(1) Vendors do not want to document their internals and interfaces, so you can only use their proprietary software.
(2) Vendors would prefer you use their tools, which in turn use their proprietary description file formats for the design files. This increases the expense of switching to another vendor for fungible embedded controllers. A good examples of these are the ECs for laptops available from TI, Western Digital, and FTDI, in particular, those used for battery and power management and 8051 emulation for matrix keyboard decoding.
It's possible to reverse engineer it, but when you are trying to get a product out the door, you care more about time to market than you care about whether or not the tools are available for free. A good vendor example in this category is Atmel. If you want to reverse engineer things so that you can use your Dediprog to program a wide range of microcontrollers, feel free to buy a wide range of microcontrollers, a wide range of SDK softwaare, and have at it.
NB: If you are trying to do this for Samsung ECs, they tend to use ECs that have a cryptographic handshake, and require encrypted load payloads. For things where you can program them without soldering extra wires on them to get to the programming UART, you can pretty much operate in the clear... unless of course the EC does a validity check on the other WCS's, for example a cryptographic checksum of the BIOS using a secret key known to the proprietary BIOS vendor and the EC, e.g. Insyde H2O BIOS used by some motherboard vendors -- probably also reverse engineerable (EE's are notoriously bad at writing robust security code) at great expense.
awk != gawk. the one true awk is maintained by bwk. and likely has seen very few updates. it is rock solid
Actually Apple sent a number of patched back to the one true awk to pass UNIX conformance testing by The Open Group, and sent those chnages back to bwk.
So where does that lead us to? A device which watches us all, which sends much of that data to central services provided by Google, where that data will most likely be stored and can most likely be accessed by law enforcement agencies.
This is often repeated, but realize that it can't record all the time. There's not enough CPU power, storage, or always-on network connectivity. This was an intentional decision to get it into the form factor at the right price point. Typically it's for still pictures and streaming really tiny pictures over Google Talk. If your strip club or movie theatre has WiFi in it and allows you to access in the venue, you might end up streaming postage stamps to people, at best.
Plus it will be pretty obvious when you take pictures, since you have to touch it active and say "Glass, take picture". The bouncer will likely throw you out at that point.
It basically doesn't do any more that your ordinary cell phone, and people pretend to text with those while filiming, and they have better net connectivity and local storage, even with no WiFi access.
2) The project you're on may not be GPL. Thanks for submitting stuff with an incompatible license I can't absorb. Even if you said no restrictions, if you put GPL on it, I'm now SOL and have a god-awful license tracking nightmare. Thanks for nothing. Please resend with "public domain" and a signature.
Technically, it's not legally possible to both put something in the public domain and disclaim warranties and fitness. The closes you can come to covering your ass and making it as public domain as possible is a two clause BSD license, because otherwise if some idiot uses it in a life support system or other critical system, it's your ass, and your house, and your car, and your future earnings on the line if things go wrong and theres no disclaimer.
If there were a specific hold harmless clause in Federal law for things you place in the public domain, we would have a lot more public domain code.
At current tax rates, that 1% in your scenario might pay so much in taxes that the 99% would still have more money then the status quo in post-tax and transfer terms.
"Might" and "if" are the most important words in your post. We also might have world peaces next year, but I'm not holding my breath. With capital gains rates capped at 15%, the average billionaire pays a lower marginal tax rate than I do. That does not bode well for your hypothesis.
That's incorrect. You are quoting the Long Term Capital Gains Federal Rate and ignoring the state rate, and that fact that both the fed and the state will go after AMT and tax as ordinary income as a short term capitol gain.
So all the FaceBook millionaires and billionaires Pay about 50% on their realized stock value at IPO time when they effectively realized the gain. In addition, FaceBook IPO'ed at $38 and immediately dropped to $25, and the employee lockup period was long enough that in order to pay the taxes, it was required to borrow against future value of the stock.
So basically they are paying $19/share in tax on something that's currently only worth $25/share -- effectively a 76% tax rate.
I understand why there are lockup periods, but you need to understand why lockup periods+ AMT is evil.
And yes, you can get out of the state portion of that if you realized the income when you were working in Nevada, Washington, Texas, or some other state with no state income tax, but realize also that RSUs, which have replaced ISOs, mean you realize the value, at grant time and you can be damned sure if you were working in California at the time of the grant, California is going to come after you for their share of the time amortized appreciation in value that you "realized" before moving to one of those states.
At least in the tech fields (News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters ring a bell?), most of the people getting these options don't start out rich in the first place, so these are usurious tax rates for these people.
