Three dollars, eight dollars, you guys are both missing the point.
People buy cheaper books on Kindles and Nooks BECAUSE THEY CAN.
Nobody will print a three dollar book for long, and fewer book stores will stock it, and even Amazon does not carry it for long due to the cost of warehouse space. These inexpensive books from new authors or older titles from known authors simply disappear from the market in printed form.
But these books can remain in ebook form forever, taking up on average half of a floppy disk work of computer storage someplace in the Amazon cloud/
Then there is the whole issue of residual value, which has been thrashed about on Slashdot in the past. You can sell your paper books, donate them to libraries, or what ever. But the publishers (with Amazon and Barnes and Noble's reluctant acquiescence) have circumvented the first sale doctrine and essentially limited your ownership rights to digital books.
This is being looked into (a year too late) by the DOJ and the EU but action is probably far off.
While that percolates, people are less apt to pay full price for a book they can't own. The market is slowly realizing this and placing a value on that residual ownership as people hold off buying this year's best sellers while they read last year's best sellers. The net result is a lower price that people are willing to pay for a damaged title. (see what I did there?).
Buying it separately (if you can afford it) is a pretty good Idea, as long as you are on a GSM network. Canadian/Euro unlocked models will work on AT&T and T-Mobile.
The advantage is you can have the full Nexus experience including carrier un-detectable tethering, and Google Wallet with NFC support.
Google Wallet, which was the principal reason this phone was designed and built by Samsung for Google was banned by VZW in a stunning stab in the back to Google.
Further, this banning may be in direct violation of their 700mhz spectrum licensing conditions, one of which was free use of any application on 700mhz bands. Verizon uses 700mhz spectrum for LTE.
It remains to be seen if anyone will call Verizon to task for this, of if they have lined enough pockets in Washington to escape this requirement.
IF its that secret. But there are indications its not all that secret or sensitive (despite public statements to the contrary).
There is considerable speculation on the web that there is not that much secret stuff in this aircraft anyway, because it was fully expected they would have operational losses. See Here:
The design lacks several elements common to stealth engineering, namely notched landing gear doors and sharp leading edges. It has a curved wing planform, and the exhaust is not shielded by the wing.[10] Aviation Week postulates that these elements suggest the designers have avoided 'highly sensitive technologies' due to the near certainty of eventual operational loss inherent with a single engine design and a desire to avoid the risk of compromising leading edge technology.
2. The original estimates already factored in maintenance and upgrades over their lifespan. Trying to factor them in again is just plain wrong.
Nonsense.
The original estimates factored in some maintenance, virtually no upgrades, and much of it based on theoretical guesswork. Now they have operated these plants for years, They can measure the actual degradation of the materials, and the history of failures of actual parts in all of these reactors.
What you call just plain wrong is just plain engineering and advancements in materials science.
Actual use reveals the true life span. Aggressive maintenance can stretch life span even further.
The same is true of small to medium sized hydro dams. They were so over-built that many of them have exceeded their design life. Some have doubled their design life without showing significant degradation, especially with new resurfacing technologies.
It is said that "Engineering is the art of finding the least safe design". By which it is meant that engineers design to use the least materials, cost, labor, and still achieve a safe result.
When actual measurements and data are poor, or not available, engineers (the good ones) over build. They design in extra safety factors, excessive strength. The result is you have Brooklyn Bridges, (a whipersnapper compared to the Ponte Fabrico B52s, the aqueducts (some still in use) and similar very over-engineered projects.
That some reactors that were designed when the industry was in its infancy are still safe and suitable today is not all that surprising. People didn't push the envelope as often then.
But it remains to be seen expect that of future designs.
I can bet that Google is directly paying them not to block their ads, but still keep continue blocking everyones else. This means increased income to Google, which now suddenly is the only provider whose ads aren't being blocked.
Wait, Those people who hate ads are not likely to click on any of them, so there is unlikely to be much increased income to google. They don't get paid by impressions, only by clicks. This is probably more of an admission that content related ads are something user actually DO want and use, and flashy in your face display advertising is NOT.
But more importantly, if you install something that is supposed to block ads, and then find some getting thru even a clueless newbie will find that opt-out feature in no time flat. So again, little revenue for this change.
Hardware can be reverse engineered, and is actually common practice.
So what? Software reverse engineering is even easier.
Nobody suggested this as a method to forever and always keep the algorithms out of the hands of the competition. That's not possible. The point is to make it somewhat harder.
