The problem is, Facebook is doing everything it can to make it nearly impossible to engage in any kind of social activity or commerce without consenting to their use of that information. It's not so much what you do on Facebook per se, as their ability to aggregate out-of-band information behind your back, from sources only loosely associated with Facebook, that makes them truly awful and dangerous.
Personally, when a store "offers" me a discount in return for liking them on Facebook, I get really mad. Most of the time, I'll throw down whatever I was planning to buy, leave in disgust, and do my best to avoid shopping at that store for months afterwards. From that point forward, I feel like I'm getting screwed over with every purchase, and over-charged by the amount of the discount they didn't let me have. The worst part is, the number of stores I can happily shop at keeps getting smaller and smaller. Every goddamn trip to buy Diet Mountain Dew or bagels turns into an exercise in moral calculus & deciding whom I hate the least this week.
At one time, I used to "like" stores to get the discount, complete the purchase, then proudly and loudly un-like them a moment later & post a note to my wall about how I completely *hated* them for twisting my arm into prostituting myself to avoid getting surcharged and screwed... but then I found out that by the time I did that, it was too late to stop them from harvesting my personal information for offline use anyway.
It looks like the article got the guy's name backwards. In Chinese, your family name comes first. So, "Wu Chien-Huang" would be properly westernized as "Mr. Wu". If, in fact, his family name were "Chien-Huang", is proper Romanized representation would be "Chien-Huang Wu".
Complicating the westernization of Chinese names, Chinese relies heavily upon inflection (so much so, that the various inflections are called "tones"). Think of the various ways you can say "Merry Christmas" to someone, expressing the entire range of feelings from "Greetings! I hope you're enjoying your holiday season" to "Fuck you, eat shit, and die!" using the same two words, depending upon how you say them.
The net result is that tens of thousands of name-syllables, represented by distinct characters in Chinese, get collapsed down to just a few hundred Roman letter sequences. Under the BEST circumstances (properly rendered into canonical Pinyin, tone accents and all), each syllable still has an ambiguity of ~2.5 characters per syllable (ie, each syllable, like "Wu", "Chien", or "Huang" could be one of 2 or 3 different Chinese characters). Strip away the accents & take liberties with the phonetics, and it's more like 5-20 per syllable. But wait... it gets worse. Just about every word in Chinese ALSO has multiple homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same, but written differently. Think, "to, too, two".
So... given only an ASCII-Romanized representation of a name like "Wu Chien-Huang", you can reasonably guess that Mr. Wu's actual name is one of approximately 20-30 possibilities. Maybe as few as a dozen, if you spend some time researching his family tree and can get the family name unambiguously nailed down to one or two possibilities (ie, figuring out whether it's "///Wu///", or "***Wu***"). But without actually seeing it written in proper Chinese, or asking his mother, or someone who saw his name written in proper Chinese at some point in time), NOBODY could ever be 100% sure what name his mother intended him to have.
In many parts of the US (I think California is the sole meaningful big-state exception... maybe Wisconsin, too), 10-digit dialing is mandatory in any city where there are overlaid areacodes. Atlanta was the first city with mandatory 10-digit dialing, but Miami, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, and plenty of other cities quickly followed once it became obvious that endlessly subdividing metro areas into smaller and smaller areacodes was creating more chaos and hassle than just making areacodes mandatory.
I believe at one point, there was a local proposal in Miami circa 1995 to allow 8-digit dialing by using the third digit of the areacode as the eighth digit, but BellSouth *VEHEMENTLY* opposed it, and in the end, it would have been mostly moot within a decade anyway thanks to nationwide number portability(*)
(*) Interestingly, Verizon, and apparently AT&T, unlike Sprint, WILL NOT allow you to port numbers nationwide. Apparently, they'll force you to change your number to one in your new areacode if your billing address changes to a different part of the country. One of my coworkers was PISSED because his parents moved to Florida from New Jersey, and Verizon made them change their numbers. As far as I know, Sprint won't allow you to sign up for new service with an alien areacode ported to the new service, but they don't care if you move across the country with an already-active account. I believe T-mobile is completely areacode-agnostic, and doesn't really care what your number is, as long as it's serviced by a local exchange of theirs *somewhere* in the country. Apparently, people have taken advantage of this using T-Mobile prepaid to port Google Voice numbers to U-verse (U-verse won't allow you to port from Google Voice, but they will allow you to port from T-Mobile, so people port their Google Voice numbers to T-Mobile prepaid, then port them from T-Mobile prepaid to U-verse as soon as the change goes through).
Or something that, AFAIK, has never been done on a production hard drive, like make the arms & heads independent for each platter, and build a 3-platter drive that transparently does RAID 5 internally (ie, presents itself to the outside world as a normal SATA drive, but internally reads & writes in parallel). Or makes more intelligent use of the flash cache by caching the first N sectors of a large file in flash, and the remainder on the drive, so it can begin reading from flash immediately while moving the head into position for the remainder.
The single biggest problem with SSDs is the fact that they just fall over and die without warning due to firmware bugs, with no hope of data recovery due to mandatory full-disk encryption that can't be disabled. That's the part about SSDs that aggravates me the worst... if they at least allowed you to boot into Linux and siphon the raw bits from the drive for offline recovery, I wouldn't mind so much. But they don't.
I made the mistake of buying a Sandforce-based drive 3 years ago, and got burned badly. The worst thing is, you can't even upgrade the firmware without losing everything on the drive, because the bastards set up the bootloader to blow away the encryption key whenever the firmware gets replaced. A Sandforce SSD is a fundamentally-flawed black box that will fail in ways that don't technically qualify as "breakage" (because you "only" have to blow it away with SecureErase to restore it to "like new", but still-flawed, condition), but can't be fixed (or even meaningfully recovered-from) because the whole thing is booby-trapped to self-destruct if you try (Google "Sandforce panic mode").
Never. Again. I won't touch a Sandforce-based SSD with a dirty tetanus-infected pole, or taint my computers with drives built around that filthy, worthless chipset family.
The problem is, you aren't necessarily talking about 750 12-volt real (RMS) watts that are clean & stable. Cheap power supplies, in particular, are notoriously stingy in the 12v department. It's one thing to make a cheap power supply capable of surging to 750w for a few hundred milliseconds before frying itself or sagging. It's another matter ENTIRELY to make a power supply capable of outputting 750w RMS without breaking a sweat, and able to keep doing it 24/7 for the next 3 years.
That said, 750 watts is probably overkill by almost any modern standard... but 350 watts in a high-end PC with multiple hard drives two video cards, and a hot CPU is probably pushing your luck unless you know beyond doubt that you're talking about 350 watts of solid RMS power.
(RMS wattage is basically the amount you can draw continuously without unacceptably degrading the power or damaging the power supply). Think: 5'3 MMA fighter who's 180 pounds of solid muscle, vs 500 pound fat lady (height almost completely irrelevant) riding her scooter at Wal Mart.
15 years, I might have agreed with you. The upside of the American billing model is that it put direct competitive pressure on phone companies to make incoming calls (or at least their first minute) free, and to create calling plans with thousands of minutes, free nights/weekends, or outright unlimited airtime. The net result is that most Americans with normal mobile phone service never pay for airtime above and beyond what's included, but in Britain people are still forced to count minutes and care. The flip side is that in Britain, if you make no outgoing calls of your own, you can get a mobile phone for something like US$15-20/month, while in the US, it was nearly impossible to get meaningful service for less than $40/month after taxes until very, very, VERY recently, regardless of how little you used it. For people who never made calls, the British model was nicer. For Americans who'd rather pay one price to enjoy an all-you-can-eat(*) buffet, the American model ended up nicer.
(*)of course, "unlimited" never truly means "unlimited", and if you exceed some unwritten threshold "too often", most carriers will either fire you as a customer or force you into a more expensive plan. The point is, though, Americans almost universally despise having meters running in the background... partly, because the only time we ever encounter them, they're being used as an excuse to jack up the prices even more. In the US, the break-even point between ANY a-la-carte service and all-you-can-eat is only slightly above "zero actual use" for most real-world situations.
