Alas, most people aren't photographers - they just want to snap a photo of themselves with their significant other doing stuff. And since digital photography is effectively "free", snapping 10 photos of the same scene doesn't matter to them.
[...]
So the basic point and shoots, as well as cellphone cameras, have to adapt to that use case - the user will just take a picture off the cuff and expect the subjects to look good in the photo. Press the shutter, and a perfect photo comes out.
The point is that unless you are cognizant of composition and lighting, you will never be able to just press the shutter and have a perfect photo come out. At least not unless you just happen to get lucky. I'm a semi-pro photographer, and like OP I agree that 90% of what makes a good photo is in the composition and lighting. For years when I first started, I was shooting with a crappy point and shoot with a fixed 35mm lens which was improperly mounted and rendered half the frame slightly out of focus. But people raved about how good my photos were because I got the composition and lighting right. It's not that hard. I'm hardly artistic - I can't draw worth crap. But learn a few basic rules and apply those heuristics when choosing how to take the photo, and your pictures will turn out much more aesthetically pleasing.
Maybe, in the distant future, cameras will have enough AI and processing to digitally extract your image from the photo, and reconstruct it so it looks like it was shot with better lighting, and auto-crop it for better composition. But for now, you just have to learn the basics of lighting and composition for yourself. I can tell you in one sentence how to make your portraits dramatically better than adding blush or removing redeye: Glue a white piece of paper in front of the flash at a 45 degree angle so it directs the light at the ceiling instead of directly at your subject. Obviously there are lots of other things you can do, but this one step will stop your portraits from looking like 98% of the cheesy self-portraits you see on the web.
That does not mean you cannot use "windows" to describe the GUI element, but you cannot ALSO name your OS "Weendows" or "Window OS" or whatever is confusingly similar to Windows.
FYI, the X Window System was released in 1984. Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. As I understood it, the trademark was on "MS Windows" or "Microsoft Windows" only. If Apple wanted to name their OS to "Apple Windows", they could.
a rogue Android app is hijacking smartphones and running up big texting bills to premium rate numbers before the owner knows it.
Which is easier:
A. Make it impossible to install or execute "rogue" apps on a computer system.
B. Make it impossible to do anything on a phone which will cost money unless the phone owner has authorized it ahead of time with the phone's service provider, and set an upper limit of how much you're willing to pay for it per month (like $5 to spend on texts, apps, etc). Anything above that, the service provider should refuse to do.
B seems like the obvious winner to me. But I suspect the service providers are getting kickbacks from the pay-services so will fight tooth and nail to stop any blocks to accessing those numbers.
Realistically though, I don't think I've seen a large surge in non-Google app stores.. although, perhaps in countries / areas where providers haven't paid Google for access, there is a growing trend?
A friend of mine showed me one he had on his phone. It was basically a warez site. All those apps you have to pay for in Android Market? The pay-versions were available for download for free there.
The best part it was ONE sample, yet somehow because it got attention from a sorta-credible source it is given more credence than the usual ancedotal observation.
Actually, the fact that it was from ONE sample makes it even worse. If these types of defects/shoddy assembly were rare, you'd expect to find one in a typical laptop teardown. Maybe two if you got an extraordinarily unlucky sample. The fact that they found three suggests that statistically, this sort of stuff is present in a high percentage of the laptops.
"This tells us the Obama Administration will do everything that the Bush Administration did"
Which leads to two possible conclusions, neither of which is going to sit well with most of the folks reading here:
A. Republicans and Democrats are just two faces of the same coin. They talk about being for and against different things, but it's all just a ploy to get people to vote for them. Underneath it all they are more concerned about keeping themselves (and this country) in power.
or
B. There are secret reasons why Bush did the unpopular things he's criticized for. Reasons so compelling that once Obama learned what they were, he changed his tune and ended up making the same decisions as Bush.
Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked. They were expensive for what they did, the functionality was crap, the battery drained almost as fast as the laptops did, and the UI was ill-fitted for the job. Then the iPad comes along - a bit limited in flexibility, but almost perfect for the form-factor and what folks expected of it. Battery life is insanely long. The UI is almost perfect for fingers (stylus? who needs that?) And everything about it just seems to 'click' with the non-techie public.
