Not this shit again. I pay taxes on top of taxes. License fees, registration fees, gas tax, sales tax, income tax, excise tax, etc etc etc.
One thing these taxes pay for are the roads I use to get to work, and the parking I use to do my shopping. If I neither earn nor spend money then maybe we're in your idea of nirvana, but not mine.
The issue is, are the taxes fair. If the roads are paid for out of income tax then people who take the train to work are being ripped off. Alternatively, if fuel taxes, registration and licence fess and parking and traffic fines are paying for schools and hospitals then motorist are being ripped off. How this works varies widely around the world.
You might think that they were different markets, but in 2013, they stated that the SpaceShipTwo was capable of launching 100 satellites daily.
LauncherOne is what's doing the launching of satellites. It's an expedible two-stage launcher carried by SpaceShipTwo. At best, consider SpaceShipTwo its first stage but, unlike conventional first stages, it contributes only a very small percentage of the energy required to reach orbit.
The Concorde flew at supersonic speeds because it was more efficient for it to do so, but modern aircraft don't because advances in the old designs caused them to become more efficient.
No, Concorde flew very fast because it wanted to get passengers to their destination twice as fast as other airliners. Modern aircraft don't because, it turns out, not enough people are willing to pay the extra cost to travel supersonically, especially since sonic booms mean you're only allowed to do so over water.
Almost all practical applications of going into space require reaching LEO (low earth orbit). This requires forty (40) times more energy than reaching 100km altitude.
I think you're correct. Mostly, Netflix doesn't geoblock by credit card address because they don't really want to win this battle. Also, having made this decision long ago, it's hard to change policy now without seriously annoying a high percentage of customers. While it is possible for people for obtain credit cards in other countries to work around such a block it's substantially harder than just buying a VPN service. The first sign that content providers are winning will be when selected new content is restricted by credit card address.
In Australia there seems to be no legal problem, to judge by
Film studios and TV companies should not use legislation that allows them to get piracy sites blocked in Australia to "inappropriately threaten" to block access to geoblocked services, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman Rod Sims has said.
The ACCC is an official government body but they appear to be firmly on the side of the consumer even when you feel the government isn't comfortable with their stance. For example, the ACCC seems to positively encourage consumer grey-marketing of books and DVDs/BDs (i.e., buying them from places like Amazon) as well as the use of VPNs to fight both the old and the new forms of geoblocking.
Encrypting that same real key with a second passphrase (retained by carrier or OS provider) would be trivial
Except that those second passphrases would all be stored in some central database which would be a very juicy target for hackers, including NSA-like agencies world-wide. Also, this is explicitly not secure against Apple or the US government and that's going to be a legitimate deal breaker for a large number of non-criminal customers both in the US and elsewhere.
The big issue with the law is that it seems to be banning end-to-end encryption. Right now, when the FBI comes to Apple and says "give us this person's iMessages in clear text" Apple can just respond "we made it so that we have no way to comply". Apple likes it that way, mostly because customers hate being spied on so it's a selling point. The UK is ramping up to say "make it so you can comply in future or else big fines and gaol". And it's going to be hard for Apple to do this just for the UK. You can bet the UK is going to be of the view that they need to be able to see the comms of foreign citizens on UK soil, and of UK citizens overseas. It's just like how California car emission laws have consequences for the whole of the US. In this case a UK law could outlaw strong encryption for ordinary consumers in the whole developed world.
if that monopoly were serving The People, Uber would not even exist for lack of interest.
How ironic your point is given that the story title is "Uber In Retreat Across Europe". The taxi industry, which is not a state-sponsored monopoly in many places, would seem to be serving the people. Just because the government requires taxi drivers to be licensed doesn't make it a monopoly any more that ordinary drivers' licences make cars a government monopoly.
However ironic you may think my point is, the danger is real that Uber will achieve widespread dominance and then be in a position to abuse their position. Unlike governments you won't be able to vote them out.
