I hope after these biodegradable plastic-like-plant-chemicals (that'll probably leech into your soft drink when/if the bottle gets warm)...
Or leaches in when the soda just sits there being acidic at any temperature, or when it hits the inside wall with bubble cavitation shock waves once the pressure is released to drink it.
My hope is that the materials chosen don't set off anybody's allergies. (For instance: I'm allergic to corn. Do I need to switch soda brands or risk anaphylaxis?)
To do that you need:
- A bullet velocity between escape velocity and circular orbit at that radius.
- No atmosphere (which would make the orbit decay enough that it wouldn't hit the shooter).
- A planet with no appreciable mass concentrations to perturb the orbit.
- A shot fired nearly dead horizontal. (Too low and it hits ground before it orbits. Too high and the orbit goes through the ground behind the shooter.)
Even then the solar wind would probably be an issue.
... how could photons originating from the earth pushing on an orbital object do anything other than move it away from the earth?
Easy:
1) Hit it more on the leading than the trailing side. The ejected material leaves primarily forward, producing a deceleration. (This even works with just photon pressure bouncing from an ideally reflective object.) Yes you always CAN hit the leading side: The laser is not at the center of the Earth so just shoot when it's coming somewhat toward you.
2) If it's spinning (with an appropriate range of alignments of its spin and orbital axes) it's even easie Heat a part of the face that's toward you but rotating toward the leading surface. The outgassing is directed forward while strong, and is weaker by the time it's directed backward.
Note that a thrust away from the center of the Earth (unless it's large enough to boost the object to escape velocity very quickly) perturbs the orbit but isn't particularly significant when it comes to raising or lowering the perigee. It's the component of thrust along the orbit that is significant.
Unfortunately, "photon torpedoes" are misnamed. They're matter-antimatter annihilation bombs. A projectile, rather than a directed-energy beam, weapon.
... given that random "preventative" drugscreening tends to catch at least as many recreational pot smokers as employees with serious, untreated drug/alcohol problems...
Not to mention completely clean people with false positives, people who recently ate buns with poppy-seed topping, people who have recently been treated for pain or had certain medical procedures, people whose samples were mixed up or contaminated in the lab,...
Modern drug tests are WAY too sensitive and pretty much every process has SOME failure rate.
I recently needed use of a Holter Monitor, which as far as I can tell could be made for $20, yet was charged $500 for 1 day's use. Until we sweep out the profiteers nothing in our health care system will be cheap.
I have no problem with profiteers. Once they're competing the price drops dramatically.
I DO have problem with the way the patent system and approval process gives them enough monopoly power to soak the population on the simple, obvious stuff, and enough costs on the non-obvious stuff that they HAVE to soak the population to avoid bankruptcy.
Note that glacial and expensive medical approvals,and asinine patents are the result of government, not profit-seeking.
Natural selection can only work on weeding out genes that affect reproduction.
Not true.
Parents and grandparents contribute to the upbringing, support, social connections, mate selection, and other things affecting reproductive success of their descendants. Post-reproduction people also have effects on the reproductive success, wealth, and survival rate of their relatives and members of their social groups, tribes, and countrymen - who are generally far more closely related than the general run of humanity. So the health of people (and other child-caring or social beings) after childbearing continues to put selection pressure on their genomes.
Granted it's not as EXTREME as the period leading up to childbirth and as a result may take many generations to suppress or eliminate something nasty (or not be sufficient to knock it down to where law-of-small-numbers wipes it out). But it's definitely present.
The "smartphone" angle appears to just involve using the smartphone as a more or less dumb modem(unlike, say, some of the "low cost field microscope" designs that use cheap plastic or fluid optics to mate with a cellphone camera and then transmit images or do image processing onboard...)
As I read it the smartphone is a very handy way to get:
- a powerful computer (with signal processing chips for acceleration),
- a user interface with a high-res color display, and
- a network connection, with
- a good software development environment in a small, portable, inexpensive, robust, and standardized package (with enormous economy of scale and other teams taking care of the computer platform design).
