Apple internally working on a pot project explains...
I thought it was bizarre that the article went there as the first option. Nicotine and marijuana. Vaping.
And then, almost as an afterthought: also vaporizers and nebulizers are used all over healthcare, beauty, aesthetics, and other industries.
<sarcasm> I agree with the article's view: they're ignoring the lucrative healthcare markets, the rich business markets, and all the scent-related companies that are looking for ways to expand their multi-billion dollar scent lines. Instead Apple is developing a product for potheads, that's truly where the money is.</sarcasm>
Seriously, there is a limit to the width of a column of text that it's comfortable to read
On the PC if I manage to hit that limit -- and currently I'm not at that limit with a large widescreen monitor -- I can resize my window to something narrower.
I certainly won't hit that limit on my phone or tablet, and if I did, I could rotate to portrait mode.
Don't take away my choices. Just because one person happens to prefer a width doesn't mean everyone does. I hate the news sites that give you a fixed panel about five inches across. Measuring horizontally I've got about 25 inches on my screen, and if I want to spread the text across the whole thing, that is MY choice.
"Responsive" doesn't mean take a design and make it work on all devices, it means
Unfortunately that IS what the term currently means among that group. Generally they (wrongly) believe they control all aspects of the web page display, that all devices are equally powerful and can run an unbounded amount of scripting, they often see no difference between a picture of text versus actual text, and don't bother to learn anything about the media they are designing for.
Aside: More than once I've had to convince a web designer that their pictures of text were the biggest reasons things weren't showing up to search engines, they kept claiming the hidden meta tags, text recognition, and image search would handle all that. Frighteningly some were never convinced, even after showing them with Google's own tools how Google interpreted their pages. Some were absolutely convinced that Google reads all text on all images and indexes pages based on image content. They could not fathom how there was a difference between text and fancy-rendered images of text.
Many wrongly assume the web browser displays the same thing on all screens, no matter what. Often they design for a few patterns they think are common, 1024x768 or 1080p, and try to force it on everyone else.
Got a Super HD display showing 7680x4320? Too bad, we'll just upscale the fonts and add some whitespace.
Got an old smartphone with a 480x640 portrait screen? We'll downscale and do an ENORMOUS amount of JavaScript processing on these devices least suited for the processing.
It seems these are the same designers with the first-world problems of their disposable $800 smart phone is more than 18 months old, and their $2000 macbook is more than three years old and ready for replacement.
Then don't. That is foolish yet is common among people who wrongly believe they have control over how a web page looks.
One premise of the markup language was that all rendering would be agnostic of the display. It was not meant to be, and should not be treated as, a pixel-perfect display.
Yet that is exactly what most "responsive" systems are trying to do. Enormous amounts of calculations to figure out how to precisely organize the display, doing the most processing on the mobile devices least capable of doing it.
Web designers need to let go of their fascination with precisely scripted layouts. Let the browse handle it. If the browser is a 480x640 phone or a 7680x4320 ultra high density monitor, designers should allow the web browser to do what it was designed for rather than going through enormous hurdles to force it to the web designer's vision -- which is usually limited to a 1024x768 or 1280x720 design.
The DOJ is butt-hurt. But too bad. The US can't just decide that their warrants are valid EVERYWHERE... If there is anything fishy, they won't go that route
The problem -- which the DOJ and other parties absolutely know -- is that they are using a warrant.
You say they won't go that route if there is anything fishy, but the fact that they are attempting to use a warrant is extremely fishy.
There is an enormous difference between a warrant which they are using, and a subpoena that they would be trying to do if the one person in the case was all they wanted.
With a subpoena the company must produce information. They must produce the information no matter where it is held, and they must produce it as binding evidence. If they really want to capture the one person, a subpoena to provide all the information about the request is a simple matter. The government gets copies of all the documents they are demanding, particularly all the business records related to the subscriber. Since the DOJ is claiming they are trying to catch a subscriber and the people they're email, these subpoenas are more than enough.
With a warrant to collect a server, they get the entire physical server. And the government gets to make a copy of the server, and search it for whatever they think is relevant to the information. A warrant means they can take all the objects so they can prevent evidence from being destroyed. They can also collect for more information from the customer about the contents of the communications.
The DOJ could take measures to collect the information using tools other than a warrant that provide all the information and require Microsoft to keep it confidential. Instead of use those, they continue to demand a warrant to seize the entire server.
Read harder. I didn't say "browsers". I said "serving a page to a client". The world didn't begin with browsers. The web didn't start the internet. The internet wasn't the first network.
In 1994 Bill Gates gave a speech at a computer conference in San Francisco on the concept of a Client Server System.
And he was late to the party with it. MIT had been doing it for 11 years at that point. They had a project that muddied the definitions at the time; the terminal in front of the user was converted to a server and the machines doing the work became the client. The work eventually branched into the X Window System, which anyone who uses Linux knows well.
