He (we) do pay full price. At the dealership, the gas pump, and on our tax bill. These things don't build themselves you know. As a society we decided to build them and we pay the full price. Try Macro Economics 101 at your local community college.
The polymer could be useful for building massive farms of artificial trees that would aim to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But that's only if countries around the globe are willing to spend untold billions of dollars to rein in atmospheric CO2.
It also says:
So you have to expend a fairly large amount of energy heating the media to 85C/185F to get it to give up the CO2, (then more energy to store the CO2). How long it takes to saturate the polymer is not mentioned, but unless its months between regeneration, the CO2 generated while collecting the polymer media, transporting it to a facility, HEATING it, capturing the recovered CO2, could exceed the amount it could capture. And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?
So the original purpose of this polymer, to keep C02 out of batteries seems to be a far better use for the polymer than environmental CO2 sequestration.
I completely disagree. I've turned off the touchpad on my Asus Transformer, and decided I really didn't need to get a bluetooth mouse for it.
Too late for you to disagree with my main point (at the top of this thread).
You've already converted your tablet into a netbook, or paper-weight laptop simply by adding the keyboard, and thereby unwittingly proved my major point: Tablets are dismal at getting any real work done, or even answering email, posting to slashdot or facebook. So miserable, that you had to add a keyboard to make your tablet marginally usable.
So you rush to the defense of tablets, after turning yours into a netbook? Thanks for proving my main point, that tablets are pretty miserable work platform.
How is the parent of this post a troll? Seems like a valid argument to me. I'm not saying I agree with it 100%,but it's still valid.
I'm not complaining. The copyright laws as they stand have gotten out of hand in terms of duration, and the hatred of that has tainted the slashdot mind.
This is Slashdot. You get marked troll instantly if you
1) badmouth Apple in any way 2) support Microsoft in any way 3) support any part of copyright and or patents.
You just have to accept that 98% of the users on Slashdot have never created anything that could be covered by copyright or patents, want everything for free, and are part of the entitlement generation. It goes with the territory. You take your lumps. If you weren't posting as AC you would get marked troll by the copyright liberation army as well.
Laws balance the rights of individuals to the rights of societies. You can't solely argue for the rights of the individual
I don't disagree with anything you've said, and implicit in every definition of copyright is a time period, after which everything becomes public domain. That part is so obvious I didn't thing it necessary to state it.
In fact I could make a case that Copyright should be knocked back to that it was originally, or maybe just to 10 years. After all, if you can't sell enough in ten years to feed your family while you work on the next creation, you should probably take up farming instead.
But that is not what the Pirate Party is proposing. They are proposing total abolition of copyright, (and by logical extension, patents too).
They are essentially saying that If I get a peek at your great manuscript, I can rush it out before you even get a chance to sell the leather bound first editions. When you do soldier on and print a few copies for friends, I can scan that and under cut your price, because there would be no legal protection at all.
Writing, composing, and recording become spare time projects for steel workers, farmers, and truck drivers, because without a source of income the people who create can't make a living, unlike the performers.
there will always be natural scarcity of some kind that can be used by artists
No. That is precisely the point. There won't be a scarcity. The moment the art is sold, shown, exhibited, in the world you propose it could instantly be copied printed replicated by anyone who happens to get near it with a camer. This could happen before the artist makes a single thin dime off of it.
Yes you will still have those that do it for the love of the doing. But far fewer. Even artists have to put bread on the table.
Let me know when you are willing to work for free, but in the mean time the artists knowledge and skill is his only stock in trade. Don't take that from him. You pay the farmer for the eggs, and seem to have no problem with that. Why should the composer get less?
Your implication is that without public funding or Copyright, creative works would no longer be produced. History demonstrates how ridiculous this is.
You need a history lesson.
Most of our great works were produced under a system of patronage or direct performance before there existed means of coping. Even Shakespeare worked for money.
At work, there's a couple of VPs whose passwords expired because they haven't logged in to their windows PC, but have been using their ipad/iphone for everything.
Which I would wager isn't much of anything. They probably do most of their work on the phone. VPs and doctors have about the same aversion to keyboards I've noticed.
