many people, here and elsewhere, seem to have the idea that observation is somehow not a part of science.
You want to hang on a wall a statement that a hypothesis is "ideally" testable somehow, even if only mathematically (he did say "or"), and herald it for stressing the importance of observation?
Being testable against observations is an essential characteristic of a hypothesis. If it isn't testable against observations, it isn't a "non-ideal" hypothesis, it is pseudoscience. Sure, any hypothesis should be mathematically consistent if it relies on math, but that isn't sufficient to make it a hypothesis.
I'm fine with it being impractical to perform the experiment with current technology/resources - that is unfortunate but as long as the experiment exists I'll accept something as being a hypothesis. I certainly won't trust it as being correct though.
What's much more entertaining to me is that more often than not, the police reporting function isn't that valuable because the officer will have caught someone and moved on to a new spot by the time I see the notice.
Yes and no. Typically when I see a report I figure the police speed trap or whatever is somewhere within a few miles, which is useful information. Often the police just move up and down a stretch of highway alternating between prepared positions.
I'm saying if they have to backdoor specific firmware, there is still hope. Of course, since they have the capability to sap up nearly everyone's data, there isn't much hope to begin with.
Snowden revealed quite a bit in this space. The NSA has numerous departments and they cooperate.
You have the zero-day guys. They get lists of things that would be useful to hack, and they hack them. I'm sure that includes OSes, firmwares, peripherals, you name it. Some zero-days are held in reserve to avoid revealing them in case a high-priority target comes along.
You have the target intelligence guys. They identify systems to hack. They profile the targets - is this just a casual PC user, a company, or some government agency. They estimate how likely the target is to detect an intrusion - they don't want to use some super-secret zero-day on a guy who is ultra-paranoid and sends all their network traffic into a canary layered in 14 layers of firewalls and IDS.
You have the guys who run the wholesale hacking department. They pair up targets with zero-days and arrange to have them delivered, probably by redirecting their network traffic through a server that hands out the attack (too bad all your ad banners aren't protected by SSL, etc).
You have the rootkit guys who then take that initial foothold and exploit it, branching out into a network beyond the firewall and installing rootkits and monitoring software all over the place.
You have the intel guys who go in and harvest the information being sought.
Then you have the monitoring team. They make sure that all the compromised hosts stay compromised. Maybe you just installed some antivirus software that removed 3 out of the 14 rootkits they installed on your box, so they'll go ahead and put 5 more in and tell the CIA they need to be more generous with their symantec bribes.
All that division of labor means that they can break into vast numbers of computers very efficiently, with great expertise.
There was a beginning to the universe (which alone breaks the symmetry: you can't shift backwards in time more than ~13 billion years)...
Well, it might be better to say that we have no scientific knowledge of what came before the big bang, and as best as we can tell it is impossible to ever obtain knowledge of what came before.
It is convenient to call this a "beginning of time" or something like that, but this is a bit of a contrived definition.
But, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread our definitions of things like space and time are already pretty tenuous in general. We're very good at predicting the results of experiments, but we're not so good at really understanding why the universe actually works the way it seems to. The equations don't really provide much insight into what is actually happening.
Remember, this is the same NSA that intercepts Cisco shipments to install back-doored firmware and develops its own zero-day hacks for Windows.
The fact that they have to do this says a lot about their capabilities.
How would you propose hacking into a computer WITHOUT developing a zero-day for it? Well, unless you want to count using vulnerabilities from three years ago that some sysadmin is too lazy to patch. It isn't like anybody thinks the NSA has some psychic that just controls the minds of sysadmins from halfway around the globe. Engineering software and getting it to run on targeted hardware is just the physical reality of intruding on systems.
We're talking about wikileaks here. Obviously that is going to be a high-profile target for intelligence agencies anywhere. You simply can't run such an operation on some unencrypted webmail service ANYWHERE.
Now that the FBI is handling my corporate penetration testing for me, how to I contact the NSA to arrange for online backup/restoral and disaster recovery? What better use of federal corporate taxes!;-)
You say that as a joke, but there is actually a serious side to this.