But even that wasn't the original. Dumb terminals have been around since the beginning. Code trying to make the client into the server has been around since the mid 1970s. The pendulum has been swinging for ages. "Get this stuff off the mainframe and out to the terminals." "Consolidate it back from the terminals and back on the mainframe." "Send this out on the web browser and let the browser do the processing." "Web 2.0 lets us send it all back to the server and get data updates live." "New Responsive pages move the work out to the individual freeing up the servers."
Like the people above, it's a pendulum that we've watched swing back and forth, over and over, for decades. They come with similar problems that we've seen time and time again.
Doh! Of course, this is the green site. These days I spend more time over there than over here, so I had slipped over in my head.
But I wouldn't mind a link to some of his threads so I can read what he's written.
Easily done. Like most people the comments are generally replies to daily news, but sometimes he makes news by complaining about his life as a depressed rich person.
If I hit the lottery and had enough money where I'd never need to work again, I'd leave work so fast I'd leave skid marks out the door!!... I work for one and ONLY ONE reason, to make money to support the style of life I enjoy when not working.... I have lots of hobbies....I'd like to spend time traveling, doing photography, chasing women, etc.... I just don't get it why anyone would still work if they didn't have to.... I have no love for my work or vocation.
There are plenty of reasons to continue working.
Let's say you win $5M. After taxes you get about $2.5M. Assuming you're in your 30's that gives you 50K per year, except that when you account for inflation you are probably closer to 30K or 20K per year when you get old. Which will suck. So even if you get lucky and have an enormous windfall, you will want to spend it slowly. Maybe pay off your current house or get a slight upgrade, and perhaps step up to a 2017 model year car. You'll want to spend it slow enough that when you reach old age you can still pay for everything. Financial planning is important.
As for reasons to continue working, you get social aspects, there are benefits like insurance benefits in countries that have private insurance (an area where USA sucks), there is a constant mental challenge. The work environment is not only about income. There are many mental / psychological / social benefits as well.
I also know several people who became rich through various means. None of them work full time or put in overtime, they end up working 20 to 30 hours each week, and they take frequent extended vacations, but they are still working. You mention photography. If that is your true passion in life then it might become your new part-time job.
If you're looking for a notable example of this, Minecraft's Notch, Markus Persson, wrote that after becoming a multi-billionaire selling Minecraft his life became a living hell. His social life was destroyed because money effected everything, he didn't have his work or his life passion, he spends time waiting for his friends (who have jobs and families) to have time, and he occasionally writes here on reddit about his struggles to keep his life interesting or feeling motivated to keep his life filled with interesting things.
Personally, if somehow my bank account had 9 or 10 figures I know I would still keep my job, but instead of a 40 hour work week it would probably become a MWF 10-3 kind of job. Enough that I could keep my sanity and my social benefits, and enough it would still make me emotionally value my free time.
"Stream Game of Thrones now without using your data, exclusively on AT&T" is something that carriers and content providers really want to do.
Close. They want the MONEY that comes with EXCLUSIVITY.
Somebody is paying for that. The big companies want it to be HBO or Showtime or Disney or whoever, spending tons of money to other big companies so the big companies can promote their big ideas.
The problem is that everybody else is excluded. Want to be in the Free Data system? Pay up. This is completely against the concept of net neutrality where all content is treated as equal content.
Prioritization is a similar issue. It is true that networks need to prioritize some types of data over other types of data. Phone calls shouldn't be buffered behind a large file transfer, so a limited degree of QoS needs to take place. But categorizing one provider over another provider is unfair. Having HBO streaming arrive at a higher QoS priority and Netflix streaming appear dead last in the QoS where it is constantly buffering and suffering lost packets because Netflix refused to pay up, that is unfair to customers.
If I pay for data it should not matter to the phone company what data I get. They should be treated as common carriers. If I want to stream data from a premium channel, or from youtube, or from a private website, or from a site the phone company thinks is undesirable, it should not matter at all. Customer pays to stream data at a specific speed, then the data should be processed at that speed. Just like common carriers of the postal service or parcel companies, if the customer pays to transfer something then it gets transferred, they don't decide to keep one company's boxes in the warehouse for an extra week just because they didn't pay an extra fee, it arrives in the warehouse it is processed just like every other package. There are still QoS for certain types of packages, a "next day air" versus regular ground shipment, but nothing is delayed because of the carrier's choices.
Binge-On is great this way. The customer can say "throttle ALL my data", or "stop throttling ALL my data". It isn't the phone company getting paid to bless a specific company with different speeds.
But power in Los Angeles is a totally different system from the power in Portland, which are totally different systems from the one in New York City, which are totally different systems from the one in Dublin Ireland.
