I've done that kind of stuff at work and those criteria are NEVER how a package is selected.
If I need a commercial product I need all manner of signoffs requiring at least weeks of delay and massive IT involvement so they can insert it into windoze images automatically or whatever it is they do.
If I'm doing FOSS it just... gets done that day. No agony. And it just works, and instead of a call center script reader in India who can only tell me to reinstall the software over and over, with FOSS the "whole internet" is my support system and they as in the whole internet know what they're doing.
Nothing about this has changed in about 15 years, so I'm not sure how this is "news". This would have been a good "news" story in the early/mid nineties.
I was looking at the toxic business relationship angle, you're looking at it from a completely different angle.
Look at the history... even the article notes that they used to get along years back. Then foolishness gets started which has steadily escalated for years. Net neutrality is being used as a weapon in todays battle in the multi-year war between that company and the local water utility. If I interpret you correctly you are analyzing how well they're applying that individual weapon. I think your interpretation is correct. However I'm writing about the overall war, it seems pretty scorched earth between those two and there's a long history of pretty much every other weapon being unleashed.
However I've worked telco last 20 years (never in this disputed area) and I've never heard of a telco-type provider having such a toxic relationship with the locals. The story is not so much that its the first (of many?) net neutrality but it takes possibly the worlds worst, most toxic business relationship to even consider trying a network neutrality fight.
I will say as a telecom veteran that sometimes "legally bad things" are done but usually they're worked out in a civilized manner without the feds, or the local cops, or judges getting involved. For example, I was not involved in, but I am aware of a situation, many years ago where one companies CO tech literally stole another companies unused plugin card to restore an outage. Technically all terribly illegal and the cops and FBI should have been called in (this was a $50K SONET card...), people should have been fired, big old blow up and news releases and security investigations all COULD have happened, but didn't. You see, its a small world, and even smaller in telecom, and we all have to work with each other, and despite a little bad blood, eventually after certain people talked politely with other people, invoices were generated and paid and everyone is more or less happy with how it turned out. Another example, when the locals dig up our fiber, our techs didn't get into fist fights or call the cops on each other or get into blame games, we just kinda fix it.
Calling the feds in is just more fuel on the fire. I'd keep an eye on this story, its probably going to blow up more before it settles down. This is just battle maneuver 342 out of 923 or whatever.
Manage it as service, then "the service we provide is standardized habitation on mars"
Imagine how cool it would be if we had a service of "habitation in space" instead of a make-work construction project that we'll deorbit almost immediately after construction completes.
Can be worked around in the "modern" era of diff and revision control. My text appears black text on white. Edited text gets highlighted as red text on white and gets (edit) prefix and suffix. Karma can take care of abuses. I imagine a stunt like you propose would get savaged. On the other hand my poorly executed joke would probably not get ripped too bad. That was my 30 second solution. Further research might find a better solution. The solution space appears large.
Yeah, but to keep the "spirit" of high speed browser development you'd have to alternate the direction with each weekly major version release. That would be kind of funny.
If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?
If they are copyrightable, will we all have to switch to Scala running on the JVM? I have to think about that a minute. As long as you expunged all java including libraries from the ecosystem, then... hmm.
why is there even a damages phase if Google has been found to not be in violation?
Yes I was mystified that the/. summary claimed it was about to begin but the linked groklaw article explains how there isn't going to be one and the jury has been dismissed (dismissed as in bye bye go home thanks for playing and have a nice life).
Sure they are compatible. Just don't take advantage of "dumb browser trick of the week" and don't use your markup language as a pixel perfect graphics art language.
All browsers display "normal" HTML... normally. At least since 1994 or so. Lets see... since I first saw a working browser on a Slowlaris box in the spring of '93 the only useful additions have been... what... SSL, CSS, more recently AJAX, and the removal of the blink tag... other than that?
You get into epic fail when only chrome version 352.1 supports embedded inline COBOL and you're just dying to use it so you use it and complain about your site only working on chrome 352.1 because all modern browsers need embedded inline COBOL and the end users demand it for their internet experience and what is wrong with the other browser devs and...
