One minor little point is that batteries are rather difficult to get to discharge in a huge blinding flash, whereas a capacitor will easily do so.
Come on,. That's so silly. Batteries can explode, spraying acid and fast moving chunks everywhere. Just hook up a car backwards for a jump. Yet we use em anyway. Gasoline, when misted, is highly explosive. Yet we use it anyway. It burns like crazy, mist or no. Yet we use it anyway. Horses can kick and stomp you to death. Yet we used em anyway. The AC voltages and current capacities in US wall outlets can electrocute you / start fires, etc. In Europe, it's even worse. UCs, with even offhand care in design, shouldn't offer "blinding flash" exposure to the user under any but the most extreme circumstances -- this is no reason not to use them.
Bottom line is that vehicles require lots and lots of energy. Right now, there are very few ways to compactly store lots of energy in a way that you can both get at it, and not get at it. So we have to pick something reasonable. UCs are reasonable, given an engineered design, rather than just gluing them all into an array and praying to $DIETY it'll not bite you in the posterior.
Odds are decent that batteries are on the way out -- ultracapacitors are the candidate for replacing them. Currently (pun intended) UC's don't have sufficient capacity, but the capacity curve has been steadily rising over time, and as the stored power required for a vehicle to go a certain distance is slowly dropping, they're likely to meet sooner or later. At that time, batteries become buggy whips in search of (missing) horses.
Aside from the present position on the total energy curve, UC's offer wider temperature ranges, less toxicity, much faster charging, essentially unlimited charge/discharge cycles, have such a long lifetime compared to a battery that they reduce the disposal/recycle problem to basically irrelevant (you could probably will your UC's a few generations down the road), and present less of a fire/explosive hazard and are easily fused in array form in safe fashion. Constant voltage output is easily obtained with off the shelf electronics, and as UCs don't age the way batteries do, determining the actual charge, as opposed to an estimate, for UCs is far more easily accomplished. Current in, self-discharge rate out, current out.
This applies from small loads to large ones; In fact, as small devices become more and more efficient, as has been the trend for some time, they are walking down the curve towards practical use of UCs even faster than vehicles are.
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't invest in a Lithium Ion startup today; it looks to me like the world's worst bet. And as for connectors and standards... it's just too early. A connector designed for the relatively anemic charge rates of a Li battery would probably go up in a flash if subjected to the current inrush that an equivalent capacity array of Uc's could demand -- and limiting the charge rate to Li rates is silly. It'll take quite a connector to provide a fast, efficient charge to an UC array, but it'll *so* be worth it. Electronics that monitor the voltage drop across the connector while aware of the available contact area could maintain a safe charge rate, pushing current at prodigious rates, potentially (hah) charging the vehicle in seconds -- far faster than either fueling up with gasoline *or* charging a battery. And contrariwise, a (relative) trickle from a could also charge the UCs overnight, leading to relatively simple and inexpensive home charging stations. Bucket-brigade techniques, where the home charger trickles itself while you're off elsewhere, then is able to quickly charge the vehicle require equivalent storage in the charger itself and so are more expensive, but again, would be so worth it.
The thing is, until all this settles out -- and it is very much in flux (hah) right now -- it doesn't make much sense to standardize on anything, unless it's a trivially replaceable connector system at the charging station.
...crashed, creating a huge crater. Initially, everyone was very sad... but then, when the children of the lost astronauts were dedicating a monument to their parents, they found gold deposit in the crater!
Then, in the sequel.... turns out the gold was really pyrite, and no one had the heart to tell the kids. So they got a free jet trip home, and grew up to make flimsy, unspaceworthy craft - just like their parents. Just so heart warming. And there's a really cute dog involved.
[curtain draws to a close to an inspiring crescendo of melodic log-drumming]
I don't use the phone -- perfectly happy with face to face and written communications -- so WTF do I need a smartphone for?