If the local power grid is powered entirely by fossil fuels, extra energy credits will not replace it with wind or solar or hydro power. Only building a new energy source (expensive) or running cables to another power supply (expensive and also suffers from energy loss over distance) will bring the other power to the system.
If a region is powered by fossil fuels, the payments do not magically make the region powered by renewable energy.
That only works if the damage was on the plastic side of the disc. Quite a few we received had issues on the reflective side, including a few that had human teeth marks on the side, and others with small points that may have been dog teeth or something.
That is in addition to scratches, grooves, and the occasional toothbrush scrub marks on the thick plastic side.
Buying green power isn't really all that green: the renewable power you are consuming is power that is...
By buying renewable energy you increase demand for renewable energy...
Right now it is a mix of both.
In many areas the power grid is only energized by fossil fuels. In other areas the power grid is only energized by hydro power, or by wind power, or by other 'renewable' energy.
You cannot truly increase demand for hydro power in an area without significant amounts of moving water, or increase demand for wind power in an area that seldom has high wind, or increase demand for solar power in an area that isn't suited for it. The initial costs to building whatever infrastructure works for an area is quite high, and the existing infrastructure is not instantly discarded.
Companies can choose to pay a premium that helps subsidize other areas.
In that regard the the grandparent post is correct. They are effectively buying indulgences. They take the energy that is the default -- likely coal or oil power plants -- and pay a little extra money to offset the cost relative to someone who is on a different power system. While it is true they are increasing demand for it somewhere, they aren't actually using renewable energy sources in all their locations. This will probably be the case always, and although we can build more energy sources in some regions, some places cannot. Some places are still completely powered by oil, coal, and similar sources. As the other posts claim, Google and other companies are paying an offset cost rather than truly being powered "100%" by renewable sources.
I get the impression that worn-out DVDs are not being replaced
I ultimately cancelled the service. Not because they didn't have variety --- they did --- but because more and more of the discs were unplayable due to scratches and abuse. Sometimes we needed to return a video two or three times for being unplayable.
The thing about those DVDs is that they cannot be (legitimately) replaced. They had a single press run, maybe two or three runs if they were popular, and that's it.
I have. Both parts are works of fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle became quite famous for his fiction. His fictional story about a bunch of mis-named religious people -- people who had an extermination order for practicing religion in a country that prides itself on freedom of religion -- was an interesting read, but it was clearly fiction just as much as Holmes was fiction.
(Although to be fair, I imagine some people think Sherlock Holmes was a real life character and perhaps may think Doyle's other fiction works are factual, too.)
This law will die or face significant overhaul as more of these stories hit the press. New of grandma charged thousands for supposedly downloading a $10 product for teens. Parents of young children charged thousands for their six-year-old downloading what they thought was a free game or movie.
Few things anger the public more than faceless corporations using the legal system to batter the elderly and the young. These stores will continue to appear --- and rightly belong --- in the news media headlines.
With luck, the courts of public opinion will trigger overhaul or reversal of the law.
Same here in Austin... if a house has access to Google Fiber, it can add $20,000 to the value, from what a real estate agent told me.
Living in Austin, can confirm. Homes around here are around $250K-$400K depending on size. When Google or AT&T come through and install fiber to the home in various neighborhoods, the property value jumps about $20K.
That is on top of the already skyrocketing home costs of over 10% per year. Great time to have already been a property owner, terrible time to buy.
This Judge is saying it's not patentable but he did not say that a specific implementation could not be copyrightable. If someone reverse engineers your software and then re-releases it as his own I'm guessing you can still sue for damages.
Exactly. There are many protections available, and even if one specific protection isn't available to you in one situation does not mean that all other protections are also unavilalbe.
Also, in the full ruling note that the "software patents" they are referring to are basic addition of doing something on a computer. Note that if you still create an original process then a patent is still fully acceptable. If someone were to figure out some amazing new sorting algorithm or amazing new pathfinding algorithm or whatever, the patent on the process is still acceptable; what isn't acceptable is taking something and adding "On a computer..." or "On the Internet..." If you create a process then it exists on a computer and off a computer, anywhere you can do something.
Specifically they write in the ruling that the '610 patent is an "On The Internet" addition, the '142 patent is an "On a Networked Computer System", and the '050 patent is an abstract idea with the expected results (receive identifiers, test for a match, output values responsive to a request). The first two were shot down by the SCOTUS with the Alice ruling, the last one shot down forever ago.
If you make a new process worthy of patent protection --- meaning a process that is non-intuitive, or that gives unexpected results when applied -- those patents are still valid even if you happen to implement them on software, they just need to be applicable as a process generally.
Nice to see that somewhere on this planet there's a judge that understands how to reasonably apply the law when it comes to patents and copyrights.
