It certainly was with me. Technical expertise required has been absolutely minimal for quite some time.
I've always been, and still am, paranoid that my (hypothetically) jailbroken phone will be bricked or otherwise have its functionality reduced, e.g. no more access to the App Store, iTunes, or developer account. I especially have little faith that this invalidates the last of those. I can definitely see how this sensibly guarantees your legal use of the phone on your own, but I don't see how this prevents Apple from telling you to piss off, take your toys and stay out of their playground.
Yes, it refreshes because the BIG GODDAMNED SHINY "AUTO-REFRESH" option at the top is set to "ON," dipshit. The whole fucking point is that you're following along LIVE and want the newest comments at the top so you don't have to keep scrolling to the bottom.
Down to more tangible scale, it is roughly 3 grams per square meter. A typical cube of sugar is roughly 4 grams. Now consider that's just surface area, not volume. You're not going to be able to see much of it even if you're swimming in it.
I currently pay $50/month for my "unlimited" laptop card, which burns through about 5-6GB per month watching movies on Netflix and TV on Hulu etc., and another $30/month for the iPhone data plan, which uses about 1GB. So, for 7GB, I'm paying $80, which is pretty ridiculous. However, if I signed up as a new customer today, I could ditch the laptop card and just use tethering -- and pay precisely the same amount of money.
If I got an iPad all else equal sans tethering, I'd have to shell out yet another $30/month for another redundant modem, bringing my data outlay to $110. Under the new terms, that'd be 10GB for even money if I just used tethering. As a new customer, that would also save me $120 on the iPad and another $100 for my laptop, because I'd just run them all through my phone. In two years, that means I'd actually be $10/month ahead of where I would be otherwise.
Now, if I tried to sell, say, my mom on getting this same collection, she'd scoff at $110/month and write-off the idea of bothering with any of it. She'd also scoff at $250 of superfluous radios. But, given the entry model WiFi-only iPad, $100 iPhone 3G, her existing computer and twenty bucks a month to tether them all up and poke around? Sold. That's precisely the market they're trying to tap. It's right there in the press release: almost no one -- on iPhones -- uses more than 2GB. To get more customers like that, they've got to lower the entry price, which is precisely what this change does.
"Seriously, what was the argument for concluding that his boss or boss's boss didn't qualify as an authorized user?"
Your average "peer" wouldn't have the foggiest idea why this is an astoundingly naive question. In many matters, even being cleared for a particular piece of information does not mean that you are actually permitted access to it at any time of your choosing and accessing it at an inappropriate time, though you are "authorized" in general, the inappropriate circumstances can land you in criminal court. Personally identifiable information in databases being a good example. I have access to tens of millions of records. I am NOT permitted to just go browsing through them at will. The _circumstances_ of how I handle that data could in many cases get me fired and in quite a few land me in jail for a/VERY/ long time. If my boss asked me to dump a bunch of records for him and have me bring them on a USB stick to the bar across the street, you bet your ass I'd say no because we could/both/ land in the clink.
That they were not given a coherent, unambiguous and precise definition of this very critical term and were allowed to convict someone on criminal charges using a definition they necessarily just made up from whole cloth based on common sense and gumption is frightening as hell.
"That was the first aspect of it, the second aspect was the denial to an authorized user. And for us that's what we really had to spend the most time on, defining who an authorized user was. Because that wasn't one of the definitions given to us."...and on that point alone, this conviction should be overturned, since it was the entire fracking point..
Few, if any, people are so selfless as to choose suicide over going to the ER full well intending on stiffing the bill. In many cases, they aren't even conscious enough to decide until the bill is a multiple of their annual income. It is this liability to others you are insuring against unless you intend to have "just kill me" tattooed on your forehead and a law passed allowing anyone passing you in distress to summarily dispatch you for the mere cost of a bullet.
Anyone who has negotiated a software licensing purchase has had to agree to similar terms. Anyone who has after accepted a severance package has agreed to similar terms. Hell, anyone who has accepted an offer of salaried employment has done so. This is common in just about every type of contractual agreement.
Besides, anyone can go to developer.apple.com, click about three times and pull the thing up. There's about as much secrecy and coercion involved in reading a pay-walled article on the New York Times, so could we all GTF over it already?
Most PACs are corporate PACs. Most unions are, quite obviously, industrial in nature. In both cases, their revenue comes from willing contributions of labor. But, in essence, the collective voice is conceivably defensible as at least remotely representative of the will of _all_ of those people.