It's no wonder Eduardo Saverin did his citizenship ploy; it saved him a heck of a lot more than the $100M that was being widely reported at the time, it was closer to $1.5B - that's 3 times what Larry Ellison paid for Lanai, the 6th larges Hawaiian island.
The ad on the page has consistently Life Technologies GeneArt Strings DNA fragments "Synthetic Genes Ready to Clone—Affordable for Every Lab".
There is a bit of vested interest for that particular Journal to publish papers promoting genetic engineering:
It doesn't hurt that there is going to be a genetic engineering conference this June, so you would also want to prime the pump to fill up the conference hall. Nothing like a good controversy to sell tickets.
Ah, you fit the profile of a google glass user perfectly... No social conscience.
I have a social conscience. I just don't ascribe stupid spying motives to Google Glass because I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic who is too mundane to figure out a profit model for the things that doesn't involve spying. Just because you can't see how to make money out of the things without spying doesn't mean that Google can't either.
So I don't have to shut up and put up with it after all.
I think we will happily allow you to protest our wearing of Google Glass devices, so long as you do it in the Free Speech Zone we've set up across town in that fenced in area under the overpass. You will also find there plenty of Tea Party folks and Occupy Wall street folks there to keep you company whom we identify as "right wing" or "left wing" to keep them from getting together and ending up effective political machines, when we all know that both of them have the same "we are pissed at the people currently in power" grievance.
But feel free to go all "Dennis Leary in Demolition Man" about people who can afford toys you can't afford or simply don't want.
It also got more than a 2/3 majority, so it's not clear a veto would even matter. Though it's possible that some of the "yes" Dem votes here would change to "no" if Obama vetoed it, to avoid overriding a president from their party.
In his two terms as president, Obama has vetoed bills presented to him exactly twice. Assuming he actually vetoes the thing, the requirement fter it being returned to the originating house of Congress requires a re-vote with a 2/3 majority of both houses. This rarely happens, and typically only has happened for 4% of vetoes. Note that he hasn't use a pocket veto for either instance in the past. I'm pretty positive that he hasn't had opportunity to pocket veto for bills he wants to make "go away", since they'd have to be presented less than 10 days prior to a congressional adjournment in order to effectively kill the bill.
You end up losing mail and who is it for someone else to filter what I can and can't see. There is a delete button for a reason. Use it.
Unless you are actually concerned that other people won't see your SPAM, then your concern that you won't see someone else's email because it was sent from a SPAMmy provider is adequately addressed by your choice of ISP.
So pick an ISP who doesn't filter; I'd suggest Network Solutions, since they are now charging extra for SPAM filtering because it's a valuable commodity. Don't pay the extra, and you can hit delete all you want.
I think there's a more interesting issue here... Why did Facebook, probably the world's largest harvester of user information after Google, launch their new app for only few selected devices? Perhaps (conspiracy theory ahead) they wanted to create a hype by releasing the app for only those few selected devices, but allow easy port for people with the proper knowledge?
It is much more highly likely that they wanted to limit distribution to the devices they had tested on, since there are two gates on the specific version of Android that a given device runs, and they had not ensured compatibility with all versions:
Gate #1: The tree from which the frozen cut of the Android sources was derived at the time that the version was frozen for productization by the device manufacturer. For some reason, people still want to erroneously believe that Android comes from Google as a finished, productized version (it doesn't), and that it takes little effort to port vendor productization changes forward to new versions of Android (it doesn't), or that the vendors submit their productization changes back to mainline Android (some do, dome don't), or when vendors do submit productization changes back, Google incorporates them into the Android repo (they generally don't).
Gate #2: The carrier generally will not distribute an Android update for the primary reason that it would permit you to ride out your two year contract with up to date features, and they want to use the lack of up to date features to get you to opt for a new device every 18 months on a 24 month contract, which in turn locks you back to the carrier until the next 18 months have passed. The secondary reason for not doing it is that the device might not have enough capability to run the new version. The tertiary reason is that it would require expensive testing which would net them zero return on investment.
Basically this means that you have to test on every device before you let the app run on it, or you're going to look like you can't program when it fails on some device you haven't tested on.
I think one of the reasons Google bought Motorola Mobility was to erase reason #1; this is consistent with them putting the Android development under the same VP as the ChromeOS development, since it doesn't have these issues, but I believe it will be an uphill (with the hill being almost vertical) battle, if that was the intended consequence of the move.
