Well, perhaps it's time that corporate shipping planners got a reminder that if you do just in time shipping & supply with zero buffer, eventually the supply chain will blink or shut down for a week due to uncontrollable acts of nature and you'll be boned.
Perhaps this is a good time to start thinking about some of the consequences of a global economy. There are definitely benefits to buying from your neighbor, but doing business locally has it's advantages as well. I'm not versed enough in economics to fully understand the implications of switching to a more localized business model, but this may be a great time to think abou the benefits of buying locally.
There's certainly a very logical argument for buying things like food locally and that's carbon emissions. Weather you believe that global warming is happening or not, carbon emissions cost money. Period. Burning petroleum, coal, or uranium to bring tasty fish from the north pacific to New York city costs money. Buying oranges grown around the corner from your house costs less money. Due to a wide variety of subsidies, relaxed environmental regulation and a whole host of other factors we don't really see the cost of imported food.
Locally grown food is probably tastier too, as it hasn't been shipped half-way around the world either. The big change is you have to learn to eat seasonally. It may be unreasonable to expect to find magoes in December in Ohio.
I keep hearing from various media about "dire economic impacts" and such. I don't recall the nautical shipping industry panicking like this over the fact that they can't reasonably send ships through a hurricane, and those happen much more frequently than volcanic eruptions of this magnitude. I get the impression that the rarity of this event that the airliners should be thankful for is also the very reason they are overreacting to it.
The problem is that we have become dependent on the 'ready today' ability to move people and goods around the world. Sixty years ago there was no FedEX overnight service that you could reliably depend on. The 1950s Tulip sellers in Holland sold their tulips to customers within a few tens of kilometers of their fields. Today, there are huge international shipping operations that depend on being able to ship those same tulips half-way around the world in less than 36 hours. Florists in Kenya are losing an estimated USD $2 million every day sitting on product that is literally rotting before their eyes.
I'm sure you can find many more examples of industry that is time sensitive and losing out due to this problem. Some examples that come quickly to mind are factories that depend on regular replenishment of components. There is a trend for smaller fabrication houses to stock only enough product to complete a fixed amount of orders. It's more economically reasonable for these small houses to stock only what they need and overnight or 2day more parts as they need them than to stock an indefinite supply. These companies are sitting idle and unable to fulfill contracts. The economic loss that potentially creates is huge. Imagine for a second the cost in lost future contracts, late penalties and loss of sales for a company who's model depends on being able to ship items around the world in less than two days. Now multiply that by all the countries that ship to, from and over europe. That's starting to get expensive.
Don't forget about all the stranded people that aren't getting their work done either. I'm staying at a hotel in Norway right now and I'm surrounded by oil industry people that are stuck here, trying to get back to the UK, France and the USA. They're trying their best to do their work, but there's only so much you can do from a lappy in the hotel loby. You can bet those folks are costing their companies some serious down time. Not only are they not doing their work, they're costing the company money staying in the expensive hotel, eating expensive food. That adds up over 7 million estimated stranded people.
Then there's the the airlines that are already hurting due to bad management, expensive fuel and a struggling economy. They have labor contracts they are obliged to fulfill. Just because their employees aren't flying and servicing, they're still entitled to their salaries. Loan and bond payments are still due even when 90% of your aircraft are sitting at an airport taking up space. You can bet every municipality that runs an airport is still expecting the airlines to pay their airport leases and gate fees even though no passengers are flying. Sum all that up and you're WAY in the red for this month.
Shipping is a slightly different ball game. When you put your stuff on a boat and ship it to Norway from New Orleans (we just did this a few weeks ago), you expect it to arrive at some point in the future. You don't expect it to arrive today, or on 28 April. You expect it to arrive at some point within 6-12 weeks (that's what the shipping company quoted). If you build your business model around that type of speed, you build it very differently. You can bet that a company that relies on shipped goods over airfreight has a much bigger buffer of raw materials and product. When a boat is delayed due to hurricane, crowded port, or whatever, it has an impact, but a much smaller impact. You can bet that a steel mill doesn't rely
While the science around climate change deserves scrutiny and probing, this probing should probably be done by scientists, not legislators. The last time I checked, the scientific method didn't include debate, Robert's Rules of Order or passage by majority. Freeman Dyson makes some interesting points against climate change in this NY Times Article. If you agree with him or not, at least he's engaging in scentific skepticism over uninformed legislation.
Obviously the majority of Utah's Assembly has no idea how science works, as it takes a majority to pass an obviously useless law. It's too bad that method doesn't work or the Utah State Assembly could go ahead and legislate the Higgs-Boson into existence right there in the chambers. I think this problem is a symptom of our terrible science education in our schools. Perhaps they could go ahead and legislate some scientific thinking into themselves while they're redefining physics.
Even if it's ASCII or a picture, just encrypt it twice.