But algorithms can't be patented, and the competition will have them shortly.
Plan the business model around the hardware, the first sentence did say:
I am starting up a company in Japan that develops sensors used in motion capture.
Embed the algorithms into the sensor if possible, but in any case make sure your sensors are better than the competition.
Hardware can be patented, and the software can be opensource. If someone else makes better software (and you get tired of the arms race) you can fall back to selling just the hardware and actually service your competition with smarter better sensors.
the only differences in terms of spoken English are related to the slang they use.
Not true. First, all English speakers, (by this I assume you mean British English) do not speak the same or have the same accents, the accents are markedly different from different areas.
The most noticeable thing to a Midwestern American is the way the swallow the tail end of words, in extreme cases to the point where it becomes an exercise just to understand them. (Wo = what, or "Shu Up and le me go" from the Ting Tings).
Its far more than just the slang. And its quite regional in nature.
Work progress has nothing to do with what else is on your screen and gets snap-shotted.
The best programmers write less code than the worst, and make the most progress in the least amount of time.
If I take 5 minutes to check my portfolio, does that entitle them to look over my shoulder at my account, holdings, etc? If I happen to email my lawyer are they allowed to screen shot this? The potential for abuse is staggering.
Nothing in the article says the computers upon which this is installed belong to the company. They are the telecommuter's personal equipment.
Dual boot? No, because anything so invasive that it can run screen shots can probably also surf your drives, mount partitions, etc. Virtual machine? Maybe. But you have to expect them to have thought of this. Separate work computer? a) why should I, b) it can probably scan my network too.
The bluetooth spec is extensible. You don't have to have constant communications, you only have to answer polls, but only as often as the other side sends them. With just a small profile change you could minimize that to once an hour if you wanted.
With specialty lithium batteries that cost near as much as they keyboard:P Alkaline The shelf life of an alkaline battery is only about 7 years.
The article mentioned nothing about Lithium batteries, but did explicitly mention "A set of two AA batteries", which presumably means commercial off the shelf batteries.
Keyboards are easy.
Nothing is happening on the keyboard unless keys are pressed. Pressing any key can also fire up the radio to send a pulse. There does not need to be constant communication, and the radio does not need to be running all the time, as long as the receiving end bluetooth stack is set to not time out. All you need is a fast power-up chipset.
This wouldn't work with a mouse (at least not a laser mouse).
The Rail corporation has no moral right to sell information that could be damaging to the financial well being of another person JUST BECAUSE that person accidentally dropped something.
There are laws covering lost property in almost every jurisdiction, and most of them give the finder more rights to the property than anyone other than the original owner. Never the less, selling damaging personal information is in itself a crime (invasion of privacy) and that it was carried out by government funded organization is inexcusable.
Rail corp's own Code of Conduct page links to a Corporate PDF that outlines their expectations, including:
You must: Take care when collecting, storing, using and disclosing personal information in order to protect individuals’ privacy
They demand this of their employees, but think nothing of the rights of their customers?
Actually, leaving it on a bus is a pretty poor way to spread malware. If you are going to be dropsticking, then you want to do it in and around internet cafes and libraries - places where you expect people with computers to be.
Because we all know, people who take buses and trains don't use computers, right?
Which begs the question of why these usb sticks were found on trains in the first place.
Neither of those assumptions makes any sense. The guy's assumptions are simply naive.
You find a usb stick, you are likely to try it out to see what's on it. The younger you are the more likely you will be to do this.
Generic malware is just as likely to be spread this way as any other. In fact this is a common method of untraceable introduction of a new virus or zombie.
What evidence did he expect to find? How hard did he look?
He just announced that the probability was low, without a shred of justification other than he didn't find any evidence. Was he looking for manifestos or something?
Further, this clown does not believe that this method of malware distributions is even viable. REALLY? Hello, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is that you?
None of these (256 meg to 8 Gig) were so valuable that their destruction would have been considered a huge waste, and the potential damage to the forgetful owner could be massive. You would think that the LEAST they could do was format them, which itself is far from fool proof. But releasing them intact just seems dumb, even if not illegal.
he Sophos researchers found personal information belonging to the former owners of the devices, as well as their families, friends and colleagues. The recovered files included images, documents, source code, audio files, video files, XML files and even AutoCAD drawings.
This isn't lost USB sticks - this is USB sticks that were lost and weren't reclaimed long enough to end up in a transit authority auction.