For someone who claims to not believe in tablets, Michael Dell seems to be trying hard to break into the market. Maybe his lack of understanding about tablets is why Dell is having problems getting into the market. Apple certainly sells a lot of them for a nonexistent market.
He didn't claim that. He doesn't believe that. Stop putting words in his mouth.
All he said was that the death of the desktop/laptop is no where close.
With JUST a keyboard a tablet becomes good for note taking, not great, just good. But you might as well have a netbook or small laptop as try to balance a tablet and a keyboard on your knees in the lecture hall. Tablets are easier to carry, and that's about it. Doing any task on them without a bag full of accessories is a a mess.
Look, I have two tablets, and a smartphone, a couple nooks and a good size laptop. I might take the tablet on vacation with the phone and nook, but I would never go on a business trip without the laptop and all my source code, and the ability to put together a professional looking document.
I will bet you dollars to donuts that I can take better notes faster in a spiral notebook than you can on a tablet. But then, I'm old school.
Copyright laws are to preserve the right of copying the work for the copyright holder. Period. Giving credit doesn't even enter into it. Satire and remixes don't matter and are already protected anyway.
That the laws have failed miserably to preserve the author/rightsholder's Right to copy and profit from their work is sad but true in this digital age.
Still, it seems a tad self serving for those that smashed into storefronts to suggest repealing laws against looting on the grounds that everyone is doing it. Is a TV set or Microwave oven that much different than a song or a book? The basic premise that a work in digital form can be replicated without depleting the inventory of the author is simply mistaking the the form for the function. The form may be bits and bytes. The function is someone's work product. Unless he proposes putting all authors and on the public teat, I am at a loss to see how anyone can keep writing books any more than I can see why anyone would stock more microwave's in a store from which anyone take anything they wanted.
The tablet's niche in academia is note-taking by hand interspersed with book-reading, things you'd do in class. It would make the most sense to use a tablet in class and a desktop to do the heavy lifting at home.
Even then, you have to wonder hoe much real note taking actually happens on these devices given the cramped keyboards, dearth of writing space, and the inability to type on a touch screen without watching it consantly. I suspect I could write just as fast and translate to my desktop later. I can also touch type on a real keyboard while watching what ever is going onto the board at the front of the room.
I wonder how many sitting in lecture halls are really facebooking their way thru boring presentations, while recording the audio for later?
Some of the better instructors are pushing links and documents directly to the tablets, and that may be where these things really shine in the class room.
Because keyboard and touch screen is a combination that just doesn't work. I've tried it, and found it just easier to add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo rather than reaching across my keyboard to touch the tablet all the time. Touch screen cursor placement is finicky on the best of tablets. And any amount of typing beyond the short email is a hopeless productivity killer.
Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration. By the time you add a keyboard and mouse so that you can be even marginally productive you might as well get the tablet so that you can work even where/when there isn't a wireless network.
The tablet's niche is on the couch or the train or the bus.
Each tower is limited in the number of handsets it can concurrently handle. Its finite. And smaller than you might imagine. Each handset has to be dealt with every few milliseconds. (Are you there? Yes I'm here. Andy traffic for me?)
Less than can be kept track of is the number of simultaneous calls and/or data transmissions that can be handled.
Spectrum availability (radio frequencies) in a given area dictate how close towers can be built to each other. Towers cost money. Lots of Nimbys refuse to have them close by.
This fits with my speculation that AT&T could care less if you tether or are high usage, they are more concerned with TYPES of traffic. It also suggests they are simply inspecting end-points (rather than deep packet inspection of content) to determine if you are likely to exceed the as-yet unstated soft-cap of data usage. If you ever connect to those sensitive endpoints they start watching and warning you.
Apparently in their analysis, sustained high bandwidth usage for an hour or more that it takes to watch a movie is MORE HARMFUL to their network than downloading the same amount or more data over short periods of time throughout the month. Either that or there is a HIGH Correspondence between people who do watch movies on their phone and those that exceed bandwidth caps.
In this latter case, visiting Hulu or Netflix just paints a big target on your own back, making you easy pickings.
But the thing is, when the lights dim, or the Air conditioning goes out you KNOW there is a shortage.
But we have no idea of the actual tower loading percentage of the cell companies. In my west coast area, dropped calls are a rarity, and I can pull 3G data all day long, and never notice any interruptions. So is there a shortage or not? Certainly not here. Maybe some other places.