I've always wondered what would happen if you were to encrypt a file over and over again, with different keys. Would that lead to any greater security, or would somehow leave more and more obvious clues as to how the data was encrypted? What would happen if you encrypted over and over using the same key?
That's a really interesting question. I'm not a math or cryptography person, so I'm just guessing here, but I bet you could some how measure how disordered the data stream was and make a guess about weather or not it was encrypted. It seems that encrypted data should also have some level of order to it. If you use something like rot-13 (which I know is a cypher not strictly encryption) to cypher an english message you can do some simple statistical analysis and make some intelligent guesses as to wich letter cypher letter corresponds to 'e' and 'a' and 'z' and so forth.
Perhaps some sort of similar thinking can be applied to a chunk of data to determine if it's just random junk or has something embedded in it. Are there any crypto or math people out there that can comment on this?
The OP brings up an interesting point, of knowing when your data is actually decrypted. For plain text, it should be pretty easy to just do a quick scan for english/french/whatever words, for pictures, it would be fairly easy to look for things like jpeg headers. But what if it's some sort of proprietary data or just a chunk of a file? How do you know if you're successful?
If they later get complaints to the contrary they can of course take the photo back down (after taking the proper time to investigate the complaint and ensure that it is legitimate). After all, how could they tell that the photo was posted illegally?
By "after taking the proper time to investigate" do you mean giving everyone, their brother, sister, cat, dog and grandma a chance to mirror it, convert it into art and write it into poetry to allow ensure that it's protected under Amendment 1?
Doesn't the onus to follow the law fall on the person providing the information? If a person were to say break into Apple and snap pictures and then provide the pictures to Gawker, wouldn't they be the party to prosecuted, not Gawker? From reading the Slate article it appears that Gawker might be protected if they are not actively soliciting people to break the law and reveal trade secrets. If an individual shows up at their office with the product and assures the editors that they have the right to share this, anything published is fair game. If, on the other hand it can be shown that Gawker knows that the product was obtained illegally or that the person sharing the product is breaking the law, they probably don't have a leg to stand on.
It is pretty obvious that Apple has something brewing by their instantaneous lawyering up though. I am getting a little sick of the play by play speculation however. I'm interested in new gadgets, but I'll read about 'em a few months after they're released so I can get the good, bad and ugly of it all rather than the Jobsesque hype.
At least it's not 20 years off like fusion and flying cars. Where is my damn auto-piloting flying car that I was promised to me when I was a kid? I can still remember watching some PBS special about auto-drive cars and how they're only 10-20 years off.
I also would like to know where the hell my quantum computer is. I ordered that thing right about 10 years ago and it still hasn't shown up. I want my money back and you damn kids better get off my lawn!
This is an excellent opportunity to honor Monty Python by honoring the group's mastery of shock and irreverence and stop quoting, word for word skits and films! The irony is killing me slowly.
People who write in textbooks are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users!
You have a choice when you get to the bookstore, you can pick the text that is brand new, the one that was obviously used by the guy that dropped out in the fifth week and is nearly pristine save for a few beer stains, you can pick the one that is loaded with all kinds of great notes, stickies and highlights of the most important stuff or something in between. It's your choice. I for one would rather stand on the toes of giants than try to reinvent the wheel.
The quote in TFA sums up my objections to eBooks as replacements for texts fairly well. Bookmarks, dog-ears, margin notes and all the other ways we interact with books are more valuable than you might think at first. For example, I lent out one of my favorite cookbooks; for a while it looked like the borrower had lost the book. At first I didn't think this was too much of a tragedy as I could order another copy online cheaper than the original. Then it hit me, all of my notes, records, adjustments and comments were lost! All of the stains, broken spine and notes have a more value than I could put a dollar on. Without a way to incorporate that kind of interaction into an eBook, I fail to see how I could be coerced to switch to a reader.
I believe the technology exists to allow interaction at the level that I want, but no one has offered a reader that even comes close yet. It seems rather trivial to add a touch screen, or even a small tablet that allows hand-written sketches or notes to be added to the pages. The Kindle allows virtual dog-ears, but they're hard to search and you don't get the visual interaction of a real book. I can run my fingers over the edge of the book and quickly find the dog-ear that I left 1/3 of the way into the book.
What kinds of features would you like to see on an eBook to make it closer to a real book? What smart ideas do you have that would allow a user to interact, annotate and generally use a virtual book like a paper book? The most important on my list are margin notes, underlining, highlighting (and I mean highlight, not inverse text), sticky notes (I have no idea how this would work), and dog ears that are easily locatable.
When eBooks can offer a greater level of interaction than we have today, students will flock to them. Who wouldn't rather carry one Kindle over a chemistry, calculus and circuits book to class? I keep hoping the next reader will be the one, but we're just not there yet. Perhaps we never will be. Captain Picard still kept dead-tree books around even though he had those nifty tablet thingiees.