The only way to erase #2 is to force the issue as part of the contract whereby Android is supplied to the devices, as a rider on the carrier contracts. This is an uphill battle for most carriers, both for the reasons already enumerated in #2, and the fact that it requires them to realize the revenue from the subsidy of the device at a different time than they currently do, as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley. They have to pick a different option under the FAS (Federal Accounting Standard).
Remember when Apple rolled out the 802.11n patch to iPhones, but there was a charge for iPods and iPads without a cellular modem? This was because they were using the same FAS rule that the carriers used on subsidized devices, which meant that they realized their profit on the subsidy over time, even thought it was paid up front. By doing this, they were able to add new device capability to carrier-connected devices because that didn't violate SOx, but would have been in violation of SOx if they had rolled the same capability out to non carrier-connected devices without charge.
It will be difficult to cause the carrier to change their FAS practices; the typical reaction in this case, to avoid having to do the same thing for all devices, is to create a separate company as a wholly owned subsidiary to operate under the separate FAS rules. AT&T has one of these, which they use to give false ANI information for telemarketers for plausible deniability by shunting them into a number block that is supposedly "reserved" by the subsidiary. The other carriers don't h
Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.
They also do not build backhaul capacity. The local cable companies do not offer symmetric speeds, since their networks are predominantly built for you to consume, not produce content, and they tend to cap production of packets. That's partly to prevent peer-to-peer, but it's more commonly because the backhaul capacity is low enough that it's only capable of sustaining 1.5 times the data rate for the ACK packets for the high end download rate.
Add to this that they don't know how to do QOS guarantees on multiple streams on the same segment using TCP window scaling to aboit filling up the upstream buffers, and that Google is actually building its own switching equipment for itself, and you have a significant technology gap when it comes to local cable operators even being able to buy comparable equipment from anyone: it's just not sold commercially by anyone, period.
I imagine Google is getting some economy of scale and some nifty equipment testing out of these deals as well, which will only improve things, not only for Google Fiber, but also for Google's data centers and their private international Internet backbone that they run.
What industry offers consumers a perfect combination of freedom of choice and customer service?
Pretty much any that doesn't involve government-enforced monopolies. Just imagine how much worse buying gasoline would be if certain companies purchased rights to supply all gasoline to individual cities, locking out competition.
You mean like Chevron purchased the right to refine the gas used in California by getting reformulation requirements put in place to prevent competition by out of state refineries, while at the same time getting MTBE to be required for environmental reasons having to do with cars manufactured prior to 1981 lacking Oxygen sensors?
Yup, that MTBE has sure been great for the environment... the natural monopoly on gas refining in California falling in Chevron's lap likely had nothing at all to do with the decision.
If you can buy the environmental laws so well that you actually REQUIRE something like MTBE be put into the environment, and you're the only one who supplies the product, how is that different from any other government-enforced monopoly?
Instead, each person has a desk with low dividers, and people can grab conference rooms as needed â" much like the headquarters of a small tech company.
I've seen attempts at that. It quickly turns into whomever has the highest status permanently booking a conference room. In effect, turning it into their own office.
I'd recommend focusing on teaching science and skip the gimmicks.
This is how the Google workplace is arranged, and I have zero doubt that this was heavily influenced by that. The "Open Plan" at Google was in turn influenced by Intel's Andy Grove, a hero of the Google executives.
Having spent some time teaching, and having worked at Google, I'd say that this is, as another poster called it, a gimmick.
The conference rooms tend to be booked for project meetings, which they will likely not have there, and interviews, which they will also likely not have there, and tend to have a smaller number than you'd like because of tearing down space to make labs and/or more room for new hires due to space pressure, which they don't have there. The conference rooms are more likely to also be 2-4 people sized, where you can jam in 4-5 people if you have to, rather than class-sized things.
The Patent Officer is clearly their way of saying "we expect great things of you, don't disappoint us", but is unlikely to have much work, as things do not go to a patent officer unless the patent has been proposed, approved, filed, and then after that, it goes to them -- this is unlikely to happen unless the persons there get patentable ideas in the first six to nine months. Unless, it occurs to me, that the Patent Officer is there as a benefit to the faculty?
The cross-disciplinary work isn't going to pan out, either, unless they only hire faculty who are already cross-disciplinary, since teaching is easier and more effective when you teach what you know. It's unlikely they are going to be able to hire James Burke to work in a cubicle farm, for example.
Large amounts of cash seem like a pretty legitimate use for a secret compartment in a car, in many neighborhoods throughout the US.
