I completely agree with you, as I said above, I don't condone this kind of behaviour in any way. The fact is, however, that if I had to make a business trip to the US next week, I would have to take measures to safeguard my data. There's nothing I can do, especially as I do not live in the US, to change this policy. Not as far as I can see anyway. There's nothing that pretty much anyone can do to change it quickly. I would hate to have to bow to policies like this, but if I need to go to the US for any reason in the near future then I can't really see how I could possibly make a useful stand against them.
In purely practical terms, then, I could previously leave idealism by the roadside and know what to to to ensure the relative safety of my data. The difference now is that even if I know my data is secure, my property may well not be, and I can't see any viable workaround for that, short of "just don't go". As it happens, that isn't a problem to me, but there are plenty of people who need to travel to the US for any number of reasons.
The privacy violations are ridiculous, but at least we know about them and can take steps to avoid them - businesses providing 'clean' laptops and accessing data remotely over an encrypted connection, for instance. I don't for a second condone them looking through our data, but the fact is it's happening and that means we have to do our best to negate the effects.
The fact that they can basically steal your laptop, phone and any other nice electronics you happen to carry, on the other hand, could potentially be rather costly. I'm not even sure how likely an insurance company is to pay out for a claim of "it was confiscated and held indefinitely by the US government".
The bit I haven't yet deciphered (I have RTFA, but it didn't really help) is what exactly the lawsuit claims. It says that it's filed under the DMCA, but not what exactly Hasbro are claiming copyright on. Is a game concept copyrightable? If not, can Scrabulous just remove whatever little bit it is that they are claiming on?
And it will take years to clear up no matter what NXP do. Not sure that's worth the release of an academic paper, to be quite honest. Unless the purpose of all this is to punish people who make mistakes?
Your implication that withholding the results would prevent cracked cards being made only works if you make the assumption that only these researchers could/would work out how to break the security. As Bruce Schneier says in the BBC article: "Assume organised crime knows about this, assume they will be selling it anyway,".
I do know where you're coming from, and I'd certainly hate to be considered a conspiracy nut. I do try to liberally apply the idiom "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence".
All that said, however, I'm not really seeing a reason here that can be explained by simple incompetence. If they are, at heart, good people, then they would want to know how accurate DNA results are. It wouldn't even expose them to looking bad if it turned out that they'd been using bad evidence - all they'd need to save face would be a photo of an FBI agent shaking hands with someone in a lab coat and a press release explaining how grateful they are for having this weakness in the testing system found. Any other ideas on why they'd want this not to be looked into?
If I'd meant a specific number I would have used a specific number - "thousands" could just as easily have been replaced by "lots" or even "as many as possible". I simply used "thousands" as an approximate and unscientific estimation of the kind of numbers passing through any particular eBay search category.
Basically, you've just taken the wrong point from my original post. What I meant when I said "I'm not paying eBay to show a little page with my listing on" was that the page hosting and checkout services are not what I want from an auction site, access to the large user base is, thus it makes sense to pay those fees to the site with by far the largest. I'm treating it more or less as an advertising service. That chart way back up at the top of the comment tree was comparing all of the technical features of the various auction sites, and I was simply agreeing that, in my opinion, they'd missed the point and that as long as an approximate baseline is met I don't really care what technical services I'm getting for my money, I care about maximising the potential views.
I don't really see what you mean - why should there be a specific number? Unless I'm making some massive logical fallacy here, the more potential buyers seeing a listing, the better. There are far more users on eBay than any other online auction system, therefore I use eBay.
Precisely - I'm not paying eBay to show a little page with my listing on, I'm paying them to show a little page with my listing on where thousands of potential buyers will see it. I don't sell enough volume to justify spending my eBay fees directly on advertising instead yet, so for now I'm more or less stuck with them.
I wasn't meaning to debate the relative merits of wind and nuclear, but I can see how my post was unclear.
I should probably have quoted you for context, I meant it more in reply to your statement that: "Nuclear... doesn't solve the problems with needing a portable liquid (or safe solid) fuel." with your statement above that to the effect that wind power does solve those problems. I was pointing out that, if we take that site at face value, any source of electricity solves them. That said, if your cost figures are accurate and the method of combing H2 with carbon captured from CO2 is, in fact, efficient then the market should naturally decide on wind to power the electrolysis. I'm still a little dubious, but you never know, I guess.
This is a budget competitor to Sony's Vaio series, not a new device class like Asus initially announced.