You also get into epic fail when yoy try to control every little pixel on the screen, as if HTML is the web page analog of the old autocad command line. Most of those kind of people would be better off just hosting freaking huge gif files with imagemaps to click on. Or putting it in flash. Either is an extremely strong indication they are putting all their effort into appearance instead of content and can thus be ignored.
About 30 years ago the same people were using early desktop publishing to put 50 different fonts in 10 different sizes and 3 colors on each printed page, and any complaints about real world usability were ignored because they were left-brained artiste's, creatives, and lowly technical people couldn't possibly understand their elite level works of art. The old wheel of IT turns around endlessly for junk, not just the good stuff. 30 years from now we're going to be hearing the same stuff about cruddy over/hyper optimized 3-d sites and neural interfaces that "need" useless non-standard stuff.
the article predicts that 'the only opportunity you'll get to truly change browsers is when your two-year smartphone contract expires.'
That's the good news. There will still be change, and there will still be competition, but the pace will be slower / the stakes will be higher. Much better for everyone except paid browser devs.
(What I do / what I need my browser to do) hasn't changed much in years, yet there's an endless spewing stream of "just like before, except now does something you don't want and/or don't care about". Combined with a handy bit of gratuitous UI screwing up, and occasionally adding (or removing) features that addons used to successfully provide.
Sometimes its funny to imagine the whole paradigm and ecosystem of web browsers applied to other apps:
Imagine a "less" command that had major version number changes every week, and the only change the end users noticed was they swapped the pgup and pgdn keys because the UI designers said it was more intuitive. After all, when you hit page down, the page doesn't actually go down in your viewport, the imaginary paper is scrolling upwards past your viewpoint, right? So hit page up to read the next screen of the scroll. And because the only users that matter are new users, and this should make it easier for them, I guess we'll just have to do it.
Imagine a "gcc" that suddenly required all language keywords to be entered as "pig latin" instead of "english". Probably about ten years ago there was a weird translator for Perl that made it operate in ancient Latin, which I thought was pretty funny at the time.
L2Networks purchases ethernet transport from Albany Water in order to serve its voice and Internet customers, Beahn said. The theft-of-service complaint stems from a single customer that uses L2Networks VoIP service over Albany Water's broadband service, he said. L2Networks also provides IP transit services to Albany Water, he said.
There's no simpler way to put it than the article quote above. What is obvious is there is a massive civil contract dispute going on, and its not entirely certain who is right and wrong. What is certain is this is merely an escalation. One side pays money to rent space and were locked out during an outage (who caused that outage?).
The real tragedy, beyond the net neutrality issue that is a minor part of this hyper dysfunctional relationship, is the rule of law is gone in the USA. If you have a civil contract between two citizens/corporations, nothing happens with law enforcement until after a judge makes a decision. But if one party in a civil contract is in any tangential way involved with a local government, then before a judge is involved, you can expect police harassment, criminal charges to be filed, etc.
This is what scares me away from municipal fiber / municipal wireless. In a civilized world it would work, but in the USA, if you are a municipal internet customer and open a trouble ticket, you could realistically expect the police to break down your door, stomp your puppy to death, and beat you, because thats just how law enforcement rolls in the land of the free.
I prefer getting access from my local cable monopoly... whats the absolute worst thing they can do to me as retaliation, disconnect my modem and tv? Intentionally screw up the paperwork and send my account to collections for service and hardware for at most a couple hundred bucks?
Hmm A couple hundred bucks and maybe an "accidental" disconnect, vs stomping family pets to death and beating people. I think I'll avoid municipal internet, thanks.
I thought the smartphone tie in was hilarious. 20 years ago I was working retail supermarket management and people used photocopiers and double sticky tape. So you buy a box of (then) 25 cent mac and cheese, photocopy the bar code, cut out, stick to 3x5 card stock so it can't be seen thru, scotch double sticky tape onto the large size free trade organic gourmet $3 chocolate bar.
