Is there *really* a need for a *slightly* smaller SIM??? Or is this just yet another planned obsolescence strategy by the handset manufacturers... Seems like micro-SIM is small enough and nano-SIM isn't all that smaller...
just getting us to buy new handsets or make obsolete our old SIMs... with little additional point...
Longer warrantees directly translate to higher costs. So Apple just needs to add 50 euros to the price to cover the increased warrantee.
But I wonder what a typical consumer would choose: higher price or smaller warrantee. I know that I always turn down the offers for extended warrantees... What's the diff? except in EU, no choice in the matter...
There are values that are more important than carbon footprint reduction, otherwise we would all be living in a big dormitory with lots of roommates. So sure, small B&M business may be less "efficient" in some ways, but economic or carbon-reduction efficiency is not necessarily of the highest priority. Small B&M's their own set of valuable contributions to our society. I'm not that keen on Amazon taking over everything online anymore than I like to see Walmart taking over local retail.
not according to the Constitution...
You order something from Amazon, your state wants you to pay a "use" tax.
Your friend sends you the same thing from another state. Do you owe a "use" tax? or is the "use" tax just for out-of-state SALES, i.e. it really *is* a sales tax, which is unconstitutional...
so what about folks that have no income? or in-state income? Are you sure you still don't want to tax in-state spending in some way?
some folks believe instead in a "wealth tax", which gets around the no-income problem...
States are constitutionality prohibited from taxing interstate commerce. Use taxes are thinly veiled interstate sales taxes -- calling them use taxes rather than sales taxes doesn't change this fact. All of this applies to trying to tax online download from servers in other states.
And why wouldnt these homeless folk try to immediately cash in, sell or trade the hotspot device for money or a nice bottle?
Every business has to deal with theft. Most of them will try to ascertain if a prospective employee will run off with their equipment by just sitting down and talking with the person. I imagine you can do the same thing with the homeless.
Sure, except, ignoring the issue of propensities and relative likihoods,
in a more "conventional" employment scenerio,
1) before hiring one does extensive background checks, reference checking, review of prior employment history, etc., 2) the employer collect far more information about the potential employee, including address, SSN, other profile data, 3) the employer has a strong handle on the employee, including salary, back salary, benefits, which in turn translates to strong motivations for the employee not to cash in with whatever he/she is entrusted with for more immediate return, against potentially fairly desperate immediate needs.
Homeless often means desperate, with few resources. You then give him/her a device worth $100-200, that brings no immediate benefit to him/her, not unlike giving a $100 watch. Now maybe if you reward him with a full meal and a night's stay for each day he brings back the device, I could see that begin to work. But otherwise, under those conditions, it seems more likely that he will try to trade that device for something much more useful to him, and I WOULDN'T blame him, nor consider it "dishonest". It is no more dishonest than you being in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and rummaging around other people's houses for food, supplies, water, etc. You wouldn't feel it to be dishonest -- not to the point of not doing it... its about survival, not ethics.
And why wouldnt these homeless folk try to immediately cash in, sell or trade the hotspot device for money or a nice bottle? They are $100+ devices, nevermind 4g service for a day or so.
fixing education requires fixing what you want to happen after education... no fix for education will work if the job market after education doesn't match the educational goals. and no changes to the job market will work without the corresponding changing in country's economic engine(s).
conversely, fix the economic engines, create the jobs needed, education fixes follow BUT you cannot allow people to coast along sucking off the system not following this track. There needs to also be a strong disincentive for the choice of being an unproductive member of society...
A big part of the problem with education in the US is a symptom of the anti-science, anti-education views of a significant segment of the population. Once the entire population is convinced that only through a re-investment in science and math will the US remain competitive in the global economy -- you can bet the Chinese have understood this very well.
This then also means pour lots of funds into science and technology R&D. (Its so hard to get grants now that it is turning many students away...) Now will make it easier to get jobs in STEM, which will drive the imperative for students to get a better STEM education, which will drive improvements in schools for STEM. And the parent will be onboard as they will now all believe the imperative for their children and the country's welfare and economy, that everything is geared toward excellence in STEM.