Agreed. Good job judge.
A copyright on the sound is just fine, which they all acknowledge. An audio recording deserves full protection under copyright law.
But as a trademark, to say "the sound of a telephone is our distinctive mark", that is too broad. Trademarks need to be distinctive.
As their name implies they are distinctive marks indicating the creator or distributor of goods, they are brand indicators. The generic bell ringing is not a distinctive brand by itself. They could trademark a series of tones for your brand (like the NBC chimes) or a jingle or theme (like the Batman theme or the McDonald's "I'm Lovin It"), but not a simple ringing bell sound.
...since firefighters were certain the victim had died immediately after the crash, it did not make sense for rescue workers to take unneeded risks in recovering his body.
They know exactly how to handle the vehicles in regular situations, and had the victim still had a chance of being alive I'm sure they would have rushed in. Most likely the body was severely mangled. When the victim is clearly dead there is no point in rushing in to rescue a corpse.
They know what to do with modern vehicles. I understand the rush to be a first poster rather than actually reading the article.
If you had actually read the article you would have seen:
... since firefighters were certain the victim had died immediately after the crash, it did not make sense for rescue workers to take unneeded risks in recovering his body.
We generally call it "evolution" round these parts.
True enough, but there is absolutely an ethical concern.
An interesting thing about evolution is that usually traits aren't fully removed, not for an extremely long time. You tend to get a range. Maybe a bell curve, maybe a curve skewed to one side or another, but it usually isn't a complete removal. Human adults have an average height, but adults range from under three feet (1 meter) to over seven feet (2.3 meters). Most people tend to be biologically extroverted, but about 1/3 of people are introverted. There is a 'pause to check' instinct in mammals, about 2/3 of humans don't have it but about 1/3 do. (Contrast with deer, about 2/3 have the 'pause to check' instinct but about 1/3 do not.)
Do we adjust genes to make people smarter? How much smarter? What about unexpected side effects of changing the genes? What about social side effects of modified people working next to unmodified people?
There are who-knows-how-many ways there are to tamper with genetics. Some ways have minimal ethical concerns, like removing a predisposition to certain cancers. But others are going to be highly controversial, like radically changing behaviors and physical characteristics.
Indeed. There is also a difference between backup and archive.
RAID = This is running live, and I need a duplicate that is instantly available so I can keep running in case one drive fails. The trick is that if there is an operation that destroys data (e.g. ransomware infection that encrypts your stuff) then you lose all disks. This is why RAID is not backup.
Backup = Just in case the machine dies, or I accidentally delete a bunch of stuff, or a virus hits, I can restore from the backup. This generally follows the 3-2-1 rule: At least three copies, at least two media, at least one off site. Businesses often use D2D2T systems for this.
Archive = I will probably never look at this again, but I absolutely need to keep a copy around for historic or business reasons. Think about services like Iron Mountain or Amazon Glacier. Tape archives that are quite cheap and almost certainly never reviewed again. This is along the lines of "show me the obituaries from a newspaper published 7 May 1957", or similar.
For the original story, it seems like he is looking for an archival solution rather than a backup solution.
I'm in an alleged Google Fiber City and I can't get it!
Lived just outside of Provo's fiber boundaries. When Google announced their acquisition of the network I was thrilled that I might finally get on it. Nope, no fiber for me, still out of range. I requested more information ever few months and was told time and again I'd be notified when it comes to my area... up until I moved late last year.
Moved to Austin, supposedly another Google Fiber city. The areas they've covered in the city are the most dense, and also most expensive, places. If you want to live somewhere affordable there is no Google Fiber. While internet access was one aspect of house-hunting, it was not a primary factor, so no Google Fiber for me yet.
in both cities it seems to be the last mile that is their problem. As expected.
You don't want ISPs, web site operators, etc to be liable for user actions. That opens up a nasty box of unintended consequences.
On the one hand, I agree. While they desperately want to remain in a different class so they can inject ads and extract money, ultimately I believe internet service will be treated as a common carrier.
On the other, while it is near impossible a part of me loves the unrealistic thought of having Comcast and AT&T executives be named in lawsuits as vicarious contributors for every crime that crosses their network. If they are liable for what crosses it, every crime from child porn and murders planned online on one extreme, to minors getting access to porn, or even for people discussing petty crimes like "I'm running late, I'll need to drive a little fast and hope I don't get caught." If they want to have ownership of what crosses their networks then with that comes responsibility and liability.
Plus you don't want the Cox subscribers to have to give the record companies $25M. You didn't think the money would somehow come out of corporate funds, executive bonus' and such?
It's a situation I pray the lawyers are charging exorbitant rates for: May both Cox and RIAA end up bankrupt, and the lawyers buy themselves large private islands in the south pacific for an early retirement.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple internally working on a pot project explains ...