Auctioning these thing seems the height of irresponsibility. I wonder what legal ramifications there are for the Rail Corporation in releasing private information, (even if accidentally lost) to total strangers.
From TFA:
he Sophos researchers found personal information belonging to the former owners of the devices, as well as their families, friends and colleagues. The recovered files included images, documents, source code, audio files, video files, XML files and even AutoCAD drawings.
Turn about is justa a backfire waiting to happen. Doing this just gives them another reason to ignore their constituents.
They won't even ban the practice or pass laws against it, they will simply send everything to voice mail and dump anything coming from these services directly in the trash.
People have to eat, pay for braces for their children's teeth, heat their homes, and pay bills. To say nothing at all about building and equipping a lab.
You need more than 1 pair. 1 pair will get offspring, but if you plan to breed brothers and sisters, you won't be in business for too long.
Much longer than you might imagine. Although not without consequences.
There are more than one instance of frozen mammoth in the world, and more will likely appear over time. These animals survived until 1700 BC in some places, and there are bound to be more frozen samples found.
If the Russians succeed in this endeavor once, the ground work will be there to do so again, when new samples are discovered.
I never said it was simple, and I never said it had to be on demand. There are middle alternatives.
I said the problem was that you have to get things on a schedule, and you have to be there (or have your device be there) at specific times, and you have to wait for the next one.
But I counter your argument, and claim it is not as complex as you make it out.
Let me subscribe easily to series I want to watch. I don't care it they cache them at the nearest head-end, or supply me with a DVR that can cache them in the background. Using 20 channels in the cable plant to send these in en-mass they could easily notifiy all interested cable boxes that their particular shows were coming, and they would have the entire collection within a day or two.
But I see no reason to wait another week for a show I know is "already in the can" and has been for the last four months. I subscribe today, and they can push the series to my DVR when they have bandwidth, so all the episodes arrive at once or a few at a time, but there are always one or more there waiting for me.
Slashdot Mirror
free is a good price.
Shop around.
Three dollars, eight dollars, you guys are both missing the point.
People buy cheaper books on Kindles and Nooks BECAUSE THEY CAN.
Nobody will print a three dollar book for long, and fewer book stores will stock it, and even Amazon does not carry it for long due to the cost of warehouse space. These inexpensive books from new authors or older titles from known authors simply disappear from the market in printed form.
But these books can remain in ebook form forever, taking up on average half of a floppy disk work of computer storage someplace in the Amazon cloud/
Then there is the whole issue of residual value, which has been thrashed about on Slashdot in the past. You can sell your paper books, donate them to libraries, or what ever. But the publishers (with Amazon and Barnes and Noble's reluctant acquiescence) have circumvented the first sale doctrine and essentially limited your ownership rights to digital books.
This is being looked into (a year too late) by the DOJ and the EU but action is probably far off.
While that percolates, people are less apt to pay full price for a book they can't own. The market is slowly realizing this and placing a value on that residual ownership as people hold off buying this year's best sellers while they read last year's best sellers. The net result is a lower price that people are willing to pay for a damaged title. (see what I did there?).
Buying it separately (if you can afford it) is a pretty good Idea, as long as you are on a GSM network. Canadian/Euro unlocked models will work on AT&T and T-Mobile.
The advantage is you can have the full Nexus experience including carrier un-detectable tethering, and Google Wallet with NFC support.
Google Wallet, which was the principal reason this phone was designed and built by Samsung for Google was banned by VZW in a stunning stab in the back to Google.
Further, this banning may be in direct violation of their 700mhz spectrum licensing conditions, one of which was free use of any application on 700mhz bands. Verizon uses 700mhz spectrum for LTE.
It remains to be seen if anyone will call Verizon to task for this, of if they have lined enough pockets in Washington to escape this requirement.
Commercial power companies are some of the oldest companies in the world in most countries.
You don't survive as a company by neglecting your physical plant.
Your cynicism is misplaced.
Exactly.
IF its that secret. But there are indications its not all that secret or sensitive (despite public statements to the contrary).
There is considerable speculation on the web that there is not that much secret stuff in this aircraft anyway, because it was fully expected they would have operational losses. See Here:
The design lacks several elements common to stealth engineering, namely notched landing gear doors and sharp leading edges. It has a curved wing planform, and the exhaust is not shielded by the wing.[10] Aviation Week postulates that these elements suggest the designers have avoided 'highly sensitive technologies' due to the near certainty of eventual operational loss inherent with a single engine design and a desire to avoid the risk of compromising leading edge technology.