While this sounds like dishonest shenanigans on the part of the cellphone companies, I doubt it would have changed anything. Consumers are not the brightest bunch out there. As an aggregate group, we make some pretty stupid decisions based very little on long-term costs. Evidence the SUV. Many millions of (mostly) useless, overpowered, gas guzzling and expensive-to maintain sport futility vehicles were sold in the US, Canada and Australia over the past few years. Until oil hit $100/barrel, people were still buying them even though common sense could easily tell you that owning a giant gas-guzzler didn't make any sense. Similarly, people will flock to the carrier that offers the hand-held that they want, or a particular feature that they find desirable. The masses are generally willing enter into contracts to pay subsidization fees for handsets indefinitely, even after the handset is well paid for (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.). We also seem to be quite willing to pay $0.20 for text messages even though it has been publicly known for years that the messages are next to free for the companies to provide. If people cared about that, they would all be using Boost Mobile's unlimited plans.
In short, it's not the price of plans that attracts users to particular companies, it's the devices and services. It's odd, uneconomical behavior, but it's what people do. No amount of government web pages are going to change that. Until consumers actually start feeling a pinch in their wallet will they move to the more economical choice and start running the numbers and looking at the MPGs as it were.
So, how about a poll...if you have ATT problems like the article mentioned, tell what part of the country you are in, and what you problem is. Is this more of a regional thing? Is it bad in the NE of the US? The west?
I'm in New Orleans and the service is terrible. About 20% of my calls either fail as I pick them up or as I dial. All over the state, the coverage is spotty at best and in some places data usage is totally out of the question, unless you've got some serious time to waste waiting for a page to load. It is also apparent that AT&T has not counted on the sheer number of phones that can jam into a city. In the French Quarter on a Saturday night, my phone is almost worthless. I can place calls with about a 20-30% failure rate, but frequently incoming calls don't ring and I don't get the voice mail until after I've left the crowded areas. This would appear to me to be a network capacity issue.
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service. AT&T obviously ran the numbers and installed EXACTLY the capacity they would need for day-to-day operations and not a single bit/sec more. As soon as people start globbing together, AT&T's network falls to its knees and pleads for mercy. I don't think the network is at fault, but rather the capacity once again. The service is marginally acceptable in most places, but there obviously isn't capacity for large numbers of phones in one place.
For the $80+ per month AT&T charges, I would expect much better service than what I'm getting. If you can hold off buying an iphone until other carriers get into the game, I would wait. I have yet to be impressed with the coverage, speed or reliability that AT&T currently offers in the South East or really any where else I've traveled. The coverage in Boston was acceptable, but hardly anything to get excited about when I was there last summer.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Benjamin Franklin
It is rather idiotic to relate using a computer to using operating a vehicle. A two ton piece of steel flying down the highway at 120k/h is vastly more of a public safety threat than any shmo using a laptop. Not only does this proposition fail to consider the nightmare of registering private individuals, but it does not take into consideration the corporate nightmare it would cause. Who would need the license, the individual operating the computer, or the owner of the computer? Would this mean that internet cafes (and the small anonymity they provide) be doomed because everyone would be forced to provide some sort of identifier token? What about libraries? This sort of identification requirement would force libraries and their entire mission of providing freely accessible information in jeopardy.
This looks like either a poorly thought out plan to help regulate stupidity or a power grab. As evidenced by warning labels on coffee cups, plastic bags and every other mass-produced item, trying to protect people from their own stupidity is nearly impossible. On the other hand, this would be a huge boon for those that wish to dissolve freedom and anonymity on the internet. Granted the average person leaves flashing neon signs with most of their personal data flashing in 1km high letters when they browse, there are still a large number of people that take online anonymity seriously and use it to their advantage for all sorts of reasons the most important being political dissidents.
A simpler solution would be to set up a Great-Firewall much like China's. Even though the GFW has proven to be less than great, it provides basically the same mechanism for keeping people out of the reach of "dangerous ideas".
Let's focus on educating people as to their rights and responsible behavior rather than trying to remove their liberties. We should also probably focus some of that energy on making the intertubes more robust and less prone to point failures and exploits; making the network more robust and idiot proof would benefit the entire world and help make dangerous and promiscuous users a danger to them selves rather than the entire world.
I just finished it the other day and while the writing was not spectacularly wonderful, his predictions of the future based on the current state of technology is fascinating. I find myself firing off browser tabs to look up something and wishing that I could send my "ghost" out to look it up for me.
I find the idea of turning our beautiful home into computronium a little bleak though. I hope we never find ourselves in that boat. Well, I probably won't live to see it any how.
This is the reason I print out the best-of-the-best of my digital photos. I want to be able to flip through those memories in 40 years and not worry about finding a DVD player that doesn't even exist in spec. form any more. I love that I can go through my grandmother's negatives, letters and other memories with the aide of only the sun.
Digital is great, but I don't see archeologists digging up a 5.25" floppy 2000 years from now and saying, "WHOA! It's Hammurabi Code!" More likely they'll say, "damn, they made a lot of crap back when."