I thought it was bizarre that the article went there as the first option. Nicotine and marijuana. Vaping.
And then, almost as an afterthought: also vaporizers and nebulizers are used all over healthcare, beauty, aesthetics, and other industries.
<sarcasm> I agree with the article's view: they're ignoring the lucrative healthcare markets, the rich business markets, and all the scent-related companies that are looking for ways to expand their multi-billion dollar scent lines. Instead Apple is developing a product for potheads, that's truly where the money is.</sarcasm>
On the PC if I manage to hit that limit -- and currently I'm not at that limit with a large widescreen monitor -- I can resize my window to something narrower.
I certainly won't hit that limit on my phone or tablet, and if I did, I could rotate to portrait mode.
Don't take away my choices. Just because one person happens to prefer a width doesn't mean everyone does. I hate the news sites that give you a fixed panel about five inches across. Measuring horizontally I've got about 25 inches on my screen, and if I want to spread the text across the whole thing, that is MY choice.
"Responsive" doesn't mean take a design and make it work on all devices, it means
Unfortunately that IS what the term currently means among that group. Generally they (wrongly) believe they control all aspects of the web page display, that all devices are equally powerful and can run an unbounded amount of scripting, they often see no difference between a picture of text versus actual text, and don't bother to learn anything about the media they are designing for.
Aside: More than once I've had to convince a web designer that their pictures of text were the biggest reasons things weren't showing up to search engines, they kept claiming the hidden meta tags, text recognition, and image search would handle all that. Frighteningly some were never convinced, even after showing them with Google's own tools how Google interpreted their pages. Some were absolutely convinced that Google reads all text on all images and indexes pages based on image content. They could not fathom how there was a difference between text and fancy-rendered images of text.
Many wrongly assume the web browser displays the same thing on all screens, no matter what. Often they design for a few patterns they think are common, 1024x768 or 1080p, and try to force it on everyone else.
Got a Super HD display showing 7680x4320? Too bad, we'll just upscale the fonts and add some whitespace.
Got an old smartphone with a 480x640 portrait screen? We'll downscale and do an ENORMOUS amount of JavaScript processing on these devices least suited for the processing.
It seems these are the same designers with the first-world problems of their disposable $800 smart phone is more than 18 months old, and their $2000 macbook is more than three years old and ready for replacement.
Its expensive to create 3 different interfaces
Then don't. That is foolish yet is common among people who wrongly believe they have control over how a web page looks.
One premise of the markup language was that all rendering would be agnostic of the display. It was not meant to be, and should not be treated as, a pixel-perfect display.
Yet that is exactly what most "responsive" systems are trying to do. Enormous amounts of calculations to figure out how to precisely organize the display, doing the most processing on the mobile devices least capable of doing it.
Web designers need to let go of their fascination with precisely scripted layouts. Let the browse handle it. If the browser is a 480x640 phone or a 7680x4320 ultra high density monitor, designers should allow the web browser to do what it was designed for rather than going through enormous hurdles to force it to the web designer's vision -- which is usually limited to a 1024x768 or 1280x720 design.
The DOJ is butt-hurt. But too bad. The US can't just decide that their warrants are valid EVERYWHERE ... If there is anything fishy, they won't go that route
The problem -- which the DOJ and other parties absolutely know -- is that they are using a warrant.
You say they won't go that route if there is anything fishy, but the fact that they are attempting to use a warrant is extremely fishy.
There is an enormous difference between a warrant which they are using, and a subpoena that they would be trying to do if the one person in the case was all they wanted.
With a subpoena the company must produce information. They must produce the information no matter where it is held, and they must produce it as binding evidence. If they really want to capture the one person, a subpoena to provide all the information about the request is a simple matter. The government gets copies of all the documents they are demanding, particularly all the business records related to the subscriber. Since the DOJ is claiming they are trying to catch a subscriber and the people they're email, these subpoenas are more than enough.
With a warrant to collect a server, they get the entire physical server. And the government gets to make a copy of the server, and search it for whatever they think is relevant to the information. A warrant means they can take all the objects so they can prevent evidence from being destroyed. They can also collect for more information from the customer about the contents of the communications.
The DOJ could take measures to collect the information using tools other than a warrant that provide all the information and require Microsoft to keep it confidential. Instead of use those, they continue to demand a warrant to seize the entire server.
Read harder. I didn't say "browsers". I said "serving a page to a client". The world didn't begin with browsers. The web didn't start the internet. The internet wasn't the first network.
In 1994 Bill Gates gave a speech at a computer conference in San Francisco on the concept of a Client Server System.
And he was late to the party with it. MIT had been doing it for 11 years at that point. They had a project that muddied the definitions at the time; the terminal in front of the user was converted to a server and the machines doing the work became the client. The work eventually branched into the X Window System, which anyone who uses Linux knows well.
