If you're using Safari on a Mac, install ClickToFlash, which in addition to letting you leave Flash off until you absolutely need it, shows YouTube video with an H.264 wrapper.
It doesn't matter how fast the AT&T network is if you can't maintain a reliable connection.
I'm a member of an AT&T family plan in the Washington DC area (one iPhone, three random voice-and-text phones), and whenever the network drops me, I remake the call and use the greeting "AT&T Sucks! Hello...". I do this routinely, a couple of times a day on average.
The only reason the network is tolerable for data is that we don't see how bursty and flaky it is underneath.
Agreed, snooping around an unlocked house is bad. If, say, my bank left their front door open, and my money was stolen, or information that led to my identity being misused, I'd have grounds to sue my bank.
The thieves did something wrong, but so did my bank by not taking elementary precautions and LETTING THEM DO IT.
I have a 2005 Prius with a built-in navsystem (bought it used - someone else got the initial screwing).
Toyota wants $300 for a DVD with updated maps. That level of overcharge makes the torrents look attractive.
I'm mounting mine on my glasses
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Stereo mikes on the temples, heads-up display on the lenses, wirelessly connected to the wallet-sized CPU/Internet-connection box.
I want it clearly stated that the US 5th Amendment covers this, though.
... and that you come from an area where the government chose a wireless standard for a whole country, so choosing a phone doesn't mean choosing a wireless carrier.
The US, for good or ill, didn't do that. The market here is fragmented to the point that the two major GSM carriers use different frequencies for their 3G service - if you jailbreak an iPhone and move it to T-Mobile, you can only get EDGE data.
There is hope that when 4G gets rolled out, it will be broadly cross-carrier compatible.
Weird that nobody who reported on this linked to the original letter.
I went looking for it primarily to get the complete list of signers:
Joe Barton (TX), Frank Pallone (NJ), Mike Rogers (MI), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Tim Murphy (PA), Bruce Braley (IA), Mike Burgess (TX), G.K. Butterfield (NC), Steve Scalise (LA), and Donna Christensen (V.I.)
I was expecting to see someone from Redmond, WA in there...
Google it for yourself. Basically, as long as most things go well for most people in China, the government will be seen as legitimate.
If, say, the economic expansion stops, or there is a recession, people will start to question the legitimacy of their rulers. Democracy allows that questioning to happen without a civil war.
Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, preventive care does not reduce health care costs.
Things like vaccination and sanitation are cheap, and easily pay for themselves. Almost all other preventive care costs more than just treating the disease as it is detected - screening for low-probability problems is expensive, and unless the screen is very accurate, money spent on treatment for false positives can overwhelm savings from early detection.
Remember the breast cancer screening recommendations awhile back? The data on those said that for every cancerous tumor detected when screening women under 50, they also found multiple benign lumps which triggered useless (and potentially dangerous, when you factor in iatrogenic infections) biopsies.
There are good arguments for universal health care. Reducing cost is not one of them, people who crunch the real health care numbers know this, and it troubles me when anyone makes an argument they know to be false.
Yes, they know a lot about me. Much of it is tied to me as an individual through my Google account - they have my email address as a username.
Have they sent me spam? No.
Have they handed info about me to other businesses? If so, none of them have obviously tried to contact me.
Can I choose to divorce Google? Yes - all of their services have a take-your-data-and-leave option. I can stop using my Google account, pull my mail out of Gmail, export and delete Google docs, delete all their cookies from my browsers, and start using another search engine. Poof! No more Google in my life.
Google wins by offerring top-quality services, and by not abusing their users' trust.
Microsoft can't understand this, because they've never really had to compete on the basis of quality, and because they think nothing of abusing their customers.
I will worry about Google when they actually do something threatening.
If you're a homeschooler, and you're 16 or older, and you can pass the placement exam (math and english) at the community college at the college level, you can become a "concurrent enrollment" student and take classes for transferrable college credit.
Making energy more expensive will slow down the world economy. For us in the West, that's a recession at worst - annoying, but our governments and way of life will survive.
For India, that's hundreds of millions of people getting out of subsistence farming more slowly. Given the choice, they'll choose to improve their lives this generation rather than next, and they DO get a vote.
Same for China, with the added risk of a revolt if their economy stops growing. The only reason the average Chinese peasant puts up with their abusive government is the possibility that industrialization will improve their lives - if their economy stalls, someone will pick up one of those Little Red Books they have lying around, and think "say... this might just work again, you know?"
India and China will industrialize as efficiently as they can, because their people will demand it.
My wife has an iPhone. She runs her free-lance business off it, so we don't jailbreak it. AT&T's network, their rules, etc.
If she also gets an iPad, with no 3G, I'll jailbreak it without a second thought.
1. Some ads are flashy/obnoxious. I block those. I don't block ads on Slashdot because by and large they are not overly intrusive. I block automatic video ads wherever I can, and I don't return to sites with roll-over pop-ups of any type.