The fact is that big brother is already well on their way to tracking everything that everybody on the planet does. And yet, in the US we have these crazy ideas like not wanting to have federal government IDs and such which holds back all kinds of progress. Imagine if you could get a government ID that in addition to the usual photo ID card has a smartcard on it for online authentication, and maybe even an acoustic modem for over-phone authentication. You could eliminate most forms of identity theft overnight.
The whole reason we resist stuff like this is that we don't want the government/corporations/etc tracking us. The thing is, they already do it. When you have enough scale and enough data to aggregate you can get around the need for tidy unique IDs assigned to each individual. However, this solution means that only huge organizations can track you - small companies then can't compete as effectively, and you don't benefit personally either.
For all we know the NSA probably has half of our hard drives fully copied onto their servers. Since they're going to do that whether we want them to or not, we might as well actually get some of the benefits of that...
It's still illegal in the UK and if the FBI hack my computer then I will initiate legal action against them for it.
Sure, and they'll just ignore your legal action. It isn't like the FBI is going to show up in a UK court to defend their actions. They'll just send an apology by way of the state department that they had a hunch you might be a terrorist and that they'd have told the UK in advance if they had realized that was where you were, and the UK government will say, "yeah, we know how that goes, thanks for the letter!"
I'm not entirely sure whether there is a better solution besides decriminalizing stuff that the FBI shouldn't be harassing people about in the first place. For genuine serious crimes where they have a lead on tor and the means to investigate but no way to tell what borders that investigation will take them across, I'm not sure what could be done besides act first and apologize later. Absent some kind of international jurisdiction for internet crimes I'm not sure what any individual country can do.
Well, I can't vouch for any specific model, but from what I understand from articles I've read at least some units are perfectly capable of detecting breathing and other involuntary movements. They use doppler radar and can pick up incredibly slow motion. Your chest is very large - I don't know if it would pick up insects, but it wouldn't surprise me if they could detect a breathing person. Pets would likely set it off as well.
Well, if dogs can't be used without warrants somebody needs to explain that to the local police. A few weeks ago I saw police following a dog through private property in my neighborhood without any apparent specific target. The walked right through my patio, around neighbor's yards, and so on. They didn't climb any fences, but I guess no putting up barbed wire is considered consent to a search.
Your incentive to invent while being employed is staying employed. Companies fund R&D so that they can profit from the discoveries.
That doesn't mean the company cannot share a portion of the profits from those discoveries with the people who made them possible.
Sure, but you're thinking a bit narrowly.
Suppose you hire 100 engineers and have them work 40 hours per week on 10 projects with 10 engineers per project.
All 100 work hard. 9/10 projects fail and make no money. The last project makes a huge fortune.
The company owners take the loss on the 9/10 projects that failed. They make a big profit on the 1/10 projects that succeed. All 100 engineers get a steady salary so they get no risk/reward either way.
Sure, it is customary to give a modest bonus/etc to those who succeed, but if all 100 engineers worked equally hard but most were just unlucky to be on the project that didn't work out, does it make sense to compensate the 10 on the successful project so much more? They all did what they were asked to do.
If you really want to get rewarded for your work, then go work for a startup. You'll get paid next to nothing, and most likely you'll go out of business receiving nothing for your work. However, if you do succeed you will own a substantial portion of the company and thus get a substantial portion of the reward.
Bottom line is that I think there needs to be a balance between risk and reward. I do think employees are treated unfairly today, but I don't think that they should get a substantial share of profits unless they've truly invested in a substantial share of the risk. They should still be treated better than they are today.
Employees are at risk of no longer earning income. Entrepreneurs are at risk of losing money they SPENT on the business. There is a key difference.
However, I do agree with most of what you said and there does need to be a balance. I just don't think the solution to a broken patent system is either abolishing it entirely or breaking it in an entirely different way.
Reduce patent terms and make them domain-specific. Ditto for copyright. Maintain ownership of each the way they are today (work for hire and all that). Provide a safety net so that people who lose their jobs DON'T lose their houses, and generally reform the whole employment system so that it isn't so one-sided.