The iPad might benefit from quite a few changes -- IR emitter, SD card slot, USB port, higher resolution, more CPU power, more memory, a less crippled OS, to name but a few -- but I'd rather have it than a smartphone (or a dumb one) any day of the week. And yeah, I own one (family owns several.) I also have laptops, desktops, etc... and it's *still* very useful. Mine sees use as a portable photographer's portfolio, an aurora analysis/warning tool, a GPS, a guitar tuner and music composition tool, an eBook reader, gives me free access to a great deal of the Internet without paying a phone company a penny, and yes, a seriously fun game machine. And more. I keep it with me at all times (lives in a handy pocket in my photographer's bag, which in turn is always with me, practically speaking.)
It's fine if you don't want/need one, for whatever reason. You are, no doubt about it, an expert on you. But your analysis of the actual worth of the item for other people is completely wrongheaded, because, believe it or not, we are not you.
For most of history, the length of a human generation has been well under 20 years. 5 generations/century, 50/millennia, 300 in 6000 years, 500 in 10000 years.
But just because you have a position of authority over someone, doesn't mean you can't be friends
Well, it shouldn't -- but in our society today, it does, at least effectively. It is media driven hysteria, seized upon by politicians who aren't inclined to do the real work they should be doing, but instead engage in the easy pandering to that hysteria with endless production of "save the children at ANY cost to society" legislation, while reams of obsolete and improper laws remain on the books. The consequences of having too close a relationship -- or simply being accused of such a thing -- are draconian and final.
Public school teachers exist in a structured environment and so far, at least, have been able to use that to erect a protective wall between them and a student body that are now armed with trivially engaged accuse-and-destroy mechanisms. But mentors, big brother types, a whole range of support that used to exist for younger folks, has basically evaporated.
As for casual associations with students online... they really aren't advisable, because the laws enabling trivially easy accusations of improprieties with huge consequences make them extremely dangerous. You can have draconian laws that draw ridiculous age lines in the sand, or you can have adults that interact normally with teenage students. But you can't have both. And since, at least at the moment, we do have those laws... I can't see why an adult should take the risk of saying anything more than hello and goodbye to anyone under the age of consent.
Yes, that's part of it. But it comes from more than one place in culture. Is the programmer fat? Yes, that'll impact the bottom line (via private insurance), but it also has social aspects... your odds of getting hired drop as you fall out of the various social norms. Is the programmer older? Again, that'll hit the private insurance rates, but there's also a cultural issue.
When it comes to cheap, remember a corporation is bound to do what it can legally to maximize earnings. If part A or service B comes from overseas, will do the job, and costs less.... well of course they're going to choose it. In a world where cost of living varies hugely downwards from what we experience here, either we reduce our own cost of living, or erect a legal wall that prevents goods and services from leveraging that advantage, or we see our jobs and services outsourced.
We can effectively erect a legal wall if we accept that our market subsequent to that will be considerably more concentrated within our own borders. This, I think, would bring our economy much further back online, and faster, than anything else we can put on the table. Reducing our own cost of living, while technically feasible, isn't culturally feasible, at least IMHO. Protectionism isn't popular, though, and there are significant ethical questions about the impact such a trade wall has on other cultures -- in other words, perhaps we can save our economy, but a significant portion of that save will be done at the cost of reducing other people's ability to earn as we make our own markets less accessible to them.
Personally, I think the US -- as a society -- has made a very serious error by allowing private insurance companies to serve as the arbiter of most worker's healthcare. By not going with a universal model, it becomes not just practical, but advisable, for the insurance companies to lock out entire classes of workers based on non-job performance issues like age, weight, preexisting health conditions, even your credit rating and various government records -- anything that tweaks the actuarial positioning of the worker is fair game as far as they're concerned. If we simply "manned up" and declared that we were going to single-payer, everyone covered, and cut the insurance companies out of the deal, we'd save the costs (and paperwork) of the middleman, while bringing a whole bunch of workers back into the fold. This is one of the many reasons that government single-payer is better than the mish-mosh of predatory middlemen we have now. I'll not argue that the government would be more efficient (it's highly doubtful) but the effect of universal heathcare extends much further into the economy than just administrative issues.