This is enabling corporations to compel labor to fund political speech directly through their actions as employees, or indirectly through ownership via institutional shareholders, with no means of controlling that speech, even if it is contrary to their interests. Moreover, corporate boards and majority (mostly institutional) shareholders may siphon profits from minority shareholders to fund political speech against their will and, in the case of the former, directly use the assets of employees to lobby against them.
This is not "free speech." This is graft funded under duress. The fact that people are raising the spectre of unions with not a shred of irony is positively frightful.
Your idea of "rigorously documented fact" might not be so cut and dried as you think.
In the meantime, your idea about what I am referring to is so abstract that you have no basis for making that judgment.
But, that wasn't the point. The point was, REGARDLESS of if what was documented was fact or fiction, whether it was rigorous or completely derelict and slipshod, if there were a million corpses piled up or we deflected a civilization-ending asteroid lobbed at us by space aliens and saved humanity... engaging in the public debate was pointless.
Few things have annoyed me as much as when I worked inside a particular three-letter acronym department than watching the public debate about something totally inflammatory while the department was unambiguously in the right by any reasonable standard, but the policy was to not engage in the debate with anyone but Congress. Of course, many members of Congress were fanning the flames for their own political gain without the slightest actual interest in the real (lack of a) problem. This wasn't a matter of vague opinion, either, it was an issue of rigorously documented fact that easily refuted the arguments going on in public.
Unfortunately, even if we had posted the proof on every major network at prime-time for a month straight, the minds in need of changing would not have changed in the slightest -- largely because the debate wasn't really about the actual topic, but other convenient vested political interests. Besides, the ethical boundaries, not to mention laws, it would be necessary to break in order to reveal the proof were so numerous that, especially in light of the futility of the public argument, the policy of no-comment actually made sense.
I fear they are about to rediscover that painfully routine circumstance here...
(8.7 * (10^12)) * 100 (bits per month) = 330 830 703 bits per second
When you find a carrier willing to hand you two OC-3s for $600/month each -- with a service level guarantee -- could you please share with the rest of the class? That'd be great.
A ticket like that in CA would result in revocation of license, a criminal charge, mandatory jail time and fine many times that...and god help you if you so much as had a shot of NyQuil in you at the time.
Are they going to sue Nexxus because their shampoo conflicts? Cisco because their Nexus switches conflict? Nexus Telecom? Nexus Internation Broadcasting Assocation? Vivendi Universal for publishing a game called Nexus? UCSB for daring to name their student newspaper "Nexus?" University of Waikato for precisely the same? Nexus Magazine?
It's JUST A DAMNED WORD and DICK did not invent it. Besides, Dick is dead, so screw the Dick children for being so damned greedy about their beloved Dick. Dick.
My office has free coffee -- a dozen kinds of Keurig pods -- and a free soda fountain. We all got pretty miffed when they down-sized the free cups, but, meh.
It's about $25-50/week not spent at the overpriced retail joints. Figure 200 employees at ten minutes, once a day to run downstairs, that's 166 hours of lost productivity -- or somewhere between $5-10K PER WEEK. To the employees, that's about $250K of collective benefit. To the employer, it's about double that in productivity not lost to everyone schlepping downstairs for coffee and soda.
On the other hand, my mother's office eliminated their coffee service, one kind, giant urn of Yuban, claiming it was an unnecessary expense. That manager got a bonus for reducing overhead...
I worked on an EHR procurement process for the last several years and, yes, there's a LOT of crapware out there, but I have seen systems deployed that were almost entirely reliant on the input of the actual front-line providers and they'd sooner saw off their own arms than go back to paper records.
"They should start working now to have all records be electronic, X-rays, MRIs, personal history, etc. should be in formats that can be directly shared between doctors."
They already do. It's called HL7. It's been around for twenty years. Teleradiology is nothing terribly new anymore either.
As for "having a doctor or nurse putting in billing codes," look, if they're worth half their salt, they can already rattle off the ICD9/10 codes with sufficient accuracy from memory that it's actually faster than scribbling the condition on paper.
Yes, even GOOD systems can fail if deployed poorly. ITFA they admitted "we sucked when we used paper, then we went to computers and lo-and-behold, we still sucked just as badly, almost precisely so, ergo, we're pretty sure it was the computer's fault." This is a typical case of bad management pointing the finger at the technology to cover their own incompetence. I'm sure when they were on paper they blamed the f'ing pencils.
I don't believe in the viability of any of this crap for any of the technical, sociological or economic reasons that should seem pretty damned obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. HOWEVER, " the freezers would be switched off " is annoyingly frequent here and is pretty astounding. The corpsicles are put in liquid nitrogen. They are not powered freezers. They require _zero_ power. They operate on the same basic principles as your average Thermos.