What other phone manufacturer would touch Tizen with a 10-foot pole? That would put them at a significant disadvantage because Samsung would never let them build a better product. So the only ones using will be Samsung, and somehow it doesn't seem likely that Samsung can create the same kind of walled garden that Apple has developed.
It seems like Google is has no long term commitment to building phone hardware. They didn't keep Motorola, for example. And this attempt to make a modular phone seems more like a technology demonstration then a product role out. Does anyone think they will try and make a business line out of it? I doubt it. So hardware vendors can continue use Android and not be worried about competing with Google directly, which is why I think they got rid of Motorola.
I think this is a big part of what is making Android so successful. It used to be part of what made MS successful, but in recent years MS has been trying to become more like Apple, and thus everybody is running (if I only had $100 everytime Adobe sells a copy of photoshop, maybe we should be the exclusive hardware provider for some new OS, etc).
People like to decry the generic model but it is a BIG reason for why PCs took off. It works best when you don't have too much vertical ownership of the whole chain, so that everybody feels like the market they're competing in is a fair one.
They're saying that if sit down all day you're more likely to be hit by lightning, die in a plane crash, and so on. Maybe there is a statistical correlation, but what it means is a big question. Maybe people who work desk jobs are more likely to be able to afford plane tickets, have to travel more often, have stressful jobs, and so on.
Interesting. I've been looking into sit/stand for my home office. The thing is that it looks like the monitor height only increases by 10" when you extend this (they say 15", but it starts out at 5" based on the dimensions). I'm just over six feet tall. I feel like I'll be staring down at my work with something like this. I'd probably want something that extends upwards something like 2-3 meters beyond the base position.
There just aren't many affordable options for sit/stand right now, though I should look on kickstarter again as I saw something in the works.
You seem to have a very utopian idea of Europe. Don't worry, Europe is generally some ten years behind contemporary developments in the States but we are quickly catching up especially in rising obesity and directly linked diseases. The massive portion sizes in the States have not always been this huge and gradually grew. There are enough restaurants over here already offering ridiculously massive portions or all-you-can-eat buffets and they make it their main selling point. Oversize clothes stores can be found everywhere as well.
Yep, "American" portion sizes are a much more recent thing than people remember, hardly 20 years ago a typical medium fountain drink cup was called a large and a small was the size of a soda can. Triple cheese burgers didn't start showing up at places like Wendy's until around 15 years ago as well.
That said, we really do need to encourage people to drink more water.
If I go to a Burger King and just ask for tap water (for free) I get one of those tiny little cups you might get from a water cooler dispenser - maybe 1/6th the capacity of even a value soft drink. I'd need to refill it about 10 times during the course of a meal since I tend to drink a lot. So, I feel like I'm being punished for drinking water, which is of course the healthiest option there is.
What you're proposing sounds like zero incentive to invent while being employed. Doesn't make much sense psychologically.
Your incentive to invent while being employed is staying employed. Companies fund R&D so that they can profit from the discoveries.
Suppose you work hard on something but it doesn't work out. Should the company be able to take your house from you to cover their losses? Of course not!
That is the difference between an investor and an employee. An investor puts money into a company and it is at risk. An employee receives money from a company and it isn't at risk. The employee gets a steady paycheck. The investor might not get anything, but they stand to make a lot more money if everything goes well.
Don't get me wrong, I think the system in the US is imbalanced and needs correction. That is true of the employer/employee relationship, and it is true of the patent/copyright systems in general. However, completely assigning copyright/patents to the individual and not the entity paying for the work is not the right solution. Companies will just stop funding R&D in that case, leaving all those inventors unemployed unless they're born wealthy enough to fund their projects (which is about how it worked in the middle ages).
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Apple and Microsoft control their own update process on all platforms; Google does not. It's the individual carriers who are getting in the way of Android updates.
They control the updates on the GSM Galaxy Nexus phone. It isn't getting the security patch.