In the end, I don't think it's fair to point the finger at companies that are trying to produce goods and services; they have to deal with the culture, economy and resources that are available to them, and they can only exist if they are economically viable. If we want them to make decisions that are more favorable to local workers, we're going to have to stop making hiring local workers such a hurdle to overcome. There are implications all over the map: just about everything associated with unions, unemployment insurance rates that spike if a company decides to discharge a worker, the lack of trade barriers at the border for goods and services produced in environments that have significantly different costs of living, the hugely complex legal and tax environment that businesses have to deal with.
You can -- and we have -- justified each of these things on its own, but taken together, our own cultural and political baggage has combined to be the concrete boots that are pulling us inexorably to the bottom of the economic river, where I think we're going to sit until we run out of air. At that point, we either take the shoes off, or we die, economically speaking.
Opportunities for those who can avoid the system's pitfalls will last the lon
Do I remember the GNAA? Sure I do. I read slashdot at -1 at all times, simply because the moderation here is unbelievably wrongheaded. So I see every troll post. And they don't bother me one bit -- I would much rather see what an Anonymous Coward has to say than subject myself to Slashdot's rather pitiful offering of preemptively devaluing the anonymous remarks. Quite often, the anonymous remarks contain more valuable content than the "highly rated" remarks. Part of that is that moderation here is so badly broken, but part of it stems directly from the fact that as an anonymous speaker, people do indeed have wider latitude in what they can say. I'm not only interested in the things we're allowed, or supposed, to say. I want to hear what people think as they actually choose to express it in the most unfettered manner possible. GNAA? That stuff is utterly pitiful, and takes just about zero effort to recognize and skip over. An anonymous post containing material unsanctioned at the source from someone in Washington, from within congress (yeah, we have posts like that here), or Iraq, or Google, for that matter... now *that's* something I'm interested in reading. And those posts would not exist in the same form if they were signed by Real Name.
The thing about slashdot is that although the corporate culture leans strongly towards the muzzling of the anonymous, it does NOT enforce this -- it leaves that up to the individual user. So I see everyone. Others choose, that is CHOOSE, to stick with the results of moderation and the default low ranking of anonymous posts.
Google's corporate culture path here is, apparently, not going to allow the users any choice about how they manage their circles. It would be as simple as Slashdot's "browse at -1" option; "only let people into my particular circle(s) if they have the "real name" thing in their profile, and then allow individual lockouts on top of that. Control it at circle granularity, and it's workable. I could have circles that were unrepressed, and others could bask in the knowledge that so-and-so is using their "Real Name."
But Google, as you point out, isn't in this for the users. That whole "do no evil" thing? Utter nonsense. As these policies show, when it comes to a choice between money and not doing people harm, money wins. And that *is* a choice they can make. And we can just look at "do no evil" as just another marketing slogan. Which I guess is exactly what it is.
The one thing consumers -- which is what we are with relation to Google -- have as our little bit of leverage is that we can vote with our value to the company; That's why you won't find me on Google+ (or Facebook.) I've never opted into either one. I always found Facebook's TOS to be odious (yeah, I actually read site TOS declarations) and Google's whole "we must know who everyone is" simply makes me want to be somewhere else where I can interact with the people they leave out.
When you opt into this real name thing, you're leaving behind those who have been stalked, those who are political rebels or pariahs, those who the state (or the feds) have declared outcasts, those on "lists", justifiably or not, people in countries where free speech is a free ticket to a machete party... me, I have no interest in this sanitized "we know who you are" world. That's a very bad, even immoral, choice for me. But I won't say you're bad because you want to go there. I'll just view it as a place containing the people I *don't* need to be listening to. The sheep. The ones who all say the same thing, think the same thing, and are happy to have the ostracized folks living under bridges -- and would just as soon forget they exist.