I "busted" a kid using our own store's 3 cent per page photocopier to copy mac n cheese UPCs. "What are you doing with a mac n cheese box and some index cards and double sticky tape and some scissors?" "Uhhh, ummm, uh its for a rebate" "get out of here kid and don't come back".. "Busted" in quotes because he hadn't done anything illegal... yet.
This scam has been around since BEFORE UPC scanners and laser bar code readers... remember price stickers put on with those pricing guns? people used to swap those around too.
Trying to turn this into a modern "smartphone" story is laughable.
Somehow I doubt that the cashiers follow Lego pricing so closely. To someone with any amount of ignorance on the merchandise, $50 may seem like a reasonable price on a large box of plastic foot needles.
Its an age thing. When I was a kid, $50 for a big box of lego would seem a bit high, so as a childless adult if I scanned a box and it said $50 I would not be overly surprised but kind of pissed off that prices have gone up so much.
Now a days I shop for lego for my kids, and some of the largest movie-tie-in licensed items are more expensive than a car loan payment. Another example, basic stereotypical "Lego house kit" prices have gone up by percentage more than real house prices went up during the bubble... and haven't come down yet unlike real house prices.
This would NOT work with apple i-devices or similar things a retail droid could be expected to purchase and know about.
I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone
When I worked retail management at a supermarket 20 years ago this was NOT the case. Had a little situation with a guy slapping "gound beef" price stickers on beef tenderloin steaks (this is about an order of magnitude diff in price). Deli workers were known to do similar foolishness with price per pound of various products... If the deli girl liked you, you got the cold shrimp pesto salad ($10/lb) for the price of the generic bulk coleslaw ($2/lb).
In the modern era of self checkout grocery stores, especially if you're paying cash and have no loyalty card, every produce item is lettuce per pound. I donno how they stay in business like that.
In the long run I think the "dollar store" concept of $1 per package is going to eventually disappear and instead of RFIDs for each can of soup in the market, they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound. The "crab legs and beef tenderloin" problem is solved by making the packaging inconveniently hard to open and inserting bricks or corn or HFCS in the package to bring the cost per pound to a standard weight. Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload. Or packaging deals of cheap bulky stuff with expensive stuff, so buying expensive per pound stir fry meat is impossible alone; you have to buy it with a 10 pound rice sack. Or can't buy steaks or charcoal, must buy steaks and charcoal.
Since everything in walmart/target/whatever comes from China, and everything is made of plastic, I could see charging stuff from those stores based solely on weight. Here, you get 5 pounds of Chinese lead painted plastic. Is it a millenium falcon lego, or a dora the explorer vacuum cleaner, who cares, its 5 pounds of plastic and that'll be $X/pound.
They are entirely effective at acheiving what they are really meant to do.
LOL that is true. Self aggrandizement, wasteful spending, gourmet meals, world travel, goofing off too much, banging interns... Unfortunately my lifestyle is not really the ideal role model the UN should have selected.
seriously, who's going to volunteer to live in a metal box on a barren rock with no women and no sex and a high risk of cancer due to all the cosmic rays?
Sounds like the computer labs back when I was working on my CS degree. I certainly had questioning moments like that at 2am when things wouldn't compile.
Well these wouldn't be coming down, on the earth anyway, so Londoners don't have to worry about it.
Oh wait, damit/. get with the 90s and add a edit button. I've got the perfect joke, the Germans can name their moon base "New London". Then when they launch their rockets, they can say "When I launch my rockets, I aim for the moon, but sometimes I hit (New) London"
... is a 3rd world country that managed a historic semblance of technology and industry through near slavery of its population, and is in perpetual decline, run by criminals with delusions of grandeur.
Oh come on, the US isn't that bad. You just need to vote for the other political party, they'll fix all the problems. Oh wait you tried that and it failed? Well I mean vote for the other, other, party I'm sure they'll fix it all right up. Oh noes, you wrote Russia. Missed that. My bad. Well that goes for Russia too.