2. The original estimates already factored in maintenance and upgrades over their lifespan. Trying to factor them in again is just plain wrong.
Nonsense.
The original estimates factored in some maintenance, virtually no upgrades, and much of it based on theoretical guesswork.
Now they have operated these plants for years, They can measure the actual degradation of the materials, and the history of failures
of actual parts in all of these reactors.
What you call just plain wrong is just plain engineering and advancements in materials science.
Design life span is a best guess.
Actual use reveals the true life span. Aggressive maintenance can stretch life span even further.
The same is true of small to medium sized hydro dams. They were so over-built that many of them have exceeded their design life. Some have doubled their design life without showing significant degradation, especially with new resurfacing technologies.
It is said that "Engineering is the art of finding the least safe design".
By which it is meant that engineers design to use the least materials, cost, labor, and still achieve a safe result.
When actual measurements and data are poor, or not available, engineers (the good ones) over build.
They design in extra safety factors, excessive strength. The result is you have Brooklyn Bridges, (a whipersnapper compared to the Ponte Fabrico B52s, the aqueducts (some still in use) and similar very over-engineered projects.
That some reactors that were designed when the industry was in its infancy are still safe and suitable today is not all that surprising. People didn't push the envelope as often then.
But it remains to be seen expect that of future designs.
I can bet that Google is directly paying them not to block their ads, but still keep continue blocking everyones else. This means increased income to Google, which now suddenly is the only provider whose ads aren't being blocked.
Wait, Those people who hate ads are not likely to click on any of them, so there is unlikely to be much increased income to google.
They don't get paid by impressions, only by clicks. This is probably more of an admission that content related ads are something user actually DO want and use, and flashy in your face display advertising is NOT.
But more importantly, if you install something that is supposed to block ads, and then find some getting thru even a clueless newbie will find that opt-out feature in no time flat. So again, little revenue for this change.
Hardware can be reverse engineered, and is actually common practice.
So what? Software reverse engineering is even easier.
Nobody suggested this as a method to forever and always keep the algorithms out of the hands of the competition. That's not possible.
The point is to make it somewhat harder.
Price your software right and nobody will bother.
But algorithms can't be patented, and the competition will have them shortly.
Plan the business model around the hardware, the first sentence did say:
I am starting up a company in Japan that develops sensors used in motion capture.
Embed the algorithms into the sensor if possible, but in any case make sure your sensors are better than the competition.
Hardware can be patented, and the software can be opensource. If someone else makes better software (and you get tired of the arms race)
you can fall back to selling just the hardware and actually service your competition with smarter better sensors.
the only differences in terms of spoken English are related to the slang they use.
Not true.
First, all English speakers, (by this I assume you mean British English) do not speak the same or have the same accents, the accents are markedly different from different areas.
The most noticeable thing to a Midwestern American is the way the swallow the tail end of words, in extreme cases to the point where it becomes an exercise just to understand them. (Wo = what, or "Shu Up and le me go" from the Ting Tings).
Its far more than just the slang. And its quite regional in nature.
Work progress has nothing to do with what else is on your screen and gets snap-shotted.
The best programmers write less code than the worst, and make the most progress in the least amount
of time.
If I take 5 minutes to check my portfolio, does that entitle them to look over my shoulder at my account, holdings, etc?
If I happen to email my lawyer are they allowed to screen shot this? The potential for abuse is staggering.
Nothing in the article says the computers upon which this is installed belong to the company. They are the telecommuter's personal equipment.
Dual boot? No, because anything so invasive that it can run screen shots can probably also surf your drives, mount partitions, etc.
Virtual machine? Maybe. But you have to expect them to have thought of this.
Separate work computer? a) why should I, b) it can probably scan my network too.
Other posts on this thread suggest otherwise.
With nearly zero drain, even alkaline will last 10 years.
The bluetooth spec is extensible.
You don't have to have constant communications, you only have to answer polls, but only as often as the other side sends them.
With just a small profile change you could minimize that to once an hour if you wanted.
With specialty lithium batteries that cost near as much as they keyboard :P Alkaline
The shelf life of an alkaline battery is only about 7 years.
The article mentioned nothing about Lithium batteries, but did explicitly mention "A set of two AA batteries", which presumably means commercial off the shelf batteries.
Keyboards are easy.