"Seem" [sic] like? For what purpose? What legitimate business has to move that amount of cash secretly rather than using checks, money orders, electronic transactions, or making (much) smaller deposits more regularly? What legitimate business has to do so on a regular enough basis that it's worth having a secret compartment installed rather than calling in an armored car company?
Private couriers in New York's diamond district. Gambling winnings at a casino or other legitimate venue; in the SF Bay area, there are plenty of high stakes poker games. Building contractors. Anyone with a large enough payroll in a cash only business, such as someone who owns multiple restaurants.
I've also seen large sums of cash carried by private couriers in order to encourage a low-ball price: "We can get financing for the higher asking price for the building, and that will take several weeks, or I can give you a smaller amount of cash now". I've personally seen $80,000 used this way to knock $30,000 off the price of a large mobile home.
I've seen $23,000 cash used in the heyday of Silicon Valley to buy out a lot of $50,000 worth of Aeron chairs and SteelCase cubicles that the seller was asking $35,000 for, if financed.
I've personally used an amount > $10,000, before such transactions were deemed questionable, to get a dealer to knock $4,000 off the price of a $16,000 sticker car. I could have talked him down by $2,000 without the cash, but it was a big club, since he was nearing the end of his fiscal year and would have to pay property taxes on unsold merchandise, as well as paying a reduced flooring penalty (this is where you carry inventory over the end of the fiscal year, and as a result, the manufacturer gives them fewer cars to sell next year).
Not every large cash movement is automatically a drug deal.
You don't combat drug (ab)use by prohibition, you use education.
Doesn't this presume that, once educated, people will no longer engage in the activity?
I don't think education is the panacea you seem to believe it is. Even if all educable people were completely rational, not every person is educable. I don't believe either of those preconditions are true, or there would be no literate cigarette smokers.
In the US there are no left wing parties. As an example, "socialist" can be used as an insult there. From the outside, all US politicians are right wing (meaning that they are not for wealth redistribution or any other left wing concept). It's not that hard to change from strongly conservative to not that strongly conservative.
I think you mean there are no really viable ones, due in large part to common sense. Or call it "lack of traction" if you want to be more polite, or call it "ineffective leadership" if you don't. To me that last one is a direct appear to common sense to not support someone who is ineffective at their job.
It was/is GOOD that phone/cable co's built out their networks to provide service to *everyone*. That is in the 'National Good'.
(1) If by "everyone", you mean "not actually everyone". There are plenty of rural areas in the US where you can't get cable TV because it's just not economical for them to run the cables to your house. If you happen to not have too many tall trees around you can typically get Dish Network Satellite services, but that certainly doesn't get you broadband Internet service.
(2) One of the dirty little secrets about cable TV is that most of the set top boxes are barely inside the limit for the RF interference they generate. But wait, there's more? If you have a high urban density, it's not unheard of to have such high noise levels that you can't get over the air television, and your only choice for television programming turns out to be cable or Dish as a workaround to the high RF noise floor. This is not an accident.
Also, it doesn't have to be a rural area; I live 50 feet too far from the LATE smack in the middle of Silicon Valley to get high speed DSL; because if they guarantee me a higher data rate at that distance, they could (but probably would not) come in in violation of the tariff. So I'm either stuck on a baseband Cable connection with a bunch of Oracle engineers who would _clearly_ never hack your cable modem, or 4G wireless (luckily there's an unlimited service in the area right now, but I don't expect that to last).
So for some rather piss poor definition of things, the infrastructure is "built out".
Almost all the government in the 31 Sanctuary Cities in the U.S. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city -- which are called that because they do not enforce federal immigration laws not cooperate in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, some going as far as to make it illegal for an officer to check immigration status, or release prisoners without checking their status, is Democratic. This includes the Mayors of Salt Lake City, Utah, and both El Paso and Houston in Texas.
Currently, the Democrats benefit from the voter fraud, nominally through a misapplication of the 1973 Voting Rights Act, predominantly in Florida, but one in eight voting registrations are flawed and/or illegal , while the Republicans benefit from the below market labor costs, so neither party actually wants the practice of illegal immigration stopped. Here is the NY Times article on it from the Pew Center for the States: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/us/politics/us-voter-registration-rolls-are-in-disarray-pew-report-finds.html?_r=0
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Yes, but is she more likely to win than Miss Australia?
Last time I checked, the UK was part of Europe.
I also noticed that those cameras did not stop the subway bombing.
But no mod points.
There are two reasons for it:
(1) Vendors do not want to document their internals and interfaces, so you can only use their proprietary software.