Maybe Germans will be the first settlers of Mars. (With a few noteworthy exceptions rapidly nearing a century ago) They're more civilized than the US or the former USSR. Even in their bad times, what's that quote, something like "Its my job to get the rockets up there, where they come down is not my department" Well these wouldn't be coming down, on the earth anyway, so Londoners don't have to worry about it.
1) If you go full international everything will take 10 times as long and cost 10 times as much. That does NOT mean you should go isolationist. If the Americans want to drop a lab literally next door, thats OK, even if they want to share power and air thats OK. But you have to be firm about each item being owned and responsible by precisely one nation (or at most a very small group) and you cannot make the whole project or even subprojects depend on that one nation's work. If the Germans want to land a really cool telescope and click it into position next to the base like a lego block, fine. But if you need a full UN treaty to launch some oxygen tanks then you're completely F'd as those guys are utterly ineffective.
2) Permanent as in ongoing perpetual expansion like a stereotypical overseas military base, or permanent as in we've not decided when to abandon ship yet? The danger of not being in perpetual expansion mode is you'll probably end up like the ISS, in construction for 99% of its lifetime and the week after the last bolt is tightened, its time to deorbit and give up. Permanent as in we intend to expand or improve this base to the tune of $1B/yr in perpetuity is a pretty good idea. Project management with a defined yet nebulous end date after which its managerially abandonded is a great idea for making "a" disposable rocket engine. Its a terrible idea for an entire base, or a station, or even a vehicle program.
3) Please don't do the space shuttle and ISS thing of promising everything to everyone for free and instantly, and then scaling back until its a miserable failure compared to its original goals. So the ISS could hold 24 crew. OK, lets build everything to the assumption that the hotel labor load will be 2 people working full time, thats less than 10% of the crew changing air filters and gaskets or unclogging toilets or whatever the hotel load is on a station. Whoops we're imploding the crew size to 6, now a minimum of 1/3 of the on-orbit time is spent maintaining the station. Whoops. Suddenly a station where most of the people do scientific research turns into an aerospace version of "this old house". Whoops.
I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill.
video editing. 1TB is about one of my wife's typical projects. What the "creative" types don't realize is if you record 10,20,30 times as much "stuff" as makes it into the final product, to edit you've got to store all that junk somewhere.
There are batching strategies where you can edit a three hour long interview down to 5 minutes of actual usable clips, repeat until everything is "clipped", then merge up all the clips and edit those. Some video editing software is very unhappy with terabyte scale projects so you have to do this anyway.
You can't edit and dispose of interview #4 because someone might have a cool story to run against it in interview #35.
This is not crazy stuff either, family history stuff
But much poorer vertical acceleration. Possibly lower range per fuel tank too. Its an apples and oranges thing. "Better" also needs some clarification.
Remember that aerospace works under the opposite optimization scheme from cars and consumer goods. Simplify and add lightness, that sort of thing. From a design standpoint they are not directly comparable.
Yeah but anerobic digestion generates less energy than aerobic digestion, so most of the calories end up in peoples guts not toilets. There is energy there.
As a crude engineering estimate, figure out what uses more oil per day, my deep fat fryer or a fuel oil furnace.
Its a brave idea but the scaling factors don't work out.
As students work together, they often search for the same items, and discover new shared interests by sharing links. We see this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content.
Yes, the above is true and I'm sure the reader is suppose to think kids are researching academic topics like Dr Martin Luther King Jr's speeches and the metabolic pathways of the TCA cycle, but lets be realistic, its going to be used to search for pr0n. And there's nothing really wrong with that, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Take the twinkies and mt dew out, and call it a tornado shelter. Its the trendy new hot topic here in the midwest ... for the last two centuries or so.
how analysts can rely on open-source software
I've done that kind of stuff at work and those criteria are NEVER how a package is selected.
If I need a commercial product I need all manner of signoffs requiring at least weeks of delay and massive IT involvement so they can insert it into windoze images automatically or whatever it is they do.
If I'm doing FOSS it just ... gets done that day. No agony. And it just works, and instead of a call center script reader in India who can only tell me to reinstall the software over and over, with FOSS the "whole internet" is my support system and they as in the whole internet know what they're doing.