The future looks like multiple part-time jobs and low pay to me
No, the future is driverless cars and no jobs or pay for cab or Uber drivers. Uber only needs their contractors for a few more years until the technology is ready, then drivers will be free to retrain for better jobs in another industry.
Once Uber has driven its competition out of business, anyone will be able to offer a service like Uber.
No, because this type of service is a natural monopoly, especially when operated by a large multi-national. Nobody wants to use a different app for every city. It would be just like trying to compete against eBay in the online auction market.
Warrant canaries. Governments can make them illegal too. Or, at least, they can in Australia; maybe the US's constitutional protections around freedom of speech could make it harder there, but I wouldn't bet on it.
State-sponsored attacks are when a government agency hacks or social engineers or otherwise obtains your data against your will AND against the will of your service provider. That's what Yahoo and Microsoft are talking about. They can safely and legally tell their users about these attempts because, if for no other reason, they can claim they don't know who's responsible for the hack.
Official government requests for users' data, like US National Security Letters, are where the government uses legal compulsion rather than trickery to obtain the data. Obviously governments can and do add legal requirements to not inform affected end users. In Australia the laws even forbid revealing that there has not been a request for users' data; no warrant canaries for us!
Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die.
Intel and AMD would love to be able to do that. We haven't been stalled under 4GHz for years for marketing reasons; it's just not possible with current technology and sane power dissipation.
This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.)
For video work its usually possible to parallelise by just having each core work on its own frame. Anyway, there seems to be plenty of literature on multithreaded FFT algorithms.
The 2.4 Ghz spectrum was opened up for general use because it has relatively poor long distance characteristics thanks to it being absorbed strongly by water
Note that 2.4GHz is absorbed pretty much the same as 2.1GHz, 2.2GHz, 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz, 2.6GHz,... There are no blips or surprises if you plot it out. The 2.4GHz ISM band appears to have been chosen just because some experimenters had built heating equipment that happened to use that frequency.
Just as a matter of basic freshman physics (Rayleigh criterion) humans do not have the optical hardware to see sub-arcminute sized detail.
Yes, they really do. Arcminute resolution is only 20/20 vision (by definition) whereas more people manage 20/15 (corrected, better eye)[1]; that's 45 arcseconds. Almost 1% of people manage 20/10 or 30 arcseconds.
Staying with 45 arcseconds, viewing distance to see the pixels on this display is then 9". If it were a 4K display of the same size the number would be 18".
How many people do you think read all of the T&Cs? How many people do you know who have read the Facebook T&Cs, for example (I know two, but I don't know anyone who has both read them and agreed to them)?
So you're going with the "I didn't read the contract before I signed it so I'm not bound by it" defence?
Whether you read them is not very interesting legally. What matters is that you agreed to them which, if you signed up, I'm betting you must have done. Typically the only protection you have in one-sided T&Cs like these is that they're interpreted as much as possible in favour of the consumer. That's in addition to "unconscionable" clauses being void.
There really needs to be some stronger consumer protections that stop Apple et al. from having 43-page T&Cs that change every few months that nobody has time to read. Even being "plain language" doesn't help when they're that long. Is there any jurisdiction in the world with a sensible approach to fixing this?
> disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority
CPU priority will make almost no difference. A tiny amount of CPU will destroy your spinning disk performance. If only the OS or AV had some way to stay dormant until there's no other disk activity.
You're forgetting the big advantage of web apps: they are cross-platform. Also, they are not only zero-install, but they can also be continuously updated on the server without needing auto-updaters or patching on users' machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Not this shit again. I pay taxes on top of taxes. License fees, registration fees, gas tax, sales tax, income tax, excise tax, etc etc etc.
One thing these taxes pay for are the roads I use to get to work, and the parking I use to do my shopping. If I neither earn nor spend money then maybe we're in your idea of nirvana, but not mine.
The issue is, are the taxes fair. If the roads are paid for out of income tax then people who take the train to work are being ripped off. Alternatively, if fuel taxes, registration and licence fess and parking and traffic fines are paying for schools and hospitals then motorist are being ripped off. How this works varies widely around the world.