The FCC set aside areacodes for mobile phones, but somewhere along the line, they were discontinued as "prejudicial".
There was also a block of areacodes set aside for non-geographic personal numbers, but there was zero interest in them, because they gave you and your callers the worst of all worlds... you were charged for incoming calls as though it were a toll free number, and people calling you were charged as through they were making the most expensive domestic long-distance calls possible.
I remember that sometime around the mid-90s, there was a bug in the ESS switching software used by BellSouth (probably others too) that allowed you to create a chain of adhoc-forwarded numbers that began with a toll-free 800 number, and ended with a local premium-rate 976 number, because there was no control in place to stop you from doing it, and the 976 billing logic charged the originator of the call rather than the forwarder.As far as I know, the practice was never actually approved, and people who did it ended up getting the money taken away from them.
In the US, a leading '1' has ALWAYS signified your understanding that the number dialed isn't a local call, and might not necessarily be free. Back when areacodes always had 0 or 1 as the second digit, never as the first digit, and exchange codes (the 3 digits after the areacode) could not have 0 or 1 as the second digit, it worked something like this: Assume two Miami phones having numbers 305-222-2222 and 305-333-3333 and a Key West phone having number 305-444-4444:
Back when 7-digit dialing was allowed, 305-222-2222 could cal 305-333-3333 by simply dialing 333-3333. No 0 or 1 within the first 3 digits, so 305 areacode was implied, as well as its status as a free call. However, if 305-222-2222 called the Key west number, he had two choices: 1-444-4444 or 1-305-444-4444 (leading 1= non-free, no 0/1 second digit implies 305 areacode)
When 10-digit dialing was implemented to allow 786 areacode to be overlaid on Miami, 11-digit permissive dialing was enabled to avoid breaking compatibility with software and dialers that automatically added a leading '1' to any 10-digit phone number (yes, there were quite a few). So, 305-222-2222 could dial 305-333-3333 by dialing EITHER 305-333-3333 OR 1-305-333-33333. However, for calls to Key West, the 1 was absolutely required, so 305-222-2222 dialing 305-444-4444 would get a recording that the number was not local & required a 0 or 1 before dialing.
Cell phones threw a new monkey wrench into the equation, because they (usually) had much larger "local" calling zones. For example, if you were a Sprint customer, everything from Orlando south to Key West was classified as a "local" call, including numbers outside your area code. So 305-222-2222 could dial 407-934-7639 without the leading 1, since to a Sprint customer who was present within the switching area of the number being called, it WAS a local call. It technically incurred per-minute airtime charges, but didn't incur additional long-distance.
Where things got ugly was when you called people who were visiting with a mobile phone from another area. I don't think many people really understand what the billing logic was, because it wasn't a common scenario until the point when most mobile phones started to have the entire US as a local calling zone anyway. As I understand it, behind the scenes, if a Sprint customer in Miami called a Sprint customer from California who was in Orlando, Sprint's network would recognize that the caller and target were both handled by the Orlando switching center and complete it as a "local" call (even if the caller didn't have free long-distance anyway), but a landline phone (or non-Sprint mobile phone) in Miami would have gotten charged for the call to California, because their carrier would have terminated the call to Sprint's switching center in California, and Sprint itself would have transparently connected it to their Orlando switching center behind the scenes.
I'll be happy with an arm on a ceiling-mounted gantry that retracts into a niche above the bath-shower alcove and keeps the toilet nice and sparkly clean, including the unspeakably nasty region BEHIND the toilet.
Somebody tell me again why it's impossible to buy a house in America with master bathroom that's built like a big waterproof shower with floor drain, so you can just hose it down with soapy water to clean it? Oh, right... because our building codes force you to use P traps and dry-venting for every single drain in the house, instead of allowing drum traps for floor drains (building a floor drain with a drum trap is cheap and easy; P-traps intrude into the ceiling envelope of the floor below, and dry-venting a floor drain that's in the middle of the room in a code-compliant manner is hard due to the horizontal distance it has to run before going vertical).
^^^ Correction: the estimate was post-Wilma. Everyone understood why we had no power for 2 weeks after Andrew. 3-4 weeks without power after Wilma, however, was just inexcusable. Andrew was a category 5 hurricane whose eyewall passed directly over the southern half of Coral Gables, and spanked the northern half pretty badly too. Wilma was a little category 3 hurricane whose eyewall didn't even pass directly over Coral Gables, and didn't even do a whole lot of damage to the city besides shredding the power lines. Coral Gables wasn't the only angry city, but it was definitely the least shy about making its displeasure with FPL's entire handling of Wilma's aftermath & trying to do an end run around FPL to solve the problem for itself once and for all.
When pressed after Hurricane Andrew, FPL came up with a completely bogus estimate that was so outrageous, even they could barely deliver it with a straight face. The reason WHY it was completely outrageous was the fact that traditionally, the assumption has been that people want power lines buried for aesthetic reasons, so it's fair to make them pay the full cost of doing it in a way that makes FPL completely 100% happy.
When FPL semi-voluntarily buries lines, it demands a 20' dedicated easement adjacent to a paved road. In roughly 70% of South Florida, that means their estimate included the cost of acquiring by eminent domain literally the entire front yards of half the city. Moreover, they demand a vacant lot per block for the transformer pad, which literally escalated the projected cost to more than a trillion dollars since actually doing it would have required buying a house on each block by eminent domain and demolishing it.
Oh, and their "plan" called for FIRST burying the high-voltage transmission lines, which are the most expensive lines you can possibly bury, and the ones that are generally repaired within a day or two of a hurricane *anyway*... as opposed to the lower-voltage neighborhood lines that are the ones that end up getting shredded by anything that vaguely resembles a hurricane, and take weeks to repair.
In other countries, particularly in Europe, they don't insist upon bulldozing an entire corridor the width of a city street and dedicating it forever to the exclusive use of the power company... they just bore small tunnels under streets & alleys without disturbing a single 400 year old cobblestone, and go to the trouble of finding ways to gracefully shoehorn the transformer equipment into some spot where it won't be unreasonably intrusive. Only in America is it considered sane and normal to allow investor-owned power companies to dictate absurd terms that turn a project that would be "expensive" into a project that would cost more than the entire Apollo space program (adjusted for inflation), and involve buying approximately 5% of the state's urban land area for brand new utility corridors (as opposed to... well... just burying the new underground cables in the same 10' wide rear easement that the poles are in now).
One city in South Florida (Coral Gables) was so angry and outraged by FPL, it was literally preparing to fund a study to take FPL's existing corridors by eminent domain and form a city-owned cooperative to bury and maintain new underground lines (built in existing utility easements) themselves. Unfortunately, FPL went to Tallahassee, screamed "Socialism!", and got a law passed that now makes it almost impossible for cities (even relatively large & wealthy ones) to independently build their own power & fiber infrastructure (basically, they'd have to prove they could pay the capital costs in full within an absurdly short timeframe, and get the county to act as guarantor for the bonds & accept liability for the full unpaid balance if the city defaulted).
> where they were smart enough to do a cost-benefit analysis and realized that underground wiring only resulted in 50% fewer outages, > while costing 4 to 6 times as much to install and repair.
As opposed to countries where they went a step further & decided that the higher cost of underground wiring was pocket change compared to the impact of service outages?
It's like electricity. From the perspective of end users who need power during anything short of an extinction-level asteroid impact event, it's almost always going to be cheaper to pay the marginal cost of buried infrastructure and hardened generation sites than it is to personally build and maintain their own parallel on-site power generation capabilities. My normal electric bills are ~$180/month. If FPL charged me 2% month more to pay for amortizing the cost of burying the neighborhood power lines out over 25 years, my bills would increase by approximately $43/year. Compare that to the cost of buying even a shit generator that's big enough to wheeze and limp while powering an air conditioner & a few hundred watts of battery chargers & lights. Add in the $35-50/day worth of gasoline it takes to keep it running at 50% load all day during the outage, and even a 10% surcharge starts to look cheap, if only because the net reliability ends up being almost the same, with a lot less individual hassle.