So the designers can work on the molecular science, the design of the (brilliant but probably simple) peripheral (containing just the special-purpose electronics), and the application-specific software. No building furniture with screens and embedded computers and then getting the result through medical-level approvals. The smartphone has all the general-purpose cybernetics in a can, built to telephony standards (tougher than mil) and ready to go.
... Obviously, finding someone's DNA on the murder weapon doesn't automatically mean they committed the crime - but it is evidence that ties them to the weapon....
If you only get one match (in a DNA database), that still doesn't mean that person did it (there could be myriad reasons for their DNA to show up in these places)...
These two statements show that, despite other things that you've said that relate to it, you're not addressing the point.
The point is that a so-called match, even if it's the only one in a database (i.e. of felons), does NOT show that it is the "matched" person's DNA. It merely shows that it COULD be. Even if it's pretty likely, it's not definitive - and especially it's far from being as indicative as prosecutors usually paint it.
Meanwhile, collecting DNA samples from large numbers of people and searching them for matches will create a large number of false positives. Perhaps (as with drug testing) far more false than true positives.
As a result I'm opposed to admission of such so-called "matches" as evidence, regardless of whether they ARE used for identifying people who might be "likely suspects" for further investigation.
Meanwhile, police and prosecutors have a long track record of fixating on innocent people when some initial evidence points to them and ending up convicting them on flimsy (or even faked) evidence and testimony (while the real perpetrator remains free to commit more crimes). Because of the false-positive risk, being included in a DNA database used for such screening is a major increase in risk and threat to freedom. So people should not be involuntarily added to such databases unless they have been CONVICTED of a major crime.
DNA is not a unique ID.
- Identical twins (and other clones) share it - to about the extent that one part of your body shares it with another.
- Releatives, especially among small population groups, share most of it. Enough to make "matches" require an inordinate number of markers to be reliable.
- Some people are chimeras - with different parts of their bodies from different egg-sperm combinations.
- And then there are transplant recipients...
Finally, it has been recently shown to be trivial to take a sample, multiply it, and use it to contaminate a crime scene or collected evidence, framing the sample's source. Similar techniques could be used to spoof DNA identity scanners.
... I don't trust them to get the statistics right. Hammering a DNA database looking for matches will produce many false positives (due to the birthday paradox), and recent history suggests that those doing the searching will try (and likely succeed) in presenting to the jury the statistics that are correct when you test a single pair of samples.
Hear hear!
IMHO DNA evidence should only be usable for defense.
- A mismatch makes it obvious that the accused (if not a chimera) is not the perpetrator.
- A "match" ("non-exclusion") makes a bunch of statistical assumptions, some of which have little or no evidence in science. (Not to mention that it does poorly for excluding twins and relatives.)
So convictions should be based on OTHER things than DNA evidence.
I wouldn't even mention business. You could make a short-lived real mailing-list if you need to.
Set up a short-lived real mailing list in a CORPORATION? It is to laugh. Hah!
I work at a major multinational communications equipment vendor. It's likely most of your internet packets go through more than one of our boxes during their travels. By the time a short-lived per-task mailing list could be set up the task would be over. And several others started and over sequentially.
Hell: A mail outage or other computer problem that doesn't (obviously to a front-line helpdesk attendant working for a service vendor and located on a different continent) affect whole departments goes in a queue where the IT department's target performance is 90% fixed within three days. Where it might wait for weeks.
And you don't need to tell me that it should be done differently. I've been fighting and losing that battle ever since we were acquired several years ago.
I don't think anyone is advocating the removal of "reply all".
Really? I thought that was exactly what was being discussed.
What I think people advocate (and email etiquette books advocate) is not automatically using re: all for every email...especially when only one person in the re: all list needs to get a response.
I'm with you there.