Like the saying goes, "information wants to be free". Not only does information want to be free, but the Streisand Effect is in full effect here. Clearly TPB was a popular site among a very devoted crowd. The harder people try to squish it, the faster it will pop up everywhere.
This reminds me of when the MPAA got all uppity about DVD Jon's DeCSS code and tried to wipe the code off the interwebs. The response was for thousands, if not millions of people to post the code as poetry, works of art, one really terrible song and a even stenographically encoded into images. The harder the MPAA fought against it, the more people pushed back to move the code into the realm of free speech and thwart them. It cost the MPAA big bucks to send out take down notices to everyone while it cost the average Joe nothing to dump the code into paintshop, add some colors and call it "art" on his web page. Obviously it's a bit harder to perpetuate an archive of TPB as "art", but it's still relatively easy to pick up a copy off the torrent network and restart the site on an ISP with lax laws and rules.
Weather you agree with what TPB was up to or not, it is interesting to see how ineffective it is to try and hold back information on the web these days. Perhaps 20 years ago it would have been trivial to shut down the ISPs hosting this type of information, but today it looks like it's darn near impossible.
It'll be fun to watch this over the next few months and see who's interest wanes first. Will the government or the Pirates give up first? What do you think?
1) AT&T's network Sucks. I have heard many complaints that the iPhone is wonderful -- at everything but being a plain cellphone.
My iphone is amazing at everything except being a phone. I've used it all over my home city and in several cities across the USA and it SUCKS. From this I gather that the service is not the issue, but rather the phone.
Standing side-by-side with other AT&T users using different handsets, I can't even connect a call, let alone complete one. The other user is calling away without issue. I fault Apple on this one, not AT&T.
As far as price, AT&T is WICKED expensive and the text messaging fees are absurd considering that SMS travel over network infrastructure that is necessary for phones to work and cost virtually nothing to deliver. I would really like to see one of the big 4 providers drop the SMS bullshit and offer unlimited texting for a few dollars a month rather than the insane amounts that are being charged right now.
Ohhh! A math co-processor! I could only dream of having a DX back in the day. Lucas Arts X-Wing ran OK if I turned down all of the FX, but Tie-Fighter ran for shite on my 486 SX rockin' the world at 25 whole MHz.
I don't know if using Linux has helped me develop logical thinking, but it certainly honed my ability to solve problems. The ability to read a log file and compare it to a man page to solve a problem has definitely grown out of my use of Linux.
The self-sufficiency of reading a manual and determining how to use a tool and how to fix it when it is broken is an incredibly useful skill that is a gift that running linux has definitely given to me.
I had that same book and a craptacular 486 SX 25! I think it had a green cover and a CD with all sorts of goodness attached. I couldn't get my crappy ATAPI CD drive to work under linux though so it was just an endless stream of writing stuff to floppies.
I have a similarly fond memory of discovering VTs. I thought it amazing that I could irc, read my mail and use lynx all at the same time and without the bloat and pain of windows. That was a turning moment for me and Linux.
My first install was Slackware back in '95. I had no idea why I was installing it, but I knew that I would be 7337 if I had it. I spent countless hours trying to find enough blank and bad-sectorless floppies to rawrite the disk images. Then, on disk 11 of 12, I'd have to start all over because the floppy had was unreadable for some reason. That was awesome.
Once it was installed, I had no idea what to do with it other than try to get X to run so I could watch the awesome Swarm screen saver I had seen at a friends house. I'm pretty sure that install only lasted a couple of weeks.
With states like North Korea and Iran actively pursuing nuclear technology, can the US, Russia and the other nuclear states afford to lose their deterrence? It seems that states like Pakistan that are potentially fragile are also on the list of potential threats.
I'm all for getting rid of nukes; they're the most terrible weapon we have and really serve as a weapon of last resort. However, in the current political climate, is it possible to eliminate the stockpiles and deterrence that goes with them?
Signing on to the Test Ban Treaty is a great first step that shows that the US is willing to practice what it preaches as far as disarmament and peace. The actual removal of nuclear weapons from the arsenal seems unlikely, however.
Along those same lines, it would be great if the US could get on board with the Global Landmine Ban Treaty. Landmines are perhaps even more terrible in their effect on people and the environment. Landmines kill and maim thousands of people every year and rarely serve the purpose they were intended for. The only even semi-valid argument for the continued use of landmines is the 38th Parallel between North and South Korea. Though given the current world political climate is pretty flimsy. North Korea wouldn't stand much of a chance invading South Korea these days.
Slashdot Mirror
A short container, I think 20' long. Enough to fit a small household of two people.
Well, perhaps it's time that corporate shipping planners got a reminder that if you do just in time shipping & supply with zero buffer, eventually the supply chain will blink or shut down for a week due to uncontrollable acts of nature and you'll be boned.