My point was that it would not be microsoft's fault in this scenario, not that this scenario happened often. So maybe in the same way that people are not dumb enough to buy computers from comanies selling computers with windows XP in 2014, they should become smart enough not to buy phones with locked bootloaders (making them dependent on hardware vendors to get android updates).
So, people should be smart enough to not buy any phone that works on the Verizon network, any phone sold in an AT&T store as part of a contract, and any phone in a T-Mobile store sold under a purchase plan other than 1-2 models in the US?
You're basically saying that Android is great as long as you don't buy 99% of the devices on the market.
And even if you guy, eg, a Galaxy Nexus with an unlocked bootloader, the company that sold it to you (Google) only provided support for 1.5 years from the date the device FIRST went on sale. MS supports Windows for 10 years after the NEXT version of Windows goes on sale. That is why 95% of the PCs in businesses are STILL running Windows despite all the talk about the death of the desktop. I don't really have a problem with the death of the desktop, but businesses aren't going to buy into an alternative that isn't supported for a long time. They're fine with BYOD, since they're not the ones paying for support.
Agree. I use Android, but they could really benefit from something like this:
https://www.google.com/chrome/...
or
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
or
https://access.redhat.com/supp...
or
http://www.ubuntu.com/info/rel...
The first link is Google's, so it isn't like they don't know how to do this stuff.
As for the costs, Cyanogen seems to prove that they can be pretty low. They support a lot of devices with very little funding to do so, partly because they are open source and rely on volunteers.
That, and their users don't seem to care if random small things break from time to time. Fortunately bluetooth stereo is much more mainstream now than it used to be, so the volunteer testers are far more likely to notice when it breaks. Back in the early days of CM it seemed like it only worked 70% of the time, but the average college student didn't use it so they didn't notice. That was before the M-series builds as well, so running "stable" meant just waiting for the next version of Android to come out so that you could use the last one, and it was basically abandonware.
Some companies pay them for support, which seems like a reasonable way to do long term updates.
As far as I've noticed, their paid firmware is just fine, probably because they actually give it serious QA, and of course it doesn't hurt that they have full access to the drivers/etc (which to be fair is a major handicap for their free efforts).
I also like that they have personally committed to updates for the phones they support, and they don't just say "it is up to your OEM." I get the impression that if a company like Oneplus folded that CM would still keep the OS updated for existing owners. Of course, they've yet to be tested on that.
Don't get me wrong, CM does great work. I just wouldn't say that they are without issue, or proof that the free software model works without any commercial ties. The areas where CM seems to go toe-to-toe with other OEMs in every regard is in the cases where they do have commercial ties.
Well, unlike the wireless phone companies, there where no vendors for the PCs that insist on putting their hands on the OS to customize the Android experience (mostly to detrimental effect, in my experience). So yes, Verizon, T-Mobile are on the hook for this one.
My plain vanilla Nexus 4 is still running fine with the latest and greatest, well latest, OS from Google. It is just staring to take some performance hits as compared to when it first came out.
Good thing you don't have a GSM Galaxy Nexus purchased directly from Google. I doubt they're patching those.
My impression is that hypotheses can very well begin with guesses, and once the guy with the guess can come up with some solid reasons for it it turns into a hypothesis.
More like once the guy with the guess can come up with an experiment that can demonstrate the falsehood (or lack thereof) of the guess it is a hypothesis.
Obviously if the guess is already inconsistent with observations then there is no need to run the experiment since it is already falsified.
It really doesn't.
A hypothesis has to make sense, has to be based on observation and/or our best current knowledge of the subject matter. Ideally it is testable somehow, even if only mathematically or theoretically.
A guess doesn't have to have any of those constraints. "Aliens did it" is a guess, but it's not a hypothesis.
Your statement should be embroidered, hung on the wall, and required reading before anyone is allowed to post on matters of science.
Way too many people, here and elsewhere, seem to have the idea that observation is somehow not a part of science.