And yes, I said $35-50/day. A typical 5600-watt generator has a 5 gallon tank, and can run for about 8-10 hours at 50% load. $3.50/gallon x 5 gallons/tank x 2.5 tanks/day = $43.75. Add up the total for 2 weeks without power after a hurricane, and you're looking at one HELL of an expensive power bill for the month ($612.50 for 14 days). Balance that against the likelihood of having about 4 weeks of cumulative power outages per decade against the relatively long service life of buried power lines, and buried infrastructure starts to look like an *incredibly* good bargain.
> The other is that it encourages judgements and policies which increase the number of people sentenced to death.
Well... probably not. Even in China, the wheels of justice turn at a glacial pace relative to organ-transplant timelines. Organ transplantation has timeframes measured in weeks... at most, a few months... from establishment of need to actual organ harvest. If you needed a lung transplant & had to wait for someone with matching compatible genotype to get arrested, convicted, and executed, you'd probably be dead long before they were.
China's policy *starts* once a prisoner is already on death row... they're genotyped, then kept alive until recipients are found for their organs. The system mostly works well, because it eliminates the rush to perform a transplant on short notice and the dependency on local availability. They can schedule the execution, harvesting, and transplant well in advance, and have everyone in place & ready to go before the prisoner gets executed.
The *real* ethical problem lies with the fact that there *are* at least a few people on death row in China whose crimes were for things that tend to make even death-penalty supporters cringe, including some political prisoners. Not a lot... but they do exist, have names, and can't be ignored.
If China were to modify the program to transparently guarantee that harvested organs came ONLY from executed prisoners convicted in a fair public trial of pure, untainted, honest-to-${deity} first-degree murder (one person plans the premature demise of another, and personally wields the murder that makes it happen), I'd venture a guess that the majority of opposition in those countries would vanish, and there would probably be calls to try and find a legal way to do the same thing in the US.
The problem, of course, is the increasingly slippery slope in the US towards seemingly casting a wider and wider net every year. In Texas, you can be convicted & condemned to death for merely being "involved" with a felony where somebody (even another criminal) dies. Stir in the trend of re-casting almost every serious crime (and plenty of more mundane ones) as "domestic terror", and you can see the 400-ton elephant in the room clad in a pink tutu & dancing under the disco ball.
Notice that the Guardian article presents a list of bills, but doesn't make it particularly easy to see their content, nor does it make much of an attempt to show WHY the Queen vetoed them. Dig a little deeper, and the usual theme can be summarized as, "Parliament was attempting to ramrod something that had strong support from the governing Party, but was unpopular with voters".
The crazy thing about Britain's monarchy is the fact that as a practical matter, the Queen ends up being the most powerful day to day advocate and supporter those who most ardently profess to despise her (or at least the institution she represents) actually *have* -- a fact that causes no small amount of hand-wringing and periodic soul-searching among the monarchy's opponents.
The British public is still coming to terms with the reality that powers granted to the government you support *today* won't magically go away the next time the government you *don't* support gets swept (even temporarily) into power. Actually, Americans aren't very good at it either(*), which drives home the point even more, because you'd think we'd have learned our lesson and know better by now.
(*) The Republicans complaining the most loudly about Obama's "dictatorial" powers don't seem to grasp that he's mostly just exercising powers that were minted BY Republicans FOR a Republican president. And the Democrats who are ready to sell the farm and give Obama sweeping powers are no less naive/insane.
> There is *no* use case for generating power from natgas coming in through a pipe.
Er... I guess you don't live in Florida, or along the Atlantic or Gulf Coasts. Natural Gas is just about the *ideal* fuel for home generators smaller than ~10KW. It's not the most efficient, but if you're buying it to make sure you can have air conditioning and charged batteries for a few days/weeks after a hurricane, absolute efficiency is less important than low ceremony and minimal preventative maintenance needs, because you're really only going to use it for more than 2-4 weeks *maybe* twice in 50 years, and the rest of the time it might get 1-5 days of use in an average year. Natural gas generators aren't *quite* 100% maintenance-free, but they're about as close to it as an average consumer is likely to get.
Regular gasoline generators suck, especially if you live somewhere with high-ethanol gas. It turns to varnish unless you run the generator every few weeks, and turns to varnish after a few years even if you *do* unless you double the gas cost by adding fuel stabilizer too.
Diesel generators are ungodly expensive in the US, at least in smaller sizes. I don't think I've ever even SEEN a diesel generator in the US smaller than 15-25 kilowatts. I think it's due to environmental reasons, because my coworkers from India said that small diesel generators are cheap and common there.
That said, if you don't have natural gas available via pipe & have to settle for propane, give some major thought to the logistics involved. Blue Rhino is NOT a viable option for generator use (due to both post-hurricane logistics and cost), and in all of Dade & Broward Counties, I think there are *maybe* 3 or 4 places where you can show up with empty customer-owned cylinders and fill them without getting raped. You really need enough cylinder capacity to get you through 3-4 days... and if you're running a 5-10KW generator around the clock to run a window air conditioner or two, that means you're going to need about 200-300lbs of LPG and 2-3 cylinders. 80lb cylinders aren't cheap -- even when used -- so make sure you factor the cost of them into your cost comparison. The cylinder-acquisition costs can EASILY double the amount you're going to have to spend to buy a 5-8KW propane generator.
While I'm at it, if you're still reading this far and live in Florida... here's the abbreviated version of my hurricane generator info.
* Be aware that you need AT LEAST 2,500 running watts and ~3,000 starting watts to reliably run even a small window air conditioner without holding your breath and praying every time you go to start it up.
* When shopping, check to see whether the generator is 120v ONLY , or also does 240v. If it outputs 240v, that probably means that each 120v circuit can only handle HALF the generator's advertised output... and that if you present it with radically unbalanced loads (ie, air conditioner on one leg, battery chargers on the other), it's going to run badly & your fuel economy will go down the toilet (assuming it doesn't stall or have other problems). The moral: it just might be worth spending a little more to get an inverter-type generator that gives you the full rated output power on a single leg, or buying a 7-10KW generator and running TWO window units with it (one on each leg), with your remaining loads divided between the two legs.
* If you want to run exactly one window unit on a generator whose capacity is a little on the low side, you might have to hack the air conditioner and graft a starter capacitor onto it (central AC units have them, but window units almost never do). You might also have to get creative and rewire the compressor & fan controls, so you can start up one, then start up the other a couple of seconds later.
* Another option, if you don't need 240v, is to rewire the generator so it has only a single 120v leg.
* Inductive loads (including anything with a motor) are "different" from resistive loads (like incandescent lights), the advertised
Actually, lack of real users is a completely legitimate reason. At this point, fsck'ing MEEGO probably has more real users than Windows Phone. I live in a big city, and I have never, ever, IN MY LIFE, seen a real Lumia out "in the wild" being used by somebody who wasn't a salesperson giving a demo.
Do you know what the funniest part is? If Microsoft hadn't turned an entire generation of geeks against Metro by ruining Windows 8 with it in an effort to ram it down our throats, they'd have probably sold ten times as many phones by now, and would have significantly more apps. Instead, everyone I know who's ever seen a Lumia demo says something like, "Ewwww... Metro... bastards ruined Windows with it" and walk away showing the kind of visceral disgust normally reserved for tubgirl pegging Goatse.cx guy with a strap-on.
And Microsoft is downright *saintly* compared to Apple & Oracle.
Microsoft makes companies that manufacture Android devices (whose unsubsidized retail prices usually exceed $300) pay them a buck in royalties. Apple just gets bitchy, plays "Thomas Edison", and tries to get everybody else's products taken off the market.
When Microsoft gets its way, the 17 or so people who buy a particular laptop have to pay an implied $35/year bulk license fee so the other 800,000 buyers of that same laptop can pay $35 instead of $90. When Apple gets its way, your options are... a macbook, a macbook, or... a macbook.
And for the billionth time... Internet Explorer didn't blow away Netscape because Microsoft was an evil monopoly. Internet Explorer blew away Netscape because Netscape 4 FUCKING SUCKED. Firefox didn't start to become competitive with IE usability-wise until around 2002, and AJAX/DOM was a clusterfuck MESS compared to IE's DHTML until sometime around 2008.