(2) Vendors would prefer you use their tools, which in turn use their proprietary description file formats for the design files. This increases the expense of switching to another vendor for fungible embedded controllers. A good examples of these are the ECs for laptops available from TI, Western Digital, and FTDI, in particular, those used for battery and power management and 8051 emulation for matrix keyboard decoding.
It's possible to reverse engineer it, but when you are trying to get a product out the door, you care more about time to market than you care about whether or not the tools are available for free. A good vendor example in this category is Atmel. If you want to reverse engineer things so that you can use your Dediprog to program a wide range of microcontrollers, feel free to buy a wide range of microcontrollers, a wide range of SDK softwaare, and have at it.
NB: If you are trying to do this for Samsung ECs, they tend to use ECs that have a cryptographic handshake, and require encrypted load payloads. For things where you can program them without soldering extra wires on them to get to the programming UART, you can pretty much operate in the clear... unless of course the EC does a validity check on the other WCS's, for example a cryptographic checksum of the BIOS using a secret key known to the proprietary BIOS vendor and the EC, e.g. Insyde H2O BIOS used by some motherboard vendors -- probably also reverse engineerable (EE's are notoriously bad at writing robust security code) at great expense.
awk != gawk. the one true awk is maintained by bwk.
and likely has seen very few updates. it is rock solid
Actually Apple sent a number of patched back to the one true awk to pass UNIX conformance testing by The Open Group, and sent those chnages back to bwk.
Sources are here: http://opensource.apple.com/source/awk/awk-18/
So where does that lead us to? A device which watches us all, which sends much of that data to central services provided by Google, where that data will most likely be stored and can most likely be accessed by law enforcement agencies.
This is often repeated, but realize that it can't record all the time. There's not enough CPU power, storage, or always-on network connectivity. This was an intentional decision to get it into the form factor at the right price point. Typically it's for still pictures and streaming really tiny pictures over Google Talk. If your strip club or movie theatre has WiFi in it and allows you to access in the venue, you might end up streaming postage stamps to people, at best.
Plus it will be pretty obvious when you take pictures, since you have to touch it active and say "Glass, take picture". The bouncer will likely throw you out at that point.
It basically doesn't do any more that your ordinary cell phone, and people pretend to text with those while filiming, and they have better net connectivity and local storage, even with no WiFi access.
2) The project you're on may not be GPL. Thanks for submitting stuff with an incompatible license I can't absorb. Even if you said no restrictions, if you put GPL on it, I'm now SOL and have a god-awful license tracking nightmare. Thanks for nothing. Please resend with "public domain" and a signature.
Technically, it's not legally possible to both put something in the public domain and disclaim warranties and fitness. The closes you can come to covering your ass and making it as public domain as possible is a two clause BSD license, because otherwise if some idiot uses it in a life support system or other critical system, it's your ass, and your house, and your car, and your future earnings on the line if things go wrong and theres no disclaimer.
If there were a specific hold harmless clause in Federal law for things you place in the public domain, we would have a lot more public domain code.
At current tax rates, that 1% in your scenario might pay so much in taxes that the 99% would still have more money then the status quo in post-tax and transfer terms.
"Might" and "if" are the most important words in your post. We also might have world peaces next year, but I'm not holding my breath. With capital gains rates capped at 15%, the average billionaire pays a lower marginal tax rate than I do. That does not bode well for your hypothesis.
That's incorrect. You are quoting the Long Term Capital Gains Federal Rate and ignoring the state rate, and that fact that both the fed and the state will go after AMT and tax as ordinary income as a short term capitol gain.
So all the FaceBook millionaires and billionaires Pay about 50% on their realized stock value at IPO time when they effectively realized the gain. In addition, FaceBook IPO'ed at $38 and immediately dropped to $25, and the employee lockup period was long enough that in order to pay the taxes, it was required to borrow against future value of the stock.
So basically they are paying $19/share in tax on something that's currently only worth $25/share -- effectively a 76% tax rate.
I understand why there are lockup periods, but you need to understand why lockup periods+ AMT is evil.
And yes, you can get out of the state portion of that if you realized the income when you were working in Nevada, Washington, Texas, or some other state with no state income tax, but realize also that RSUs, which have replaced ISOs, mean you realize the value, at grant time and you can be damned sure if you were working in California at the time of the grant, California is going to come after you for their share of the time amortized appreciation in value that you "realized" before moving to one of those states.
At least in the tech fields (News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters ring a bell?), most of the people getting these options don't start out rich in the first place, so these are usurious tax rates for these people.