Microsoft and Intel saw tablets as a way to expand sales of x86 processors and Windows OSes. Consequently, they encouraged tablet makers to produce what were basically oversized laptops with high-end x86 processors and Windows. Because the laptops had to be oversized (to accommodate the swivel display and digitizer), the only really viable laptop platform was the ultralight category, which drove prices even higher. All this might have made sense in the early 2000s when laptops were less capable, but by 2005 it should've been obvious to them that there wasn't really a tablet market at above-premium-laptop price and performance levels. That if there was a market for this, it was at a level below laptops. But then they wouldn't get to sell their x86 processors and copies of Windows, so they kept plugging the supra-laptop tablet. They weren't letting the market decide what the devices should be like, they were dictating to the market what it should like. This never works.
Many people, including myself, saw tablets as being viable at a lower price point and reduced functionality. But the Wintel duopoly kept steering any lower-functionality device upward towards x86 and Windows. Take netbooks as an example. First the derided the concept. Then when they saw the things were actually selling enough to threaten their other sales, they gussied up the Atom processor and extended the life of Windows XP to compete. If you look today, about the only distinguishing factor between netbooks and notebooks is whether they use an Atom processor or a Core processor. The category has pretty much been successfully integrated into the x68/Windows sales structure.
The tablet market, without a well-established OS to drive smaller, lighter, cheaper tablets, stagnated. That's why Apple, not beholden to Microsoft nor Intel and no stranger to rolling its own OS, was able to do what other manufacturers couldn't. Apple succeeded with the iPad not so much because it was innovative, but because Intel and Microsoft had steered companies away from that market sector for so long that it opened up a huge opportunity for anyone capable and willing to put together the hardware and OS for it. If you want to give Apple props for innovation in this category, it should be for making the Newton, not the iPad. The iPad just happened to fill a hole Intel and Microsoft created, a hole that likely would have been filled a lot sooner if those two weren't so intent on protecting their x86 and Windows sales.
The iPad is still not right IMHO. Apple's sales are in the millions. I see tablets as a replacement for the clipboard - the pen and paper used in businesses everywhere. All those forms people fill out only for someone to type it into a computer later? Tablet. All those notes people take on paper only to type it into a computer later? Tablet. That sheaf of papers you carry around work? Tablet. Those reference books on your bookshelf at work? Tablet. Think of the tablet-like device UPS custom-made for its delivery people. Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
Actually, the three launch videos they have on the NASA site are strategically cut so you don't see the foam strike. I watched it live and it was pretty obvious when it came off,in between SRB separation and external tank separation. But the "Discovery's Last Launch a Spectacular Sight" and "STS-133 Daily Mission Recap - Flight Day 1" videos cut off before the foam strike, while the "STS-133 Discovery is in Orbit" video picks up after the foam strike.
I'm not sure why they're trying to hide it. Seeing it live, it was pretty obvious that it was a low relative velocity impact. It was already so far up in space that there wasn't enough air to slow the foam down considerably prior to impact.
Bullshit! The only reasonable course of action, when faced with what we (the reasonable people, not the nutjob climate skeptics) think may happen, is to take action! Taking no or not enough action (not enough according to what we think will happen etc.) is just insane as it means gambling with the planet. We've only got 1 planet so you cannot gamble with that! Anyones who disagrees with this is just 1 thing: Insane.
Realize that the most reasonable and expeditious course of action to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels is to massively build out nuclear power generation, right? Not only will they offset coal power plants, you can also rig them up to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and convert it back into O2 or water and carbon. The only reason we don't do that is because of the energy requirement - you would have to burn even more coal to generate enough energy to convert CO2 into something else, making it a one step forward, two steps back proposition. But nuclear's energy cost is low enough to make it viable. But strangely, the environmental groups don't want nuclear. They want us to spend decades doing research and development into wind and solar. Funny how the problem is imminent enough that we have to scale back our carbon emissions immediately, but not so imminent that we can spend decades dilly-dallying with developing new green technologies to solve it instead of using the best technological solution we already have.
I disagree with the general sentiment that the average consumer is blissfully ignorant of Sony's malfeasance when it comes to content protection. While the average consumer may not understand it from a big picture perspective, Sony's current position in the market has already been crippled by consumer reaction to how they protect their content.