A growing problem in professional environments is the loss of productivity due to too many emails. Not having to wade through and delete the hundred or so reply all emails a day I get would definitely increase my productivity.
I agree it's a problem - one I have, too. But at least in my case it's not a "reply all" issue. (Such reply explosions are a couple-times-a-year problem.)
The problem is departmental and project-wide mailing lists being used for things that should be discussed among a subset - for which "reply all" is the correct button to use.
... there's no reason to count an email as part of the same thread once the subject has changed...
Sure there is.
The subject is often related to something at the start of the thread that becomes obsolete. Changing the subject when the actual subject of conversation changes keeps things sane - especially when something important comes up. (Example: A flash team debugging something and, after several iterations of "try this" "no that didn't work" something significant is discovered.)
Thread by Subject: (rather than References: and In-reply-to:) and a change of subject splits the flash team email into different parts of a crowded inbox. Oops! But don't change the subject and someone multiplexing among several teams may waste hours because the subject line didn't inform him that he needed to open the email and pay attention to the new development in THIS task NOW.
I'm pretty sure there are entire tomes of email etiquette books that universally advise against the use of "reply all".
And if so they're tomes full of something else as well.
"Reply All" allows the instant creation of a task-based "mailing list" in a business setting, without the overhead of setting up a mailing list and tearing it down after the task is done.
If the mail tools didn't have it, participations in a flash crew would require copying all the addresses every time. That's a job for a computer, not a busy worker with a mouse and incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. And accidentally dropping one address can not only disrupt the operation but offend the lost worker.
Imagine the effect on office productivity of doubling (or more) the time to communicate. It can dwarf the time spent in deleting the occasional emails from being improperly added to the Cc: list on mail exchanges that are one-shot or will peter out in short order.
Sure "Reply All" can cause problems. So can fire, or virtually any other powerful tool when improperly used.
pretty much every modern Linux boot disk can mount a Windows partition of any kind, so you could have easily done data recovery at bare minimum before doing the "damn the data and re-image".
And then you put the data back - and the viruses right along with it.
Sorry, Pita. It's not that easy. Cleaning the viruses from a saved image of an infected system is a job for pricey tools from the multi-billion-dollar Windows anti-malware industry. And those tools want to work on something THEIR toolbox rescued, not an image snapped by a Linux boot disk.
The US market is very peculiar, so you might be spot on there, but over here in the EU where there is competition, SMS are in most cases free, even though they do as you point out actually cost quite a bit to service, the competition here is just so fierce you can't charge anything meaningful for them.
I agree completely (with the caveat that, if a significant number of people started using IP-over-SMS to avoid data charges it wouldn't stay free AND unfettered for long.)
The US cellular market has been noncompetitive from the beginning, due to a failing of the FCC: They defined "competition" to exist when there were TWO cellular carriers in a given market, and initially allocated the spectrum in a way that made it essentially impossible for a third player to get in. They stayed that way for decades, while a small number of carriers became entrenched.
Market forces don't significantly drive down prices until there are THREE competitors (or the barriers to entry are so low that a new player is always a possibility that must be headed off.) At two players the market forces drive their prices toward each other but don't penalize that price point being high. The incentive is still to go for all the market will bear, creating a defacto cartel with no communication but price signals. Add a third player and the incentive shifts toward defecting and sucking market share from both of your competition. (Or at least that's how I understand it.)
These days we've got opportunity for more players (with more bands, plus service alternatives). And we are seeing some price and service pressure. But we've got a long way to go before somebody with a better idea can get funding from investors burned by the.com collapse and roll out a continent-wide service that would win the resulting price war and the ability of the entrenched players to turn up more/better services when it's in their interest to do so.
Back in the late '60s or early '70s I took a "Psychology of Language Acquisition" course for a humanities distribution requirement. One of the things we were told about was a researcher in the field who had sound-filmed most of her daughter's waking life for several years, to collect such data.