Exactly. Any light being absorbed/reflected by the lower layers will have passed twice thru the upper layers, once on the way in, again on the way out. We have no way of telling at this distance what is really being filtered where.
I've been first time shopping for a cell phone. It has been a nightmare. You can't pick a phone and then pick a plan.
That's not exactly true. Go into any carrier, look at the display, pick the phone you want, tell the salesman, then they will tell you the cost of the plan options.
If you have no carrier preference, go to Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse, Car Toys, or Walmart and buy the phone you want and they will sell you a plan from a carrier that supports that phone.
If the network is 80% loaded, why are they so slow building additional towers. Most people in urban areas can't remember the last time a new tower was added any where near them.
We are never going to get a true picture of how scarce or plentiful bandwidth really is until the FCC forces tower loading data out of the hands of the carriers. You want to build a new tower? Fine. Tell me your current tower loading in that area.
Until they cough up that data I'm suspicious of any bandwidth shortage claims.
In most other industries, high volume users end up paying the major part of the bill and subsidize low volume users, even as they benefit from bulk pricing.
Coal, gas, electricity, and even food. Bulk purchasers get a discount, but having them in the market assures an infrastructure which can handle thousand of other customers easily. The little customers pay proportionally more, but probably would pay even more with the bulk purchasers absent from the market.
The Carriers should charge a cheaper rate per megabyte for bulk data users. They shouldn't cut them off. They shouldn't charge them progressively more the more they use. They should actually give them discounts. Buying the next tier up should be cheaper than watching your data usage trying to live under the line.
Almost all the phones out there, including iPhones and Androids and even Windows phones have the ability to open a socket and leave it open until it times out (15 to 18 minutes later) to detect when there is something to send, (an email arrived, a message, etc). Apple use the Microsoft method and expanded it big time in their push technology to prevent polling by several apps for multiple email accounts, etc. Google, Apple, Microsoft all support some form of this for email, calendar, and messages.
Unfortunately, the Facebook crowd can't live with out knowing instantly when someone updates a page in some dank part of the inter-tubes, and therefore many apps poll. Bandwidth has become so reliable that nobody bothers deploying push technology if they can avoid it. People want instant weather, news, stock quotes, etc, and its just easier for these software developers to poll for this data while the phone sleeps in your pocket.
Add to this carriers tracking your phone's position without your knowledge. Several carriers sell this service to their customers for tracking family members. Then there is the whole Carrier IQ debacle. Its hard to know how much data this really pushes, but I suspect it is small.
But most of the traffic is stuff that customers specifically ask for. They want the Facebook updates. They want the weather. And they insist on using pop mail accounts that don't support IMAP Idle and therefor have to poll for messages every few minutes.
Server side services, search, SIRI, are also growing in popularity, but again this is by user request. You don't have to strut around asking what your calendar looks like instead of tapping an icon.
So I don't thing the Carriers are guilty here of much beyond offering what their customers want in terms of connectivity.
The problem here is that the Carriers realize just HOW MUCH the customers want this, and are currently in that phase of their business plan where they are milking it for all they can, pretending there is a bandwidth shortage, and applying caps and tiers to maximize revenue. I suspect it is mostly to prevent calls via Voip from being cost effective, and to hold down those people who tether an entire household to a single 3g phone. We've seen this all before. Just about the time the bitch level raises high enough to attract regulatory attention things will become free again. Just like long distance calls. Just like text messaging.
Its a passing phase. As soon as LTE is as widely deployed as 3G today, carriers will stop selling minutes and just sell you bandwidth, and you will make calls over the net. Voip and sip will go from being virtually banned to mandatory.
Then prices will come down as tiers will expand, and they can launch the next phase of artificial shortages and over charging for what ever feature is next to strike the fancy of consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
He (we) do pay full price. At the dealership, the gas pump, and on our tax bill. These things don't build themselves you know. As a society we decided to build them and we pay the full price. Try Macro Economics 101 at your local community college.
Ooops...
It also says:
Once saturated with CO2, the PEI-silica combo is easy to regenerate. The CO2 floats away after the polymer is heated to 85C.