What does everyone remember Sony being famous for? The Walkman. When the MP3 market took off, everyone just assumed that Sony would be a big player in it. Sony was synonymous with expensive but high quality portable music players, so it was natural to expect a fantastic MP3 player from them. But Sony's music division somehow managed to force their electronics division to encumber their MP3 players with heavy DRM. At first they wouldn't even play MP3s - you had to buy/convert to some proprietary format which, in preventing you from trading songs or converting to MP3, made it extraordinarily difficult just to put your music on the player. People warned each other in droves to stay away from it.
As a result, Sony has a negligible presence in the MP3 player market today. In order to protect their music division which has approx $5 billion/yr in sales, they missed the opportunity to grab the lead in a new electronics product market where the current leader makes over $12 billion/yr. They let the tail wag the dog, and paid dearly for it.
did you mean that if it's your union its your collective bargaining group built to screw employers out of more money than the employees are worth and healthcare purchase group? Cuz then I'd agree with you, BUT I don't see how any of that has anything to do with the mechanics of performing your job.
As opposed to the employers, who want to screw employees and pay them less than they're worth?
Every employee is paid less than they think they're worth.
Every employer pays more than they think their employees are worth.
Where the two meet in the middle is called the fair market price. The problem with being fair is that neither the employer nor employee is happy about it. In other words, when one side is happy with an agreement, that's a pretty good indication that it's unfair in their favor. So unions and employers squabbling is not news. It's when they're not squabbling that there's probably something fishy or underhanded is going on.
Things like this are one of the main reasons we pay ~$25/mo for a land line despite having 5 active cell phones in the house on 2 separate networks (not to mention a few inactive ones that can still call 911) I know that if the excrement hits the air circulator that I will have more options to reach people than finicky mobile networks.
I can't say if this is true everywhere, but the "inactive" landlines in the houses I've lived at still gave a dial tone. You can still use them to call 911 and toll-free (1-800, 1-888, etc) numbers. You don't have to pay the phone company $25/mo for them. I used to use it for making calls to toll-free support and mail order companies, so I wouldn't rack up as many minutes on my cell phone back when they were relatively expensive.
And (flamewar time) I continued to be baffled over all the flack they got over the stupid wifi thing. They came clean, admitted everything, co-operated with the investigations and people still tore them 12 new ones. Personally I think they should have been commended for admitting they made a mistake rather than going into full on cover up mode.
Because what they did was still wrong. If someone admits to robbing a bank and returns the money and says sorry, you don't pat them on the head, tell them how good they are for admitting it, and let them go. You still punish them, you just punish them less than if they'd tried to hide it. Likewise, the reaction to Google for the wi-fi thing was less severe than it could have been if they'd tried to cover it up. But it still had to be negative.
Having been to the heart of Ethiopia, I can tell you what they really need are jobs. Yea, food, education, clean water... that's all good, but none of it will remain there without money and they only way to keep money there is to build factories to employee the people.
I would go a step further. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in developing countries. In contrast, the population growth of industrialized nations is nearly zero. If you look at the historical population growth of industrialized nations, you'll see the same thing. Sky high population growth when there's a subsistence economy, shifting to low or even negative population growth as they achieve affluence. The desire/need to have more kids dwindles with increasing economic development.
Now apply those concepts to a country receiving humanitarian aid. Food and clean water provided as aid allow for more population growth, while the destructive influence on local economic development means it'll take even longer before that population growth is arrested. In other words, alleviating their suffering today just sets them up for even more suffering in the future. We're approaching it as a static problem where if there are hungry people, feed 'em so they aren't hungry anymore. But it's not a static problem, it's a dynamic problem, where feeding them will lead to there being even more hungry people in the future than if you hadn't fed them at all.
The focus must first be on economic development and education (both in engineering and contraception) in developing countries. Basic needs like food and water should be secondary, and preferably not provided at all. Their own progress in farming and modernizing their infrastructure should be what's providing them with more food and clean water. The way we're doing it now is like feeding deer during a spate of cold winters. By artificially increasing their food supply, you're allowing their population to balloon far beyond the land's carrying capacity, setting them up for a huge population crash when one winter you decide you can't afford to feed the deer anymore. The better solution is to teach the deer how to grow their own food.
If you feel really bad about it, you can still feed them. But their economic development has to be progressing quicker than their population growth. That is, if you find yourself feeding them more year after year, that means you need to concentrate less on food and more on economic development. Only when you have to provide them with less food each successive year will you know they're on the path to modernization and independence from international aid.