Nothing is happening on the keyboard unless keys are pressed. Pressing any key can also fire up the radio to send a pulse. There does not need to be constant communication, and the radio does not need to be running all the time, as long as the receiving end bluetooth stack is set to not time out. All you need is a fast power-up chipset.
This wouldn't work with a mouse (at least not a laser mouse).
The Rail corporation has no moral right to sell information that could be damaging to the financial well being of another person
JUST BECAUSE that person accidentally dropped something.
There are laws covering lost property in almost every jurisdiction, and most of them give the finder more rights to the property than anyone other than the original owner. Never the less, selling damaging personal information is in itself a crime (invasion of privacy) and that it was carried out by government funded organization is inexcusable.
Rail corp's own Code of Conduct page links to a Corporate PDF that outlines their expectations, including:
You must:
Take care when collecting, storing, using
and disclosing personal information in
order to protect individuals’ privacy
They demand this of their employees, but think nothing of the rights of their customers?
Actually, leaving it on a bus is a pretty poor way to spread malware. If you are going to be dropsticking, then you want to do it in and around internet cafes and libraries - places where you expect people with computers to be.
Because we all know, people who take buses and trains don't use computers, right?
Which begs the question of why these usb sticks were found on trains in the first place.
Neither of those assumptions makes any sense. The guy's assumptions are simply naive.
You find a usb stick, you are likely to try it out to see what's on it.
The younger you are the more likely you will be to do this.
Generic malware is just as likely to be spread this way as any other. In fact this is a common method of untraceable introduction of a new virus or zombie.
What evidence did he expect to find? How hard did he look?
He just announced that the probability was low, without a shred of justification other than he didn't find any evidence.
Was he looking for manifestos or something?
Further, this clown does not believe that this method of malware distributions is even viable. REALLY?
Hello, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is that you?
My thoughts exactly.
None of these (256 meg to 8 Gig) were so valuable that their destruction would have been considered a huge waste, and the potential damage to the forgetful owner could be massive. You would think that the LEAST they could do was format them, which itself is far from fool proof. But releasing them intact just seems dumb, even if not illegal.
he Sophos researchers found personal information belonging to the former owners of the devices, as well as their families, friends and colleagues. The recovered files included images, documents, source code, audio files, video files, XML files and even AutoCAD drawings.
This isn't lost USB sticks - this is USB sticks that were lost and weren't reclaimed long enough to end up in a transit authority auction.
Auctioning these thing seems the height of irresponsibility. I wonder what legal ramifications there are for the Rail Corporation in releasing private information, (even if accidentally lost) to total strangers.
From TFA:
he Sophos researchers found personal information belonging to the former owners of the devices, as well as their families, friends and colleagues. The recovered files included images, documents, source code, audio files, video files, XML files and even AutoCAD drawings.
Turnabout is fair play.
Turn about is justa a backfire waiting to happen.
Doing this just gives them another reason to ignore their constituents.
They won't even ban the practice or pass laws against it, they will simply send everything to voice mail
and dump anything coming from these services directly in the trash.
Why does it always have to be about the money?
People have to eat, pay for braces for their children's teeth, heat their homes, and pay bills.
To say nothing at all about building and equipping a lab.
I would have thought this was self evident.
You need more than 1 pair. 1 pair will get offspring, but if you plan to breed brothers and sisters, you won't be in business for too long.
Much longer than you might imagine. Although not without consequences.
There are more than one instance of frozen mammoth in the world, and more will likely appear over time. These animals survived until 1700 BC in some places, and there are bound to be more frozen samples found.
If the Russians succeed in this endeavor once, the ground work will be there to do so again, when new samples are discovered.
I never said it was simple, and I never said it had to be on demand. There are middle alternatives.
I said the problem was that you have to get things on a schedule, and you have to be there (or have your device be there) at specific times, and you have to wait for the next one.
But I counter your argument, and claim it is not as complex as you make it out.
Let me subscribe easily to series I want to watch. I don't care it they cache them at the nearest head-end, or supply me with a DVR that
can cache them in the background. Using 20 channels in the cable plant to send these in en-mass they could easily notifiy all interested cable boxes
that their particular shows were coming, and they would have the entire collection within a day or two.
But I see no reason to wait another week for a show I know is "already in the can" and has been for the last four months.
I subscribe today, and they can push the series to my DVR when they have bandwidth, so all the episodes arrive at once or a few at a time, but there are always one or more there waiting for me.