Phone book companies do this, as well. They include fake phone numbers in their books; if a competitor uses their (copyrighted) data they can easily find out just by taking the competitor's book and looking for the fake number.
When it comes to crashing helicopters my philosophy is to just let everyone roll against 20D damage and let karma (or the burning thereof) sort it out. Life can be so easy in the shadows... for the GM, that is.
Come on, are we supposed to feel sorry for you? You violated hospital rules on bringing in soul-eating animals; you clearly had it coming. Also, when government officials come asking for your forcefield generator everyone knows that you tell them you "didn't pick up any signals from HAARP" while winking. The basement-microwave story just makes you look conspicious.
They sat him in front of a notebook where he got a blowjob while someone put a gun against his head and John Travolta counted down from sixty until he caved in to the pressure and used ls/usr/bin to crack the 128-bit encryption securing TorrentSpy's login form.
Yeah, but then the conections between individual providers' networks won't be between their backbones but via end users. So if you want to access a Comcast site from AOL your traffic goes through a link with an upstream bandwidth of 30 kB/s, which you share with 100 other people. Even though there might be more than one such link, bandwidth is going to stay bad.
If you want to semi-reliably crash the OS X kernel just combine Hibiscus (a Java-based HBCI client) with a smart card reader. Apart from not understanding the PC/SC driver Hibiscus can actually get the driver to crash the kernel. Of course the driver could just be funky; I can't quite verify that until I get GTK+ compiled and can build Gnucash...
By the way, anyone know card-reading tools for PC/SC devices under OS X?
True. "Good enough, cheap enough" is universally the correct solution. Problems only arise when one of the two values is incorrectly estimated. But "* enough" is a widely varying value. While I don't really care whether my home computer can boast 100.00% buffer overflow protection but don't have much money a large corporation would lose millions of dollars per hour of downtime and gladly pays eight figures for hardware that can make sure that malware breaks before the system does. Our perceptions of "good enough" and "cheap enough" would wildly differ.
Great. My sex life would be so much better if I heard that "dit-dit-dit" sound all the time. Awesome idea.
That's almost as bad as a bionic ear. "Well, on the upside yout tinnitus is gone. On the downside you're going to hear that 'bionic power' sound effect 24/7."
If these things are reasonably durable they might qualify for being passed out by charity workers. "For only two Dollars little Mbele can light up her home at night."
Of course the old problem of making sure that the stuff doesn't end up in the warehouse of a corrupt official remains.
Doesn't change the fact that a lot of people would probably rather have access to a little bit of electricity without having to rely on fiendishly expensive solar cells than hope that at some point in the future industrialization will come and make their lives better.
If you can't make large improvements that doesn't mean you can't try to make small ones. Not everyone gets to save the world, but some people can make it a slightly better place. Even though this device won't make Tanzania export leader I'm pretty sure that, if deployed, it could improve the lives of a number of people.
Awesome! I can't wait to read this on the back of deodorant spray cans:
PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant will give your skin a cool and fresh feeling and will prevent sweating for up to twenty years.
Known possible side effects include prickling of the skin, headaches, numbness, diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, hyperthermia, hallucinations, lung failure, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, an atypical form of Parkinson's disease, coma and death.
Not to be taken orally. Keep out of the reach of small children.
Warning: PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant is known to build up in the groundwater and in animals. Any object that has been in direct contact with PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant at any point as well as the remains of persons, cremated or not, who have used PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant at any point may not be disposed of normally and must be handed over to the Environmental Protection Agency as per the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act ("Superfund Act") of 1980.
I wonder how a modern day Boston Tea Party might look... Perhaps a bunch of people steals a couple crates of audio discs*, make a video in which they destroy them and state their intention in doing so and then release said video to all major news outlets as well as YouTube (just in case big media isn't interested).
* Maybe even some audio CDs, but given how much the **AA hate the Red Book standard it's rather unlikely.
Note that I didn't say that lack of 3G will "kill" the iPhone (it will only do that when the 2G networks go down, which is quite some time away). I merely said that it's one reason why the iPhone is not going to own the market. In order to do that Apple really would have to offer something for everyone. The "I need a mobile that doubles as an UMTS modem" market remains as untapped as the "I need a very robust phone" market, the "simpler is better" market and the "more than 100 bucks for a mobile is ridiculous" market. (Not to mention the "I need loud stereo speakers so I can listen to my music on the train" market, also known as the "I have an IQ below 20 and I want the whole world to know" market.) The people who spend hundreds of bucks on a smartphone just because it looks spiffy are only part of a large, saturated market - and by no means are they the overwhelming majority. And that's why the iPhone as it is today can never achieve dominance.