Another good reason is to avoid lookalike domains. Say you're a semi-luddite and don't use bookmarks. You want to do your banking and type www.bamkofamerica.com in the URL bar. The bank's website comes up and you do your banking as usual. A week later, you find your bank account has been drained. Someone saw the possibility of typing an 'm' instead of an 'n' in the URL, registered the domain, set it up so it looked just like the real BoA website and conducted a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your bank login and password.
If you had typed "bamkofamerica" into Google, it would've noticed the typo, told you about it, and substituted the correct site. Not a big deal if you use bookmarks, but for sites where I have logins which I don't bookmark (like amazon.com), I used to get to them via Google instead of directly. Then Firefox added the awesome bar or whatever it's called which is annoying most of the time, but is actually pretty handy for this purpose.
Helicopters will full rescue crew are expensive to build and operate. I would imagine the best use of these drones would be to blanket the search grid. Instead of a handful of planes and helicopters doing lawnmower patterns over thousands of square miles of ocean, you could put a drone over every few dozen square miles. Use them to supplement the human search (or vice versa), and have the rescue helos check out any positive hits the drones report.
What the "greed is good" crowd seem to be missing here is that these energy companies are big. Really really big. And as a sector, the oil energy sector dwarfs all other economic sectors.
Here are all the economic sectors of the U.S. (2002). Big Oil is a subset of the Mining sector, which was the fourth smallest sector if you sort by sales. Only arts, entertainment & recreation; management companies; and educational services were smaller. The entire mining sector's sales comprised less than 1% of all the sales in the U.S. economy.
Those figures are probably from the 2000 Census, when oil was $25-$30 a barrel. It's at around $70-$80 now, so I expect the mining sector will be several times bigger in the 2010 Census (not that it makes the companies bigger, since most of the revenue from that price increase is given straight to oil exporting countries). But it's still small potatoes compared to other sectors of the economy.
I don't own stock in Apple, its over priced anyway for a consumer electronics company [...] Health issues should be private, kept private and not trivialized by news media. - Respect the privacy of others, too many people in the media don't
The two are tied more closely than you think. Info on Jobs' health is necessary for Apple shareholders. Unlike just about every other company out there, Apple does not pay dividends. All that profit Apple makes? The shareholders see none of it. Zero. Zilch. The entirety of Apple's stock valuation is based on how much people think it'll go up or down in the future, not on how much profit they make. So Job's health is a huge factor in Apple's stock price. And I would argue that since Jobs himself made it this way, that the shareholders have a right to know the status of his health. When you buy Apple stock, you aren't buying a piece of the company. You're buying a piece of the brand, which derives most of its value from Jobs as a salesman.
Take it from an engineer who's seen lots of fellow engineers try to make start-ups and fail. Having good engineering is not enough. You need good engineering and good marketing. Woz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the marketing genius. Without either, Apple would not be where it is today.
From what I've seen, it's not the end-of-life disposal of drives which leads to this type of data leak. It's when a drive dies under warranty and you send it to the manufacturer for a replacement. Since it's non-functional, you can't erase it. Since you need to return it without any signs of abuse for a warranty replacement, you can't destroy it.
The manufacturer usually just fixes it, and sells it as a refurb / sends it out as a replacement drive for others which have failed under warranty. They just do a quick format, or sometimes even don't bother formatting, before sending the fixed drive out. Meaning the new recipient of your old drive has all your data.
Corporations have many mandates. Profit is the primary one, but rarely is it the only one. An obviously secondary one for Microsoft is to make software. That's why when the housing market boomed, Microsoft continued writing software instead of buying up real estate. When gold prices shot up, Microsoft continued writing software instead of buying up gold.
There's lots to criticize about corporations, but this level of reductionism of their driving motives deviates so much from reality that it's useless for analyzing any situation involving corporations, and makes one sound like you're from the loony conspiracy theory fringe.
Okay but why not just go to the Android Market where you get 100% of the subscription money, all of the ad money, and have no printing/postage costs?
Because Apple has shown they're willing to completely lock down their platform to restrict user freedom. Which is exactly what the publishers want - their ebooks and magazines and the hardware to be locked down with DRM to prevent users from doing whatever they want with the content they buy. In the publishers' minds, DRM is a requirement. Android platforms mostly aren't locked down tight enough to satisfy their DRM requirement (that's why Netflix for Android hasn't come out yet).