Perhaps this is a good time to start thinking about some of the consequences of a global economy. There are definitely benefits to buying from your neighbor, but doing business locally has it's advantages as well. I'm not versed enough in economics to fully understand the implications of switching to a more localized business model, but this may be a great time to think abou the benefits of buying locally.
There's certainly a very logical argument for buying things like food locally and that's carbon emissions. Weather you believe that global warming is happening or not, carbon emissions cost money. Period. Burning petroleum, coal, or uranium to bring tasty fish from the north pacific to New York city costs money. Buying oranges grown around the corner from your house costs less money. Due to a wide variety of subsidies, relaxed environmental regulation and a whole host of other factors we don't really see the cost of imported food.
Locally grown food is probably tastier too, as it hasn't been shipped half-way around the world either. The big change is you have to learn to eat seasonally. It may be unreasonable to expect to find magoes in December in Ohio.
I keep hearing from various media about "dire economic impacts" and such. I don't recall the nautical shipping industry panicking like this over the fact that they can't reasonably send ships through a hurricane, and those happen much more frequently than volcanic eruptions of this magnitude. I get the impression that the rarity of this event that the airliners should be thankful for is also the very reason they are overreacting to it.
The problem is that we have become dependent on the 'ready today' ability to move people and goods around the world. Sixty years ago there was no FedEX overnight service that you could reliably depend on. The 1950s Tulip sellers in Holland sold their tulips to customers within a few tens of kilometers of their fields. Today, there are huge international shipping operations that depend on being able to ship those same tulips half-way around the world in less than 36 hours. Florists in Kenya are losing an estimated USD $2 million every day sitting on product that is literally rotting before their eyes.
I'm sure you can find many more examples of industry that is time sensitive and losing out due to this problem. Some examples that come quickly to mind are factories that depend on regular replenishment of components. There is a trend for smaller fabrication houses to stock only enough product to complete a fixed amount of orders. It's more economically reasonable for these small houses to stock only what they need and overnight or 2day more parts as they need them than to stock an indefinite supply. These companies are sitting idle and unable to fulfill contracts. The economic loss that potentially creates is huge. Imagine for a second the cost in lost future contracts, late penalties and loss of sales for a company who's model depends on being able to ship items around the world in less than two days. Now multiply that by all the countries that ship to, from and over europe. That's starting to get expensive.
Don't forget about all the stranded people that aren't getting their work done either. I'm staying at a hotel in Norway right now and I'm surrounded by oil industry people that are stuck here, trying to get back to the UK, France and the USA. They're trying their best to do their work, but there's only so much you can do from a lappy in the hotel loby. You can bet those folks are costing their companies some serious down time. Not only are they not doing their work, they're costing the company money staying in the expensive hotel, eating expensive food. That adds up over 7 million estimated stranded people.
Then there's the the airlines that are already hurting due to bad management, expensive fuel and a struggling economy. They have labor contracts they are obliged to fulfill. Just because their employees aren't flying and servicing, they're still entitled to their salaries. Loan and bond payments are still due even when 90% of your aircraft are sitting at an airport taking up space. You can bet every municipality that runs an airport is still expecting the airlines to pay their airport leases and gate fees even though no passengers are flying. Sum all that up and you're WAY in the red for this month.
Shipping is a slightly different ball game. When you put your stuff on a boat and ship it to Norway from New Orleans (we just did this a few weeks ago), you expect it to arrive at some point in the future. You don't expect it to arrive today, or on 28 April. You expect it to arrive at some point within 6-12 weeks (that's what the shipping company quoted). If you build your business model around that type of speed, you build it very differently. You can bet that a company that relies on shipped goods over airfreight has a much bigger buffer of raw materials and product. When a boat is delayed due to hurricane, crowded port, or whatever, it has an impact, but a much smaller impact. You can bet that a steel mill doesn't rely
While the science around climate change deserves scrutiny and probing, this probing should probably be done by scientists, not legislators. The last time I checked, the scientific method didn't include debate, Robert's Rules of Order or passage by majority. Freeman Dyson makes some interesting points against climate change in this NY Times Article. If you agree with him or not, at least he's engaging in scentific skepticism over uninformed legislation.
Obviously the majority of Utah's Assembly has no idea how science works, as it takes a majority to pass an obviously useless law. It's too bad that method doesn't work or the Utah State Assembly could go ahead and legislate the Higgs-Boson into existence right there in the chambers. I think this problem is a symptom of our terrible science education in our schools. Perhaps they could go ahead and legislate some scientific thinking into themselves while they're redefining physics.
All we need now are some Heisenberg Compensators and we're half way to a teleporter.
Even if it's ASCII or a picture, just encrypt it twice.
I've always wondered what would happen if you were to encrypt a file over and over again, with different keys. Would that lead to any greater security, or would somehow leave more and more obvious clues as to how the data was encrypted? What would happen if you encrypted over and over using the same key?