(By the way, I called the iPhone a 3G phone, thinking that UMTS was already 3.5G. Of course the iPhone is 2G, pure UMTS is 3G and 3.5G is UMTS with HSDPA.)
Not that the USA haven't been doing the same... Look at the budgets of the Department of Fish and Game, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, the United States Postal Service and the Bureau of Weights and Measures, around the year 2000. I tell you, there's something strange with those numbers, almost as if there's a secret Ag&/%z%#ÌÁ\%&IOEW$%& NO CARRIER
No, but it did turn out they were Magical "Girls". After having seen them turn into Sailor Bubba and the Hairy Warriors most of their colleagues immediately left towards the nearest tall building to jump off of.
WiFi is nice, if you're in a large city with many open APs and lax laws. Which means that in 90% of everywhere it's retty useless because you're either not in a city with a sufficiently large concentration of APs, the APs aren't open (note that pretty much all manufacturers have switched to using encryption as the default setting) or using someone else's AP without permission is illegal (e.g. in Germany you can be slapped with a number of charges, however they only really stick if the network had at least WEP). Not many cities offer municipal WiFi, so you're effectively limited to using the iPhone's WiFi capabilities in your (company's) own network. Where you usually have access to a desktop computer.
I'm pretty sure there are places where having a phone with an 802.11 chipset is nice, but at least in Germany I'd expect UMTS connectivity to be much higher due to people encrypting their APs and more rural areas generally having no contiguous WiFi coverage even in towns. (Note that in Gerany "rural" begins at about twenty kilometers from the next large city.)
Give me a WiFi standard with a range of a few kilometers and good data quality and I'll admit that WiFi is better than 3G for data services. But as it is, WiFi's comparatively abysmal range and the virtual absence of public hotspots only make it competitive under some specific circumstances, which are far from universal.
Let's look at the factors going against the iPhone grabbing the entire mobile phone market: A company with zero reputation in the mobile phone market (1) releases a very expensive (2) 3G (3) smartphone (4) whose main selling argument is its nice UI (5).
Even if you exclude those who prefer a simple phone over a smartphone, thus eliminating problem number 4, you still have four very solid reasons against buying an iPhone vs. buying another mobile. It's expensive. It doesn't do UMTS or HSDPA. It's not quite robust. It doesn't have killer features not found in cheaper mobiles. Apart from being insanely stylish, the iPhone jut doesn't have much going for it towards capturing the whole market.
Interesting. I thought German was pretty isolated in having that feature. (Quick Wikipedia research tells me that it's in fact a feature of many germanic languages.) Wikipedia lists a particularly long actually used word in the German language as "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" (Cattle marking and beef labelling supervision duties delegation law), which is proof that our politicians can super-size things besides wars. Unlimited compounding is awesome.
Don't forgat that DVDs are pretty lousy as long-term storage devices. Unfortunately I don't know of a medium that is known to last longer (and feasible for home use)... Anyone?
have a "hidden" PC stashed in a panel behind the entertainment center. I replicate nightly from my desktop to the media center.
Using small backup systems in hard to find spots can help against backup theft. Not many burglars are going to notice the Mac mini/NSLU2/similar small device in the small corner above the cupboard, especially if the device uses 802.11 instead of wired networking (or the cable runs up to the device inside the wall. This approach also makes the power cord easy to hide). Hiding devices entierly inside walls helps, too. Just make sure they don't take in too much dust. Also, small flash drives can be hidden just about everywhere. If you can keep your backup sizes small, a Compact Flash card or 1.8" drive can be used to take a backup with you at all times - or tape it behind a radiator or something.
If you can't keep burglars from taking your stuff away you can still try to keep them from noticing it in the first place. Doesn't work too well for laptops/desktops, but for data storage it's entirely doable.
Slashdot Mirror
Phone book companies do this, as well. They include fake phone numbers in their books; if a competitor uses their (copyrighted) data they can easily find out just by taking the competitor's book and looking for the fake number.
[...]not necessarily targeting Apple because they have a vendetta against apple[...]
I do think, however, that the public humiliation they received from Apple the last time they did a story about them might have been a factor.