If you ever suffered the indignity of having to USE Netscape 3 or (shudder) 4, you'd KNOW why web developers ditched Netscape for IE literally overnight back in 1997. The universal availability of IE didn't force its use, it just empowered the suffering web developers of the world to say, "Netscape sucks, and you have IE anyway, so USE IT, because we're never touching the steaming pile of shit called Netscape EVER AGAIN."
Back in 2000, Microsoft could have launched IE5 for Linux as an $89.99 retail product, and sold it like crack to Linux users, even if it required installing "mswin32.ko" as a loadable kernel module and giving Microsoft total control of the entire system as a prerequisite. Especially if the copy protection were largely symbolic, and Microsoft's real goal had been to get 99% penetration among Linux users while wringing some extra bonus cash out of corporate users.
Microsoft is far from saintly. But let's not kid ourselves... Apple and Oracle routinely do things that would have gotten Bill Gates drawn, quartered, & hanged in his entrails. And Google gets away with stuff that would be utterly scandalous in any other context just because they bribe everyone with free toys.
> that's even funnier considering that MS says their browser for windows phone is desktop quality.
Well... it IS "desktop quality"... if you're running Windows 8 and lowered your expectations enough.
The ultimate slap against Microsoft would be for the Surface to spend months moving slowly at near-liquidation prices, then suddenly sell out a few hours after someone releases a bootloader crack that enables users to overwrite it with Linux.
It's not so much that Google is Jesus, as "Qualcomm has fucked up licensing policies". For example, the REAL reason why every carrier in the US -- including our two nominally-GSM ones -- impose "LTE Lock-in" is due to the way Qualcomm licenses its radio modem firmware. Basically, if you're someone like Sony, Qualcomm will sell you the chips, but they insist on licensing the LTE (and CDMA) firmware directly (and ONLY) to the carrier itself. So, it's basically impossible to build a phone with carrier-agnostic LTE using a Qualcomm chipset and sell it in the US.
The good news is that Qualcomm's monopoly on top-shelf American LTE-capable chipsets is almost over. The Renesas MP5232 was announced last December, and phones built with it (including the new HTC One Google Play Edition, which happens to be pretty much the only non-AT&T-blessed phone capable of doing LTE on AT&T). With a little luck, by this time next year, the floodgates will start to open, and there will be at least a few top-shelf imports capable of doing an end run around AT&T and using LTE without having to kiss their ring first.
I have to second that. CM10.1rc5 was a mess on the AT&T GS3, but a lot of that mess sorted itself out once I managed to get my hands on the new I747UCDMG2 radio modem. Apparently, 4.2 needs some new extensions to the radio modem to work properly, and most of them unfortunately had to be kludged for 4.2 to work on d2att/i747 until the new radio modem finally got released into the wild.
Clearly you've never tried using Bluetooth to exchange data between an iPhone and an Android phone. Fuck, you can't even do it between two iPhones, or two non-rooted+reflashed Android phones for that matter (at least, not without one or both users having to spend 3-5 minutes downloading and installing a third party app first).
Now I know how civilizations fall... they throw away working infrastructure before there's a good replacement, or have it destroyed by a natural disaster after they've become too poor to afford to rebuild it. More than fifteen years ago, we had IrDA. It worked more or less flawlessly. Want to share contact data? Point, press & hold the addressbook button, wait for the beep, and you're done. With Palm, at least, you didn't even have to try all that hard to get the aiming right. Laptops had it, WinMo had it, and I used it as my primary means of sync'ing Palm Desktop for years.
Then Bluetooth Happened, Apple released the iPhone, and everything went to hell as manufacturer after manufacturer took IrDA away without any actual working replacement besides having your friend call your goddamn phone & hoping your carrier doesn't mangle the caller ID data so you can try creating a new contact record with the name and number.
> The documentation for the Java crypto API is certainly convoluted and uninformative enough to be rather painful to read and > left me wondering what the different methods actually do.
That's the understatement of the decade. I still remember the experiment I did once to see whether I could get deterministic RSA encryption to work. The idea was to have a private key stored off-server, have a public key stored on-server, and treat the public key-encrypted output like a hash for runtime login purposes, but be capable of actual decryption offline if I ever really *had* to do it for some reason (like changing the algorithm, fixing a bug, etc).
The catch is, RSA intentionally tries to produce NON-deterministic ciphertext. In other words, by design, you can encrypt the same input with the same key a dozen times, and get a dozen different outputs (all of which ultimately decrypt back to the same values). It does, however, have a special mode you can set that explicitly tells it to encrypt in a way that has deterministic output (IE, encrypt the same bytes 16 times with the same key, and get the same output from each run).
From what I can recall (it was 3-4 years ago), I used IBM's JCE provider... and never, ever got it to work. I'm 99.9% sure it was an outright bug in the library, caused by a flag no real person has probably ever *used*, but it's almost impossible to say for sure, because in an afternoon of Google-searching, I basically came up with 3 or 4 references that even acknowledged that the mode exists.
This illustrates the main challenge with encryption, and shows why everybody tends to use the same peer-reviewed algorithms and libraries, even when supposedly better alternatives exist... it's damn near *impossible* for anybody who isn't a cryptography researcher to confidently validate stuff like this. At best, you can run unit tests to validate that something works and doesn't crash... but demonstrating more abstract things, like "the encryption keys are strong" is almost impossible to meaningfully do as an individual developer.
> Unless Woz can pull magic out of his pocket and take over the reigns at Apple, that is.
They'd never, EVER let Woz be in charge, if only because his first signature product would be an iPad with an unlockable bootloader that can be jailbroken using iTunes & triple-boot IOS, Android, and Ubuntu.
His second major product launch would be the iPhone Max, with 6" display, microSD, real camera button, and 6,000mAH battery. Also bootloader-unlockable, able to be jailbroken from within iTunes, and easily capable of triple-booting IOS, Android, and Ubuntu.
He'd launch into his keynote speech at Apple's annual conference and show a cool app he found on Cydia.
A few minutes later, he'd show off the new MaxMac Pro... a Mac with the form factor of an airline-acceptable ~5" thick 22" carry-on suitcase with 2560x1600 display flanked by a pair of displays that fold over it like the shutters over a window, the fastest i7 Intel has available, and a buckling-spring keyboard with both Trackpoint and touchpad.
Then... Jonathan Ive wakes up, bed soaked with sweat, screaming "No! NO! NOOOOOOO!"...
We don't need "a-la-carte" programming so much as the ability to opt out of one or both of the two most expensive blocks of channels that somehow ended up being regarded by the cable industry as non-negotiable prerequisites to getting everything else... the ESPN family of sports channels, and the Disney family of kids channels. There are lots of other channels few people really care about passionately, but THOSE channels come out to literally a few cents per month. It's ESPN and Disney that *really* drive up the base price of reasonable cable in the US... and drive it up a LOT. As in, the cable company actually pays MORE to ESPN and Disney than they pay to HBO and Showtime. (the figure I saw was that cable companies pay something like $12/month for ESPN, and $8/month for Disney, vs roughly $6/month for HBO or Showtime).
Instead of mandating a-la-carte pricing (which would really end up being a rate hike for 90% of customers, and would leave the remainder saving maybe $5-10/month and getting way less for their m oney), Congress should prohibit cable channels from forcing their channel bundles on a cable company's entire subscriber base. If it cost the same amount for Comcast to give you ESPN, Disney, HBO, or Showtime, there's no reason why they wouldn't change from making everyone get ESPN and Disney, and instead made their middle tier a Chinese menu where you picked 2 out of 4 (ESPN, Disney, Showtime, HBO). They'd make the same amount of profit (or more), and customers who hate ESPN and Disney would be happier with HBO and/or Showtime.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not small. No no no!
Honeycomb's got...a big big bite!
Big big (taste/crunch) in a big big bite!