An interesting artifact from that was that the daughter had coined a three-syllable word-like thing that sounded like "ah-WIDdah". (I think it was during the two- or three-word utterance stage.) She seemed to use it like an ordinary word. But mommy, and the rest of the department, couldn't figure out what it meant or what purpose it served. Eventually she stopped using it. Some time after the experiment was over and the daughter was talking normally, they showed the films to the daughter. She couldn't figure it out, either. (The scientists figure it most likely was a placeholder for words that she hadn't learned yet. But that's hardly needed in the small-group utterances stages so it's still a mystery.)
I remember when SMS was free and was hidden in the advanced menu of a 3-line text display of a phone.
SMS messages go over the (VERY!) low bandwidth control channel used for communication between the cellphone and the tower, and from there over the call set-up channels among the towers, their controllers, and the rest of the telephone network. Using them to let cellphone handsets emulate a text pager (and a text pager message sender) was something of an afterthought, put into the GSM spec and then ported to others. Because they're on the control channel, they work even if the phone has no data service or is not data service capable.
Once they caught on and started having major traffic despite the small packet size, the telcos put a price tag on them, both to try to avoid channel saturation and as a handy revenue stream. (Yes even a large number of the little text messages wouldn't clog the channels. But a customer-deployed IP-over-SMS would have been trivial. Charging a few cents for every 140-byte packet killed that idea.)
Now that mobile data services has created a fat data pipe under the separate "payload" bandwidth, moving the services currently running on SMS makes great sense for the users. But now that SMS messages have become a major income stream, despite their extreme price, the carriers have no incentive to kill this surprise cash cow. So the innovation has to come from apps developers.
Social networking and blogging tools and sites were strong contributors to the organizatin of the Tunisan and Egyptian revolutions - to the point that the Egyptian revolution might be characterized as a revolution run by "flash mob" events. With these tools conspiracies could grow so fast they stayed far ahead of the governments' efforts to identify, infiltrate, and shut them down.
But the FACT of the revolutions' success has created a "Schelling Point" (AKA "focus point") - a game theoretical situation when the participants, with no direct communication, know that "The time is now and everybody else knows it too.".
Once you have a Schelling Point, communication is not so necessary. So prosecuting Facebook posters will be too little, too late. So will shutting off Internet access and phone service in your country.
Eventually governments may be able to develop new methods to head off and suppress popular uprisings. But for now it's the people who have the upper hand.
To the dictators of the world I say: Welcome to "The Singularity". B-) )
When something is deleted, or even overwritten and scrubbed the old information is still there because the SSD's wear leveling firmware moves the write to a new physical block. This means you can't reliably erase or scrub anything on an SSD. Even if you fill the entire hard drive (DBAN) the SSD may be using the over-provisioning and not erase the old data.
Except that the ATA "sanitize" commands are supposed to do whatever is necessary to render the data permanently inaccessible (even by disassembling the device) before returning.
And just 18 days ago we had an article on a paper from UCSD where they tested nine ATA SSDs and of them:
- 4 worked correctly,
- 1 was encrypted so they couldn't check it with their methodology,
- 2 didn't work correctly, leaving some data accessible,
- 1 LIED, saying it succeeded but doing nothing to erase the data, and
- 1 didn't implement the command.
I suspect the grandparent posting was asking which category this drive will occupy.
IP + time + ISP logs gives a strong indication of which subscriber account was involved. If the same person posted multiply from the same machine at different times, the uncertainty of identification (primarily due to clock skew and log record losses) is reduced.
Civil cases swing on preponderance of evidence, rather than reasonable doubt. So it's harder to make arguments like "somebody must have used my computer when I wasn't looking/hacked my machine/got on my WiFi" stick.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope after these biodegradable plastic-like-plant-chemicals (that'll probably leech into your soft drink when/if the bottle gets warm)...
Or leaches in when the soda just sits there being acidic at any temperature, or when it hits the inside wall with bubble cavitation shock waves once the pressure is released to drink it.