You want to hang on a wall a statement that a hypothesis is "ideally" testable somehow, even if only mathematically (he did say "or"), and herald it for stressing the importance of observation?
Being testable against observations is an essential characteristic of a hypothesis. If it isn't testable against observations, it isn't a "non-ideal" hypothesis, it is pseudoscience. Sure, any hypothesis should be mathematically consistent if it relies on math, but that isn't sufficient to make it a hypothesis.
I'm fine with it being impractical to perform the experiment with current technology/resources - that is unfortunate but as long as the experiment exists I'll accept something as being a hypothesis. I certainly won't trust it as being correct though.
What's much more entertaining to me is that more often than not, the police reporting function isn't that valuable because the officer will have caught someone and moved on to a new spot by the time I see the notice.
Yes and no. Typically when I see a report I figure the police speed trap or whatever is somewhere within a few miles, which is useful information. Often the police just move up and down a stretch of highway alternating between prepared positions.
I'm saying if they have to backdoor specific firmware, there is still hope. Of course, since they have the capability to sap up nearly everyone's data, there isn't much hope to begin with.
Snowden revealed quite a bit in this space. The NSA has numerous departments and they cooperate.
You have the zero-day guys. They get lists of things that would be useful to hack, and they hack them. I'm sure that includes OSes, firmwares, peripherals, you name it. Some zero-days are held in reserve to avoid revealing them in case a high-priority target comes along.
You have the target intelligence guys. They identify systems to hack. They profile the targets - is this just a casual PC user, a company, or some government agency. They estimate how likely the target is to detect an intrusion - they don't want to use some super-secret zero-day on a guy who is ultra-paranoid and sends all their network traffic into a canary layered in 14 layers of firewalls and IDS.
You have the guys who run the wholesale hacking department. They pair up targets with zero-days and arrange to have them delivered, probably by redirecting their network traffic through a server that hands out the attack (too bad all your ad banners aren't protected by SSL, etc).
You have the rootkit guys who then take that initial foothold and exploit it, branching out into a network beyond the firewall and installing rootkits and monitoring software all over the place.
You have the intel guys who go in and harvest the information being sought.
Then you have the monitoring team. They make sure that all the compromised hosts stay compromised. Maybe you just installed some antivirus software that removed 3 out of the 14 rootkits they installed on your box, so they'll go ahead and put 5 more in and tell the CIA they need to be more generous with their symantec bribes.
All that division of labor means that they can break into vast numbers of computers very efficiently, with great expertise.
There was a beginning to the universe (which alone breaks the symmetry: you can't shift backwards in time more than ~13 billion years)...
Well, it might be better to say that we have no scientific knowledge of what came before the big bang, and as best as we can tell it is impossible to ever obtain knowledge of what came before.
It is convenient to call this a "beginning of time" or something like that, but this is a bit of a contrived definition.
But, as has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread our definitions of things like space and time are already pretty tenuous in general. We're very good at predicting the results of experiments, but we're not so good at really understanding why the universe actually works the way it seems to. The equations don't really provide much insight into what is actually happening.
Remember, this is the same NSA that intercepts Cisco shipments to install back-doored firmware and develops its own zero-day hacks for Windows.
The fact that they have to do this says a lot about their capabilities.
How would you propose hacking into a computer WITHOUT developing a zero-day for it? Well, unless you want to count using vulnerabilities from three years ago that some sysadmin is too lazy to patch. It isn't like anybody thinks the NSA has some psychic that just controls the minds of sysadmins from halfway around the globe. Engineering software and getting it to run on targeted hardware is just the physical reality of intruding on systems.
We're talking about wikileaks here. Obviously that is going to be a high-profile target for intelligence agencies anywhere. You simply can't run such an operation on some unencrypted webmail service ANYWHERE.
Now that the FBI is handling my corporate penetration testing for me, how to I contact the NSA to arrange for online backup/restoral and disaster recovery? What better use of federal corporate taxes! ;-)
You say that as a joke, but there is actually a serious side to this.