From TFA:
The polymer could be useful for building massive farms of artificial trees that would aim to reduce atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and prevent the worst ravages of climate change. But that's only if countries around the globe are willing to spend untold billions of dollars to rein in atmospheric CO2.
It also says:
So you have to expend a fairly large amount of energy heating the media to 85C/185F to get it to give up the CO2, (then more energy to store the CO2).
How long it takes to saturate the polymer is not mentioned, but unless its months between regeneration, the CO2 generated while collecting the polymer media, transporting it to a facility, HEATING it, capturing the recovered CO2, could exceed the amount it could capture. And then you are still left with the CO2 you captured. What to do with that?
So the original purpose of this polymer, to keep C02 out of batteries seems to be a far better use for the polymer than environmental CO2 sequestration.
While far from perfect, farming real trees seems a less energy intensive method especially when treated as a crop, harvested at the optimal time, with the wood used for long duration storage.
I completely disagree. I've turned off the touchpad on my Asus Transformer, and decided I really didn't need to get a bluetooth mouse for it.
Too late for you to disagree with my main point (at the top of this thread).
You've already converted your tablet into a netbook, or paper-weight laptop simply by adding the keyboard, and thereby unwittingly proved my major point: Tablets are dismal at getting any real work done, or even answering email, posting to slashdot or facebook. So miserable, that you had to add a keyboard to make your tablet marginally usable.
But, hey, thanks for proving my point.
So you rush to the defense of tablets, after turning yours into a netbook?
Thanks for proving my main point, that tablets are pretty miserable work platform.
How is the parent of this post a troll? Seems like a valid argument to me. I'm not saying I agree with it 100% ,but it's still valid.
I'm not complaining.
The copyright laws as they stand have gotten out of hand in terms of duration, and the hatred of that has tainted the slashdot mind.
This is Slashdot. You get marked troll instantly if you
1) badmouth Apple in any way
2) support Microsoft in any way
3) support any part of copyright and or patents.
You just have to accept that 98% of the users on Slashdot have never created anything that could be covered by copyright or patents,
want everything for free, and are part of the entitlement generation. It goes with the territory. You take your lumps. If you weren't
posting as AC you would get marked troll by the copyright liberation army as well.
Laws balance the rights of individuals to the rights of societies. You can't solely argue for the rights of the individual
I don't disagree with anything you've said, and implicit in every definition of copyright is a time period, after which everything becomes public domain.
That part is so obvious I didn't thing it necessary to state it.
In fact I could make a case that Copyright should be knocked back to that it was originally, or maybe just to 10 years.
After all, if you can't sell enough in ten years to feed your family while you work on the next creation, you should probably take
up farming instead.
But that is not what the Pirate Party is proposing. They are proposing total abolition of copyright, (and by logical extension, patents too).
They are essentially saying that If I get a peek at your great manuscript, I can rush it out before you even get a chance to sell the leather
bound first editions. When you do soldier on and print a few copies for friends, I can scan that
and under cut your price, because there would be no legal protection at all.
Writing, composing, and recording become spare time projects for steel workers, farmers, and truck drivers, because without a source of income
the people who create can't make a living, unlike the performers.
there will always be natural scarcity of some kind that can be used by artists
No. That is precisely the point. There won't be a scarcity. The moment the art is sold, shown, exhibited, in the world you propose it could instantly be copied printed replicated by anyone who happens to get near it with a camer. This could happen before the artist makes a single thin dime off of it.
Yes you will still have those that do it for the love of the doing. But far fewer. Even artists have to put bread on the table.
Let me know when you are willing to work for free, but in the mean time the artists knowledge and skill is his only stock in trade. Don't take that from him.
You pay the farmer for the eggs, and seem to have no problem with that. Why should the composer get less?
Your implication is that without public funding or Copyright, creative works would no longer be produced. History demonstrates how ridiculous this is.
You need a history lesson.
Most of our great works were produced under a system of patronage or direct performance before there existed means of coping.
Even Shakespeare worked for money.
At work, there's a couple of VPs whose passwords expired because they haven't logged in to their windows PC, but have been using their ipad/iphone for everything.
Which I would wager isn't much of anything. They probably do most of their work on the phone. VPs and doctors have about the same aversion to keyboards I've noticed.