It's no wonder Eduardo Saverin did his citizenship ploy; it saved him a heck of a lot more than the $100M that was being widely reported at the time, it was closer to $1.5B - that's 3 times what Larry Ellison paid for Lanai, the 6th larges Hawaiian island.
No need to look very far for the funding, just go to the journal site:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/13601385
The ad on the page has consistently Life Technologies GeneArt Strings DNA fragments "Synthetic Genes Ready to Clone—Affordable for Every Lab".
There is a bit of vested interest for that particular Journal to publish papers promoting genetic engineering:
It doesn't hurt that there is going to be a genetic engineering conference this June, so you would also want to prime the pump to fill up the conference hall. Nothing like a good controversy to sell tickets.
Ah, you fit the profile of a google glass user perfectly... No social conscience.
I have a social conscience. I just don't ascribe stupid spying motives to Google Glass because I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic who is too mundane to figure out a profit model for the things that doesn't involve spying. Just because you can't see how to make money out of the things without spying doesn't mean that Google can't either.
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.
So I don't have to shut up and put up with it after all.
I think we will happily allow you to protest our wearing of Google Glass devices, so long as you do it in the Free Speech Zone we've set up across town in that fenced in area under the overpass. You will also find there plenty of Tea Party folks and Occupy Wall street folks there to keep you company whom we identify as "right wing" or "left wing" to keep them from getting together and ending up effective political machines, when we all know that both of them have the same "we are pissed at the people currently in power" grievance.
But feel free to go all "Dennis Leary in Demolition Man" about people who can afford toys you can't afford or simply don't want.
It also got more than a 2/3 majority, so it's not clear a veto would even matter. Though it's possible that some of the "yes" Dem votes here would change to "no" if Obama vetoed it, to avoid overriding a president from their party.
In his two terms as president, Obama has vetoed bills presented to him exactly twice. Assuming he actually vetoes the thing, the requirement fter it being returned to the originating house of Congress requires a re-vote with a 2/3 majority of both houses. This rarely happens, and typically only has happened for 4% of vetoes. Note that he hasn't use a pocket veto for either instance in the past. I'm pretty positive that he hasn't had opportunity to pocket veto for bills he wants to make "go away", since they'd have to be presented less than 10 days prior to a congressional adjournment in order to effectively kill the bill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_vetoes#Barack_Obama
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_veto#United_States
You end up losing mail and who is it for someone else to filter what I can and can't see. There is a delete button for a reason. Use it.
Unless you are actually concerned that other people won't see your SPAM, then your concern that you won't see someone else's email because it was sent from a SPAMmy provider is adequately addressed by your choice of ISP.
So pick an ISP who doesn't filter; I'd suggest Network Solutions, since they are now charging extra for SPAM filtering because it's a valuable commodity. Don't pay the extra, and you can hit delete all you want.
I think there's a more interesting issue here...
Why did Facebook, probably the world's largest harvester of user information after Google, launch their new app for only few selected devices?
Perhaps (conspiracy theory ahead) they wanted to create a hype by releasing the app for only those few selected devices, but allow easy port for people with the proper knowledge?
It is much more highly likely that they wanted to limit distribution to the devices they had tested on, since there are two gates on the specific version of Android that a given device runs, and they had not ensured compatibility with all versions:
Gate #1: The tree from which the frozen cut of the Android sources was derived at the time that the version was frozen for productization by the device manufacturer. For some reason, people still want to erroneously believe that Android comes from Google as a finished, productized version (it doesn't), and that it takes little effort to port vendor productization changes forward to new versions of Android (it doesn't), or that the vendors submit their productization changes back to mainline Android (some do, dome don't), or when vendors do submit productization changes back, Google incorporates them into the Android repo (they generally don't).
Gate #2: The carrier generally will not distribute an Android update for the primary reason that it would permit you to ride out your two year contract with up to date features, and they want to use the lack of up to date features to get you to opt for a new device every 18 months on a 24 month contract, which in turn locks you back to the carrier until the next 18 months have passed. The secondary reason for not doing it is that the device might not have enough capability to run the new version. The tertiary reason is that it would require expensive testing which would net them zero return on investment.
Basically this means that you have to test on every device before you let the app run on it, or you're going to look like you can't program when it fails on some device you haven't tested on.
I think one of the reasons Google bought Motorola Mobility was to erase reason #1; this is consistent with them putting the Android development under the same VP as the ChromeOS development, since it doesn't have these issues, but I believe it will be an uphill (with the hill being almost vertical) battle, if that was the intended consequence of the move.