My hope is that the materials chosen don't set off anybody's allergies. (For instance: I'm allergic to corn. Do I need to switch soda brands or risk anaphylaxis?)
To do that you need:
- A bullet velocity between escape velocity and circular orbit at that radius.
- No atmosphere (which would make the orbit decay enough that it wouldn't hit the shooter).
- A planet with no appreciable mass concentrations to perturb the orbit.
- A shot fired nearly dead horizontal. (Too low and it hits ground before it orbits. Too high and the orbit goes through the ground behind the shooter.)
Even then the solar wind would probably be an issue.
... how could photons originating from the earth pushing on an orbital object do anything other than move it away from the earth?
Easy:
1) Hit it more on the leading than the trailing side. The ejected material leaves primarily forward, producing a deceleration. (This even works with just photon pressure bouncing from an ideally reflective object.) Yes you always CAN hit the leading side: The laser is not at the center of the Earth so just shoot when it's coming somewhat toward you.
2) If it's spinning (with an appropriate range of alignments of its spin and orbital axes) it's even easie Heat a part of the face that's toward you but rotating toward the leading surface. The outgassing is directed forward while strong, and is weaker by the time it's directed backward.
Note that a thrust away from the center of the Earth (unless it's large enough to boost the object to escape velocity very quickly) perturbs the orbit but isn't particularly significant when it comes to raising or lowering the perigee. It's the component of thrust along the orbit that is significant.
Fire photon torpedoes!
Unfortunately, "photon torpedoes" are misnamed. They're matter-antimatter annihilation bombs. A projectile, rather than a directed-energy beam, weapon.
... given that random "preventative" drugscreening tends to catch at least as many recreational pot smokers as employees with serious, untreated drug/alcohol problems ...
Not to mention completely clean people with false positives, people who recently ate buns with poppy-seed topping, people who have recently been treated for pain or had certain medical procedures, people whose samples were mixed up or contaminated in the lab, ...
Modern drug tests are WAY too sensitive and pretty much every process has SOME failure rate.
"Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder"
I recently needed use of a Holter Monitor, which as far as I can tell could be made for $20, yet was charged $500 for 1 day's use. Until we sweep out the profiteers nothing in our health care system will be cheap.
I have no problem with profiteers. Once they're competing the price drops dramatically.
I DO have problem with the way the patent system and approval process gives them enough monopoly power to soak the population on the simple, obvious stuff, and enough costs on the non-obvious stuff that they HAVE to soak the population to avoid bankruptcy.
Note that glacial and expensive medical approvals,and asinine patents are the result of government, not profit-seeking.
Natural selection can only work on weeding out genes that affect reproduction.
Not true.
Parents and grandparents contribute to the upbringing, support, social connections, mate selection, and other things affecting reproductive success of their descendants. Post-reproduction people also have effects on the reproductive success, wealth, and survival rate of their relatives and members of their social groups, tribes, and countrymen - who are generally far more closely related than the general run of humanity. So the health of people (and other child-caring or social beings) after childbearing continues to put selection pressure on their genomes.
Granted it's not as EXTREME as the period leading up to childbirth and as a result may take many generations to suppress or eliminate something nasty (or not be sufficient to knock it down to where law-of-small-numbers wipes it out). But it's definitely present.
The "smartphone" angle appears to just involve using the smartphone as a more or less dumb modem(unlike, say, some of the "low cost field microscope" designs that use cheap plastic or fluid optics to mate with a cellphone camera and then transmit images or do image processing onboard...)
As I read it the smartphone is a very handy way to get:
- a powerful computer (with signal processing chips for acceleration),
- a user interface with a high-res color display, and
- a network connection, with
- a good software development environment
in a small, portable, inexpensive, robust, and standardized package (with enormous economy of scale and other teams taking care of the computer platform design).