When it comes to crashing helicopters my philosophy is to just let everyone roll against 20D damage and let karma (or the burning thereof) sort it out. Life can be so easy in the shadows... for the GM, that is.
Come on, are we supposed to feel sorry for you? You violated hospital rules on bringing in soul-eating animals; you clearly had it coming. Also, when government officials come asking for your forcefield generator everyone knows that you tell them you "didn't pick up any signals from HAARP" while winking. The basement-microwave story just makes you look conspicious.
Your troubles were clearly your own fault.
I'm somewhat surprised he got away with 15 kilobucks in the positive...
They sat him in front of a notebook where he got a blowjob while someone put a gun against his head and John Travolta counted down from sixty until he caved in to the pressure and used ls /usr/bin to crack the 128-bit encryption securing TorrentSpy's login form.
Hollywood uses that method a lot.
Yeah, but then the conections between individual providers' networks won't be between their backbones but via end users. So if you want to access a Comcast site from AOL your traffic goes through a link with an upstream bandwidth of 30 kB/s, which you share with 100 other people. Even though there might be more than one such link, bandwidth is going to stay bad.
If you want to semi-reliably crash the OS X kernel just combine Hibiscus (a Java-based HBCI client) with a smart card reader. Apart from not understanding the PC/SC driver Hibiscus can actually get the driver to crash the kernel. Of course the driver could just be funky; I can't quite verify that until I get GTK+ compiled and can build Gnucash...
By the way, anyone know card-reading tools for PC/SC devices under OS X?
So that more women buy Macs. Remember, queers get all the chicks.
True. "Good enough, cheap enough" is universally the correct solution. Problems only arise when one of the two values is incorrectly estimated. But "* enough" is a widely varying value. While I don't really care whether my home computer can boast 100.00% buffer overflow protection but don't have much money a large corporation would lose millions of dollars per hour of downtime and gladly pays eight figures for hardware that can make sure that malware breaks before the system does. Our perceptions of "good enough" and "cheap enough" would wildly differ.
Great. My sex life would be so much better if I heard that "dit-dit-dit" sound all the time. Awesome idea.
That's almost as bad as a bionic ear. "Well, on the upside yout tinnitus is gone. On the downside you're going to hear that 'bionic power' sound effect 24/7."
If these things are reasonably durable they might qualify for being passed out by charity workers. "For only two Dollars little Mbele can light up her home at night."
Of course the old problem of making sure that the stuff doesn't end up in the warehouse of a corrupt official remains.
Doesn't change the fact that a lot of people would probably rather have access to a little bit of electricity without having to rely on fiendishly expensive solar cells than hope that at some point in the future industrialization will come and make their lives better.
If you can't make large improvements that doesn't mean you can't try to make small ones. Not everyone gets to save the world, but some people can make it a slightly better place. Even though this device won't make Tanzania export leader I'm pretty sure that, if deployed, it could improve the lives of a number of people.
Awesome! I can't wait to read this on the back of deodorant spray cans:
PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant will give your skin a cool and fresh feeling and will prevent sweating for up to twenty years.
Known possible side effects include prickling of the skin, headaches, numbness, diarrhea, vomiting, dehydration, hyperthermia, hallucinations, lung failure, kidney failure, cardiac arrest, an atypical form of Parkinson's disease, coma and death.
Not to be taken orally. Keep out of the reach of small children.
Warning: PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant is known to build up in the groundwater and in animals. Any object that has been in direct contact with PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant at any point as well as the remains of persons, cremated or not, who have used PoisonCorp(TM) Cool&Fresh(TM) dedorant at any point may not be disposed of normally and must be handed over to the Environmental Protection Agency as per the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act ("Superfund Act") of 1980.
Well, it might also have given her a healthier skin tone. At least healthier than without blood.
Blood: The cosmetic you just can't live without.
I wonder how a modern day Boston Tea Party might look... Perhaps a bunch of people steals a couple crates of audio discs*, make a video in which they destroy them and state their intention in doing so and then release said video to all major news outlets as well as YouTube (just in case big media isn't interested).
* Maybe even some audio CDs, but given how much the **AA hate the Red Book standard it's rather unlikely.