But, ultimately, the primary reason this will never happen is we need people to die for society and the species itself to be sustainable. The irony is that by removing death from the equation, you end up with even more death, certainly the potential for a lot more suffering.
Apart from that, people take risks now, basically because they realize "I'm going to die someday anyway, probably tomorrow, so screw it I AM going to be an astronaut, work in a level-4 biohazard lab, fish crab for you, be a coal miner, whatever." Remove death from the equation and the risk-aversion would become paralyzing. Worse, currently, if you accidentally run someone over with a bus, you shaved a tangible amount of time off someone who we're pretty certain was doomed to the dirt nap shortly anyway, so we sort of let it go unless you made a pretty devoted effort in dispatching them. In a society with a reasonable expectation of physical immortality, you just caused effectively infinite damage to someone who could have had infinite value to society -- hey, with 1500 years, that unfortunate roadkill could have gone from flipping burgers at 50 to being the next Einstein, Sagan, and Hawking combined by the ripe age of 220 and still have time to best Mozart by 350. What would we do to you? Horribly execute, then revive you only to execute you again and again for all eternity? To people expecting to live a thousand or so years, that would seem a perfectly reasonable punishment for pulverizing someone in their bilssful youth of 93. But then, we could conceivably extract infinite benefit from you, so maybe we'd just put you in a forced labor camp with no hope of death, but just execute and revive you every alternate Saturday for kicks, then send you back to the mines.
Seriously. Why the hell is this on Slashdot AT ALL much less on the front page? Even in whatever field this is attempting to masquerade, this isn't even craptastic. It's just crap.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly was with me. Technical expertise required has been absolutely minimal for quite some time.
I've always been, and still am, paranoid that my (hypothetically) jailbroken phone will be bricked or otherwise have its functionality reduced, e.g. no more access to the App Store, iTunes, or developer account. I especially have little faith that this invalidates the last of those. I can definitely see how this sensibly guarantees your legal use of the phone on your own, but I don't see how this prevents Apple from telling you to piss off, take your toys and stay out of their playground.
Yes, it refreshes because the BIG GODDAMNED SHINY "AUTO-REFRESH" option at the top is set to "ON," dipshit. The whole fucking point is that you're following along LIVE and want the newest comments at the top so you don't have to keep scrolling to the bottom.
Down to more tangible scale, it is roughly 3 grams per square meter. A typical cube of sugar is roughly 4 grams. Now consider that's just surface area, not volume. You're not going to be able to see much of it even if you're swimming in it.
I really don't see this as terribly evil.
I currently pay $50/month for my "unlimited" laptop card, which burns through about 5-6GB per month watching movies on Netflix and TV on Hulu etc., and another $30/month for the iPhone data plan, which uses about 1GB. So, for 7GB, I'm paying $80, which is pretty ridiculous. However, if I signed up as a new customer today, I could ditch the laptop card and just use tethering -- and pay precisely the same amount of money.
If I got an iPad all else equal sans tethering, I'd have to shell out yet another $30/month for another redundant modem, bringing my data outlay to $110. Under the new terms, that'd be 10GB for even money if I just used tethering. As a new customer, that would also save me $120 on the iPad and another $100 for my laptop, because I'd just run them all through my phone. In two years, that means I'd actually be $10/month ahead of where I would be otherwise.
Now, if I tried to sell, say, my mom on getting this same collection, she'd scoff at $110/month and write-off the idea of bothering with any of it. She'd also scoff at $250 of superfluous radios. But, given the entry model WiFi-only iPad, $100 iPhone 3G, her existing computer and twenty bucks a month to tether them all up and poke around? Sold. That's precisely the market they're trying to tap. It's right there in the press release: almost no one -- on iPhones -- uses more than 2GB. To get more customers like that, they've got to lower the entry price, which is precisely what this change does.
I fail to see how that is evil.
Form of, a jackass:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann
"Seriously, what was the argument for concluding that his boss or boss's boss didn't qualify as an authorized user?"
Your average "peer" wouldn't have the foggiest idea why this is an astoundingly naive question. In many matters, even being cleared for a particular piece of information does not mean that you are actually permitted access to it at any time of your choosing and accessing it at an inappropriate time, though you are "authorized" in general, the inappropriate circumstances can land you in criminal court. Personally identifiable information in databases being a good example. I have access to tens of millions of records. I am NOT permitted to just go browsing through them at will. The _circumstances_ of how I handle that data could in many cases get me fired and in quite a few land me in jail for a /VERY/ long time. If my boss asked me to dump a bunch of records for him and have me bring them on a USB stick to the bar across the street, you bet your ass I'd say no because we could /both/ land in the clink.