Karma has hoisted the publishing industry by their own petard, and they've gotten stuck with a hardware partner who is just like them. The publishing industry tells us we have to read books and magazines their way and like it, Apple tells the publishing industry they have to sell books and magazines Apple's way and like it. Really, I can't think of a more fitting hardware partner for them. They completely deserve each other.
Re-read what you just wrote. You are angry and outraged because you completely fell for the fear. Pretty much nothing which goes on is new. A small subset of wealthy Americans have tried to grab more power pretty much constantly since the country was founded. It has not destroyed the country in over 200 years, what makes you think this time it's suddenly different? (At which point the person selling the fear will step in and say, "It hasn't destroyed it yet!")
I would argue that the left's campaign of fear against wealthy people exerting too much political power feeds a drive to bigger government and more regulation. Which fans the the right's campaign of fear against bigger government that feeds a drive by wealthy people to try to gain more political power to try to decrease the role of government. If you could bottle these two opposing forces together, you'd have a perpetual motion machine whose energy yields nonstop political activity and money. Bottling it is exactly what the Democratic and Republican parties have done.
Well, if they don't accurately and honestly identify themselves then how are others who upload supposed to know that the videos by the movie companies are not violating any copyrights? If it's OK for some random people (aka the movie studios hiding behind fake personas) who's to say other videos of the same movie aren't allowed?
So since you believe it's wrong for companies to hide behind anonymous personas on the grounds that it's dishonest and inaccurate, I take it you also believe it's wrong for regular people to hide behind anonymous personas?
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The point is that unless you are cognizant of composition and lighting, you will never be able to just press the shutter and have a perfect photo come out. At least not unless you just happen to get lucky. I'm a semi-pro photographer, and like OP I agree that 90% of what makes a good photo is in the composition and lighting. For years when I first started, I was shooting with a crappy point and shoot with a fixed 35mm lens which was improperly mounted and rendered half the frame slightly out of focus. But people raved about how good my photos were because I got the composition and lighting right. It's not that hard. I'm hardly artistic - I can't draw worth crap. But learn a few basic rules and apply those heuristics when choosing how to take the photo, and your pictures will turn out much more aesthetically pleasing.
Maybe, in the distant future, cameras will have enough AI and processing to digitally extract your image from the photo, and reconstruct it so it looks like it was shot with better lighting, and auto-crop it for better composition. But for now, you just have to learn the basics of lighting and composition for yourself. I can tell you in one sentence how to make your portraits dramatically better than adding blush or removing redeye: Glue a white piece of paper in front of the flash at a 45 degree angle so it directs the light at the ceiling instead of directly at your subject. Obviously there are lots of other things you can do, but this one step will stop your portraits from looking like 98% of the cheesy self-portraits you see on the web.
FYI, the X Window System was released in 1984. Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released in 1985. As I understood it, the trademark was on "MS Windows" or "Microsoft Windows" only. If Apple wanted to name their OS to "Apple Windows", they could.
Which is easier:
A. Make it impossible to install or execute "rogue" apps on a computer system.
B. Make it impossible to do anything on a phone which will cost money unless the phone owner has authorized it ahead of time with the phone's service provider, and set an upper limit of how much you're willing to pay for it per month (like $5 to spend on texts, apps, etc). Anything above that, the service provider should refuse to do.
B seems like the obvious winner to me. But I suspect the service providers are getting kickbacks from the pay-services so will fight tooth and nail to stop any blocks to accessing those numbers.
A friend of mine showed me one he had on his phone. It was basically a warez site. All those apps you have to pay for in Android Market? The pay-versions were available for download for free there.
They're made on an assembly line. One person installs one part.
Actually, the fact that it was from ONE sample makes it even worse. If these types of defects/shoddy assembly were rare, you'd expect to find one in a typical laptop teardown. Maybe two if you got an extraordinarily unlucky sample. The fact that they found three suggests that statistically, this sort of stuff is present in a high percentage of the laptops.
Which leads to two possible conclusions, neither of which is going to sit well with most of the folks reading here:
A. Republicans and Democrats are just two faces of the same coin. They talk about being for and against different things, but it's all just a ploy to get people to vote for them. Underneath it all they are more concerned about keeping themselves (and this country) in power.
or
B. There are secret reasons why Bush did the unpopular things he's criticized for. Reasons so compelling that once Obama learned what they were, he changed his tune and ended up making the same decisions as Bush.