At least, it USED to be, until the nutrition nazis ruined it, like seemingly everything else from our childhoods. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb_(cereal)
The problem is, Facebook is doing everything it can to make it nearly impossible to engage in any kind of social activity or commerce without consenting to their use of that information. It's not so much what you do on Facebook per se, as their ability to aggregate out-of-band information behind your back, from sources only loosely associated with Facebook, that makes them truly awful and dangerous.
Personally, when a store "offers" me a discount in return for liking them on Facebook, I get really mad. Most of the time, I'll throw down whatever I was planning to buy, leave in disgust, and do my best to avoid shopping at that store for months afterwards. From that point forward, I feel like I'm getting screwed over with every purchase, and over-charged by the amount of the discount they didn't let me have. The worst part is, the number of stores I can happily shop at keeps getting smaller and smaller. Every goddamn trip to buy Diet Mountain Dew or bagels turns into an exercise in moral calculus & deciding whom I hate the least this week.
At one time, I used to "like" stores to get the discount, complete the purchase, then proudly and loudly un-like them a moment later & post a note to my wall about how I completely *hated* them for twisting my arm into prostituting myself to avoid getting surcharged and screwed... but then I found out that by the time I did that, it was too late to stop them from harvesting my personal information for offline use anyway.
It looks like the article got the guy's name backwards. In Chinese, your family name comes first. So, "Wu Chien-Huang" would be properly westernized as "Mr. Wu". If, in fact, his family name were "Chien-Huang", is proper Romanized representation would be "Chien-Huang Wu".
Complicating the westernization of Chinese names, Chinese relies heavily upon inflection (so much so, that the various inflections are called "tones"). Think of the various ways you can say "Merry Christmas" to someone, expressing the entire range of feelings from "Greetings! I hope you're enjoying your holiday season" to "Fuck you, eat shit, and die!" using the same two words, depending upon how you say them.
The net result is that tens of thousands of name-syllables, represented by distinct characters in Chinese, get collapsed down to just a few hundred Roman letter sequences. Under the BEST circumstances (properly rendered into canonical Pinyin, tone accents and all), each syllable still has an ambiguity of ~2.5 characters per syllable (ie, each syllable, like "Wu", "Chien", or "Huang" could be one of 2 or 3 different Chinese characters). Strip away the accents & take liberties with the phonetics, and it's more like 5-20 per syllable. But wait... it gets worse. Just about every word in Chinese ALSO has multiple homonyms -- words that are pronounced the same, but written differently. Think, "to, too, two".
So... given only an ASCII-Romanized representation of a name like "Wu Chien-Huang", you can reasonably guess that Mr. Wu's actual name is one of approximately 20-30 possibilities. Maybe as few as a dozen, if you spend some time researching his family tree and can get the family name unambiguously nailed down to one or two possibilities (ie, figuring out whether it's "///Wu///", or "***Wu***"). But without actually seeing it written in proper Chinese, or asking his mother, or someone who saw his name written in proper Chinese at some point in time), NOBODY could ever be 100% sure what name his mother intended him to have.
Almost, but not quite 100% right.
In many parts of the US (I think California is the sole meaningful big-state exception... maybe Wisconsin, too), 10-digit dialing is mandatory in any city where there are overlaid areacodes. Atlanta was the first city with mandatory 10-digit dialing, but Miami, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, and plenty of other cities quickly followed once it became obvious that endlessly subdividing metro areas into smaller and smaller areacodes was creating more chaos and hassle than just making areacodes mandatory.
I believe at one point, there was a local proposal in Miami circa 1995 to allow 8-digit dialing by using the third digit of the areacode as the eighth digit, but BellSouth *VEHEMENTLY* opposed it, and in the end, it would have been mostly moot within a decade anyway thanks to nationwide number portability(*)
(*) Interestingly, Verizon, and apparently AT&T, unlike Sprint, WILL NOT allow you to port numbers nationwide. Apparently, they'll force you to change your number to one in your new areacode if your billing address changes to a different part of the country. One of my coworkers was PISSED because his parents moved to Florida from New Jersey, and Verizon made them change their numbers. As far as I know, Sprint won't allow you to sign up for new service with an alien areacode ported to the new service, but they don't care if you move across the country with an already-active account. I believe T-mobile is completely areacode-agnostic, and doesn't really care what your number is, as long as it's serviced by a local exchange of theirs *somewhere* in the country. Apparently, people have taken advantage of this using T-Mobile prepaid to port Google Voice numbers to U-verse (U-verse won't allow you to port from Google Voice, but they will allow you to port from T-Mobile, so people port their Google Voice numbers to T-Mobile prepaid, then port them from T-Mobile prepaid to U-verse as soon as the change goes through).
Or something that, AFAIK, has never been done on a production hard drive, like make the arms & heads independent for each platter, and build a 3-platter drive that transparently does RAID 5 internally (ie, presents itself to the outside world as a normal SATA drive, but internally reads & writes in parallel). Or makes more intelligent use of the flash cache by caching the first N sectors of a large file in flash, and the remainder on the drive, so it can begin reading from flash immediately while moving the head into position for the remainder.
The single biggest problem with SSDs is the fact that they just fall over and die without warning due to firmware bugs, with no hope of data recovery due to mandatory full-disk encryption that can't be disabled. That's the part about SSDs that aggravates me the worst... if they at least allowed you to boot into Linux and siphon the raw bits from the drive for offline recovery, I wouldn't mind so much. But they don't.
I made the mistake of buying a Sandforce-based drive 3 years ago, and got burned badly. The worst thing is, you can't even upgrade the firmware without losing everything on the drive, because the bastards set up the bootloader to blow away the encryption key whenever the firmware gets replaced. A Sandforce SSD is a fundamentally-flawed black box that will fail in ways that don't technically qualify as "breakage" (because you "only" have to blow it away with SecureErase to restore it to "like new", but still-flawed, condition), but can't be fixed (or even meaningfully recovered-from) because the whole thing is booby-trapped to self-destruct if you try (Google "Sandforce panic mode").
Never. Again. I won't touch a Sandforce-based SSD with a dirty tetanus-infected pole, or taint my computers with drives built around that filthy, worthless chipset family.
The problem is, you aren't necessarily talking about 750 12-volt real (RMS) watts that are clean & stable. Cheap power supplies, in particular, are notoriously stingy in the 12v department. It's one thing to make a cheap power supply capable of surging to 750w for a few hundred milliseconds before frying itself or sagging. It's another matter ENTIRELY to make a power supply capable of outputting 750w RMS without breaking a sweat, and able to keep doing it 24/7 for the next 3 years.
That said, 750 watts is probably overkill by almost any modern standard... but 350 watts in a high-end PC with multiple hard drives two video cards, and a hot CPU is probably pushing your luck unless you know beyond doubt that you're talking about 350 watts of solid RMS power.
(RMS wattage is basically the amount you can draw continuously without unacceptably degrading the power or damaging the power supply). Think: 5'3 MMA fighter who's 180 pounds of solid muscle, vs 500 pound fat lady (height almost completely irrelevant) riding her scooter at Wal Mart.
> A far better way to handle it.
15 years, I might have agreed with you. The upside of the American billing model is that it put direct competitive pressure on phone companies to make incoming calls (or at least their first minute) free, and to create calling plans with thousands of minutes, free nights/weekends, or outright unlimited airtime. The net result is that most Americans with normal mobile phone service never pay for airtime above and beyond what's included, but in Britain people are still forced to count minutes and care. The flip side is that in Britain, if you make no outgoing calls of your own, you can get a mobile phone for something like US$15-20/month, while in the US, it was nearly impossible to get meaningful service for less than $40/month after taxes until very, very, VERY recently, regardless of how little you used it. For people who never made calls, the British model was nicer. For Americans who'd rather pay one price to enjoy an all-you-can-eat(*) buffet, the American model ended up nicer.
(*)of course, "unlimited" never truly means "unlimited", and if you exceed some unwritten threshold "too often", most carriers will either fire you as a customer or force you into a more expensive plan. The point is, though, Americans almost universally despise having meters running in the background... partly, because the only time we ever encounter them, they're being used as an excuse to jack up the prices even more. In the US, the break-even point between ANY a-la-carte service and all-you-can-eat is only slightly above "zero actual use" for most real-world situations.