So the designers can work on the molecular science, the design of the (brilliant but probably simple) peripheral (containing just the special-purpose electronics), and the application-specific software. No building furniture with screens and embedded computers and then getting the result through medical-level approvals. The smartphone has all the general-purpose cybernetics in a can, built to telephony standards (tougher than mil) and ready to go.
... Obviously, finding someone's DNA on the murder weapon doesn't automatically mean they committed the crime - but it is evidence that ties them to the weapon. ...
If you only get one match (in a DNA database), that still doesn't mean that person did it (there could be myriad reasons for their DNA to show up in these places) ...
These two statements show that, despite other things that you've said that relate to it, you're not addressing the point.
The point is that a so-called match, even if it's the only one in a database (i.e. of felons), does NOT show that it is the "matched" person's DNA. It merely shows that it COULD be. Even if it's pretty likely, it's not definitive - and especially it's far from being as indicative as prosecutors usually paint it.
Meanwhile, collecting DNA samples from large numbers of people and searching them for matches will create a large number of false positives. Perhaps (as with drug testing) far more false than true positives.
As a result I'm opposed to admission of such so-called "matches" as evidence, regardless of whether they ARE used for identifying people who might be "likely suspects" for further investigation.
Meanwhile, police and prosecutors have a long track record of fixating on innocent people when some initial evidence points to them and ending up convicting them on flimsy (or even faked) evidence and testimony (while the real perpetrator remains free to commit more crimes). Because of the false-positive risk, being included in a DNA database used for such screening is a major increase in risk and threat to freedom. So people should not be involuntarily added to such databases unless they have been CONVICTED of a major crime.
Eventually, our DNA became our ID.
DNA is not a unique ID.
- Identical twins (and other clones) share it - to about the extent that one part of your body shares it with another.
- Releatives, especially among small population groups, share most of it. Enough to make "matches" require an inordinate number of markers to be reliable.
- Some people are chimeras - with different parts of their bodies from different egg-sperm combinations.
- And then there are transplant recipients...
Finally, it has been recently shown to be trivial to take a sample, multiply it, and use it to contaminate a crime scene or collected evidence, framing the sample's source. Similar techniques could be used to spoof DNA identity scanners.
... I don't trust them to get the statistics right. Hammering a DNA database looking for matches will produce many false positives (due to the birthday paradox), and recent history suggests that those doing the searching will try (and likely succeed) in presenting to the jury the statistics that are correct when you test a single pair of samples.
Hear hear!
IMHO DNA evidence should only be usable for defense.
- A mismatch makes it obvious that the accused (if not a chimera) is not the perpetrator.
- A "match" ("non-exclusion") makes a bunch of statistical assumptions, some of which have little or no evidence in science. (Not to mention that it does poorly for excluding twins and relatives.)
So convictions should be based on OTHER things than DNA evidence.
I wouldn't even mention business. You could make a short-lived real mailing-list if you need to.
Set up a short-lived real mailing list in a CORPORATION? It is to laugh. Hah!
I work at a major multinational communications equipment vendor. It's likely most of your internet packets go through more than one of our boxes during their travels. By the time a short-lived per-task mailing list could be set up the task would be over. And several others started and over sequentially.
Hell: A mail outage or other computer problem that doesn't (obviously to a front-line helpdesk attendant working for a service vendor and located on a different continent) affect whole departments goes in a queue where the IT department's target performance is 90% fixed within three days. Where it might wait for weeks.
And you don't need to tell me that it should be done differently. I've been fighting and losing that battle ever since we were acquired several years ago.
I don't think anyone is advocating the removal of "reply all".
Really? I thought that was exactly what was being discussed.
What I think people advocate (and email etiquette books advocate) is not automatically using re: all for every email...especially when only one person in the re: all list needs to get a response.
I'm with you there.
A growing problem in professional environments is the loss of productivity due to too many emails. Not having to wade through and delete the hundred or so reply all emails a day I get would definitely increase my productivity.