Maybe it is, but I don't really see the problem with that - seriously, before these machines sprang up you'd be lucky to find a decent ultra-portable at twice the price of the eee and its competitors (hell, the eee line aren't even the cheapest or the best value for money any more, IMHO). Whatever the marketers want to call them aside, I'm glad these are out there now because that means I don't have to pay over a grand for a decent ultra-portable laptop.
There's nothing that surprising about the 20GB and 40GB SSDs - they're not exactly the super high speed ones you see selling for thousands, they're just the same memory as the SD cards or USB keys you see selling for next to nothing. They're not as cheap as spinning discs, hence the 80GB one and a Windows license being the same price as the 40GB drive alone, but they aren't an enormous distance off.
Why are you 'upset' about the higher spec on the Linux versions? I guess they could've offered the same spec for less money, but the volume cost of a Windows license probably isn't that much, so I doubt it would have been very significant.
But then you're getting into the conversation about how much money small size and light weight is worth to the buyer, and that's a personal matter. A 15" (or even a 13") machine compared to an 8.9" one is an apples to oranges comparison.
The reason I found the post interesting is because it was (more or less) taking the value of portability into account and comparing to a machine with relatively similar (although obviously not the same) size and weight.
Having written this post I'm now aware that it sounds a little fanboyish - I really have no direct bias towards netbooks here, and I fully admit they've made some very annoying decisions when designing some of them, but I still disagree with your point. Anyway...
Firstly I'd say to ignore the price quoted here - it's just a particularly glaring example of 'rip off Britain'. In the US it's a $400 machine, MSI just decided to add a significant amount over and above the extra tax we have to pay.
There's also the fact that 50% extra size you mentioned is somewhat significant for something that you might want to always have available in your bag - it's almost like carrying a paperback novel compared to a bulky textbook.
The X40 comparison is interesting - the only advantage I can see to it is the larger keyboard. Larger screen makes almost no difference because it's almost exactly the same resolution as the normal 8.9 and 10" LCDs (actually lower res than the 8.9" ones used in the Gigabyte M912 and HP 2133). The 1.2GHz Pentium M is probably a bit faster than a 1.6 Atom, but really is it enough to make a difference? Unless I'm much mistaken they're both fast enough to browse the web, use OpenOffice, listen to music and so on but both too slow for realistically doing things like video or photo editing. The RAM and hard drive are comparable in both machines. Durability I will give you, although a ThinkPad that's been kicking around in someone's bag for 4 years probably doesn't have that much left against a brand new, less well built Asus.
If there's something the X40 can do that these machines can't then I'm not really seeing it, which is why it puzzles me a little that you consider them not to be 'full fledged laptops'. Really I think it comes down to how much you care about the keyboard.
It's very low cost if you buy one in the US, they're just choosing to rip off UK buyers by a significant amount.
Incidentally, I do applaud Asus for selling in the UK without any significant markup beyond that of VAT, which is obviously not their fault.
In terms of 'superior', however, it pains me to see even supposedly technical publications fail to mention things like the fact that the 10" screen on the Wind is the same resolution as the 8.9s on the other companies' offerings and thus provides no actual extra space. Nor do they explicitly mention the fact that it is significantly more expensive than the Aspire One or Eee 901 purely because they felt like charging us more.
You're no longer allowed to 'not accept PayPal' on eBay UK - it's required for almost all sales.
Google checkout is an interesting one - it's specifically marked as not acceptable on the eBay help pages, but through a rather protracted conversation with customer services I managed to find out that sellers are allowed to use it but that it must be offered alongside PayPal and outside of eBay's checkout.
Incidentally, it is normally possible to get something of an answer from them if you're persistent and direct enough (any willing to put up with eight or nine pointless copy-paste responses that are so infuriating you want to throw your computer out of the window).
The first thing I would say is that whether they're good or whether they're bad, it is absolutely unacceptable for one company with almost 100% of the market (eBay) to force you to use a specific service.
In my opinion PayPal's dispute resolution process is dubious at best and the customer service is nothing short of abysmal. A more concrete reason to dislike being forced to use them, however, is simply that they are considerably more expensive than other equivalent services.
Of course the bill is going to pass, and that strikes me as a massive weakness in any representative system.
Sometimes what's good for the representatives will be at odds with what's good for the rest of the public. The representatives are the ones who get to vote on the issue - whose well-being do you think they're going to choose?
Short of direct democracy (which is impractical) I unfortunately can't really see a way around this.
I'd say that the payoff from helping a smart child to become a brilliant one is going to be much higher than making a dumb (that feels like a very unscientific term to use, but 'less intelligent' just sounds like politically correct crap, so feel free to correct me) child become a mediocre one.