You might think that they were different markets, but in 2013, they stated that the SpaceShipTwo was capable of launching 100 satellites daily.
LauncherOne is what's doing the launching of satellites. It's an expedible two-stage launcher carried by SpaceShipTwo. At best, consider SpaceShipTwo its first stage but, unlike conventional first stages, it contributes only a very small percentage of the energy required to reach orbit.
The Concorde flew at supersonic speeds because it was more efficient for it to do so, but modern aircraft don't because advances in the old designs caused them to become more efficient.
No, Concorde flew very fast because it wanted to get passengers to their destination twice as fast as other airliners. Modern aircraft don't because, it turns out, not enough people are willing to pay the extra cost to travel supersonically, especially since sonic booms mean you're only allowed to do so over water.
Almost all practical applications of going into space require reaching LEO (low earth orbit). This requires forty (40) times more energy than reaching 100km altitude.
I think you're correct. Mostly, Netflix doesn't geoblock by credit card address because they don't really want to win this battle. Also, having made this decision long ago, it's hard to change policy now without seriously annoying a high percentage of customers. While it is possible for people for obtain credit cards in other countries to work around such a block it's substantially harder than just buying a VPN service. The first sign that content providers are winning will be when selected new content is restricted by credit card address.
If you mean criminal law, probably not, actually.
In Australia there seems to be no legal problem, to judge by
Film studios and TV companies should not use legislation that allows them to get piracy sites blocked in Australia to "inappropriately threaten" to block access to geoblocked services, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chairman Rod Sims has said.
The ACCC is an official government body but they appear to be firmly on the side of the consumer even when you feel the government isn't comfortable with their stance. For example, the ACCC seems to positively encourage consumer grey-marketing of books and DVDs/BDs (i.e., buying them from places like Amazon) as well as the use of VPNs to fight both the old and the new forms of geoblocking.
Encrypting that same real key with a second passphrase (retained by carrier or OS provider) would be trivial
Except that those second passphrases would all be stored in some central database which would be a very juicy target for hackers, including NSA-like agencies world-wide. Also, this is explicitly not secure against Apple or the US government and that's going to be a legitimate deal breaker for a large number of non-criminal customers both in the US and elsewhere.
The big issue with the law is that it seems to be banning end-to-end encryption. Right now, when the FBI comes to Apple and says "give us this person's iMessages in clear text" Apple can just respond "we made it so that we have no way to comply". Apple likes it that way, mostly because customers hate being spied on so it's a selling point. The UK is ramping up to say "make it so you can comply in future or else big fines and gaol". And it's going to be hard for Apple to do this just for the UK. You can bet the UK is going to be of the view that they need to be able to see the comms of foreign citizens on UK soil, and of UK citizens overseas. It's just like how California car emission laws have consequences for the whole of the US. In this case a UK law could outlaw strong encryption for ordinary consumers in the whole developed world.
if that monopoly were serving The People, Uber would not even exist for lack of interest.
How ironic your point is given that the story title is "Uber In Retreat Across Europe". The taxi industry, which is not a state-sponsored monopoly in many places, would seem to be serving the people. Just because the government requires taxi drivers to be licensed doesn't make it a monopoly any more that ordinary drivers' licences make cars a government monopoly.
However ironic you may think my point is, the danger is real that Uber will achieve widespread dominance and then be in a position to abuse their position. Unlike governments you won't be able to vote them out.
The future looks like multiple part-time jobs and low pay to me
No, the future is driverless cars and no jobs or pay for cab or Uber drivers. Uber only needs their contractors for a few more years until the technology is ready, then drivers will be free to retrain for better jobs in another industry.
Once Uber has driven its competition out of business, anyone will be able to offer a service like Uber.
No, because this type of service is a natural monopoly, especially when operated by a large multi-national. Nobody wants to use a different app for every city. It would be just like trying to compete against eBay in the online auction market.