For someone who claims to not believe in tablets, Michael Dell seems to be trying hard to break into the market. Maybe his lack of understanding about tablets is why Dell is having problems getting into the market. Apple certainly sells a lot of them for a nonexistent market.
He didn't claim that.
He doesn't believe that.
Stop putting words in his mouth.
All he said was that the death of the desktop/laptop is no where close.
With JUST a keyboard a tablet becomes good for note taking, not great, just good. But you might as well have a netbook or small laptop as try to balance a tablet and a keyboard on your knees in the lecture hall. Tablets are easier to carry, and that's about it. Doing any task on them without a bag full of accessories is a a mess.
Look, I have two tablets, and a smartphone, a couple nooks and a good size laptop. I might take the tablet on vacation with the phone and nook, but I would never go on a business trip without the laptop and all my source code, and the ability to put together a professional looking document.
I will bet you dollars to donuts that I can take better notes faster in a spiral notebook than you can on a tablet. But then, I'm old school.
Copyright laws are to preserve the right of copying the work for the copyright holder. Period.
Giving credit doesn't even enter into it. Satire and remixes don't matter and are already protected anyway.
That the laws have failed miserably to preserve the author/rightsholder's Right to copy and profit from their work is
sad but true in this digital age.
Still, it seems a tad self serving for those that smashed into storefronts to suggest repealing laws against looting on
the grounds that everyone is doing it. Is a TV set or Microwave oven that much different than a song or a book?
The basic premise that a work in digital form can be replicated without depleting the inventory of the author is simply mistaking the
the form for the function. The form may be bits and bytes. The function is someone's work product. Unless he proposes putting
all authors and on the public teat, I am at a loss to see how anyone can keep writing books any more than I can see why anyone
would stock more microwave's in a store from which anyone take anything they wanted.
The tablet's niche in academia is note-taking by hand interspersed with book-reading, things you'd do in class. It would make the most sense to use a tablet in class and a desktop to do the heavy lifting at home.
Even then, you have to wonder hoe much real note taking actually happens on these devices given the cramped keyboards, dearth of writing space, and the inability to type on a touch screen without watching it consantly. I suspect I could write just as fast and translate to my desktop later. I can also touch type on a real keyboard while watching what ever is going onto the board at the front of the room.
I wonder how many sitting in lecture halls are really facebooking their way thru boring presentations, while recording the audio for later?
Some of the better instructors are pushing links and documents directly to the tablets, and that may be where these things really shine in the class room.
Sorry, why are you adding a mouse?
Because keyboard and touch screen is a combination that just doesn't work. I've tried it, and found it just easier to add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse combo rather than reaching across my keyboard to touch the tablet all the time. Touch screen cursor placement is finicky on the best of tablets. And any amount of typing beyond the short email is a hopeless productivity killer.
Might as well get the laptop I meant.
Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration. By the time you add a keyboard and mouse so that you can be even marginally productive you might as well get the tablet so that you can work even where/when there isn't a wireless network.
The tablet's niche is on the couch or the train or the bus.
Its a lot different than fiber.
Each tower is limited in the number of handsets it can concurrently handle. Its finite. And smaller than you might imagine.
Each handset has to be dealt with every few milliseconds. (Are you there? Yes I'm here. Andy traffic for me?)
Less than can be kept track of is the number of simultaneous calls and/or data transmissions that can be handled.
Spectrum availability (radio frequencies) in a given area dictate how close towers can be built to each other. Towers cost money. Lots of Nimbys refuse to have them close by.
Its a lot different than fiber.
This fits with my speculation that AT&T could care less if you tether or are high usage, they are more concerned with TYPES of traffic.
It also suggests they are simply inspecting end-points (rather than deep packet inspection of content) to determine if you are likely to exceed the as-yet unstated soft-cap of data usage. If you ever connect to those sensitive endpoints they start watching and warning you.
Apparently in their analysis, sustained high bandwidth usage for an hour or more that it takes to watch a movie is MORE HARMFUL to their network than downloading the same amount or more data over short periods of time throughout the month. Either that or there is a HIGH Correspondence between people who do watch movies on their phone and those that exceed bandwidth caps.