That said, it is only a zero-sum game if you keep all the existing factors (primarily funding) the same. More teachers and more resources allow the classes to be split according to ability - everyone gets the help they need at their own level, more or less. One teacher stops the bottom end getting left behind, one teaches the average group, one challenges the top end.
I'm particularly surprised to hear this from Nokia, actually. It's been a few years since I was working with mobile phones, so maybe they've changed since then, but their SIM locks seemed like pretty much token efforts to appease the networks. Back then, at least, a lot of Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones were only unlockable with a full flash of the phone's OS while Nokias just needed a code that could be easily calculated from the phone's serial number. I always got the impression that Nokia wanted their phones to be unlocked - they don't make any money from the network contract anyway, so it was in their interests to have the handset itself as useful as possible to the customer.
The post mentioned total fee structure, not just the PayPal fees. On your $38 auction you would be paying at least another $2.74 in eBay fees, and that's just going on the bare minimum amounts.
There's also the fact that there are services equivalent to PayPal that charge 1.5%+$0.30, so its service simply can't compete on value. That's precisely why eBay are now choosing to force sellers to offer it - in order to prevent them from using more economical options.
PayPal does indeed suck for sellers as well as buyers.
Really I don't object to them charging a percentage on transactions - it's still cheaper than a full merchant account. What I very much do object to is them charging twice what Google Checkout does for an equivalent transaction. What I object to even more is being forced as a seller to use PayPal - incidentally does anyone know who in the UK I should make a complaint about this to? It reeks of anticompetitive behaviour, as the Australians have realised.
eBay actually has Google Checkout listed as 'Not permitted' on their Accepted Payments page, and anyone who has ever tried to email eBay's support team to question this will know how hard it is to get an answer (they normally just spout irrelevant canned responses until you give up) but I did finally get an email from eBay explaining that I am allowed to use it but that I must offer it alongside PayPal and outside of the eBay checkout process.
I won't even go into PayPal's dubious dispute processes and lack of safeguards - they are well documented elsewhere, but again the argument of "don't use them" is rendered moot by eBay's policies.
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I completely agree with you, as I said above, I don't condone this kind of behaviour in any way. The fact is, however, that if I had to make a business trip to the US next week, I would have to take measures to safeguard my data. There's nothing I can do, especially as I do not live in the US, to change this policy. Not as far as I can see anyway. There's nothing that pretty much anyone can do to change it quickly. I would hate to have to bow to policies like this, but if I need to go to the US for any reason in the near future then I can't really see how I could possibly make a useful stand against them.
In purely practical terms, then, I could previously leave idealism by the roadside and know what to to to ensure the relative safety of my data. The difference now is that even if I know my data is secure, my property may well not be, and I can't see any viable workaround for that, short of "just don't go". As it happens, that isn't a problem to me, but there are plenty of people who need to travel to the US for any number of reasons.
The privacy violations are ridiculous, but at least we know about them and can take steps to avoid them - businesses providing 'clean' laptops and accessing data remotely over an encrypted connection, for instance. I don't for a second condone them looking through our data, but the fact is it's happening and that means we have to do our best to negate the effects.
The fact that they can basically steal your laptop, phone and any other nice electronics you happen to carry, on the other hand, could potentially be rather costly. I'm not even sure how likely an insurance company is to pay out for a claim of "it was confiscated and held indefinitely by the US government".
The bit I haven't yet deciphered (I have RTFA, but it didn't really help) is what exactly the lawsuit claims. It says that it's filed under the DMCA, but not what exactly Hasbro are claiming copyright on. Is a game concept copyrightable? If not, can Scrabulous just remove whatever little bit it is that they are claiming on?
And it will take years to clear up no matter what NXP do. Not sure that's worth the release of an academic paper, to be quite honest. Unless the purpose of all this is to punish people who make mistakes?
Your implication that withholding the results would prevent cracked cards being made only works if you make the assumption that only these researchers could/would work out how to break the security. As Bruce Schneier says in the BBC article: "Assume organised crime knows about this, assume they will be selling it anyway,".
I do know where you're coming from, and I'd certainly hate to be considered a conspiracy nut. I do try to liberally apply the idiom "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence".
All that said, however, I'm not really seeing a reason here that can be explained by simple incompetence. If they are, at heart, good people, then they would want to know how accurate DNA results are. It wouldn't even expose them to looking bad if it turned out that they'd been using bad evidence - all they'd need to save face would be a photo of an FBI agent shaking hands with someone in a lab coat and a press release explaining how grateful they are for having this weakness in the testing system found. Any other ideas on why they'd want this not to be looked into?