I agree it's a problem - one I have, too. But at least in my case it's not a "reply all" issue. (Such reply explosions are a couple-times-a-year problem.)
The problem is departmental and project-wide mailing lists being used for things that should be discussed among a subset - for which "reply all" is the correct button to use.
Cease and desist from writing "que" when you mean "cue".
Maybe there were so many lawyers that they had to get in line.
... there's no reason to count an email as part of the same thread once the subject has changed ...
Sure there is.
The subject is often related to something at the start of the thread that becomes obsolete. Changing the subject when the actual subject of conversation changes keeps things sane - especially when something important comes up. (Example: A flash team debugging something and, after several iterations of "try this" "no that didn't work" something significant is discovered.)
Thread by Subject: (rather than References: and In-reply-to:) and a change of subject splits the flash team email into different parts of a crowded inbox. Oops! But don't change the subject and someone multiplexing among several teams may waste hours because the subject line didn't inform him that he needed to open the email and pay attention to the new development in THIS task NOW.
I'm pretty sure there are entire tomes of email etiquette books that universally advise against the use of "reply all".
And if so they're tomes full of something else as well.
"Reply All" allows the instant creation of a task-based "mailing list" in a business setting, without the overhead of setting up a mailing list and tearing it down after the task is done.
If the mail tools didn't have it, participations in a flash crew would require copying all the addresses every time. That's a job for a computer, not a busy worker with a mouse and incipient carpal tunnel syndrome. And accidentally dropping one address can not only disrupt the operation but offend the lost worker.
Imagine the effect on office productivity of doubling (or more) the time to communicate. It can dwarf the time spent in deleting the occasional emails from being improperly added to the Cc: list on mail exchanges that are one-shot or will peter out in short order.
Sure "Reply All" can cause problems. So can fire, or virtually any other powerful tool when improperly used.
pretty much every modern Linux boot disk can mount a Windows partition of any kind, so you could have easily done data recovery at bare minimum before doing the "damn the data and re-image".
And then you put the data back - and the viruses right along with it.
Sorry, Pita. It's not that easy. Cleaning the viruses from a saved image of an infected system is a job for pricey tools from the multi-billion-dollar Windows anti-malware industry. And those tools want to work on something THEIR toolbox rescued, not an image snapped by a Linux boot disk.
The US market is very peculiar, so you might be spot on there, but over here in the EU where there is competition, SMS are in most cases free, even though they do as you point out actually cost quite a bit to service, the competition here is just so fierce you can't charge anything meaningful for them.
I agree completely (with the caveat that, if a significant number of people started using IP-over-SMS to avoid data charges it wouldn't stay free AND unfettered for long.)
The US cellular market has been noncompetitive from the beginning, due to a failing of the FCC: They defined "competition" to exist when there were TWO cellular carriers in a given market, and initially allocated the spectrum in a way that made it essentially impossible for a third player to get in. They stayed that way for decades, while a small number of carriers became entrenched.
Market forces don't significantly drive down prices until there are THREE competitors (or the barriers to entry are so low that a new player is always a possibility that must be headed off.) At two players the market forces drive their prices toward each other but don't penalize that price point being high. The incentive is still to go for all the market will bear, creating a defacto cartel with no communication but price signals. Add a third player and the incentive shifts toward defecting and sucking market share from both of your competition. (Or at least that's how I understand it.)
These days we've got opportunity for more players (with more bands, plus service alternatives). And we are seeing some price and service pressure. But we've got a long way to go before somebody with a better idea can get funding from investors burned by the .com collapse and roll out a continent-wide service that would win the resulting price war and the ability of the entrenched players to turn up more/better services when it's in their interest to do so.
Back in the late '60s or early '70s I took a "Psychology of Language Acquisition" course for a humanities distribution requirement. One of the things we were told about was a researcher in the field who had sound-filmed most of her daughter's waking life for several years, to collect such data.