How to convince the average American that STEM is of the highest priority? Difficult, but it should be something quite forceful, probably Darwinian (i.e. make it painfully obvious that survive depends on it). The US population has been lulled into a false sense of security that the US will always be on top and that Americans have the "freedom" to do as they choose and they will be okay regardless of what they choose. That part of the "American Dream" has to be torn down -- because it is untrue. It is not okay to believe in views that are contrary to science and still expect the future to turn out well.
You are wrong. Bandwidth is a correct term for describing the 3GB cap, because it's not a 3GB absolute cap, it is a cap of 3GB PER UNIT OF TIME. Which as you point out, is a RATE of usage. And so BANDWIDTH is the correct term
That definition of "bandwidth" is of course silly, since all data usage can be referred to a window in time, if you allow time to be arbitrarily large, like decades, centuries or eons...
Bandwidth is NOT about usage (bytes) per MONTH, at least not that anyone cares about. Bandwidth is about instantaneous time, or nearly so. A one second window is typical. A day is way too long for most uses of the term "bandwidth". Most bandwidth figures are quote as "per second".
Your usage of "bandwidth" where the time window is one month is just plain silly... its about as useful as claiming that the average driver in the US drives 12000 miles/year and calling that a speed/velocity...
correct, IT subserves the university, student, faculty and staff, not the reverse. We have exactly the same nonsense at our univ., with the added observation that while all other depts are in budgetary and hiring freeze, the IT dept manages to grow and grow to be the largest most expensive single entity on campus, with the power to control everyones professional life.
It is definitely the tail wagging the dog here, but if I go directly to the CIO, with the support of the dean and president, thinsg do get done, and graciously so... so the dog still can be the wagger if it so chooses to.
VERY naive... witness what Sprint has done this past year...
MULTIPLE changes that affect the bottomline, i.e. what the customer actually has to pay or what the customer actually gets in the way of services, discounts or equipment upgrades. HOWEVER, Sprint merely says "these changes are not "material"". They are not changes to the contract, and therefore not grounds for leaving ETF-free.
Furthermore Sprint says, "if you disagree, tough. You CANNOT sue us as a class action. Your ONLY recourse is arbitration or small claims court." and the kicker "We INVITE litigation". Oh and about arbitration, Sprint change the rules as to how the arbiter is chosen: Sprint gets to choose and it chose a pro-corporate arbiter that it pays (can we say "conflict of interest")...
In the US... different strengths...
PagePlus, good rates except for data, Verizon coverage, BYOD
Boost/VM, unlimited plans w/data, Sprint network, no BYOD
Ting, great pooled/family plans, hotspot included, Sprint network, no BYOD
Tmobile, daily rates, GSM/SIMs, low yearly rates, BYOD
StraightTalk, unlimited plans w/ data, AT&T Tmo, GSM/SIMs, BYOD
For single, moderate use, just voice/text I'd first look at PagePlus because of BYOD and Verizon coverage.
"Your example of using a yellow highlighter DOES change the document, as does scribbling on it. Making a copy and marking that up is still marking up right in the full document. I'm not familiar enough with Acrobat's annotations to know if it makes them in a separate file... if so, that could well be prior art."
OK, except that I wasn't trying to make arguments about prior art. Instead I was talking about "one practiced in the arts", i.e. "innovations" that are so obvious that they should be ruled as NON-innovations that are obvious to anyone "practiced in the arts". The USPTO is supposed to throw out any patents that describe minor or obvious adaptations and improvements that any expert in the field (or anyone at all) would easily come up with.
USPTO *used* to set a pretty high bar for obvious improvments, modifications and "innovations", using the notion that "one practiced in the arts..." (i.e. experts in the field), could, would and have easily arrived at the same solutions, tricks and modifications. Some of these "protected innovations" are obviously ridiculous and trivial to "one practiced in the arts...", like:
* Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.... please... what does yellow highlighter do, nevermind just scribbling on a printout of a doc while retaining the original copy... sheesh... Does Adobe pay MS for their annotation features in Acrobat?
* Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection.... again, easy selection??? been doing it for years with mice, with EMACs marking functions, etc.
* Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster.... quite sure Netscape did this at least 15 years ago or earlier... and simply starting to display before download is finished? (one practiced in the arts... obvious and trivial).
ok, reading the abstract of the research article provides further clues, though far from a complete explanation...
"Here we design and characterize a miniature swimming mechanism that uses the magnetic fields of the MRI for both propulsion and wireless powering of the capsule. Our method uses both the static and the radio frequency (RF) magnetic fields inherently available in MRI to generate a propulsive force."
As I suspected, they have to use the RF modulation signal since a static field by itself is not suitable for generating power. The abstract mentions a 20Hz modulation -- I guess they are commandeering the regular RF signals and/or injecting a 20Hz signal on top of it. For example, such a 20Hz signal could be extracted and generating an opposing dynamic magnetic field to create the needed motor. The abstract also mentions a net 0.85mw power output of the setup.
I would have to dig into the standard MRI protocols to see what this means for the RF signal, but as I mentioned, this is the same signal that, if misused can (and has) cause severe burns in patients (and subsequent lawsuits).
Also still of concern is the length of time of the procedure. Its got to be at least an hour or two, which I think means at least $5000 or more in scanner time, not counted any costs for the added technology.
Since the MRI magnetic field is STATIC, not sure exactly how this little pill is going to move in arbitrary directions. The article isn't sufficiently detailed to answer this question. Unless they are planning to use the RF modulation energy (the same signal that has been known to burn patients in MRI's) -- not sure I'd be happy about that.
BTW, MRI scans run at least $1000-1500 for a quickie scan. So this technique sounds like it will ring up a bill of at least $5000 or more, for a session.
Dell is not right. He may be right that Dell cannot compete with Apple, though. If you had to pick one or two meals, you might choose lobster and steak. That doesnt mean that there is no market for chicken or fish. If you had to choose 1 or 2 vehicles, you might choose a BMW and a Jeep. That doesnt mean that people wont buy Harleys or bicycles or Prius.
Mostly, just because stodgy companies like HP and Dell cant effectively compete with Apple in smartphones and tablets doesnt mean that the market for iphones and ipads isnt healthy and worth billions and stealing marketshare from traditional PCs and laptops. Cuz it is.
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Is there *really* a need for a *slightly* smaller SIM??? Or is this just yet another planned obsolescence strategy by the handset manufacturers... Seems like micro-SIM is small enough and nano-SIM isn't all that smaller... just getting us to buy new handsets or make obsolete our old SIMs... with little additional point...
"They still have to pay for the scum sucking lawyers. That is some level of punishment." I'm sure they are on retainer, so, no, not much punishment...
Longer warrantees directly translate to higher costs. So Apple just needs to add 50 euros to the price to cover the increased warrantee. But I wonder what a typical consumer would choose: higher price or smaller warrantee. I know that I always turn down the offers for extended warrantees... What's the diff? except in EU, no choice in the matter...
lots of problems with servers in the air... much easier to put servers on ships in int'l waters... like pirate radio...
There are values that are more important than carbon footprint reduction, otherwise we would all be living in a big dormitory with lots of roommates. So sure, small B&M business may be less "efficient" in some ways, but economic or carbon-reduction efficiency is not necessarily of the highest priority. Small B&M's their own set of valuable contributions to our society. I'm not that keen on Amazon taking over everything online anymore than I like to see Walmart taking over local retail.
not according to the Constitution... You order something from Amazon, your state wants you to pay a "use" tax. Your friend sends you the same thing from another state. Do you owe a "use" tax? or is the "use" tax just for out-of-state SALES, i.e. it really *is* a sales tax, which is unconstitutional...
so what about folks that have no income? or in-state income? Are you sure you still don't want to tax in-state spending in some way? some folks believe instead in a "wealth tax", which gets around the no-income problem...
States are constitutionality prohibited from taxing interstate commerce. Use taxes are thinly veiled interstate sales taxes -- calling them use taxes rather than sales taxes doesn't change this fact. All of this applies to trying to tax online download from servers in other states.