The fact is that big brother is already well on their way to tracking everything that everybody on the planet does. And yet, in the US we have these crazy ideas like not wanting to have federal government IDs and such which holds back all kinds of progress. Imagine if you could get a government ID that in addition to the usual photo ID card has a smartcard on it for online authentication, and maybe even an acoustic modem for over-phone authentication. You could eliminate most forms of identity theft overnight.
The whole reason we resist stuff like this is that we don't want the government/corporations/etc tracking us. The thing is, they already do it. When you have enough scale and enough data to aggregate you can get around the need for tidy unique IDs assigned to each individual. However, this solution means that only huge organizations can track you - small companies then can't compete as effectively, and you don't benefit personally either.
For all we know the NSA probably has half of our hard drives fully copied onto their servers. Since they're going to do that whether we want them to or not, we might as well actually get some of the benefits of that...
There is just a slight problem: For TOR, most users will not be in the US, and the warrant will be completely invalid.
Agree, but the victims of the invalid warrant will also be without recourse.
It's still illegal in the UK and if the FBI hack my computer then I will initiate legal action against them for it.
Sure, and they'll just ignore your legal action. It isn't like the FBI is going to show up in a UK court to defend their actions. They'll just send an apology by way of the state department that they had a hunch you might be a terrorist and that they'd have told the UK in advance if they had realized that was where you were, and the UK government will say, "yeah, we know how that goes, thanks for the letter!"
I'm not entirely sure whether there is a better solution besides decriminalizing stuff that the FBI shouldn't be harassing people about in the first place. For genuine serious crimes where they have a lead on tor and the means to investigate but no way to tell what borders that investigation will take them across, I'm not sure what could be done besides act first and apologize later. Absent some kind of international jurisdiction for internet crimes I'm not sure what any individual country can do.
Well, I can't vouch for any specific model, but from what I understand from articles I've read at least some units are perfectly capable of detecting breathing and other involuntary movements. They use doppler radar and can pick up incredibly slow motion. Your chest is very large - I don't know if it would pick up insects, but it wouldn't surprise me if they could detect a breathing person. Pets would likely set it off as well.
Well, if dogs can't be used without warrants somebody needs to explain that to the local police. A few weeks ago I saw police following a dog through private property in my neighborhood without any apparent specific target. The walked right through my patio, around neighbor's yards, and so on. They didn't climb any fences, but I guess no putting up barbed wire is considered consent to a search.
Your incentive to invent while being employed is staying employed. Companies fund R&D so that they can profit from the discoveries.
That doesn't mean the company cannot share a portion of the profits from those discoveries with the people who made them possible.
Sure, but you're thinking a bit narrowly.
Suppose you hire 100 engineers and have them work 40 hours per week on 10 projects with 10 engineers per project.
All 100 work hard. 9/10 projects fail and make no money. The last project makes a huge fortune.
The company owners take the loss on the 9/10 projects that failed. They make a big profit on the 1/10 projects that succeed. All 100 engineers get a steady salary so they get no risk/reward either way.
Sure, it is customary to give a modest bonus/etc to those who succeed, but if all 100 engineers worked equally hard but most were just unlucky to be on the project that didn't work out, does it make sense to compensate the 10 on the successful project so much more? They all did what they were asked to do.
If you really want to get rewarded for your work, then go work for a startup. You'll get paid next to nothing, and most likely you'll go out of business receiving nothing for your work. However, if you do succeed you will own a substantial portion of the company and thus get a substantial portion of the reward.
Bottom line is that I think there needs to be a balance between risk and reward. I do think employees are treated unfairly today, but I don't think that they should get a substantial share of profits unless they've truly invested in a substantial share of the risk. They should still be treated better than they are today.
Sure, but it makes water in water cups just as impractical. I get that theft is an issue, and I'm all for finding solutions to that.
Employees are at risk of no longer earning income. Entrepreneurs are at risk of losing money they SPENT on the business. There is a key difference.
However, I do agree with most of what you said and there does need to be a balance. I just don't think the solution to a broken patent system is either abolishing it entirely or breaking it in an entirely different way.