Nothing about this has changed in about 15 years, so I'm not sure how this is "news". This would have been a good "news" story in the early/mid nineties.
I was looking at the toxic business relationship angle, you're looking at it from a completely different angle.
Look at the history... even the article notes that they used to get along years back. Then foolishness gets started which has steadily escalated for years. Net neutrality is being used as a weapon in todays battle in the multi-year war between that company and the local water utility. If I interpret you correctly you are analyzing how well they're applying that individual weapon. I think your interpretation is correct. However I'm writing about the overall war, it seems pretty scorched earth between those two and there's a long history of pretty much every other weapon being unleashed.
However I've worked telco last 20 years (never in this disputed area) and I've never heard of a telco-type provider having such a toxic relationship with the locals. The story is not so much that its the first (of many?) net neutrality but it takes possibly the worlds worst, most toxic business relationship to even consider trying a network neutrality fight.
I will say as a telecom veteran that sometimes "legally bad things" are done but usually they're worked out in a civilized manner without the feds, or the local cops, or judges getting involved. For example, I was not involved in, but I am aware of a situation, many years ago where one companies CO tech literally stole another companies unused plugin card to restore an outage. Technically all terribly illegal and the cops and FBI should have been called in (this was a $50K SONET card...), people should have been fired, big old blow up and news releases and security investigations all COULD have happened, but didn't. You see, its a small world, and even smaller in telecom, and we all have to work with each other, and despite a little bad blood, eventually after certain people talked politely with other people, invoices were generated and paid and everyone is more or less happy with how it turned out. Another example, when the locals dig up our fiber, our techs didn't get into fist fights or call the cops on each other or get into blame games, we just kinda fix it.
Calling the feds in is just more fuel on the fire. I'd keep an eye on this story, its probably going to blow up more before it settles down. This is just battle maneuver 342 out of 923 or whatever.
Manage it as service, then "the service we provide is standardized habitation on mars"
Imagine how cool it would be if we had a service of "habitation in space" instead of a make-work construction project that we'll deorbit almost immediately after construction completes.
Can be worked around in the "modern" era of diff and revision control.
My text appears black text on white.
Edited text gets highlighted as red text on white and gets (edit) prefix and suffix.
Karma can take care of abuses. I imagine a stunt like you propose would get savaged. On the other hand my poorly executed joke would probably not get ripped too bad.
That was my 30 second solution. Further research might find a better solution. The solution space appears large.
Yeah, but to keep the "spirit" of high speed browser development you'd have to alternate the direction with each weekly major version release. That would be kind of funny.
If the APIs turn out to be non-copyrightable, does this mean we can really all enjoy/suffer Java for free?
If they are copyrightable, will we all have to switch to Scala running on the JVM? I have to think about that a minute. As long as you expunged all java including libraries from the ecosystem, then... hmm.
why is there even a damages phase if Google has been found to not be in violation?
Yes I was mystified that the /. summary claimed it was about to begin but the linked groklaw article explains how there isn't going to be one and the jury has been dismissed (dismissed as in bye bye go home thanks for playing and have a nice life).
none of which are really compatible
Sure they are compatible. Just don't take advantage of "dumb browser trick of the week" and don't use your markup language as a pixel perfect graphics art language.
All browsers display "normal" HTML ... normally. At least since 1994 or so. Lets see... since I first saw a working browser on a Slowlaris box in the spring of '93 the only useful additions have been... what... SSL, CSS, more recently AJAX, and the removal of the blink tag... other than that?
You get into epic fail when only chrome version 352.1 supports embedded inline COBOL and you're just dying to use it so you use it and complain about your site only working on chrome 352.1 because all modern browsers need embedded inline COBOL and the end users demand it for their internet experience and what is wrong with the other browser devs and ...
You also get into epic fail when yoy try to control every little pixel on the screen, as if HTML is the web page analog of the old autocad command line. Most of those kind of people would be better off just hosting freaking huge gif files with imagemaps to click on. Or putting it in flash. Either is an extremely strong indication they are putting all their effort into appearance instead of content and can thus be ignored.