The FCC set aside areacodes for mobile phones, but somewhere along the line, they were discontinued as "prejudicial".
There was also a block of areacodes set aside for non-geographic personal numbers, but there was zero interest in them, because they gave you and your callers the worst of all worlds... you were charged for incoming calls as though it were a toll free number, and people calling you were charged as through they were making the most expensive domestic long-distance calls possible.
I remember that sometime around the mid-90s, there was a bug in the ESS switching software used by BellSouth (probably others too) that allowed you to create a chain of adhoc-forwarded numbers that began with a toll-free 800 number, and ended with a local premium-rate 976 number, because there was no control in place to stop you from doing it, and the 976 billing logic charged the originator of the call rather than the forwarder.As far as I know, the practice was never actually approved, and people who did it ended up getting the money taken away from them.
In the US, a leading '1' has ALWAYS signified your understanding that the number dialed isn't a local call, and might not necessarily be free. Back when areacodes always had 0 or 1 as the second digit, never as the first digit, and exchange codes (the 3 digits after the areacode) could not have 0 or 1 as the second digit, it worked something like this: Assume two Miami phones having numbers 305-222-2222 and 305-333-3333 and a Key West phone having number 305-444-4444:
Back when 7-digit dialing was allowed, 305-222-2222 could cal 305-333-3333 by simply dialing 333-3333. No 0 or 1 within the first 3 digits, so 305 areacode was implied, as well as its status as a free call. However, if 305-222-2222 called the Key west number, he had two choices: 1-444-4444 or 1-305-444-4444 (leading 1= non-free, no 0/1 second digit implies 305 areacode)
When 10-digit dialing was implemented to allow 786 areacode to be overlaid on Miami, 11-digit permissive dialing was enabled to avoid breaking compatibility with software and dialers that automatically added a leading '1' to any 10-digit phone number (yes, there were quite a few). So, 305-222-2222 could dial 305-333-3333 by dialing EITHER 305-333-3333 OR 1-305-333-33333. However, for calls to Key West, the 1 was absolutely required, so 305-222-2222 dialing 305-444-4444 would get a recording that the number was not local & required a 0 or 1 before dialing.
Cell phones threw a new monkey wrench into the equation, because they (usually) had much larger "local" calling zones. For example, if you were a Sprint customer, everything from Orlando south to Key West was classified as a "local" call, including numbers outside your area code. So 305-222-2222 could dial 407-934-7639 without the leading 1, since to a Sprint customer who was present within the switching area of the number being called, it WAS a local call. It technically incurred per-minute airtime charges, but didn't incur additional long-distance.
Where things got ugly was when you called people who were visiting with a mobile phone from another area. I don't think many people really understand what the billing logic was, because it wasn't a common scenario until the point when most mobile phones started to have the entire US as a local calling zone anyway. As I understand it, behind the scenes, if a Sprint customer in Miami called a Sprint customer from California who was in Orlando, Sprint's network would recognize that the caller and target were both handled by the Orlando switching center and complete it as a "local" call (even if the caller didn't have free long-distance anyway), but a landline phone (or non-Sprint mobile phone) in Miami would have gotten charged for the call to California, because their carrier would have terminated the call to Sprint's switching center in California, and Sprint itself would have transparently connected it to their Orlando switching center behind the scenes.
I'll be happy with an arm on a ceiling-mounted gantry that retracts into a niche above the bath-shower alcove and keeps the toilet nice and sparkly clean, including the unspeakably nasty region BEHIND the toilet.
Somebody tell me again why it's impossible to buy a house in America with master bathroom that's built like a big waterproof shower with floor drain, so you can just hose it down with soapy water to clean it? Oh, right... because our building codes force you to use P traps and dry-venting for every single drain in the house, instead of allowing drum traps for floor drains (building a floor drain with a drum trap is cheap and easy; P-traps intrude into the ceiling envelope of the floor below, and dry-venting a floor drain that's in the middle of the room in a code-compliant manner is hard due to the horizontal distance it has to run before going vertical).
^^^ Correction: the estimate was post-Wilma. Everyone understood why we had no power for 2 weeks after Andrew. 3-4 weeks without power after Wilma, however, was just inexcusable. Andrew was a category 5 hurricane whose eyewall passed directly over the southern half of Coral Gables, and spanked the northern half pretty badly too. Wilma was a little category 3 hurricane whose eyewall didn't even pass directly over Coral Gables, and didn't even do a whole lot of damage to the city besides shredding the power lines. Coral Gables wasn't the only angry city, but it was definitely the least shy about making its displeasure with FPL's entire handling of Wilma's aftermath & trying to do an end run around FPL to solve the problem for itself once and for all.
When pressed after Hurricane Andrew, FPL came up with a completely bogus estimate that was so outrageous, even they could barely deliver it with a straight face. The reason WHY it was completely outrageous was the fact that traditionally, the assumption has been that people want power lines buried for aesthetic reasons, so it's fair to make them pay the full cost of doing it in a way that makes FPL completely 100% happy.
When FPL semi-voluntarily buries lines, it demands a 20' dedicated easement adjacent to a paved road. In roughly 70% of South Florida, that means their estimate included the cost of acquiring by eminent domain literally the entire front yards of half the city. Moreover, they demand a vacant lot per block for the transformer pad, which literally escalated the projected cost to more than a trillion dollars since actually doing it would have required buying a house on each block by eminent domain and demolishing it.
Oh, and their "plan" called for FIRST burying the high-voltage transmission lines, which are the most expensive lines you can possibly bury, and the ones that are generally repaired within a day or two of a hurricane *anyway*... as opposed to the lower-voltage neighborhood lines that are the ones that end up getting shredded by anything that vaguely resembles a hurricane, and take weeks to repair.
In other countries, particularly in Europe, they don't insist upon bulldozing an entire corridor the width of a city street and dedicating it forever to the exclusive use of the power company... they just bore small tunnels under streets & alleys without disturbing a single 400 year old cobblestone, and go to the trouble of finding ways to gracefully shoehorn the transformer equipment into some spot where it won't be unreasonably intrusive. Only in America is it considered sane and normal to allow investor-owned power companies to dictate absurd terms that turn a project that would be "expensive" into a project that would cost more than the entire Apollo space program (adjusted for inflation), and involve buying approximately 5% of the state's urban land area for brand new utility corridors (as opposed to... well... just burying the new underground cables in the same 10' wide rear easement that the poles are in now).
One city in South Florida (Coral Gables) was so angry and outraged by FPL, it was literally preparing to fund a study to take FPL's existing corridors by eminent domain and form a city-owned cooperative to bury and maintain new underground lines (built in existing utility easements) themselves. Unfortunately, FPL went to Tallahassee, screamed "Socialism!", and got a law passed that now makes it almost impossible for cities (even relatively large & wealthy ones) to independently build their own power & fiber infrastructure (basically, they'd have to prove they could pay the capital costs in full within an absurdly short timeframe, and get the county to act as guarantor for the bonds & accept liability for the full unpaid balance if the city defaulted).
> where they were smart enough to do a cost-benefit analysis and realized that underground wiring only resulted in 50% fewer outages,
> while costing 4 to 6 times as much to install and repair.
As opposed to countries where they went a step further & decided that the higher cost of underground wiring was pocket change compared to the impact of service outages?
It's like electricity. From the perspective of end users who need power during anything short of an extinction-level asteroid impact event, it's almost always going to be cheaper to pay the marginal cost of buried infrastructure and hardened generation sites than it is to personally build and maintain their own parallel on-site power generation capabilities. My normal electric bills are ~$180/month. If FPL charged me 2% month more to pay for amortizing the cost of burying the neighborhood power lines out over 25 years, my bills would increase by approximately $43/year. Compare that to the cost of buying even a shit generator that's big enough to wheeze and limp while powering an air conditioner & a few hundred watts of battery chargers & lights. Add in the $35-50/day worth of gasoline it takes to keep it running at 50% load all day during the outage, and even a 10% surcharge starts to look cheap, if only because the net reliability ends up being almost the same, with a lot less individual hassle.