In this latter case, visiting Hulu or Netflix just paints a big target on your own back, making you easy pickings.
But the thing is, when the lights dim, or the Air conditioning goes out you KNOW there is a shortage.
But we have no idea of the actual tower loading percentage of the cell companies. In my west coast area, dropped calls are a rarity, and I can pull 3G data all day long, and never notice any interruptions. So is there a shortage or not? Certainly not here. Maybe some other places.
Exactly. Any light being absorbed/reflected by the lower layers will have passed twice thru the upper layers, once on the way in, again on the way out. We have no way of telling at this distance what is really being filtered where.
I've been first time shopping for a cell phone. It has been a nightmare. You can't pick a phone and then pick a plan.
That's not exactly true. Go into any carrier, look at the display, pick the phone you want, tell the salesman, then they will tell you the cost of the plan options.
If you have no carrier preference, go to Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse, Car Toys, or Walmart and buy the phone you want and they will
sell you a plan from a carrier that supports that phone.
Good point.
If the network is 80% loaded, why are they so slow building additional towers.
Most people in urban areas can't remember the last time a new tower was added any where near them.
We are never going to get a true picture of how scarce or plentiful bandwidth really is until the FCC forces tower loading data out of the hands of the carriers. You want to build a new tower? Fine. Tell me your current tower loading in that area.
Until they cough up that data I'm suspicious of any bandwidth shortage claims.
If you weren't an AC you might actually get points.
In most other industries, high volume users end up paying the major part of the bill and subsidize low volume users, even as they benefit from bulk pricing.
Coal, gas, electricity, and even food. Bulk purchasers get a discount, but having them in the market assures an infrastructure which can handle thousand of other customers easily. The little customers pay proportionally more, but probably would pay even more with the bulk purchasers absent from the market.
The Carriers should charge a cheaper rate per megabyte for bulk data users. They shouldn't cut them off. They shouldn't charge them progressively more the more they use. They should actually give them discounts. Buying the next tier up should be cheaper than watching your data usage trying to live under the line.
Almost all the phones out there, including iPhones and Androids and even Windows phones have the ability to open a socket and leave it open until it times out (15 to 18 minutes later) to detect when there is something to send, (an email arrived, a message, etc). Apple use the Microsoft method and expanded it big time in their push technology to prevent polling by several apps for multiple email accounts, etc. Google, Apple, Microsoft all support some form of this for email, calendar, and messages.
Unfortunately, the Facebook crowd can't live with out knowing instantly when someone updates a page in some dank part of the inter-tubes, and therefore many apps poll. Bandwidth has become so reliable that nobody bothers deploying push technology if they can avoid it. People want instant weather, news, stock quotes, etc, and its just easier for these software developers to poll for this data while the phone sleeps in your pocket.
Add to this carriers tracking your phone's position without your knowledge. Several carriers sell this service to their customers for tracking family members. Then there is the whole Carrier IQ debacle. Its hard to know how much data this really pushes, but I suspect it is small.
But most of the traffic is stuff that customers specifically ask for. They want the Facebook updates. They want the weather. And they insist on using pop mail accounts that don't support IMAP Idle and therefor have to poll for messages every few minutes.
Server side services, search, SIRI, are also growing in popularity, but again this is by user request. You don't have to strut around asking what your calendar looks like instead of tapping an icon.
So I don't thing the Carriers are guilty here of much beyond offering what their customers want in terms of connectivity.
The problem here is that the Carriers realize just HOW MUCH the customers want this, and are currently in that phase of their business plan where they are milking it for all they can, pretending there is a bandwidth shortage, and applying caps and tiers to maximize revenue. I suspect it is mostly to prevent calls via Voip from being cost effective, and to hold down those people who tether an entire household to a single 3g phone. We've seen this all before. Just about the time the bitch level raises high enough to attract regulatory attention things will become free again. Just like long distance calls. Just like text messaging.
Its a passing phase. As soon as LTE is as widely deployed as 3G today, carriers will stop selling minutes and just sell you bandwidth, and you will make calls over the net. Voip and sip will go from being virtually banned to mandatory.
Then prices will come down as tiers will expand, and they can launch the next phase of artificial shortages and over charging for what ever feature is next to strike the fancy of consumers.