That's a really interesting question. I'm not a math or cryptography person, so I'm just guessing here, but I bet you could some how measure how disordered the data stream was and make a guess about weather or not it was encrypted. It seems that encrypted data should also have some level of order to it. If you use something like rot-13 (which I know is a cypher not strictly encryption) to cypher an english message you can do some simple statistical analysis and make some intelligent guesses as to wich letter cypher letter corresponds to 'e' and 'a' and 'z' and so forth.
Perhaps some sort of similar thinking can be applied to a chunk of data to determine if it's just random junk or has something embedded in it. Are there any crypto or math people out there that can comment on this?
The OP brings up an interesting point, of knowing when your data is actually decrypted. For plain text, it should be pretty easy to just do a quick scan for english/french/whatever words, for pictures, it would be fairly easy to look for things like jpeg headers. But what if it's some sort of proprietary data or just a chunk of a file? How do you know if you're successful?
If they later get complaints to the contrary they can of course take the photo back down (after taking the proper time to investigate the complaint and ensure that it is legitimate). After all, how could they tell that the photo was posted illegally?
By "after taking the proper time to investigate" do you mean giving everyone, their brother, sister, cat, dog and grandma a chance to mirror it, convert it into art and write it into poetry to allow ensure that it's protected under Amendment 1?
Doesn't the onus to follow the law fall on the person providing the information? If a person were to say break into Apple and snap pictures and then provide the pictures to Gawker, wouldn't they be the party to prosecuted, not Gawker? From reading the Slate article it appears that Gawker might be protected if they are not actively soliciting people to break the law and reveal trade secrets. If an individual shows up at their office with the product and assures the editors that they have the right to share this, anything published is fair game. If, on the other hand it can be shown that Gawker knows that the product was obtained illegally or that the person sharing the product is breaking the law, they probably don't have a leg to stand on.
It is pretty obvious that Apple has something brewing by their instantaneous lawyering up though. I am getting a little sick of the play by play speculation however. I'm interested in new gadgets, but I'll read about 'em a few months after they're released so I can get the good, bad and ugly of it all rather than the Jobsesque hype.
At least it's not 20 years off like fusion and flying cars. Where is my damn auto-piloting flying car that I was promised to me when I was a kid? I can still remember watching some PBS special about auto-drive cars and how they're only 10-20 years off.
I also would like to know where the hell my quantum computer is. I ordered that thing right about 10 years ago and it still hasn't shown up. I want my money back and you damn kids better get off my lawn!
This is an excellent opportunity to honor Monty Python by honoring the group's mastery of shock and irreverence and stop quoting, word for word skits and films! The irony is killing me slowly.
Highly apropos XKCD comic on the subject.
People who write in textbooks are the scum of the earth. I can't stand that! Take separate notes! Respect the text for future users!
You have a choice when you get to the bookstore, you can pick the text that is brand new, the one that was obviously used by the guy that dropped out in the fifth week and is nearly pristine save for a few beer stains, you can pick the one that is loaded with all kinds of great notes, stickies and highlights of the most important stuff or something in between. It's your choice. I for one would rather stand on the toes of giants than try to reinvent the wheel.
The quote in TFA sums up my objections to eBooks as replacements for texts fairly well. Bookmarks, dog-ears, margin notes and all the other ways we interact with books are more valuable than you might think at first. For example, I lent out one of my favorite cookbooks; for a while it looked like the borrower had lost the book. At first I didn't think this was too much of a tragedy as I could order another copy online cheaper than the original. Then it hit me, all of my notes, records, adjustments and comments were lost! All of the stains, broken spine and notes have a more value than I could put a dollar on. Without a way to incorporate that kind of interaction into an eBook, I fail to see how I could be coerced to switch to a reader.
I believe the technology exists to allow interaction at the level that I want, but no one has offered a reader that even comes close yet. It seems rather trivial to add a touch screen, or even a small tablet that allows hand-written sketches or notes to be added to the pages. The Kindle allows virtual dog-ears, but they're hard to search and you don't get the visual interaction of a real book. I can run my fingers over the edge of the book and quickly find the dog-ear that I left 1/3 of the way into the book.
What kinds of features would you like to see on an eBook to make it closer to a real book? What smart ideas do you have that would allow a user to interact, annotate and generally use a virtual book like a paper book? The most important on my list are margin notes, underlining, highlighting (and I mean highlight, not inverse text), sticky notes (I have no idea how this would work), and dog ears that are easily locatable.
When eBooks can offer a greater level of interaction than we have today, students will flock to them. Who wouldn't rather carry one Kindle over a chemistry, calculus and circuits book to class? I keep hoping the next reader will be the one, but we're just not there yet. Perhaps we never will be. Captain Picard still kept dead-tree books around even though he had those nifty tablet thingiees.