Note that I didn't say that lack of 3G will "kill" the iPhone (it will only do that when the 2G networks go down, which is quite some time away). I merely said that it's one reason why the iPhone is not going to own the market. In order to do that Apple really would have to offer something for everyone. The "I need a mobile that doubles as an UMTS modem" market remains as untapped as the "I need a very robust phone" market, the "simpler is better" market and the "more than 100 bucks for a mobile is ridiculous" market. (Not to mention the "I need loud stereo speakers so I can listen to my music on the train" market, also known as the "I have an IQ below 20 and I want the whole world to know" market.) The people who spend hundreds of bucks on a smartphone just because it looks spiffy are only part of a large, saturated market - and by no means are they the overwhelming majority. And that's why the iPhone as it is today can never achieve dominance.
(By the way, I called the iPhone a 3G phone, thinking that UMTS was already 3.5G. Of course the iPhone is 2G, pure UMTS is 3G and 3.5G is UMTS with HSDPA.)
Not that the USA haven't been doing the same... Look at the budgets of the Department of Fish and Game, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services, the United States Postal Service and the Bureau of Weights and Measures, around the year 2000. I tell you, there's something strange with those numbers, almost as if there's a secret Ag&/%z%#ÌÁ\%&IOEW$%& NO CARRIER
Can it at least turn on a dime, Macross Zero style? Thrust vectoring does own the sky, you know.
No, but it did turn out they were Magical "Girls". After having seen them turn into Sailor Bubba and the Hairy Warriors most of their colleagues immediately left towards the nearest tall building to jump off of.
WiFi is nice, if you're in a large city with many open APs and lax laws. Which means that in 90% of everywhere it's retty useless because you're either not in a city with a sufficiently large concentration of APs, the APs aren't open (note that pretty much all manufacturers have switched to using encryption as the default setting) or using someone else's AP without permission is illegal (e.g. in Germany you can be slapped with a number of charges, however they only really stick if the network had at least WEP). Not many cities offer municipal WiFi, so you're effectively limited to using the iPhone's WiFi capabilities in your (company's) own network. Where you usually have access to a desktop computer.
I'm pretty sure there are places where having a phone with an 802.11 chipset is nice, but at least in Germany I'd expect UMTS connectivity to be much higher due to people encrypting their APs and more rural areas generally having no contiguous WiFi coverage even in towns. (Note that in Gerany "rural" begins at about twenty kilometers from the next large city.)
Give me a WiFi standard with a range of a few kilometers and good data quality and I'll admit that WiFi is better than 3G for data services. But as it is, WiFi's comparatively abysmal range and the virtual absence of public hotspots only make it competitive under some specific circumstances, which are far from universal.
Let's look at the factors going against the iPhone grabbing the entire mobile phone market: A company with zero reputation in the mobile phone market (1) releases a very expensive (2) 3G (3) smartphone (4) whose main selling argument is its nice UI (5).
Even if you exclude those who prefer a simple phone over a smartphone, thus eliminating problem number 4, you still have four very solid reasons against buying an iPhone vs. buying another mobile. It's expensive. It doesn't do UMTS or HSDPA. It's not quite robust. It doesn't have killer features not found in cheaper mobiles. Apart from being insanely stylish, the iPhone jut doesn't have much going for it towards capturing the whole market.
Interesting. I thought German was pretty isolated in having that feature. (Quick Wikipedia research tells me that it's in fact a feature of many germanic languages.) Wikipedia lists a particularly long actually used word in the German language as "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" (Cattle marking and beef labelling supervision duties delegation law), which is proof that our politicians can super-size things besides wars. Unlimited compounding is awesome.
Don't forgat that DVDs are pretty lousy as long-term storage devices. Unfortunately I don't know of a medium that is known to last longer (and feasible for home use)... Anyone?
have a "hidden" PC stashed in a panel behind the entertainment center. I replicate nightly from my desktop to the media center.
Using small backup systems in hard to find spots can help against backup theft. Not many burglars are going to notice the Mac mini/NSLU2/similar small device in the small corner above the cupboard, especially if the device uses 802.11 instead of wired networking (or the cable runs up to the device inside the wall. This approach also makes the power cord easy to hide). Hiding devices entierly inside walls helps, too. Just make sure they don't take in too much dust. Also, small flash drives can be hidden just about everywhere. If you can keep your backup sizes small, a Compact Flash card or 1.8" drive can be used to take a backup with you at all times - or tape it behind a radiator or something.
If you can't keep burglars from taking your stuff away you can still try to keep them from noticing it in the first place. Doesn't work too well for laptops/desktops, but for data storage it's entirely doable.