About 30 years ago the same people were using early desktop publishing to put 50 different fonts in 10 different sizes and 3 colors on each printed page, and any complaints about real world usability were ignored because they were left-brained artiste's, creatives, and lowly technical people couldn't possibly understand their elite level works of art. The old wheel of IT turns around endlessly for junk, not just the good stuff. 30 years from now we're going to be hearing the same stuff about cruddy over/hyper optimized 3-d sites and neural interfaces that "need" useless non-standard stuff.
the article predicts that 'the only opportunity you'll get to truly change browsers is when your two-year smartphone contract expires.'
That's the good news. There will still be change, and there will still be competition, but the pace will be slower / the stakes will be higher. Much better for everyone except paid browser devs.
(What I do / what I need my browser to do) hasn't changed much in years, yet there's an endless spewing stream of "just like before, except now does something you don't want and/or don't care about". Combined with a handy bit of gratuitous UI screwing up, and occasionally adding (or removing) features that addons used to successfully provide.
Sometimes its funny to imagine the whole paradigm and ecosystem of web browsers applied to other apps:
Imagine a "less" command that had major version number changes every week, and the only change the end users noticed was they swapped the pgup and pgdn keys because the UI designers said it was more intuitive. After all, when you hit page down, the page doesn't actually go down in your viewport, the imaginary paper is scrolling upwards past your viewpoint, right? So hit page up to read the next screen of the scroll. And because the only users that matter are new users, and this should make it easier for them, I guess we'll just have to do it.
Imagine a "gcc" that suddenly required all language keywords to be entered as "pig latin" instead of "english". Probably about ten years ago there was a weird translator for Perl that made it operate in ancient Latin, which I thought was pretty funny at the time.
This is a little complicated. From the article:
L2Networks purchases ethernet transport from Albany Water in order to serve its voice and Internet customers, Beahn said. The theft-of-service complaint stems from a single customer that uses L2Networks VoIP service over Albany Water's broadband service, he said. L2Networks also provides IP transit services to Albany Water, he said.
There's no simpler way to put it than the article quote above. What is obvious is there is a massive civil contract dispute going on, and its not entirely certain who is right and wrong. What is certain is this is merely an escalation. One side pays money to rent space and were locked out during an outage (who caused that outage?).
The real tragedy, beyond the net neutrality issue that is a minor part of this hyper dysfunctional relationship, is the rule of law is gone in the USA. If you have a civil contract between two citizens/corporations, nothing happens with law enforcement until after a judge makes a decision. But if one party in a civil contract is in any tangential way involved with a local government, then before a judge is involved, you can expect police harassment, criminal charges to be filed, etc.
This is what scares me away from municipal fiber / municipal wireless. In a civilized world it would work, but in the USA, if you are a municipal internet customer and open a trouble ticket, you could realistically expect the police to break down your door, stomp your puppy to death, and beat you, because thats just how law enforcement rolls in the land of the free.
I prefer getting access from my local cable monopoly... whats the absolute worst thing they can do to me as retaliation, disconnect my modem and tv? Intentionally screw up the paperwork and send my account to collections for service and hardware for at most a couple hundred bucks?
Hmm A couple hundred bucks and maybe an "accidental" disconnect, vs stomping family pets to death and beating people. I think I'll avoid municipal internet, thanks.
I thought the smartphone tie in was hilarious. 20 years ago I was working retail supermarket management and people used photocopiers and double sticky tape. So you buy a box of (then) 25 cent mac and cheese, photocopy the bar code, cut out, stick to 3x5 card stock so it can't be seen thru, scotch double sticky tape onto the large size free trade organic gourmet $3 chocolate bar.
I "busted" a kid using our own store's 3 cent per page photocopier to copy mac n cheese UPCs. "What are you doing with a mac n cheese box and some index cards and double sticky tape and some scissors?" "Uhhh, ummm, uh its for a rebate" "get out of here kid and don't come back".. "Busted" in quotes because he hadn't done anything illegal ... yet.