And nothing was lost
While this sounds like dishonest shenanigans on the part of the cellphone companies, I doubt it would have changed anything. Consumers are not the brightest bunch out there. As an aggregate group, we make some pretty stupid decisions based very little on long-term costs. Evidence the SUV. Many millions of (mostly) useless, overpowered, gas guzzling and expensive-to maintain sport futility vehicles were sold in the US, Canada and Australia over the past few years. Until oil hit $100/barrel, people were still buying them even though common sense could easily tell you that owning a giant gas-guzzler didn't make any sense. Similarly, people will flock to the carrier that offers the hand-held that they want, or a particular feature that they find desirable. The masses are generally willing enter into contracts to pay subsidization fees for handsets indefinitely, even after the handset is well paid for (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc.). We also seem to be quite willing to pay $0.20 for text messages even though it has been publicly known for years that the messages are next to free for the companies to provide. If people cared about that, they would all be using Boost Mobile's unlimited plans.
In short, it's not the price of plans that attracts users to particular companies, it's the devices and services. It's odd, uneconomical behavior, but it's what people do. No amount of government web pages are going to change that. Until consumers actually start feeling a pinch in their wallet will they move to the more economical choice and start running the numbers and looking at the MPGs as it were.
So, how about a poll...if you have ATT problems like the article mentioned, tell what part of the country you are in, and what you problem is. Is this more of a regional thing? Is it bad in the NE of the US? The west?
I'm in New Orleans and the service is terrible. About 20% of my calls either fail as I pick them up or as I dial. All over the state, the coverage is spotty at best and in some places data usage is totally out of the question, unless you've got some serious time to waste waiting for a page to load. It is also apparent that AT&T has not counted on the sheer number of phones that can jam into a city. In the French Quarter on a Saturday night, my phone is almost worthless. I can place calls with about a 20-30% failure rate, but frequently incoming calls don't ring and I don't get the voice mail until after I've left the crowded areas. This would appear to me to be a network capacity issue.
At festivals, where there are thousands of people jammed together (like Jazz-Fest, Satchmo Fest, Shrimp and Petrol Fest, Strawberry Fest, Satsuma Fest, Fest Fest, Mardi Gras (don't even get me started on mardi gras), etc.) My phone might as well be a brick. No incoming, no outgoing, no texts, no service. AT&T obviously ran the numbers and installed EXACTLY the capacity they would need for day-to-day operations and not a single bit/sec more. As soon as people start globbing together, AT&T's network falls to its knees and pleads for mercy. I don't think the network is at fault, but rather the capacity once again. The service is marginally acceptable in most places, but there obviously isn't capacity for large numbers of phones in one place.
For the $80+ per month AT&T charges, I would expect much better service than what I'm getting. If you can hold off buying an iphone until other carriers get into the game, I would wait. I have yet to be impressed with the coverage, speed or reliability that AT&T currently offers in the South East or really any where else I've traveled. The coverage in Boston was acceptable, but hardly anything to get excited about when I was there last summer.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Benjamin Franklin
It is rather idiotic to relate using a computer to using operating a vehicle. A two ton piece of steel flying down the highway at 120k/h is vastly more of a public safety threat than any shmo using a laptop. Not only does this proposition fail to consider the nightmare of registering private individuals, but it does not take into consideration the corporate nightmare it would cause. Who would need the license, the individual operating the computer, or the owner of the computer? Would this mean that internet cafes (and the small anonymity they provide) be doomed because everyone would be forced to provide some sort of identifier token? What about libraries? This sort of identification requirement would force libraries and their entire mission of providing freely accessible information in jeopardy.
This looks like either a poorly thought out plan to help regulate stupidity or a power grab. As evidenced by warning labels on coffee cups, plastic bags and every other mass-produced item, trying to protect people from their own stupidity is nearly impossible. On the other hand, this would be a huge boon for those that wish to dissolve freedom and anonymity on the internet. Granted the average person leaves flashing neon signs with most of their personal data flashing in 1km high letters when they browse, there are still a large number of people that take online anonymity seriously and use it to their advantage for all sorts of reasons the most important being political dissidents.
A simpler solution would be to set up a Great-Firewall much like China's. Even though the GFW has proven to be less than great, it provides basically the same mechanism for keeping people out of the reach of "dangerous ideas".
Let's focus on educating people as to their rights and responsible behavior rather than trying to remove their liberties. We should also probably focus some of that energy on making the intertubes more robust and less prone to point failures and exploits; making the network more robust and idiot proof would benefit the entire world and help make dangerous and promiscuous users a danger to them selves rather than the entire world.
Accellerando much?
I just finished it the other day and while the writing was not spectacularly wonderful, his predictions of the future based on the current state of technology is fascinating. I find myself firing off browser tabs to look up something and wishing that I could send my "ghost" out to look it up for me.
I find the idea of turning our beautiful home into computronium a little bleak though. I hope we never find ourselves in that boat. Well, I probably won't live to see it any how.