Warrant canaries. Governments can make them illegal too. Or, at least, they can in Australia; maybe the US's constitutional protections around freedom of speech could make it harder there, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The summary is confusing two separate situations:
State-sponsored attacks are when a government agency hacks or social engineers or otherwise obtains your data against your will AND against the will of your service provider. That's what Yahoo and Microsoft are talking about. They can safely and legally tell their users about these attempts because, if for no other reason, they can claim they don't know who's responsible for the hack.
Official government requests for users' data, like US National Security Letters, are where the government uses legal compulsion rather than trickery to obtain the data. Obviously governments can and do add legal requirements to not inform affected end users. In Australia the laws even forbid revealing that there has not been a request for users' data; no warrant canaries for us!
3. Ship them to the Middle East
4. Profit !
Or, more likely: 4. Be convicted of supporting terrorism.
Customers will demand that Intel and AMD start having more oomph per core than just adding more cores to the die.
Intel and AMD would love to be able to do that. We haven't been stalled under 4GHz for years for marketing reasons; it's just not possible with current technology and sane power dissipation.
This will help a lot in tasks that can't be multithreaded (fast fourier transforms if doing video, for example.)
For video work its usually possible to parallelise by just having each core work on its own frame. Anyway, there seems to be plenty of literature on multithreaded FFT algorithms.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Got to love Tom Lehrer. These lyrics are now 50 years old and predate Apollo 11. The last line seems prophetic now:
"in German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
NASA space shuttles were blowing up as recently as 2003.
I believe the correct engineering and PC term is "catastrophic self-disassembly."
The 2.4 Ghz spectrum was opened up for general use because it has relatively poor long distance characteristics thanks to it being absorbed strongly by water
Note that 2.4GHz is absorbed pretty much the same as 2.1GHz, 2.2GHz, 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz, 2.6GHz, ... There are no blips or surprises if you plot it out. The 2.4GHz ISM band appears to have been chosen just because some experimenters had built heating equipment that happened to use that frequency.
So, which mobile browsers can be set to enforce HTTPS everywhere? Seems like this is a fix that the carriers can't do much about.
Just as a matter of basic freshman physics (Rayleigh criterion) humans do not have the optical hardware to see sub-arcminute sized detail.
Yes, they really do. Arcminute resolution is only 20/20 vision (by definition) whereas more people manage 20/15 (corrected, better eye)[1]; that's 45 arcseconds. Almost 1% of people manage 20/10 or 30 arcseconds.
Staying with 45 arcseconds, viewing distance to see the pixels on this display is then 9". If it were a 4K display of the same size the number would be 18".
to the company's press release.
I bought my current truck for 0% interest for 5 years... I'll take the free money...
If you had paid cash you would have paid a lower price. That's how "free" finance works.
How many people do you think read all of the T&Cs? How many people do you know who have read the Facebook T&Cs, for example (I know two, but I don't know anyone who has both read them and agreed to them)?
So you're going with the "I didn't read the contract before I signed it so I'm not bound by it" defence?
Whether you read them is not very interesting legally. What matters is that you agreed to them which, if you signed up, I'm betting you must have done. Typically the only protection you have in one-sided T&Cs like these is that they're interpreted as much as possible in favour of the consumer. That's in addition to "unconscionable" clauses being void.
There really needs to be some stronger consumer protections that stop Apple et al. from having 43-page T&Cs that change every few months that nobody has time to read. Even being "plain language" doesn't help when they're that long. Is there any jurisdiction in the world with a sensible approach to fixing this?
there's no functional difference between buying that, and buying a GSM phone and not slotting a SIM card
Except that a GSM phone with no SIM can call 911 (and/or 112).
> disk scanning could take place after hours and/or under a lower CPU priority
CPU priority will make almost no difference. A tiny amount of CPU will destroy your spinning disk performance. If only the OS or AV had some way to stay dormant until there's no other disk activity.
You're forgetting the big advantage of web apps: they are cross-platform. Also, they are not only zero-install, but they can also be continuously updated on the server without needing auto-updaters or patching on users' machines.