This scam has been around since BEFORE UPC scanners and laser bar code readers... remember price stickers put on with those pricing guns? people used to swap those around too.
Trying to turn this into a modern "smartphone" story is laughable.
Somehow I doubt that the cashiers follow Lego pricing so closely. To someone with any amount of ignorance on the merchandise, $50 may seem like a reasonable price on a large box of plastic foot needles.
Its an age thing. When I was a kid, $50 for a big box of lego would seem a bit high, so as a childless adult if I scanned a box and it said $50 I would not be overly surprised but kind of pissed off that prices have gone up so much.
Now a days I shop for lego for my kids, and some of the largest movie-tie-in licensed items are more expensive than a car loan payment.
Another example, basic stereotypical "Lego house kit" prices have gone up by percentage more than real house prices went up during the bubble... and haven't come down yet unlike real house prices.
This would NOT work with apple i-devices or similar things a retail droid could be expected to purchase and know about.
I would expect them to see that the description that comes up isn't what the product is. The price isn't stored in the bar code, you can't change the barcode to make the product lower priced, but you can print a bar code for a cheaper item and stick it on the expensive one. The till would bring up the product description and price of the cheap item, so they need to be selling a cheaper item with a sufficiently similar description that it would not get noticed by a sleepy drone
When I worked retail management at a supermarket 20 years ago this was NOT the case. Had a little situation with a guy slapping "gound beef" price stickers on beef tenderloin steaks (this is about an order of magnitude diff in price). Deli workers were known to do similar foolishness with price per pound of various products... If the deli girl liked you, you got the cold shrimp pesto salad ($10/lb) for the price of the generic bulk coleslaw ($2/lb).
In the modern era of self checkout grocery stores, especially if you're paying cash and have no loyalty card, every produce item is lettuce per pound. I donno how they stay in business like that.
In the long run I think the "dollar store" concept of $1 per package is going to eventually disappear and instead of RFIDs for each can of soup in the market, they'll simply weigh your cart and charge you a flat rate per pound. The "crab legs and beef tenderloin" problem is solved by making the packaging inconveniently hard to open and inserting bricks or corn or HFCS in the package to bring the cost per pound to a standard weight. Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload. Or packaging deals of cheap bulky stuff with expensive stuff, so buying expensive per pound stir fry meat is impossible alone; you have to buy it with a 10 pound rice sack. Or can't buy steaks or charcoal, must buy steaks and charcoal.
Since everything in walmart/target/whatever comes from China, and everything is made of plastic, I could see charging stuff from those stores based solely on weight. Here, you get 5 pounds of Chinese lead painted plastic. Is it a millenium falcon lego, or a dora the explorer vacuum cleaner, who cares, its 5 pounds of plastic and that'll be $X/pound.
They are entirely effective at acheiving what they are really meant to do.
LOL that is true. Self aggrandizement, wasteful spending, gourmet meals, world travel, goofing off too much, banging interns... Unfortunately my lifestyle is not really the ideal role model the UN should have selected.
seriously, who's going to volunteer to live in a metal box on a barren rock with no women and no sex and a high risk of cancer due to all the cosmic rays?
Sounds like the computer labs back when I was working on my CS degree. I certainly had questioning moments like that at 2am when things wouldn't compile.
Well these wouldn't be coming down, on the earth anyway, so Londoners don't have to worry about it.
Oh wait, damit /. get with the 90s and add a edit button. I've got the perfect joke, the Germans can name their moon base "New London". Then when they launch their rockets, they can say "When I launch my rockets, I aim for the moon, but sometimes I hit (New) London"
... is a 3rd world country that managed a historic semblance of technology and industry through near slavery of its population, and is in perpetual decline, run by criminals with delusions of grandeur.
Oh come on, the US isn't that bad. You just need to vote for the other political party, they'll fix all the problems. Oh wait you tried that and it failed? Well I mean vote for the other, other, party I'm sure they'll fix it all right up. Oh noes, you wrote Russia. Missed that. My bad. Well that goes for Russia too.