That they were not given a coherent, unambiguous and precise definition of this very critical term and were allowed to convict someone on criminal charges using a definition they necessarily just made up from whole cloth based on common sense and gumption is frightening as hell.
I pray this is reversed on appeal.
"That was the first aspect of it, the second aspect was the denial to an authorized user. And for us that's what we really had to spend the most time on, defining who an authorized user was. Because that wasn't one of the definitions given to us." ...and on that point alone, this conviction should be overturned, since it was the entire fracking point..
Few, if any, people are so selfless as to choose suicide over going to the ER full well intending on stiffing the bill. In many cases, they aren't even conscious enough to decide until the bill is a multiple of their annual income. It is this liability to others you are insuring against unless you intend to have "just kill me" tattooed on your forehead and a law passed allowing anyone passing you in distress to summarily dispatch you for the mere cost of a bullet.
Yet in DC/MD/VA, Blue Cross costs $89/month.
Anyone who has negotiated a software licensing purchase has had to agree to similar terms. Anyone who has after accepted a severance package has agreed to similar terms. Hell, anyone who has accepted an offer of salaried employment has done so. This is common in just about every type of contractual agreement.
Besides, anyone can go to developer.apple.com, click about three times and pull the thing up. There's about as much secrecy and coercion involved in reading a pay-walled article on the New York Times, so could we all GTF over it already?
The way every other member of your species has done in every conceivable field since time immemorial. You simply DO.
For the rest, here's a quick run-down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFQkMAPVoIo
Most PACs are corporate PACs. Most unions are, quite obviously, industrial in nature. In both cases, their revenue comes from willing contributions of labor. But, in essence, the collective voice is conceivably defensible as at least remotely representative of the will of _all_ of those people.
This is enabling corporations to compel labor to fund political speech directly through their actions as employees, or indirectly through ownership via institutional shareholders, with no means of controlling that speech, even if it is contrary to their interests. Moreover, corporate boards and majority (mostly institutional) shareholders may siphon profits from minority shareholders to fund political speech against their will and, in the case of the former, directly use the assets of employees to lobby against them.
This is not "free speech." This is graft funded under duress. The fact that people are raising the spectre of unions with not a shred of irony is positively frightful.
Your idea of "rigorously documented fact" might not be so cut and dried as you think.
In the meantime, your idea about what I am referring to is so abstract that you have no basis for making that judgment.
But, that wasn't the point. The point was, REGARDLESS of if what was documented was fact or fiction, whether it was rigorous or completely derelict and slipshod, if there were a million corpses piled up or we deflected a civilization-ending asteroid lobbed at us by space aliens and saved humanity... engaging in the public debate was pointless.
Few things have annoyed me as much as when I worked inside a particular three-letter acronym department than watching the public debate about something totally inflammatory while the department was unambiguously in the right by any reasonable standard, but the policy was to not engage in the debate with anyone but Congress. Of course, many members of Congress were fanning the flames for their own political gain without the slightest actual interest in the real (lack of a) problem. This wasn't a matter of vague opinion, either, it was an issue of rigorously documented fact that easily refuted the arguments going on in public.
Unfortunately, even if we had posted the proof on every major network at prime-time for a month straight, the minds in need of changing would not have changed in the slightest -- largely because the debate wasn't really about the actual topic, but other convenient vested political interests. Besides, the ethical boundaries, not to mention laws, it would be necessary to break in order to reveal the proof were so numerous that, especially in light of the futility of the public argument, the policy of no-comment actually made sense.
I fear they are about to rediscover that painfully routine circumstance here...
(8.7 * (10^12)) * 100 (bits per month) = 330 830 703 bits per second
When you find a carrier willing to hand you two OC-3s for $600/month each -- with a service level guarantee -- could you please share with the rest of the class? That'd be great.
The math here isn't that hard, people.
https://www.shakeweight.com/ver4/index.asp
A ticket like that in CA would result in revocation of license, a criminal charge, mandatory jail time and fine many times that...and god help you if you so much as had a shot of NyQuil in you at the time.
http://jalopnik.com/5318413/top-gear-played-by-bogus-210%252B-mph-bugatti-veyron-ticket-too
Basically, they're saying for 5% of the price of a T1 you get 5% the capacity over a month.
So, continuing on about the tenth year in a row, I continue find it very hard to give a shit.
Are they going to sue Nexxus because their shampoo conflicts?