But even that wasn't the original. Dumb terminals have been around since the beginning. Code trying to make the client into the server has been around since the mid 1970s. The pendulum has been swinging for ages. "Get this stuff off the mainframe and out to the terminals." "Consolidate it back from the terminals and back on the mainframe." "Send this out on the web browser and let the browser do the processing." "Web 2.0 lets us send it all back to the server and get data updates live." "New Responsive pages move the work out to the individual freeing up the servers."
Like the people above, it's a pendulum that we've watched swing back and forth, over and over, for decades. They come with similar problems that we've seen time and time again.
but this is actually /. :-)
Doh! Of course, this is the green site. These days I spend more time over there than over here, so I had slipped over in my head.
But I wouldn't mind a link to some of his threads so I can read what he's written.
Easily done. Like most people the comments are generally replies to daily news, but sometimes he makes news by complaining about his life as a depressed rich person.
If I hit the lottery and had enough money where I'd never need to work again, I'd leave work so fast I'd leave skid marks out the door!! ... I work for one and ONLY ONE reason, to make money to support the style of life I enjoy when not working. ... I have lots of hobbies....I'd like to spend time traveling, doing photography, chasing women, etc. ... I just don't get it why anyone would still work if they didn't have to. ... I have no love for my work or vocation.
There are plenty of reasons to continue working.
Let's say you win $5M. After taxes you get about $2.5M. Assuming you're in your 30's that gives you 50K per year, except that when you account for inflation you are probably closer to 30K or 20K per year when you get old. Which will suck. So even if you get lucky and have an enormous windfall, you will want to spend it slowly. Maybe pay off your current house or get a slight upgrade, and perhaps step up to a 2017 model year car. You'll want to spend it slow enough that when you reach old age you can still pay for everything. Financial planning is important.
As for reasons to continue working, you get social aspects, there are benefits like insurance benefits in countries that have private insurance (an area where USA sucks), there is a constant mental challenge. The work environment is not only about income. There are many mental / psychological / social benefits as well.
I also know several people who became rich through various means. None of them work full time or put in overtime, they end up working 20 to 30 hours each week, and they take frequent extended vacations, but they are still working. You mention photography. If that is your true passion in life then it might become your new part-time job.
If you're looking for a notable example of this, Minecraft's Notch, Markus Persson, wrote that after becoming a multi-billionaire selling Minecraft his life became a living hell. His social life was destroyed because money effected everything, he didn't have his work or his life passion, he spends time waiting for his friends (who have jobs and families) to have time, and he occasionally writes here on reddit about his struggles to keep his life interesting or feeling motivated to keep his life filled with interesting things.
Personally, if somehow my bank account had 9 or 10 figures I know I would still keep my job, but instead of a 40 hour work week it would probably become a MWF 10-3 kind of job. Enough that I could keep my sanity and my social benefits, and enough it would still make me emotionally value my free time.
"Stream Game of Thrones now without using your data, exclusively on AT&T" is something that carriers and content providers really want to do.
Close. They want the MONEY that comes with EXCLUSIVITY.
Somebody is paying for that. The big companies want it to be HBO or Showtime or Disney or whoever, spending tons of money to other big companies so the big companies can promote their big ideas.
The problem is that everybody else is excluded. Want to be in the Free Data system? Pay up. This is completely against the concept of net neutrality where all content is treated as equal content.
Prioritization is a similar issue. It is true that networks need to prioritize some types of data over other types of data. Phone calls shouldn't be buffered behind a large file transfer, so a limited degree of QoS needs to take place. But categorizing one provider over another provider is unfair. Having HBO streaming arrive at a higher QoS priority and Netflix streaming appear dead last in the QoS where it is constantly buffering and suffering lost packets because Netflix refused to pay up, that is unfair to customers.
If I pay for data it should not matter to the phone company what data I get. They should be treated as common carriers. If I want to stream data from a premium channel, or from youtube, or from a private website, or from a site the phone company thinks is undesirable, it should not matter at all. Customer pays to stream data at a specific speed, then the data should be processed at that speed. Just like common carriers of the postal service or parcel companies, if the customer pays to transfer something then it gets transferred, they don't decide to keep one company's boxes in the warehouse for an extra week just because they didn't pay an extra fee, it arrives in the warehouse it is processed just like every other package. There are still QoS for certain types of packages, a "next day air" versus regular ground shipment, but nothing is delayed because of the carrier's choices.
Binge-On is great this way. The customer can say "throttle ALL my data", or "stop throttling ALL my data". It isn't the phone company getting paid to bless a specific company with different speeds.
Once electricity is in the grid, it is fungible.
Within a local network, yes.