2. Some ads cause pages to render slowly, or stop rendering entirely. I give up and close pages that are clearly blocked waiting on j.random.adserver.com, for whatever reason (slow ad server, net congestion, slow home browser). I wish there were a way to relegate ad rendering in browsers to, say, one thread, leaving the rest of them for the content I really want to see.
The common theme with these two problems is: when ads interfere with my viewing of non-ad content, they get dropped or blocked.
At least that's how it worked when we switched from T-Mobile to AT&T to get an iPhone. The customer service people royally screwed up our phone number transfers, misled us as to how long it would take to get an iPhone when they were out of stock, misfiled the phone in their shop (so they didn't notify us when it arrived - we had to bug them to search by order number), put the wrong names on phone numbers, gave phones in our family plan the wrong extra features, claimed things were unscrewed when they weren't, repeatedly, etc...
The one thing they got right was telling us up front that "your two year period starts over when you make ANY change to your plan" - increase of minutes, add another family member, whatever.
AT&T phone customer service is actually good, though. We had to call several times, but every time we called customer service, things got fixed.
I work for a NASA contractor. Some of my group's best people have a combination of hard-science and IT/CS experience.
You need both when you're implementing systems to schedule and steer satellite antennas, catch data passes in the hundreds of MB, and push them through layers of processing to create usable data products. A large part of the fun here is taking processing code written by scientists, giving it a consistent interface, and making it behave in an automated system, without changing its semantics. Having a clue about the science is very useful here.
It's similar to working for a university, in that pay is stable and not spectacular, and that at the end of the day you've accomplished something worthwhile. If our group went away for some reason, near-real-time satellite data would get much more expensive or vanish altogether.
My wife has an iPhone, I have the piece-of-junk Sony-Ericsson they were giving away last year. Both of them routinely drop calls, to the point where whenever it happens, I answer the repeat call with:
AT&T sucks! Hello...
The contract that got us the iPhone 3G expires next July, and with any luck there will be a shiny new Verizon 4G option available.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're using Safari on a Mac, install ClickToFlash, which in addition to letting you leave Flash off until you absolutely need it, shows YouTube video with an H.264 wrapper.
It doesn't matter how fast the AT&T network is if you can't maintain a reliable connection.
I'm a member of an AT&T family plan in the Washington DC area (one iPhone, three random voice-and-text phones), and whenever the network drops me, I remake the call and use the greeting "AT&T Sucks! Hello...". I do this routinely, a couple of times a day on average.
The only reason the network is tolerable for data is that we don't see how bursty and flaky it is underneath.
Agreed, snooping around an unlocked house is bad. If, say, my bank left their front door open, and my money was stolen, or information that led to my identity being misused, I'd have grounds to sue my bank.
The thieves did something wrong, but so did my bank by not taking elementary precautions and LETTING THEM DO IT.
FIOS came to my neighborhood a few years ago. For the last three years, I've made an annual phone call to Comcast:
Hello, how can I help you?
I'd like to cancel my service - your standard rates are higher than FIOS, so I'm switching.
What can we do to keep you as a customer?
Reduce my rates.
I can offer you $33/month internet for 12 months.
OK, I'll stay with you. Thanks!
So, if you have any long-term commitment to them, you can now break it with no penalty.
I have a 2005 Prius with a built-in navsystem (bought it used - someone else got the initial screwing).
Toyota wants $300 for a DVD with updated maps. That level of overcharge makes the torrents look attractive.
Stereo mikes on the temples, heads-up display on the lenses, wirelessly connected to the wallet-sized CPU/Internet-connection box. I want it clearly stated that the US 5th Amendment covers this, though.
... and that you come from an area where the government chose a wireless standard for a whole country, so choosing a phone doesn't mean choosing a wireless carrier. The US, for good or ill, didn't do that. The market here is fragmented to the point that the two major GSM carriers use different frequencies for their 3G service - if you jailbreak an iPhone and move it to T-Mobile, you can only get EDGE data. There is hope that when 4G gets rolled out, it will be broadly cross-carrier compatible.
is here.
Weird that nobody who reported on this linked to the original letter.
I went looking for it primarily to get the complete list of signers:
Joe Barton (TX), Frank Pallone (NJ), Mike Rogers (MI), Jan Schakowsky (IL), Tim Murphy (PA), Bruce Braley (IA), Mike Burgess (TX), G.K. Butterfield (NC), Steve Scalise (LA), and Donna Christensen (V.I.)
I was expecting to see someone from Redmond, WA in there...
Given the current generation's sex imbalance, that is.
Google it for yourself. Basically, as long as most things go well for most people in China, the government will be seen as legitimate. If, say, the economic expansion stops, or there is a recession, people will start to question the legitimacy of their rulers. Democracy allows that questioning to happen without a civil war.
Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, preventive care does not reduce health care costs.