Reduce patent terms and make them domain-specific. Ditto for copyright. Maintain ownership of each the way they are today (work for hire and all that). Provide a safety net so that people who lose their jobs DON'T lose their houses, and generally reform the whole employment system so that it isn't so one-sided.
What other phone manufacturer would touch Tizen with a 10-foot pole? That would put them at a significant disadvantage because Samsung would never let them build a better product. So the only ones using will be Samsung, and somehow it doesn't seem likely that Samsung can create the same kind of walled garden that Apple has developed.
It seems like Google is has no long term commitment to building phone hardware. They didn't keep Motorola, for example. And this attempt to make a modular phone seems more like a technology demonstration then a product role out. Does anyone think they will try and make a business line out of it? I doubt it. So hardware vendors can continue use Android and not be worried about competing with Google directly, which is why I think they got rid of Motorola.
I think this is a big part of what is making Android so successful. It used to be part of what made MS successful, but in recent years MS has been trying to become more like Apple, and thus everybody is running (if I only had $100 everytime Adobe sells a copy of photoshop, maybe we should be the exclusive hardware provider for some new OS, etc).
People like to decry the generic model but it is a BIG reason for why PCs took off. It works best when you don't have too much vertical ownership of the whole chain, so that everybody feels like the market they're competing in is a fair one.
Exactly.
They're saying that if sit down all day you're more likely to be hit by lightning, die in a plane crash, and so on. Maybe there is a statistical correlation, but what it means is a big question. Maybe people who work desk jobs are more likely to be able to afford plane tickets, have to travel more often, have stressful jobs, and so on.
s/meter/foot - I'm not THAT tall. :)
Interesting. I've been looking into sit/stand for my home office. The thing is that it looks like the monitor height only increases by 10" when you extend this (they say 15", but it starts out at 5" based on the dimensions). I'm just over six feet tall. I feel like I'll be staring down at my work with something like this. I'd probably want something that extends upwards something like 2-3 meters beyond the base position.
There just aren't many affordable options for sit/stand right now, though I should look on kickstarter again as I saw something in the works.
You seem to have a very utopian idea of Europe. Don't worry, Europe is generally some ten years behind contemporary developments in the States but we are quickly catching up especially in rising obesity and directly linked diseases. The massive portion sizes in the States have not always been this huge and gradually grew. There are enough restaurants over here already offering ridiculously massive portions or all-you-can-eat buffets and they make it their main selling point. Oversize clothes stores can be found everywhere as well.
Yep, "American" portion sizes are a much more recent thing than people remember, hardly 20 years ago a typical medium fountain drink cup was called a large and a small was the size of a soda can. Triple cheese burgers didn't start showing up at places like Wendy's until around 15 years ago as well.
That said, we really do need to encourage people to drink more water.
If I go to a Burger King and just ask for tap water (for free) I get one of those tiny little cups you might get from a water cooler dispenser - maybe 1/6th the capacity of even a value soft drink. I'd need to refill it about 10 times during the course of a meal since I tend to drink a lot. So, I feel like I'm being punished for drinking water, which is of course the healthiest option there is.
What you're proposing sounds like zero incentive to invent while being employed. Doesn't make much sense psychologically.
Your incentive to invent while being employed is staying employed. Companies fund R&D so that they can profit from the discoveries.
Suppose you work hard on something but it doesn't work out. Should the company be able to take your house from you to cover their losses? Of course not!
That is the difference between an investor and an employee. An investor puts money into a company and it is at risk. An employee receives money from a company and it isn't at risk. The employee gets a steady paycheck. The investor might not get anything, but they stand to make a lot more money if everything goes well.
Don't get me wrong, I think the system in the US is imbalanced and needs correction. That is true of the employer/employee relationship, and it is true of the patent/copyright systems in general. However, completely assigning copyright/patents to the individual and not the entity paying for the work is not the right solution. Companies will just stop funding R&D in that case, leaving all those inventors unemployed unless they're born wealthy enough to fund their projects (which is about how it worked in the middle ages).