But power in Los Angeles is a totally different system from the power in Portland, which are totally different systems from the one in New York City, which are totally different systems from the one in Dublin Ireland.
If the local power grid is powered entirely by fossil fuels, extra energy credits will not replace it with wind or solar or hydro power. Only building a new energy source (expensive) or running cables to another power supply (expensive and also suffers from energy loss over distance) will bring the other power to the system.
If a region is powered by fossil fuels, the payments do not magically make the region powered by renewable energy.
That only works if the damage was on the plastic side of the disc. Quite a few we received had issues on the reflective side, including a few that had human teeth marks on the side, and others with small points that may have been dog teeth or something.
That is in addition to scratches, grooves, and the occasional toothbrush scrub marks on the thick plastic side.
Buying green power isn't really all that green: the renewable power you are consuming is power that is ...
By buying renewable energy you increase demand for renewable energy...
Right now it is a mix of both.
In many areas the power grid is only energized by fossil fuels. In other areas the power grid is only energized by hydro power, or by wind power, or by other 'renewable' energy.
You cannot truly increase demand for hydro power in an area without significant amounts of moving water, or increase demand for wind power in an area that seldom has high wind, or increase demand for solar power in an area that isn't suited for it. The initial costs to building whatever infrastructure works for an area is quite high, and the existing infrastructure is not instantly discarded.
Companies can choose to pay a premium that helps subsidize other areas.
In that regard the the grandparent post is correct. They are effectively buying indulgences. They take the energy that is the default -- likely coal or oil power plants -- and pay a little extra money to offset the cost relative to someone who is on a different power system. While it is true they are increasing demand for it somewhere, they aren't actually using renewable energy sources in all their locations. This will probably be the case always, and although we can build more energy sources in some regions, some places cannot. Some places are still completely powered by oil, coal, and similar sources. As the other posts claim, Google and other companies are paying an offset cost rather than truly being powered "100%" by renewable sources.
I get the impression that worn-out DVDs are not being replaced
I ultimately cancelled the service. Not because they didn't have variety --- they did --- but because more and more of the discs were unplayable due to scratches and abuse. Sometimes we needed to return a video two or three times for being unplayable.
The thing about those DVDs is that they cannot be (legitimately) replaced. They had a single press run, maybe two or three runs if they were popular, and that's it.
Read "A Study in Scarlet".
I have. Both parts are works of fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle became quite famous for his fiction. His fictional story about a bunch of mis-named religious people -- people who had an extermination order for practicing religion in a country that prides itself on freedom of religion -- was an interesting read, but it was clearly fiction just as much as Holmes was fiction.
(Although to be fair, I imagine some people think Sherlock Holmes was a real life character and perhaps may think Doyle's other fiction works are factual, too.)
This law will die or face significant overhaul as more of these stories hit the press. New of grandma charged thousands for supposedly downloading a $10 product for teens. Parents of young children charged thousands for their six-year-old downloading what they thought was a free game or movie.
Few things anger the public more than faceless corporations using the legal system to batter the elderly and the young. These stores will continue to appear --- and rightly belong --- in the news media headlines.
With luck, the courts of public opinion will trigger overhaul or reversal of the law.
Same here in Austin... if a house has access to Google Fiber, it can add $20,000 to the value, from what a real estate agent told me.
Living in Austin, can confirm. Homes around here are around $250K-$400K depending on size. When Google or AT&T come through and install fiber to the home in various neighborhoods, the property value jumps about $20K.
That is on top of the already skyrocketing home costs of over 10% per year. Great time to have already been a property owner, terrible time to buy.
This Judge is saying it's not patentable but he did not say that a specific implementation could not be copyrightable. If someone reverse engineers your software and then re-releases it as his own I'm guessing you can still sue for damages.
Exactly. There are many protections available, and even if one specific protection isn't available to you in one situation does not mean that all other protections are also unavilalbe.
Also, in the full ruling note that the "software patents" they are referring to are basic addition of doing something on a computer. Note that if you still create an original process then a patent is still fully acceptable. If someone were to figure out some amazing new sorting algorithm or amazing new pathfinding algorithm or whatever, the patent on the process is still acceptable; what isn't acceptable is taking something and adding "On a computer..." or "On the Internet..." If you create a process then it exists on a computer and off a computer, anywhere you can do something.
Specifically they write in the ruling that the '610 patent is an "On The Internet" addition, the '142 patent is an "On a Networked Computer System", and the '050 patent is an abstract idea with the expected results (receive identifiers, test for a match, output values responsive to a request). The first two were shot down by the SCOTUS with the Alice ruling, the last one shot down forever ago.
If you make a new process worthy of patent protection --- meaning a process that is non-intuitive, or that gives unexpected results when applied -- those patents are still valid even if you happen to implement them on software, they just need to be applicable as a process generally.