And yes, I said $35-50/day. A typical 5600-watt generator has a 5 gallon tank, and can run for about 8-10 hours at 50% load. $3.50/gallon x 5 gallons/tank x 2.5 tanks/day = $43.75. Add up the total for 2 weeks without power after a hurricane, and you're looking at one HELL of an expensive power bill for the month ($612.50 for 14 days). Balance that against the likelihood of having about 4 weeks of cumulative power outages per decade against the relatively long service life of buried power lines, and buried infrastructure starts to look like an *incredibly* good bargain.
> The other is that it encourages judgements and policies which increase the number of people sentenced to death.
Well... probably not. Even in China, the wheels of justice turn at a glacial pace relative to organ-transplant timelines. Organ transplantation has timeframes measured in weeks... at most, a few months... from establishment of need to actual organ harvest. If you needed a lung transplant & had to wait for someone with matching compatible genotype to get arrested, convicted, and executed, you'd probably be dead long before they were.
China's policy *starts* once a prisoner is already on death row... they're genotyped, then kept alive until recipients are found for their organs. The system mostly works well, because it eliminates the rush to perform a transplant on short notice and the dependency on local availability. They can schedule the execution, harvesting, and transplant well in advance, and have everyone in place & ready to go before the prisoner gets executed.
The *real* ethical problem lies with the fact that there *are* at least a few people on death row in China whose crimes were for things that tend to make even death-penalty supporters cringe, including some political prisoners. Not a lot... but they do exist, have names, and can't be ignored.
If China were to modify the program to transparently guarantee that harvested organs came ONLY from executed prisoners convicted in a fair public trial of pure, untainted, honest-to-${deity} first-degree murder (one person plans the premature demise of another, and personally wields the murder that makes it happen), I'd venture a guess that the majority of opposition in those countries would vanish, and there would probably be calls to try and find a legal way to do the same thing in the US.
The problem, of course, is the increasingly slippery slope in the US towards seemingly casting a wider and wider net every year. In Texas, you can be convicted & condemned to death for merely being "involved" with a felony where somebody (even another criminal) dies. Stir in the trend of re-casting almost every serious crime (and plenty of more mundane ones) as "domestic terror", and you can see the 400-ton elephant in the room clad in a pink tutu & dancing under the disco ball.
> Guess that's what you get with a Monarchy
Notice that the Guardian article presents a list of bills, but doesn't make it particularly easy to see their content, nor does it make much of an attempt to show WHY the Queen vetoed them. Dig a little deeper, and the usual theme can be summarized as, "Parliament was attempting to ramrod something that had strong support from the governing Party, but was unpopular with voters".
The crazy thing about Britain's monarchy is the fact that as a practical matter, the Queen ends up being the most powerful day to day advocate and supporter those who most ardently profess to despise her (or at least the institution she represents) actually *have* -- a fact that causes no small amount of hand-wringing and periodic soul-searching among the monarchy's opponents.
The British public is still coming to terms with the reality that powers granted to the government you support *today* won't magically go away the next time the government you *don't* support gets swept (even temporarily) into power. Actually, Americans aren't very good at it either(*), which drives home the point even more, because you'd think we'd have learned our lesson and know better by now.
(*) The Republicans complaining the most loudly about Obama's "dictatorial" powers don't seem to grasp that he's mostly just exercising powers that were minted BY Republicans FOR a Republican president. And the Democrats who are ready to sell the farm and give Obama sweeping powers are no less naive/insane.
> There is *no* use case for generating power from natgas coming in through a pipe.
Er... I guess you don't live in Florida, or along the Atlantic or Gulf Coasts. Natural Gas is just about the *ideal* fuel for home generators smaller than ~10KW. It's not the most efficient, but if you're buying it to make sure you can have air conditioning and charged batteries for a few days/weeks after a hurricane, absolute efficiency is less important than low ceremony and minimal preventative maintenance needs, because you're really only going to use it for more than 2-4 weeks *maybe* twice in 50 years, and the rest of the time it might get 1-5 days of use in an average year. Natural gas generators aren't *quite* 100% maintenance-free, but they're about as close to it as an average consumer is likely to get.
Regular gasoline generators suck, especially if you live somewhere with high-ethanol gas. It turns to varnish unless you run the generator every few weeks, and turns to varnish after a few years even if you *do* unless you double the gas cost by adding fuel stabilizer too.
Diesel generators are ungodly expensive in the US, at least in smaller sizes. I don't think I've ever even SEEN a diesel generator in the US smaller than 15-25 kilowatts. I think it's due to environmental reasons, because my coworkers from India said that small diesel generators are cheap and common there.
That said, if you don't have natural gas available via pipe & have to settle for propane, give some major thought to the logistics involved. Blue Rhino is NOT a viable option for generator use (due to both post-hurricane logistics and cost), and in all of Dade & Broward Counties, I think there are *maybe* 3 or 4 places where you can show up with empty customer-owned cylinders and fill them without getting raped. You really need enough cylinder capacity to get you through 3-4 days... and if you're running a 5-10KW generator around the clock to run a window air conditioner or two, that means you're going to need about 200-300lbs of LPG and 2-3 cylinders. 80lb cylinders aren't cheap -- even when used -- so make sure you factor the cost of them into your cost comparison. The cylinder-acquisition costs can EASILY double the amount you're going to have to spend to buy a 5-8KW propane generator.
While I'm at it, if you're still reading this far and live in Florida... here's the abbreviated version of my hurricane generator info.
* Be aware that you need AT LEAST 2,500 running watts and ~3,000 starting watts to reliably run even a small window air conditioner without holding your breath and praying every time you go to start it up.
* When shopping, check to see whether the generator is 120v ONLY , or also does 240v. If it outputs 240v, that probably means that each 120v circuit can only handle HALF the generator's advertised output... and that if you present it with radically unbalanced loads (ie, air conditioner on one leg, battery chargers on the other), it's going to run badly & your fuel economy will go down the toilet (assuming it doesn't stall or have other problems). The moral: it just might be worth spending a little more to get an inverter-type generator that gives you the full rated output power on a single leg, or buying a 7-10KW generator and running TWO window units with it (one on each leg), with your remaining loads divided between the two legs.
* If you want to run exactly one window unit on a generator whose capacity is a little on the low side, you might have to hack the air conditioner and graft a starter capacitor onto it (central AC units have them, but window units almost never do). You might also have to get creative and rewire the compressor & fan controls, so you can start up one, then start up the other a couple of seconds later.
* Another option, if you don't need 240v, is to rewire the generator so it has only a single 120v leg.
* Inductive loads (including anything with a motor) are "different" from resistive loads (like incandescent lights), the advertised
Actually, lack of real users is a completely legitimate reason. At this point, fsck'ing MEEGO probably has more real users than Windows Phone. I live in a big city, and I have never, ever, IN MY LIFE, seen a real Lumia out "in the wild" being used by somebody who wasn't a salesperson giving a demo.
Do you know what the funniest part is? If Microsoft hadn't turned an entire generation of geeks against Metro by ruining Windows 8 with it in an effort to ram it down our throats, they'd have probably sold ten times as many phones by now, and would have significantly more apps. Instead, everyone I know who's ever seen a Lumia demo says something like, "Ewwww... Metro... bastards ruined Windows with it" and walk away showing the kind of visceral disgust normally reserved for tubgirl pegging Goatse.cx guy with a strap-on.
And Microsoft is downright *saintly* compared to Apple & Oracle.
Microsoft makes companies that manufacture Android devices (whose unsubsidized retail prices usually exceed $300) pay them a buck in royalties. Apple just gets bitchy, plays "Thomas Edison", and tries to get everybody else's products taken off the market.
When Microsoft gets its way, the 17 or so people who buy a particular laptop have to pay an implied $35/year bulk license fee so the other 800,000 buyers of that same laptop can pay $35 instead of $90. When Apple gets its way, your options are... a macbook, a macbook, or... a macbook.