Microsoft and Intel saw tablets as a way to expand sales of x86 processors and Windows OSes. Consequently, they encouraged tablet makers to produce what were basically oversized laptops with high-end x86 processors and Windows. Because the laptops had to be oversized (to accommodate the swivel display and digitizer), the only really viable laptop platform was the ultralight category, which drove prices even higher. All this might have made sense in the early 2000s when laptops were less capable, but by 2005 it should've been obvious to them that there wasn't really a tablet market at above-premium-laptop price and performance levels. That if there was a market for this, it was at a level below laptops. But then they wouldn't get to sell their x86 processors and copies of Windows, so they kept plugging the supra-laptop tablet. They weren't letting the market decide what the devices should be like, they were dictating to the market what it should like. This never works.
Many people, including myself, saw tablets as being viable at a lower price point and reduced functionality. But the Wintel duopoly kept steering any lower-functionality device upward towards x86 and Windows. Take netbooks as an example. First the derided the concept. Then when they saw the things were actually selling enough to threaten their other sales, they gussied up the Atom processor and extended the life of Windows XP to compete. If you look today, about the only distinguishing factor between netbooks and notebooks is whether they use an Atom processor or a Core processor. The category has pretty much been successfully integrated into the x68/Windows sales structure.
The tablet market, without a well-established OS to drive smaller, lighter, cheaper tablets, stagnated. That's why Apple, not beholden to Microsoft nor Intel and no stranger to rolling its own OS, was able to do what other manufacturers couldn't. Apple succeeded with the iPad not so much because it was innovative, but because Intel and Microsoft had steered companies away from that market sector for so long that it opened up a huge opportunity for anyone capable and willing to put together the hardware and OS for it. If you want to give Apple props for innovation in this category, it should be for making the Newton, not the iPad. The iPad just happened to fill a hole Intel and Microsoft created, a hole that likely would have been filled a lot sooner if those two weren't so intent on protecting their x86 and Windows sales.
The iPad is still not right IMHO. Apple's sales are in the millions. I see tablets as a replacement for the clipboard - the pen and paper used in businesses everywhere. All those forms people fill out only for someone to type it into a computer later? Tablet. All those notes people take on paper only to type it into a computer later? Tablet. That sheaf of papers you carry around work? Tablet. Those reference books on your bookshelf at work? Tablet. Think of the tablet-like device UPS custom-made for its delivery people. Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
Actually, the three launch videos they have on the NASA site are strategically cut so you don't see the foam strike. I watched it live and it was pretty obvious when it came off,in between SRB separation and external tank separation. But the "Discovery's Last Launch a Spectacular Sight" and "STS-133 Daily Mission Recap - Flight Day 1" videos cut off before the foam strike, while the "STS-133 Discovery is in Orbit" video picks up after the foam strike.
I'm not sure why they're trying to hide it. Seeing it live, it was pretty obvious that it was a low relative velocity impact. It was already so far up in space that there wasn't enough air to slow the foam down considerably prior to impact.
Realize that the most reasonable and expeditious course of action to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels is to massively build out nuclear power generation, right? Not only will they offset coal power plants, you can also rig them up to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, and convert it back into O2 or water and carbon. The only reason we don't do that is because of the energy requirement - you would have to burn even more coal to generate enough energy to convert CO2 into something else, making it a one step forward, two steps back proposition. But nuclear's energy cost is low enough to make it viable. But strangely, the environmental groups don't want nuclear. They want us to spend decades doing research and development into wind and solar. Funny how the problem is imminent enough that we have to scale back our carbon emissions immediately, but not so imminent that we can spend decades dilly-dallying with developing new green technologies to solve it instead of using the best technological solution we already have.
I disagree with the general sentiment that the average consumer is blissfully ignorant of Sony's malfeasance when it comes to content protection. While the average consumer may not understand it from a big picture perspective, Sony's current position in the market has already been crippled by consumer reaction to how they protect their content.
Here's Sony's FY2009 sales by segment (slide 4). Their music division had 522.6 billion yen in sales for FY2009, or about $5.25 billion. Here's Apple's sales for roughly the same period (PDF warning). In FY2009, Apple sold $8.09 billion worth of iPods, and had ~$4 billion worth of music sales in the iTunes store.