Things like vaccination and sanitation are cheap, and easily pay for themselves. Almost all other preventive care costs more than just treating the disease as it is detected - screening for low-probability problems is expensive, and unless the screen is very accurate, money spent on treatment for false positives can overwhelm savings from early detection.
Remember the breast cancer screening recommendations awhile back? The data on those said that for every cancerous tumor detected when screening women under 50, they also found multiple benign lumps which triggered useless (and potentially dangerous, when you factor in iatrogenic infections) biopsies.
There are good arguments for universal health care. Reducing cost is not one of them, people who crunch the real health care numbers know this, and it troubles me when anyone makes an argument they know to be false.
Spider Robinson wrote a story about what infinite copyright might do to the human race: Melancholy Elephants.
Systems like this would allow people with no artistic talent of their own to strip-mine other artists' creative space.
Yes, they know a lot about me. Much of it is tied to me as an individual through my Google account - they have my email address as a username.
Have they sent me spam? No.
Have they handed info about me to other businesses? If so, none of them have obviously tried to contact me.
Can I choose to divorce Google? Yes - all of their services have a take-your-data-and-leave option. I can stop using my Google account, pull my mail out of Gmail, export and delete Google docs, delete all their cookies from my browsers, and start using another search engine. Poof! No more Google in my life.
Google wins by offerring top-quality services, and by not abusing their users' trust.
Microsoft can't understand this, because they've never really had to compete on the basis of quality, and because they think nothing of abusing their customers.
I will worry about Google when they actually do something threatening.
If you're a homeschooler, and you're 16 or older, and you can pass the placement exam (math and english) at the community college at the college level, you can become a "concurrent enrollment" student and take classes for transferrable college credit.
Making energy more expensive will slow down the world economy. For us in the West, that's a recession at worst - annoying, but our governments and way of life will survive.
For India, that's hundreds of millions of people getting out of subsistence farming more slowly. Given the choice, they'll choose to improve their lives this generation rather than next, and they DO get a vote.
Same for China, with the added risk of a revolt if their economy stops growing. The only reason the average Chinese peasant puts up with their abusive government is the possibility that industrialization will improve their lives - if their economy stalls, someone will pick up one of those Little Red Books they have lying around, and think "say... this might just work again, you know?"
India and China will industrialize as efficiently as they can, because their people will demand it.
My wife has an iPhone. She runs her free-lance business off it, so we don't jailbreak it. AT&T's network, their rules, etc. If she also gets an iPad, with no 3G, I'll jailbreak it without a second thought.
... I ran into a professor of statistics who said that computers were going to be a passing fad in his field.
1. Some ads are flashy/obnoxious. I block those. I don't block ads on Slashdot because by and large they are not overly intrusive. I block automatic video ads wherever I can, and I don't return to sites with roll-over pop-ups of any type.
2. Some ads cause pages to render slowly, or stop rendering entirely. I give up and close pages that are clearly blocked waiting on j.random.adserver.com, for whatever reason (slow ad server, net congestion, slow home browser). I wish there were a way to relegate ad rendering in browsers to, say, one thread, leaving the rest of them for the content I really want to see.
The common theme with these two problems is: when ads interfere with my viewing of non-ad content, they get dropped or blocked.
... until the joint and bone strengthening pills are also available.
At least that's how it worked when we switched from T-Mobile to AT&T to get an iPhone. The customer service people royally screwed up our phone number transfers, misled us as to how long it would take to get an iPhone when they were out of stock, misfiled the phone in their shop (so they didn't notify us when it arrived - we had to bug them to search by order number), put the wrong names on phone numbers, gave phones in our family plan the wrong extra features, claimed things were unscrewed when they weren't, repeatedly, etc...
The one thing they got right was telling us up front that "your two year period starts over when you make ANY change to your plan" - increase of minutes, add another family member, whatever. AT&T phone customer service is actually good, though. We had to call several times, but every time we called customer service, things got fixed.
The Government does have to get a warrant to open your mail. Don't they?
I work for a NASA contractor. Some of my group's best people have a combination of hard-science and IT/CS experience.
You need both when you're implementing systems to schedule and steer satellite antennas, catch data passes in the hundreds of MB, and push them through layers of processing to create usable data products. A large part of the fun here is taking processing code written by scientists, giving it a consistent interface, and making it behave in an automated system, without changing its semantics. Having a clue about the science is very useful here.
It's similar to working for a university, in that pay is stable and not spectacular, and that at the end of the day you've accomplished something worthwhile. If our group went away for some reason, near-real-time satellite data would get much more expensive or vanish altogether.
It's much harder to explosively short a battery if you can't remove it.
(You and I know it's still possible, but remember, we're doing TSA CYA logic here - if they can say "we did our best" they're covered).
My wife has an iPhone, I have the piece-of-junk Sony-Ericsson they were giving away last year. Both of them routinely drop calls, to the point where whenever it happens, I answer the repeat call with:
AT&T sucks! Hello...
The contract that got us the iPhone 3G expires next July, and with any luck there will be a shiny new Verizon 4G option available.