Nice to see that somewhere on this planet there's a judge that understands how to reasonably apply the law when it comes to patents and copyrights.
Agreed. Good job judge.
A copyright on the sound is just fine, which they all acknowledge. An audio recording deserves full protection under copyright law.
But as a trademark, to say "the sound of a telephone is our distinctive mark", that is too broad. Trademarks need to be distinctive.
As their name implies they are distinctive marks indicating the creator or distributor of goods, they are brand indicators. The generic bell ringing is not a distinctive brand by itself. They could trademark a series of tones for your brand (like the NBC chimes) or a jingle or theme (like the Batman theme or the McDonald's "I'm Lovin It"), but not a simple ringing bell sound.
From the article:
They know exactly how to handle the vehicles in regular situations, and had the victim still had a chance of being alive I'm sure they would have rushed in. Most likely the body was severely mangled. When the victim is clearly dead there is no point in rushing in to rescue a corpse.
They know what to do with modern vehicles. I understand the rush to be a first poster rather than actually reading the article.
If you had actually read the article you would have seen:
We generally call it "evolution" round these parts.
True enough, but there is absolutely an ethical concern.
An interesting thing about evolution is that usually traits aren't fully removed, not for an extremely long time. You tend to get a range. Maybe a bell curve, maybe a curve skewed to one side or another, but it usually isn't a complete removal. Human adults have an average height, but adults range from under three feet (1 meter) to over seven feet (2.3 meters). Most people tend to be biologically extroverted, but about 1/3 of people are introverted. There is a 'pause to check' instinct in mammals, about 2/3 of humans don't have it but about 1/3 do. (Contrast with deer, about 2/3 have the 'pause to check' instinct but about 1/3 do not.)
Do we adjust genes to make people smarter? How much smarter? What about unexpected side effects of changing the genes? What about social side effects of modified people working next to unmodified people?
There are who-knows-how-many ways there are to tamper with genetics. Some ways have minimal ethical concerns, like removing a predisposition to certain cancers. But others are going to be highly controversial, like radically changing behaviors and physical characteristics.
Companies Are making more money With Fewer employees.
What did i win?
You won the layoff, your CEO won a $15M bonus. Congratulations.
Say with with me: "RAID is not backup!"
Indeed. There is also a difference between backup and archive.
RAID = This is running live, and I need a duplicate that is instantly available so I can keep running in case one drive fails. The trick is that if there is an operation that destroys data (e.g. ransomware infection that encrypts your stuff) then you lose all disks. This is why RAID is not backup.
Backup = Just in case the machine dies, or I accidentally delete a bunch of stuff, or a virus hits, I can restore from the backup. This generally follows the 3-2-1 rule: At least three copies, at least two media, at least one off site. Businesses often use D2D2T systems for this.
Archive = I will probably never look at this again, but I absolutely need to keep a copy around for historic or business reasons. Think about services like Iron Mountain or Amazon Glacier. Tape archives that are quite cheap and almost certainly never reviewed again. This is along the lines of "show me the obituaries from a newspaper published 7 May 1957", or similar.
For the original story, it seems like he is looking for an archival solution rather than a backup solution.
I'm in an alleged Google Fiber City and I can't get it!
Lived just outside of Provo's fiber boundaries. When Google announced their acquisition of the network I was thrilled that I might finally get on it. Nope, no fiber for me, still out of range. I requested more information ever few months and was told time and again I'd be notified when it comes to my area ... up until I moved late last year.
Moved to Austin, supposedly another Google Fiber city. The areas they've covered in the city are the most dense, and also most expensive, places. If you want to live somewhere affordable there is no Google Fiber. While internet access was one aspect of house-hunting, it was not a primary factor, so no Google Fiber for me yet.
in both cities it seems to be the last mile that is their problem. As expected.
You don't want ISPs, web site operators, etc to be liable for user actions. That opens up a nasty box of unintended consequences.
On the one hand, I agree. While they desperately want to remain in a different class so they can inject ads and extract money, ultimately I believe internet service will be treated as a common carrier. On the other, while it is near impossible a part of me loves the unrealistic thought of having Comcast and AT&T executives be named in lawsuits as vicarious contributors for every crime that crosses their network. If they are liable for what crosses it, every crime from child porn and murders planned online on one extreme, to minors getting access to porn, or even for people discussing petty crimes like "I'm running late, I'll need to drive a little fast and hope I don't get caught." If they want to have ownership of what crosses their networks then with that comes responsibility and liability.
Plus you don't want the Cox subscribers to have to give the record companies $25M. You didn't think the money would somehow come out of corporate funds, executive bonus' and such?
It's a situation I pray the lawyers are charging exorbitant rates for: May both Cox and RIAA end up bankrupt, and the lawyers buy themselves large private islands in the south pacific for an early retirement.