The only way to erase #2 is to force the issue as part of the contract whereby Android is supplied to the devices, as a rider on the carrier contracts. This is an uphill battle for most carriers, both for the reasons already enumerated in #2, and the fact that it requires them to realize the revenue from the subsidy of the device at a different time than they currently do, as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley. They have to pick a different option under the FAS (Federal Accounting Standard).
Remember when Apple rolled out the 802.11n patch to iPhones, but there was a charge for iPods and iPads without a cellular modem? This was because they were using the same FAS rule that the carriers used on subsidized devices, which meant that they realized their profit on the subsidy over time, even thought it was paid up front. By doing this, they were able to add new device capability to carrier-connected devices because that didn't violate SOx, but would have been in violation of SOx if they had rolled the same capability out to non carrier-connected devices without charge.
It will be difficult to cause the carrier to change their FAS practices; the typical reaction in this case, to avoid having to do the same thing for all devices, is to create a separate company as a wholly owned subsidiary to operate under the separate FAS rules. AT&T has one of these, which they use to give false ANI information for telemarketers for plausible deniability by shunting them into a number block that is supposedly "reserved" by the subsidiary. The other carriers don't h
I laughed myself silly over the mental image on this one...
Google has employee Vint Cerf call Comcast CEO.
Vint: "I see you are operating in violation of our patent on packets..."
Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.
They also do not build backhaul capacity. The local cable companies do not offer symmetric speeds, since their networks are predominantly built for you to consume, not produce content, and they tend to cap production of packets. That's partly to prevent peer-to-peer, but it's more commonly because the backhaul capacity is low enough that it's only capable of sustaining 1.5 times the data rate for the ACK packets for the high end download rate.
Add to this that they don't know how to do QOS guarantees on multiple streams on the same segment using TCP window scaling to aboit filling up the upstream buffers, and that Google is actually building its own switching equipment for itself, and you have a significant technology gap when it comes to local cable operators even being able to buy comparable equipment from anyone: it's just not sold commercially by anyone, period.
I imagine Google is getting some economy of scale and some nifty equipment testing out of these deals as well, which will only improve things, not only for Google Fiber, but also for Google's data centers and their private international Internet backbone that they run.
What industry offers consumers a perfect combination of freedom of choice and customer service?
Pretty much any that doesn't involve government-enforced monopolies. Just imagine how much worse buying gasoline would be if certain companies purchased rights to supply all gasoline to individual cities, locking out competition.
You mean like Chevron purchased the right to refine the gas used in California by getting reformulation requirements put in place to prevent competition by out of state refineries, while at the same time getting MTBE to be required for environmental reasons having to do with cars manufactured prior to 1981 lacking Oxygen sensors?
Yup, that MTBE has sure been great for the environment... the natural monopoly on gas refining in California falling in Chevron's lap likely had nothing at all to do with the decision.
If you can buy the environmental laws so well that you actually REQUIRE something like MTBE be put into the environment, and you're the only one who supplies the product, how is that different from any other government-enforced monopoly?
I've seen attempts at that. It quickly turns into whomever has the highest status permanently booking a conference room. In effect, turning it into their own office.
I'd recommend focusing on teaching science and skip the gimmicks.
This is how the Google workplace is arranged, and I have zero doubt that this was heavily influenced by that. The "Open Plan" at Google was in turn influenced by Intel's Andy Grove, a hero of the Google executives.
Having spent some time teaching, and having worked at Google, I'd say that this is, as another poster called it, a gimmick.
The conference rooms tend to be booked for project meetings, which they will likely not have there, and interviews, which they will also likely not have there, and tend to have a smaller number than you'd like because of tearing down space to make labs and/or more room for new hires due to space pressure, which they don't have there. The conference rooms are more likely to also be 2-4 people sized, where you can jam in 4-5 people if you have to, rather than class-sized things.
The Patent Officer is clearly their way of saying "we expect great things of you, don't disappoint us", but is unlikely to have much work, as things do not go to a patent officer unless the patent has been proposed, approved, filed, and then after that, it goes to them -- this is unlikely to happen unless the persons there get patentable ideas in the first six to nine months. Unless, it occurs to me, that the Patent Officer is there as a benefit to the faculty?
The cross-disciplinary work isn't going to pan out, either, unless they only hire faculty who are already cross-disciplinary, since teaching is easier and more effective when you teach what you know. It's unlikely they are going to be able to hire James Burke to work in a cubicle farm, for example.