Cisco because their Nexus switches conflict?
Nexus Telecom?
Nexus Internation Broadcasting Assocation?
Vivendi Universal for publishing a game called Nexus?
UCSB for daring to name their student newspaper "Nexus?"
University of Waikato for precisely the same?
Nexus Magazine?
It's JUST A DAMNED WORD and DICK did not invent it. Besides, Dick is dead, so screw the Dick children for being so damned greedy about their beloved Dick. Dick.
Who reads a book on an iPod or phone?! Seriously?
Me. Daily.
Do you carry around one of those magnifying screens from "Brazil"?
No. Stanza and Kindle for iPhone have a variable font-size that is perfectly sufficient to approximate or best that of an average paperback.
My office has free coffee -- a dozen kinds of Keurig pods -- and a free soda fountain. We all got pretty miffed when they down-sized the free cups, but, meh.
It's about $25-50/week not spent at the overpriced retail joints. Figure 200 employees at ten minutes, once a day to run downstairs, that's 166 hours of lost productivity -- or somewhere between $5-10K PER WEEK. To the employees, that's about $250K of collective benefit. To the employer, it's about double that in productivity not lost to everyone schlepping downstairs for coffee and soda.
On the other hand, my mother's office eliminated their coffee service, one kind, giant urn of Yuban, claiming it was an unnecessary expense. That manager got a bonus for reducing overhead...
Consider an old CPU that is 5W idle vs. 25W peak. 20W difference works out roughly to: .02*.06*24*3650*5000
That's $525,600 in juice over ten years assuming $0.06/KWh -- just for the CPUs.
I worked on an EHR procurement process for the last several years and, yes, there's a LOT of crapware out there, but I have seen systems deployed that were almost entirely reliant on the input of the actual front-line providers and they'd sooner saw off their own arms than go back to paper records.
"They should start working now to have all records be electronic, X-rays, MRIs, personal history, etc. should be in formats that can be directly shared between doctors."
They already do. It's called HL7. It's been around for twenty years. Teleradiology is nothing terribly new anymore either.
As for "having a doctor or nurse putting in billing codes," look, if they're worth half their salt, they can already rattle off the ICD9/10 codes with sufficient accuracy from memory that it's actually faster than scribbling the condition on paper.
Yes, even GOOD systems can fail if deployed poorly. ITFA they admitted "we sucked when we used paper, then we went to computers and lo-and-behold, we still sucked just as badly, almost precisely so, ergo, we're pretty sure it was the computer's fault." This is a typical case of bad management pointing the finger at the technology to cover their own incompetence. I'm sure when they were on paper they blamed the f'ing pencils.
I don't believe in the viability of any of this crap for any of the technical, sociological or economic reasons that should seem pretty damned obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. HOWEVER, " the freezers would be switched off " is annoyingly frequent here and is pretty astounding. The corpsicles are put in liquid nitrogen. They are not powered freezers. They require _zero_ power. They operate on the same basic principles as your average Thermos.
But, ultimately, the primary reason this will never happen is we need people to die for society and the species itself to be sustainable. The irony is that by removing death from the equation, you end up with even more death, certainly the potential for a lot more suffering.
Apart from that, people take risks now, basically because they realize "I'm going to die someday anyway, probably tomorrow, so screw it I AM going to be an astronaut, work in a level-4 biohazard lab, fish crab for you, be a coal miner, whatever." Remove death from the equation and the risk-aversion would become paralyzing. Worse, currently, if you accidentally run someone over with a bus, you shaved a tangible amount of time off someone who we're pretty certain was doomed to the dirt nap shortly anyway, so we sort of let it go unless you made a pretty devoted effort in dispatching them. In a society with a reasonable expectation of physical immortality, you just caused effectively infinite damage to someone who could have had infinite value to society -- hey, with 1500 years, that unfortunate roadkill could have gone from flipping burgers at 50 to being the next Einstein, Sagan, and Hawking combined by the ripe age of 220 and still have time to best Mozart by 350. What would we do to you? Horribly execute, then revive you only to execute you again and again for all eternity? To people expecting to live a thousand or so years, that would seem a perfectly reasonable punishment for pulverizing someone in their bilssful youth of 93. But then, we could conceivably extract infinite benefit from you, so maybe we'd just put you in a forced labor camp with no hope of death, but just execute and revive you every alternate Saturday for kicks, then send you back to the mines.
Seriously. Why the hell is this on Slashdot AT ALL much less on the front page? Even in whatever field this is attempting to masquerade, this isn't even craptastic. It's just crap.