I know what defines a rocket, and I didn't see any noticeable air intakes on the planes in the pictures, that's why I asked.
Having looked a little closer it seems that they're burning kerosene and carrying liquid oxygen as an oxidiser, so they really are rockets, not jets.
What makes you think they're jets rather than rockets? They looked like planes with rockets in the back to my (admittedly untrained) eye.
To be fair, I wasn't expecting them to try and make Pystar take back the systems that they'd already sold.
If I'd meant a specific number I would have used a specific number - "thousands" could just as easily have been replaced by "lots" or even "as many as possible". I simply used "thousands" as an approximate and unscientific estimation of the kind of numbers passing through any particular eBay search category.
Basically, you've just taken the wrong point from my original post. What I meant when I said "I'm not paying eBay to show a little page with my listing on" was that the page hosting and checkout services are not what I want from an auction site, access to the large user base is, thus it makes sense to pay those fees to the site with by far the largest. I'm treating it more or less as an advertising service. That chart way back up at the top of the comment tree was comparing all of the technical features of the various auction sites, and I was simply agreeing that, in my opinion, they'd missed the point and that as long as an approximate baseline is met I don't really care what technical services I'm getting for my money, I care about maximising the potential views.
I don't really see what you mean - why should there be a specific number? Unless I'm making some massive logical fallacy here, the more potential buyers seeing a listing, the better. There are far more users on eBay than any other online auction system, therefore I use eBay.
Precisely - I'm not paying eBay to show a little page with my listing on, I'm paying them to show a little page with my listing on where thousands of potential buyers will see it. I don't sell enough volume to justify spending my eBay fees directly on advertising instead yet, so for now I'm more or less stuck with them.
I wasn't meaning to debate the relative merits of wind and nuclear, but I can see how my post was unclear.
I should probably have quoted you for context, I meant it more in reply to your statement that: "Nuclear ... doesn't solve the problems with needing a portable liquid (or safe solid) fuel." with your statement above that to the effect that wind power does solve those problems. I was pointing out that, if we take that site at face value, any source of electricity solves them. That said, if your cost figures are accurate and the method of combing H2 with carbon captured from CO2 is, in fact, efficient then the market should naturally decide on wind to power the electrolysis. I'm still a little dubious, but you never know, I guess.
What's the difference between using wind generated electricity to electrolyse water and using nuclear generated electricity to electrolyse water?
This is a budget competitor to Sony's Vaio series, not a new device class like Asus initially announced.
Maybe it is, but I don't really see the problem with that - seriously, before these machines sprang up you'd be lucky to find a decent ultra-portable at twice the price of the eee and its competitors (hell, the eee line aren't even the cheapest or the best value for money any more, IMHO). Whatever the marketers want to call them aside, I'm glad these are out there now because that means I don't have to pay over a grand for a decent ultra-portable laptop.
There's nothing that surprising about the 20GB and 40GB SSDs - they're not exactly the super high speed ones you see selling for thousands, they're just the same memory as the SD cards or USB keys you see selling for next to nothing. They're not as cheap as spinning discs, hence the 80GB one and a Windows license being the same price as the 40GB drive alone, but they aren't an enormous distance off.
Why are you 'upset' about the higher spec on the Linux versions? I guess they could've offered the same spec for less money, but the volume cost of a Windows license probably isn't that much, so I doubt it would have been very significant.
But then you're getting into the conversation about how much money small size and light weight is worth to the buyer, and that's a personal matter. A 15" (or even a 13") machine compared to an 8.9" one is an apples to oranges comparison.
The reason I found the post interesting is because it was (more or less) taking the value of portability into account and comparing to a machine with relatively similar (although obviously not the same) size and weight.
Having written this post I'm now aware that it sounds a little fanboyish - I really have no direct bias towards netbooks here, and I fully admit they've made some very annoying decisions when designing some of them, but I still disagree with your point. Anyway...
Firstly I'd say to ignore the price quoted here - it's just a particularly glaring example of 'rip off Britain'. In the US it's a $400 machine, MSI just decided to add a significant amount over and above the extra tax we have to pay.
There's also the fact that 50% extra size you mentioned is somewhat significant for something that you might want to always have available in your bag - it's almost like carrying a paperback novel compared to a bulky textbook.
The X40 comparison is interesting - the only advantage I can see to it is the larger keyboard. Larger screen makes almost no difference because it's almost exactly the same resolution as the normal 8.9 and 10" LCDs (actually lower res than the 8.9" ones used in the Gigabyte M912 and HP 2133). The 1.2GHz Pentium M is probably a bit faster than a 1.6 Atom, but really is it enough to make a difference? Unless I'm much mistaken they're both fast enough to browse the web, use OpenOffice, listen to music and so on but both too slow for realistically doing things like video or photo editing. The RAM and hard drive are comparable in both machines. Durability I will give you, although a ThinkPad that's been kicking around in someone's bag for 4 years probably doesn't have that much left against a brand new, less well built Asus.