What does everyone remember Sony being famous for? The Walkman. When the MP3 market took off, everyone just assumed that Sony would be a big player in it. Sony was synonymous with expensive but high quality portable music players, so it was natural to expect a fantastic MP3 player from them. But Sony's music division somehow managed to force their electronics division to encumber their MP3 players with heavy DRM. At first they wouldn't even play MP3s - you had to buy/convert to some proprietary format which, in preventing you from trading songs or converting to MP3, made it extraordinarily difficult just to put your music on the player. People warned each other in droves to stay away from it.
As a result, Sony has a negligible presence in the MP3 player market today. In order to protect their music division which has approx $5 billion/yr in sales, they missed the opportunity to grab the lead in a new electronics product market where the current leader makes over $12 billion/yr. They let the tail wag the dog, and paid dearly for it.
Every employee is paid less than they think they're worth.
Every employer pays more than they think their employees are worth.
Where the two meet in the middle is called the fair market price. The problem with being fair is that neither the employer nor employee is happy about it. In other words, when one side is happy with an agreement, that's a pretty good indication that it's unfair in their favor. So unions and employers squabbling is not news. It's when they're not squabbling that there's probably something fishy or underhanded is going on.
I can't say if this is true everywhere, but the "inactive" landlines in the houses I've lived at still gave a dial tone. You can still use them to call 911 and toll-free (1-800, 1-888, etc) numbers. You don't have to pay the phone company $25/mo for them. I used to use it for making calls to toll-free support and mail order companies, so I wouldn't rack up as many minutes on my cell phone back when they were relatively expensive.
Because what they did was still wrong. If someone admits to robbing a bank and returns the money and says sorry, you don't pat them on the head, tell them how good they are for admitting it, and let them go. You still punish them, you just punish them less than if they'd tried to hide it. Likewise, the reaction to Google for the wi-fi thing was less severe than it could have been if they'd tried to cover it up. But it still had to be negative.
I would go a step further. The vast majority of the world's population growth is in developing countries. In contrast, the population growth of industrialized nations is nearly zero. If you look at the historical population growth of industrialized nations, you'll see the same thing. Sky high population growth when there's a subsistence economy, shifting to low or even negative population growth as they achieve affluence. The desire/need to have more kids dwindles with increasing economic development.
Now apply those concepts to a country receiving humanitarian aid. Food and clean water provided as aid allow for more population growth, while the destructive influence on local economic development means it'll take even longer before that population growth is arrested. In other words, alleviating their suffering today just sets them up for even more suffering in the future. We're approaching it as a static problem where if there are hungry people, feed 'em so they aren't hungry anymore. But it's not a static problem, it's a dynamic problem, where feeding them will lead to there being even more hungry people in the future than if you hadn't fed them at all.
The focus must first be on economic development and education (both in engineering and contraception) in developing countries. Basic needs like food and water should be secondary, and preferably not provided at all. Their own progress in farming and modernizing their infrastructure should be what's providing them with more food and clean water. The way we're doing it now is like feeding deer during a spate of cold winters. By artificially increasing their food supply, you're allowing their population to balloon far beyond the land's carrying capacity, setting them up for a huge population crash when one winter you decide you can't afford to feed the deer anymore. The better solution is to teach the deer how to grow their own food.
If you feel really bad about it, you can still feed them. But their economic development has to be progressing quicker than their population growth. That is, if you find yourself feeding them more year after year, that means you need to concentrate less on food and more on economic development. Only when you have to provide them with less food each successive year will you know they're on the path to modernization and independence from international aid.
Another good reason is to avoid lookalike domains. Say you're a semi-luddite and don't use bookmarks. You want to do your banking and type www.bamkofamerica.com in the URL bar. The bank's website comes up and you do your banking as usual. A week later, you find your bank account has been drained. Someone saw the possibility of typing an 'm' instead of an 'n' in the URL, registered the domain, set it up so it looked just like the real BoA website and conducted a man-in-the-middle attack to harvest your bank login and password.
If you had typed "bamkofamerica" into Google, it would've noticed the typo, told you about it, and substituted the correct site. Not a big deal if you use bookmarks, but for sites where I have logins which I don't bookmark (like amazon.com), I used to get to them via Google instead of directly. Then Firefox added the awesome bar or whatever it's called which is annoying most of the time, but is actually pretty handy for this purpose.