"Seem" [sic] like? For what purpose? What legitimate business has to move that amount of cash secretly rather than using checks, money orders, electronic transactions, or making (much) smaller deposits more regularly? What legitimate business has to do so on a regular enough basis that it's worth having a secret compartment installed rather than calling in an armored car company?
Private couriers in New York's diamond district. Gambling winnings at a casino or other legitimate venue; in the SF Bay area, there are plenty of high stakes poker games. Building contractors. Anyone with a large enough payroll in a cash only business, such as someone who owns multiple restaurants.
I've also seen large sums of cash carried by private couriers in order to encourage a low-ball price: "We can get financing for the higher asking price for the building, and that will take several weeks, or I can give you a smaller amount of cash now". I've personally seen $80,000 used this way to knock $30,000 off the price of a large mobile home.
I've seen $23,000 cash used in the heyday of Silicon Valley to buy out a lot of $50,000 worth of Aeron chairs and SteelCase cubicles that the seller was asking $35,000 for, if financed.
I've personally used an amount > $10,000, before such transactions were deemed questionable, to get a dealer to knock $4,000 off the price of a $16,000 sticker car. I could have talked him down by $2,000 without the cash, but it was a big club, since he was nearing the end of his fiscal year and would have to pay property taxes on unsold merchandise, as well as paying a reduced flooring penalty (this is where you carry inventory over the end of the fiscal year, and as a result, the manufacturer gives them fewer cars to sell next year).
Not every large cash movement is automatically a drug deal.
You don't combat drug (ab)use by prohibition, you use education.
Doesn't this presume that, once educated, people will no longer engage in the activity?
I don't think education is the panacea you seem to believe it is. Even if all educable people were completely rational, not every person is educable. I don't believe either of those preconditions are true, or there would be no literate cigarette smokers.
In the US there are no left wing parties.
As an example, "socialist" can be used as an insult there.
From the outside, all US politicians are right wing (meaning that they are not for wealth redistribution or any other left wing concept). It's not that hard to change from strongly conservative to not that strongly conservative.
I think you mean there are no really viable ones, due in large part to common sense. Or call it "lack of traction" if you want to be more polite, or call it "ineffective leadership" if you don't. To me that last one is a direct appear to common sense to not support someone who is ineffective at their job.
Socialist Party of USA: http://socialistparty-usa.net/
Communist Party USA: http://www.cpusa.org/
Here's the current active list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_United_States#Party_comparisons
Here's the current full list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_States
I have a no nudity clause in my contract.
But I will do implied for union scale......
What an amazing coincidence! As your employer, we also have a no-nudity clause in your contract....
It was/is GOOD that phone/cable co's built out their networks to provide service to *everyone*. That is in the 'National Good'.
(1) If by "everyone", you mean "not actually everyone". There are plenty of rural areas in the US where you can't get cable TV because it's just not economical for them to run the cables to your house. If you happen to not have too many tall trees around you can typically get Dish Network Satellite services, but that certainly doesn't get you broadband Internet service.
(2) One of the dirty little secrets about cable TV is that most of the set top boxes are barely inside the limit for the RF interference they generate. But wait, there's more? If you have a high urban density, it's not unheard of to have such high noise levels that you can't get over the air television, and your only choice for television programming turns out to be cable or Dish as a workaround to the high RF noise floor. This is not an accident.
Also, it doesn't have to be a rural area; I live 50 feet too far from the LATE smack in the middle of Silicon Valley to get high speed DSL; because if they guarantee me a higher data rate at that distance, they could (but probably would not) come in in violation of the tariff. So I'm either stuck on a baseband Cable connection with a bunch of Oracle engineers who would _clearly_ never hack your cable modem, or 4G wireless (luckily there's an unlimited service in the area right now, but I don't expect that to last).
So for some rather piss poor definition of things, the infrastructure is "built out".
Almost all the government in the 31 Sanctuary Cities in the U.S. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city -- which are called that because they do not enforce federal immigration laws not cooperate in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, some going as far as to make it illegal for an officer to check immigration status, or release prisoners without checking their status, is Democratic. This includes the Mayors of Salt Lake City, Utah, and both El Paso and Houston in Texas.
Currently, the Democrats benefit from the voter fraud, nominally through a misapplication of the 1973 Voting Rights Act, predominantly in Florida, but one in eight voting registrations are flawed and/or illegal , while the Republicans benefit from the below market labor costs, so neither party actually wants the practice of illegal immigration stopped. Here is the NY Times article on it from the Pew Center for the States: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/us/politics/us-voter-registration-rolls-are-in-disarray-pew-report-finds.html?_r=0