This is the reason I print out the best-of-the-best of my digital photos. I want to be able to flip through those memories in 40 years and not worry about finding a DVD player that doesn't even exist in spec. form any more. I love that I can go through my grandmother's negatives, letters and other memories with the aide of only the sun.
Digital is great, but I don't see archeologists digging up a 5.25" floppy 2000 years from now and saying, "WHOA! It's Hammurabi Code!" More likely they'll say, "damn, they made a lot of crap back when."
Like the saying goes, "information wants to be free". Not only does information want to be free, but the Streisand Effect is in full effect here. Clearly TPB was a popular site among a very devoted crowd. The harder people try to squish it, the faster it will pop up everywhere.
This reminds me of when the MPAA got all uppity about DVD Jon's DeCSS code and tried to wipe the code off the interwebs. The response was for thousands, if not millions of people to post the code as poetry, works of art, one really terrible song and a even stenographically encoded into images. The harder the MPAA fought against it, the more people pushed back to move the code into the realm of free speech and thwart them. It cost the MPAA big bucks to send out take down notices to everyone while it cost the average Joe nothing to dump the code into paintshop, add some colors and call it "art" on his web page. Obviously it's a bit harder to perpetuate an archive of TPB as "art", but it's still relatively easy to pick up a copy off the torrent network and restart the site on an ISP with lax laws and rules.
Weather you agree with what TPB was up to or not, it is interesting to see how ineffective it is to try and hold back information on the web these days. Perhaps 20 years ago it would have been trivial to shut down the ISPs hosting this type of information, but today it looks like it's darn near impossible.
It'll be fun to watch this over the next few months and see who's interest wanes first. Will the government or the Pirates give up first? What do you think?
1) AT&T's network Sucks. I have heard many complaints that the iPhone is wonderful -- at everything but being a plain cellphone.
My iphone is amazing at everything except being a phone. I've used it all over my home city and in several cities across the USA and it SUCKS. From this I gather that the service is not the issue, but rather the phone.
Standing side-by-side with other AT&T users using different handsets, I can't even connect a call, let alone complete one. The other user is calling away without issue. I fault Apple on this one, not AT&T.
As far as price, AT&T is WICKED expensive and the text messaging fees are absurd considering that SMS travel over network infrastructure that is necessary for phones to work and cost virtually nothing to deliver. I would really like to see one of the big 4 providers drop the SMS bullshit and offer unlimited texting for a few dollars a month rather than the insane amounts that are being charged right now.
Ohhh! A math co-processor! I could only dream of having a DX back in the day. Lucas Arts X-Wing ran OK if I turned down all of the FX, but Tie-Fighter ran for shite on my 486 SX rockin' the world at 25 whole MHz.
I don't know if using Linux has helped me develop logical thinking, but it certainly honed my ability to solve problems. The ability to read a log file and compare it to a man page to solve a problem has definitely grown out of my use of Linux.
The self-sufficiency of reading a manual and determining how to use a tool and how to fix it when it is broken is an incredibly useful skill that is a gift that running linux has definitely given to me.
I had that same book and a craptacular 486 SX 25! I think it had a green cover and a CD with all sorts of goodness attached. I couldn't get my crappy ATAPI CD drive to work under linux though so it was just an endless stream of writing stuff to floppies.
I have a similarly fond memory of discovering VTs. I thought it amazing that I could irc, read my mail and use lynx all at the same time and without the bloat and pain of windows. That was a turning moment for me and Linux.
My first install was Slackware back in '95. I had no idea why I was installing it, but I knew that I would be 7337 if I had it. I spent countless hours trying to find enough blank and bad-sectorless floppies to rawrite the disk images. Then, on disk 11 of 12, I'd have to start all over because the floppy had was unreadable for some reason. That was awesome.
Once it was installed, I had no idea what to do with it other than try to get X to run so I could watch the awesome Swarm screen saver I had seen at a friends house. I'm pretty sure that install only lasted a couple of weeks.
With states like North Korea and Iran actively pursuing nuclear technology, can the US, Russia and the other nuclear states afford to lose their deterrence? It seems that states like Pakistan that are potentially fragile are also on the list of potential threats.
I'm all for getting rid of nukes; they're the most terrible weapon we have and really serve as a weapon of last resort. However, in the current political climate, is it possible to eliminate the stockpiles and deterrence that goes with them?
Signing on to the Test Ban Treaty is a great first step that shows that the US is willing to practice what it preaches as far as disarmament and peace. The actual removal of nuclear weapons from the arsenal seems unlikely, however.
Along those same lines, it would be great if the US could get on board with the Global Landmine Ban Treaty. Landmines are perhaps even more terrible in their effect on people and the environment. Landmines kill and maim thousands of people every year and rarely serve the purpose they were intended for. The only even semi-valid argument for the continued use of landmines is the 38th Parallel between North and South Korea. Though given the current world political climate is pretty flimsy. North Korea wouldn't stand much of a chance invading South Korea these days.