And for the billionth time... Internet Explorer didn't blow away Netscape because Microsoft was an evil monopoly. Internet Explorer blew away Netscape because Netscape 4 FUCKING SUCKED. Firefox didn't start to become competitive with IE usability-wise until around 2002, and AJAX/DOM was a clusterfuck MESS compared to IE's DHTML until sometime around 2008.
If you ever suffered the indignity of having to USE Netscape 3 or (shudder) 4, you'd KNOW why web developers ditched Netscape for IE literally overnight back in 1997. The universal availability of IE didn't force its use, it just empowered the suffering web developers of the world to say, "Netscape sucks, and you have IE anyway, so USE IT, because we're never touching the steaming pile of shit called Netscape EVER AGAIN."
Back in 2000, Microsoft could have launched IE5 for Linux as an $89.99 retail product, and sold it like crack to Linux users, even if it required installing "mswin32.ko" as a loadable kernel module and giving Microsoft total control of the entire system as a prerequisite. Especially if the copy protection were largely symbolic, and Microsoft's real goal had been to get 99% penetration among Linux users while wringing some extra bonus cash out of corporate users.
Microsoft is far from saintly. But let's not kid ourselves... Apple and Oracle routinely do things that would have gotten Bill Gates drawn, quartered, & hanged in his entrails. And Google gets away with stuff that would be utterly scandalous in any other context just because they bribe everyone with free toys.
> that's even funnier considering that MS says their browser for windows phone is desktop quality.
Well... it IS "desktop quality" ... if you're running Windows 8 and lowered your expectations enough.
The ultimate slap against Microsoft would be for the Surface to spend months moving slowly at near-liquidation prices, then suddenly sell out a few hours after someone releases a bootloader crack that enables users to overwrite it with Linux.
It's not so much that Google is Jesus, as "Qualcomm has fucked up licensing policies". For example, the REAL reason why every carrier in the US -- including our two nominally-GSM ones -- impose "LTE Lock-in" is due to the way Qualcomm licenses its radio modem firmware. Basically, if you're someone like Sony, Qualcomm will sell you the chips, but they insist on licensing the LTE (and CDMA) firmware directly (and ONLY) to the carrier itself. So, it's basically impossible to build a phone with carrier-agnostic LTE using a Qualcomm chipset and sell it in the US.
The good news is that Qualcomm's monopoly on top-shelf American LTE-capable chipsets is almost over. The Renesas MP5232 was announced last December, and phones built with it (including the new HTC One Google Play Edition, which happens to be pretty much the only non-AT&T-blessed phone capable of doing LTE on AT&T). With a little luck, by this time next year, the floodgates will start to open, and there will be at least a few top-shelf imports capable of doing an end run around AT&T and using LTE without having to kiss their ring first.
I have to second that. CM10.1rc5 was a mess on the AT&T GS3, but a lot of that mess sorted itself out once I managed to get my hands on the new I747UCDMG2 radio modem. Apparently, 4.2 needs some new extensions to the radio modem to work properly, and most of them unfortunately had to be kludged for 4.2 to work on d2att/i747 until the new radio modem finally got released into the wild.
Clearly you've never tried using Bluetooth to exchange data between an iPhone and an Android phone. Fuck, you can't even do it between two iPhones, or two non-rooted+reflashed Android phones for that matter (at least, not without one or both users having to spend 3-5 minutes downloading and installing a third party app first).
Now I know how civilizations fall... they throw away working infrastructure before there's a good replacement, or have it destroyed by a natural disaster after they've become too poor to afford to rebuild it. More than fifteen years ago, we had IrDA. It worked more or less flawlessly. Want to share contact data? Point, press & hold the addressbook button, wait for the beep, and you're done. With Palm, at least, you didn't even have to try all that hard to get the aiming right. Laptops had it, WinMo had it, and I used it as my primary means of sync'ing Palm Desktop for years.
Then Bluetooth Happened, Apple released the iPhone, and everything went to hell as manufacturer after manufacturer took IrDA away without any actual working replacement besides having your friend call your goddamn phone & hoping your carrier doesn't mangle the caller ID data so you can try creating a new contact record with the name and number.
> The documentation for the Java crypto API is certainly convoluted and uninformative enough to be rather painful to read and
> left me wondering what the different methods actually do.
That's the understatement of the decade. I still remember the experiment I did once to see whether I could get deterministic RSA encryption to work. The idea was to have a private key stored off-server, have a public key stored on-server, and treat the public key-encrypted output like a hash for runtime login purposes, but be capable of actual decryption offline if I ever really *had* to do it for some reason (like changing the algorithm, fixing a bug, etc).
The catch is, RSA intentionally tries to produce NON-deterministic ciphertext. In other words, by design, you can encrypt the same input with the same key a dozen times, and get a dozen different outputs (all of which ultimately decrypt back to the same values). It does, however, have a special mode you can set that explicitly tells it to encrypt in a way that has deterministic output (IE, encrypt the same bytes 16 times with the same key, and get the same output from each run).
From what I can recall (it was 3-4 years ago), I used IBM's JCE provider... and never, ever got it to work. I'm 99.9% sure it was an outright bug in the library, caused by a flag no real person has probably ever *used*, but it's almost impossible to say for sure, because in an afternoon of Google-searching, I basically came up with 3 or 4 references that even acknowledged that the mode exists.
This illustrates the main challenge with encryption, and shows why everybody tends to use the same peer-reviewed algorithms and libraries, even when supposedly better alternatives exist... it's damn near *impossible* for anybody who isn't a cryptography researcher to confidently validate stuff like this. At best, you can run unit tests to validate that something works and doesn't crash... but demonstrating more abstract things, like "the encryption keys are strong" is almost impossible to meaningfully do as an individual developer.
No! No! The kangaroo was at the Last Supper!
You don't want an artist, you want a bloody PHOTOGRAPHER!!!
> Unless Woz can pull magic out of his pocket and take over the reigns at Apple, that is.
They'd never, EVER let Woz be in charge, if only because his first signature product would be an iPad with an unlockable bootloader that can be jailbroken using iTunes & triple-boot IOS, Android, and Ubuntu.
His second major product launch would be the iPhone Max, with 6" display, microSD, real camera button, and 6,000mAH battery. Also bootloader-unlockable, able to be jailbroken from within iTunes, and easily capable of triple-booting IOS, Android, and Ubuntu.
He'd launch into his keynote speech at Apple's annual conference and show a cool app he found on Cydia.
A few minutes later, he'd show off the new MaxMac Pro... a Mac with the form factor of an airline-acceptable ~5" thick 22" carry-on suitcase with 2560x1600 display flanked by a pair of displays that fold over it like the shutters over a window, the fastest i7 Intel has available, and a buckling-spring keyboard with both Trackpoint and touchpad.
Then... Jonathan Ive wakes up, bed soaked with sweat, screaming "No! NO! NOOOOOOO!" ...
We don't need "a-la-carte" programming so much as the ability to opt out of one or both of the two most expensive blocks of channels that somehow ended up being regarded by the cable industry as non-negotiable prerequisites to getting everything else... the ESPN family of sports channels, and the Disney family of kids channels. There are lots of other channels few people really care about passionately, but THOSE channels come out to literally a few cents per month. It's ESPN and Disney that *really* drive up the base price of reasonable cable in the US... and drive it up a LOT. As in, the cable company actually pays MORE to ESPN and Disney than they pay to HBO and Showtime. (the figure I saw was that cable companies pay something like $12/month for ESPN, and $8/month for Disney, vs roughly $6/month for HBO or Showtime).
Instead of mandating a-la-carte pricing (which would really end up being a rate hike for 90% of customers, and would leave the remainder saving maybe $5-10/month and getting way less for their m oney), Congress should prohibit cable channels from forcing their channel bundles on a cable company's entire subscriber base. If it cost the same amount for Comcast to give you ESPN, Disney, HBO, or Showtime, there's no reason why they wouldn't change from making everyone get ESPN and Disney, and instead made their middle tier a Chinese menu where you picked 2 out of 4 (ESPN, Disney, Showtime, HBO). They'd make the same amount of profit (or more), and customers who hate ESPN and Disney would be happier with HBO and/or Showtime.