If there's something the X40 can do that these machines can't then I'm not really seeing it, which is why it puzzles me a little that you consider them not to be 'full fledged laptops'. Really I think it comes down to how much you care about the keyboard.
It's very low cost if you buy one in the US, they're just choosing to rip off UK buyers by a significant amount.
Incidentally, I do applaud Asus for selling in the UK without any significant markup beyond that of VAT, which is obviously not their fault.
In terms of 'superior', however, it pains me to see even supposedly technical publications fail to mention things like the fact that the 10" screen on the Wind is the same resolution as the 8.9s on the other companies' offerings and thus provides no actual extra space. Nor do they explicitly mention the fact that it is significantly more expensive than the Aspire One or Eee 901 purely because they felt like charging us more.
You're no longer allowed to 'not accept PayPal' on eBay UK - it's required for almost all sales.
Google checkout is an interesting one - it's specifically marked as not acceptable on the eBay help pages, but through a rather protracted conversation with customer services I managed to find out that sellers are allowed to use it but that it must be offered alongside PayPal and outside of eBay's checkout.
Incidentally, it is normally possible to get something of an answer from them if you're persistent and direct enough (any willing to put up with eight or nine pointless copy-paste responses that are so infuriating you want to throw your computer out of the window).
The first thing I would say is that whether they're good or whether they're bad, it is absolutely unacceptable for one company with almost 100% of the market (eBay) to force you to use a specific service.
In my opinion PayPal's dispute resolution process is dubious at best and the customer service is nothing short of abysmal. A more concrete reason to dislike being forced to use them, however, is simply that they are considerably more expensive than other equivalent services.
Of course the bill is going to pass, and that strikes me as a massive weakness in any representative system.
Sometimes what's good for the representatives will be at odds with what's good for the rest of the public. The representatives are the ones who get to vote on the issue - whose well-being do you think they're going to choose?
Short of direct democracy (which is impractical) I unfortunately can't really see a way around this.
I'd say that the payoff from helping a smart child to become a brilliant one is going to be much higher than making a dumb (that feels like a very unscientific term to use, but 'less intelligent' just sounds like politically correct crap, so feel free to correct me) child become a mediocre one.
That said, it is only a zero-sum game if you keep all the existing factors (primarily funding) the same. More teachers and more resources allow the classes to be split according to ability - everyone gets the help they need at their own level, more or less. One teacher stops the bottom end getting left behind, one teaches the average group, one challenges the top end.
I'm particularly surprised to hear this from Nokia, actually. It's been a few years since I was working with mobile phones, so maybe they've changed since then, but their SIM locks seemed like pretty much token efforts to appease the networks. Back then, at least, a lot of Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones were only unlockable with a full flash of the phone's OS while Nokias just needed a code that could be easily calculated from the phone's serial number. I always got the impression that Nokia wanted their phones to be unlocked - they don't make any money from the network contract anyway, so it was in their interests to have the handset itself as useful as possible to the customer.
The post mentioned total fee structure, not just the PayPal fees. On your $38 auction you would be paying at least another $2.74 in eBay fees, and that's just going on the bare minimum amounts.
There's also the fact that there are services equivalent to PayPal that charge 1.5%+$0.30, so its service simply can't compete on value. That's precisely why eBay are now choosing to force sellers to offer it - in order to prevent them from using more economical options.
PayPal does indeed suck for sellers as well as buyers.
Really I don't object to them charging a percentage on transactions - it's still cheaper than a full merchant account. What I very much do object to is them charging twice what Google Checkout does for an equivalent transaction. What I object to even more is being forced as a seller to use PayPal - incidentally does anyone know who in the UK I should make a complaint about this to? It reeks of anticompetitive behaviour, as the Australians have realised.
eBay actually has Google Checkout listed as 'Not permitted' on their Accepted Payments page, and anyone who has ever tried to email eBay's support team to question this will know how hard it is to get an answer (they normally just spout irrelevant canned responses until you give up) but I did finally get an email from eBay explaining that I am allowed to use it but that I must offer it alongside PayPal and outside of the eBay checkout process.
I won't even go into PayPal's dubious dispute processes and lack of safeguards - they are well documented elsewhere, but again the argument of "don't use them" is rendered moot by eBay's policies.