Helicopters will full rescue crew are expensive to build and operate. I would imagine the best use of these drones would be to blanket the search grid. Instead of a handful of planes and helicopters doing lawnmower patterns over thousands of square miles of ocean, you could put a drone over every few dozen square miles. Use them to supplement the human search (or vice versa), and have the rescue helos check out any positive hits the drones report.
Here are all the economic sectors of the U.S. (2002). Big Oil is a subset of the Mining sector, which was the fourth smallest sector if you sort by sales. Only arts, entertainment & recreation; management companies; and educational services were smaller. The entire mining sector's sales comprised less than 1% of all the sales in the U.S. economy.
Those figures are probably from the 2000 Census, when oil was $25-$30 a barrel. It's at around $70-$80 now, so I expect the mining sector will be several times bigger in the 2010 Census (not that it makes the companies bigger, since most of the revenue from that price increase is given straight to oil exporting countries). But it's still small potatoes compared to other sectors of the economy.
The two are tied more closely than you think. Info on Jobs' health is necessary for Apple shareholders. Unlike just about every other company out there, Apple does not pay dividends. All that profit Apple makes? The shareholders see none of it. Zero. Zilch. The entirety of Apple's stock valuation is based on how much people think it'll go up or down in the future, not on how much profit they make. So Job's health is a huge factor in Apple's stock price. And I would argue that since Jobs himself made it this way, that the shareholders have a right to know the status of his health. When you buy Apple stock, you aren't buying a piece of the company. You're buying a piece of the brand, which derives most of its value from Jobs as a salesman.
Take it from an engineer who's seen lots of fellow engineers try to make start-ups and fail. Having good engineering is not enough. You need good engineering and good marketing. Woz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the marketing genius. Without either, Apple would not be where it is today.
From what I've seen, it's not the end-of-life disposal of drives which leads to this type of data leak. It's when a drive dies under warranty and you send it to the manufacturer for a replacement. Since it's non-functional, you can't erase it. Since you need to return it without any signs of abuse for a warranty replacement, you can't destroy it.
The manufacturer usually just fixes it, and sells it as a refurb / sends it out as a replacement drive for others which have failed under warranty. They just do a quick format, or sometimes even don't bother formatting, before sending the fixed drive out. Meaning the new recipient of your old drive has all your data.
Corporations have many mandates. Profit is the primary one, but rarely is it the only one. An obviously secondary one for Microsoft is to make software. That's why when the housing market boomed, Microsoft continued writing software instead of buying up real estate. When gold prices shot up, Microsoft continued writing software instead of buying up gold.
There's lots to criticize about corporations, but this level of reductionism of their driving motives deviates so much from reality that it's useless for analyzing any situation involving corporations, and makes one sound like you're from the loony conspiracy theory fringe.
Because Apple has shown they're willing to completely lock down their platform to restrict user freedom. Which is exactly what the publishers want - their ebooks and magazines and the hardware to be locked down with DRM to prevent users from doing whatever they want with the content they buy. In the publishers' minds, DRM is a requirement. Android platforms mostly aren't locked down tight enough to satisfy their DRM requirement (that's why Netflix for Android hasn't come out yet).
Karma has hoisted the publishing industry by their own petard, and they've gotten stuck with a hardware partner who is just like them. The publishing industry tells us we have to read books and magazines their way and like it, Apple tells the publishing industry they have to sell books and magazines Apple's way and like it. Really, I can't think of a more fitting hardware partner for them. They completely deserve each other.
Re-read what you just wrote. You are angry and outraged because you completely fell for the fear. Pretty much nothing which goes on is new. A small subset of wealthy Americans have tried to grab more power pretty much constantly since the country was founded. It has not destroyed the country in over 200 years, what makes you think this time it's suddenly different? (At which point the person selling the fear will step in and say, "It hasn't destroyed it yet!")
I would argue that the left's campaign of fear against wealthy people exerting too much political power feeds a drive to bigger government and more regulation. Which fans the the right's campaign of fear against bigger government that feeds a drive by wealthy people to try to gain more political power to try to decrease the role of government. If you could bottle these two opposing forces together, you'd have a perpetual motion machine whose energy yields nonstop political activity and money. Bottling it is exactly what the Democratic and Republican parties have done.
So since you believe it's wrong for companies to hide behind anonymous personas on the grounds that it's dishonest and inaccurate, I take it you also believe it's wrong for regular people to hide behind anonymous personas?