Maybe Germans will be the first settlers of Mars. (With a few noteworthy exceptions rapidly nearing a century ago) They're more civilized than the US or the former USSR. Even in their bad times, what's that quote, something like "Its my job to get the rockets up there, where they come down is not my department" Well these wouldn't be coming down, on the earth anyway, so Londoners don't have to worry about it.
3 areas of concern as seen on the ISS
1) If you go full international everything will take 10 times as long and cost 10 times as much. That does NOT mean you should go isolationist. If the Americans want to drop a lab literally next door, thats OK, even if they want to share power and air thats OK. But you have to be firm about each item being owned and responsible by precisely one nation (or at most a very small group) and you cannot make the whole project or even subprojects depend on that one nation's work. If the Germans want to land a really cool telescope and click it into position next to the base like a lego block, fine. But if you need a full UN treaty to launch some oxygen tanks then you're completely F'd as those guys are utterly ineffective.
2) Permanent as in ongoing perpetual expansion like a stereotypical overseas military base, or permanent as in we've not decided when to abandon ship yet? The danger of not being in perpetual expansion mode is you'll probably end up like the ISS, in construction for 99% of its lifetime and the week after the last bolt is tightened, its time to deorbit and give up. Permanent as in we intend to expand or improve this base to the tune of $1B/yr in perpetuity is a pretty good idea. Project management with a defined yet nebulous end date after which its managerially abandonded is a great idea for making "a" disposable rocket engine. Its a terrible idea for an entire base, or a station, or even a vehicle program.
3) Please don't do the space shuttle and ISS thing of promising everything to everyone for free and instantly, and then scaling back until its a miserable failure compared to its original goals. So the ISS could hold 24 crew. OK, lets build everything to the assumption that the hotel labor load will be 2 people working full time, thats less than 10% of the crew changing air filters and gaskets or unclogging toilets or whatever the hotel load is on a station. Whoops we're imploding the crew size to 6, now a minimum of 1/3 of the on-orbit time is spent maintaining the station. Whoops. Suddenly a station where most of the people do scientific research turns into an aerospace version of "this old house". Whoops.
I can't see how an average person will use more than about 1TB of space any time soon and even then that's probably overkill.
video editing. 1TB is about one of my wife's typical projects. What the "creative" types don't realize is if you record 10,20,30 times as much "stuff" as makes it into the final product, to edit you've got to store all that junk somewhere.
There are batching strategies where you can edit a three hour long interview down to 5 minutes of actual usable clips, repeat until everything is "clipped", then merge up all the clips and edit those. Some video editing software is very unhappy with terabyte scale projects so you have to do this anyway.
You can't edit and dispose of interview #4 because someone might have a cool story to run against it in interview #35.
This is not crazy stuff either, family history stuff
Picard was the only one to bring any starship of any class home at all.
Janeway, last 3 minutes of the last episode.
Maybe "spent a lot of time" meant they copied the work of the "android x86" guys. That's what I used to put android on my EEE netbook. Works great.
Reinventing the wheel?
But much poorer vertical acceleration. Possibly lower range per fuel tank too. Its an apples and oranges thing. "Better" also needs some clarification.
Remember that aerospace works under the opposite optimization scheme from cars and consumer goods. Simplify and add lightness, that sort of thing. From a design standpoint they are not directly comparable.
Yeah but anerobic digestion generates less energy than aerobic digestion, so most of the calories end up in peoples guts not toilets. There is energy there.
As a crude engineering estimate, figure out what uses more oil per day, my deep fat fryer or a fuel oil furnace.
Its a brave idea but the scaling factors don't work out.
As students work together, they often search for the same items, and discover new shared interests by sharing links. We see this trend today on many social networks, such as Twitter, where shared links spread virally and amplify popular content.
Yes, the above is true and I'm sure the reader is suppose to think kids are researching academic topics like Dr Martin Luther King Jr's speeches and the metabolic pathways of the TCA cycle, but lets be realistic, its going to be used to search for pr0n. And there's nothing really wrong with that, either.