And why wouldnt these homeless folk try to immediately cash in, sell or trade the hotspot device for money or a nice bottle?
Every business has to deal with theft. Most of them will try to ascertain if a prospective employee will run off with their equipment by just sitting down and talking with the person. I imagine you can do the same thing with the homeless.
Sure, except, ignoring the issue of propensities and relative likihoods, in a more "conventional" employment scenerio,
1) before hiring one does extensive background checks, reference checking, review of prior employment history, etc.,
2) the employer collect far more information about the potential employee, including address, SSN, other profile data,
3) the employer has a strong handle on the employee, including salary, back salary, benefits, which in turn translates to strong motivations for the employee not to cash in with whatever he/she is entrusted with for more immediate return, against potentially fairly desperate immediate needs.
Homeless often means desperate, with few resources. You then give him/her a device worth $100-200, that brings no immediate benefit to him/her, not unlike giving a $100 watch. Now maybe if you reward him with a full meal and a night's stay for each day he brings back the device, I could see that begin to work. But otherwise, under those conditions, it seems more likely that he will try to trade that device for something much more useful to him, and I WOULDN'T blame him, nor consider it "dishonest". It is no more dishonest than you being in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and rummaging around other people's houses for food, supplies, water, etc. You wouldn't feel it to be dishonest -- not to the point of not doing it... its about survival, not ethics.
And why wouldnt these homeless folk try to immediately cash in, sell or trade the hotspot device for money or a nice bottle? They are $100+ devices, nevermind 4g service for a day or so.
conversely, fix the economic engines, create the jobs needed, education fixes follow BUT you cannot allow people to coast along sucking off the system not following this track. There needs to also be a strong disincentive for the choice of being an unproductive member of society...
This then also means pour lots of funds into science and technology R&D. (Its so hard to get grants now that it is turning many students away...) Now will make it easier to get jobs in STEM, which will drive the imperative for students to get a better STEM education, which will drive improvements in schools for STEM. And the parent will be onboard as they will now all believe the imperative for their children and the country's welfare and economy, that everything is geared toward excellence in STEM.
How to convince the average American that STEM is of the highest priority? Difficult, but it should be something quite forceful, probably Darwinian (i.e. make it painfully obvious that survive depends on it). The US population has been lulled into a false sense of security that the US will always be on top and that Americans have the "freedom" to do as they choose and they will be okay regardless of what they choose. That part of the "American Dream" has to be torn down -- because it is untrue. It is not okay to believe in views that are contrary to science and still expect the future to turn out well.
nice dream, huh...
that's bloody funny... but it goes with the flow...
That definition of "bandwidth" is of course silly, since all data usage can be referred to a window in time, if you allow time to be arbitrarily large, like decades, centuries or eons... Bandwidth is NOT about usage (bytes) per MONTH, at least not that anyone cares about. Bandwidth is about instantaneous time, or nearly so. A one second window is typical. A day is way too long for most uses of the term "bandwidth". Most bandwidth figures are quote as "per second". Your usage of "bandwidth" where the time window is one month is just plain silly... its about as useful as claiming that the average driver in the US drives 12000 miles/year and calling that a speed/velocity...
It is definitely the tail wagging the dog here, but if I go directly to the CIO, with the support of the dean and president, thinsg do get done, and graciously so... so the dog still can be the wagger if it so chooses to.
VERY naive... witness what Sprint has done this past year... MULTIPLE changes that affect the bottomline, i.e. what the customer actually has to pay or what the customer actually gets in the way of services, discounts or equipment upgrades. HOWEVER, Sprint merely says "these changes are not "material"". They are not changes to the contract, and therefore not grounds for leaving ETF-free. Furthermore Sprint says, "if you disagree, tough. You CANNOT sue us as a class action. Your ONLY recourse is arbitration or small claims court." and the kicker "We INVITE litigation". Oh and about arbitration, Sprint change the rules as to how the arbiter is chosen: Sprint gets to choose and it chose a pro-corporate arbiter that it pays (can we say "conflict of interest")...