An interesting artifact from that was that the daughter had coined a three-syllable word-like thing that sounded like "ah-WIDdah". (I think it was during the two- or three-word utterance stage.) She seemed to use it like an ordinary word. But mommy, and the rest of the department, couldn't figure out what it meant or what purpose it served. Eventually she stopped using it. Some time after the experiment was over and the daughter was talking normally, they showed the films to the daughter. She couldn't figure it out, either. (The scientists figure it most likely was a placeholder for words that she hadn't learned yet. But that's hardly needed in the small-group utterances stages so it's still a mystery.)
I remember when SMS was free and was hidden in the advanced menu of a 3-line text display of a phone.
SMS messages go over the (VERY!) low bandwidth control channel used for communication between the cellphone and the tower, and from there over the call set-up channels among the towers, their controllers, and the rest of the telephone network. Using them to let cellphone handsets emulate a text pager (and a text pager message sender) was something of an afterthought, put into the GSM spec and then ported to others. Because they're on the control channel, they work even if the phone has no data service or is not data service capable.
Once they caught on and started having major traffic despite the small packet size, the telcos put a price tag on them, both to try to avoid channel saturation and as a handy revenue stream. (Yes even a large number of the little text messages wouldn't clog the channels. But a customer-deployed IP-over-SMS would have been trivial. Charging a few cents for every 140-byte packet killed that idea.)
Now that mobile data services has created a fat data pipe under the separate "payload" bandwidth, moving the services currently running on SMS makes great sense for the users. But now that SMS messages have become a major income stream, despite their extreme price, the carriers have no incentive to kill this surprise cash cow. So the innovation has to come from apps developers.
Social networking and blogging tools and sites were strong contributors to the organizatin of the Tunisan and Egyptian revolutions - to the point that the Egyptian revolution might be characterized as a revolution run by "flash mob" events. With these tools conspiracies could grow so fast they stayed far ahead of the governments' efforts to identify, infiltrate, and shut them down.
But the FACT of the revolutions' success has created a "Schelling Point" (AKA "focus point") - a game theoretical situation when the participants, with no direct communication, know that "The time is now and everybody else knows it too.".
Once you have a Schelling Point, communication is not so necessary. So prosecuting Facebook posters will be too little, too late. So will shutting off Internet access and phone service in your country.
Eventually governments may be able to develop new methods to head off and suppress popular uprisings. But for now it's the people who have the upper hand.
To the dictators of the world I say: Welcome to "The Singularity". B-) )
When something is deleted, or even overwritten and scrubbed the old information is still there because the SSD's wear leveling firmware moves the write to a new physical block. This means you can't reliably erase or scrub anything on an SSD. Even if you fill the entire hard drive (DBAN) the SSD may be using the over-provisioning and not erase the old data.
Except that the ATA "sanitize" commands are supposed to do whatever is necessary to render the data permanently inaccessible (even by disassembling the device) before returning.
And just 18 days ago we had an article on a paper from UCSD where they tested nine ATA SSDs and of them:
- 4 worked correctly,
- 1 was encrypted so they couldn't check it with their methodology,
- 2 didn't work correctly, leaving some data accessible,
- 1 LIED, saying it succeeded but doing nothing to erase the data, and
- 1 didn't implement the command.
I suspect the grandparent posting was asking which category this drive will occupy.
First, let's upgrade the patent clerks to "patent engineers", because that's what they should be, with appropriate qualifications and salary.
Don't know about patent clerks. But I understand that patent lawyers are already required to also be engineers. Have been for some time.
We known that IP =/= You, so who cares?
IP + time + ISP logs gives a strong indication of which subscriber account was involved. If the same person posted multiply from the same machine at different times, the uncertainty of identification (primarily due to clock skew and log record losses) is reduced.
Civil cases swing on preponderance of evidence, rather than reasonable doubt. So it's harder to make arguments like "somebody must have used my computer when I wasn't looking/hacked my machine/got on my WiFi" stick.