In the US... different strengths... PagePlus, good rates except for data, Verizon coverage, BYOD Boost/VM, unlimited plans w/data, Sprint network, no BYOD Ting, great pooled/family plans, hotspot included, Sprint network, no BYOD Tmobile, daily rates, GSM/SIMs, low yearly rates, BYOD StraightTalk, unlimited plans w/ data, AT&T Tmo, GSM/SIMs, BYOD For single, moderate use, just voice/text I'd first look at PagePlus because of BYOD and Verizon coverage.
UV can be used to visualize blood, DNA, etc... see where murders and creampies were performed...
OK, except that I wasn't trying to make arguments about prior art. Instead I was talking about "one practiced in the arts", i.e. "innovations" that are so obvious that they should be ruled as NON-innovations that are obvious to anyone "practiced in the arts". The USPTO is supposed to throw out any patents that describe minor or obvious adaptations and improvements that any expert in the field (or anyone at all) would easily come up with.
USPTO *used* to set a pretty high bar for obvious improvments, modifications and "innovations", using the notion that "one practiced in the arts..." (i.e. experts in the field), could, would and have easily arrived at the same solutions, tricks and modifications. Some of these "protected innovations" are obviously ridiculous and trivial to "one practiced in the arts...", like: ... please... what does yellow highlighter do, nevermind just scribbling on a printout of a doc while retaining the original copy... sheesh... Does Adobe pay MS for their annotation features in Acrobat?
... again, easy selection??? been doing it for years with mice, with EMACs marking functions, etc.
... quite sure Netscape did this at least 15 years ago or earlier... and simply starting to display before download is finished? (one practiced in the arts... obvious and trivial).
* Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.
* Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection.
* Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster.
ok, reading the abstract of the research article provides further clues, though far from a complete explanation... "Here we design and characterize a miniature swimming mechanism that uses the magnetic fields of the MRI for both propulsion and wireless powering of the capsule. Our method uses both the static and the radio frequency (RF) magnetic fields inherently available in MRI to generate a propulsive force." As I suspected, they have to use the RF modulation signal since a static field by itself is not suitable for generating power. The abstract mentions a 20Hz modulation -- I guess they are commandeering the regular RF signals and/or injecting a 20Hz signal on top of it. For example, such a 20Hz signal could be extracted and generating an opposing dynamic magnetic field to create the needed motor. The abstract also mentions a net 0.85mw power output of the setup. I would have to dig into the standard MRI protocols to see what this means for the RF signal, but as I mentioned, this is the same signal that, if misused can (and has) cause severe burns in patients (and subsequent lawsuits). Also still of concern is the length of time of the procedure. Its got to be at least an hour or two, which I think means at least $5000 or more in scanner time, not counted any costs for the added technology.
ok, please tell me how to POWER a device by a STATIC magnetic field. All common uses of magnetic fields for power require dynamic magnetic fields.
I give you a horseshoe magnet. Make it a motor WITHOUT anything else (no electric fields, etc).
Since the MRI magnetic field is STATIC, not sure exactly how this little pill is going to move in arbitrary directions. The article isn't sufficiently detailed to answer this question. Unless they are planning to use the RF modulation energy (the same signal that has been known to burn patients in MRI's) -- not sure I'd be happy about that.
BTW, MRI scans run at least $1000-1500 for a quickie scan. So this technique sounds like it will ring up a bill of at least $5000 or more, for a session.
I kinda like the nano fuel cell idea better...
Dell is not right. He may be right that Dell cannot compete with Apple, though.
If you had to pick one or two meals, you might choose lobster and steak. That doesnt mean that there is no market for chicken or fish.
If you had to choose 1 or 2 vehicles, you might choose a BMW and a Jeep. That doesnt mean that people wont buy Harleys or bicycles or Prius.
Mostly, just because stodgy companies like HP and Dell cant effectively compete with Apple in smartphones and tablets doesnt mean that the market for iphones and ipads isnt healthy and worth billions and stealing marketshare from traditional PCs and laptops. Cuz it is.