I lean strongly libertarian; I think Google should be able to do what they want. But when they do things I consider odious, then *I* get to do what I want, too, and that is to not engage the company in what I consider to be less than good practices. Google+ is odious, as I presently understand it. As long as that is the case, "teh social" is "teh worthless."
I understand the point. The problem is, as I said, that the POD equipment is expensive, "real" books are dropping in popularity (regardless of how they are produced) and that generally speaking, the "feel" of a real book is more troublesome than the "feel" of an eBook. Personally -- and I readily admit this is just an opinion, but it *is* an opinion from someone who reads about a book a day -- real books seem to be to be more a matter of nostalgia than actual functionality; most of us reading today grew up with real books, and I think there is a hangover type of thing going on. In terms of actual benefits of a real book in the normal types of uses they undergo... there are very few.
There are potential "gotchas" for eBooks, but so far, they've been able to keep those experiences to a minimum, and as long as they do... eBooks will clobber real books.
Speaking as an owner of a literary agency as well as a fellow with many thousands of physical books in my library, IMHO POD had its market potential nuked by the same forces that are impacting normal print. That is (a) the ability to carry an entire library in a Kindle, iP[od|ad|hone], general purpose Android device, other dedicated readers like the Nook, your home computer, laptop, etc; (b) the ability to put a title you want to read in your hands in seconds, (c) the ability to read what would have been a heavy volume on a relatively light device. Print (not POD) also suffers from (d) the eBook and POD ability to get a book from "last word written/edited" to the sales channel in what is effectively zero time.
Good POD devices are expensive; and demand, like demand for any physical book, is dropping as more and more people hop on the eBook bandwagon. This makes payback for the POD device an uncertain proposition for the host business.
The entire book business is in flux. One reason authors are interested (and understandably so) in Amazon's all-in-one model is the horrible royalty conditions the legacy publishers have imposed upon eBooks. With a normal book, the tradition is an advance, then royalties. With an eBook, the approach so far has almost always been give the publisher the book, they'll charge all costs to its account, and when it pays them off, they'll come with a (very small) royalty. There are several consequences to this, one of which is critical. For an established author who isn't top tier (meaning, can't demand an up front royalty), income from the previous traditionally published book fades away in the normal fashion as buzz for it dies down, but income for a new eBook via the same route won't even start for a year or more -- and in the meantime, the publishers still expect the author to do a great deal of the marketing out of pocket. That's a very tough situation to find yourself in, particularly if you are trying to make it as a full time writer.
Camera. Keylogger. Drugs. A dull, but ragged edged knife. Waterboarding. Possession of your daughter. Need I go on? There are always new attacks. Security is not what you think it is; consequently, neither is encryption, from ROT13 to the most advanced thing you're aware of (which is unlikely to be the most advanced thing the government is aware of, btw.)
All encryption does is secure one avenue. There are always others.
Look. Brute force: Division... divide a million by three, by subtracting three from the dividend and counting how many times it happens before the dividend rolls past zero. 333k cycles. Now do long division. 8 cycles. Snap, it's done.
Now jump forward a decade or two... quantum computing... probabilistic algorithms... Snap, AES is cracked. Never assume that today's technology will be applied to tomorrow's problems. If you do -- everything you come up with is very likely to be wrong.
Finally -- never assume the NSA and it's sibling agencies are using what YOU consider to be today's technology. Also very likely to be wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what you're saying... there's no drawback, then.
Or did you simply miss my point about the power curve?
They can charge basically as fast as you can supply current.
Come on,. That's so silly. Batteries can explode, spraying acid and fast moving chunks everywhere. Just hook up a car backwards for a jump. Yet we use em anyway. Gasoline, when misted, is highly explosive. Yet we use it anyway. It burns like crazy, mist or no. Yet we use it anyway. Horses can kick and stomp you to death. Yet we used em anyway. The AC voltages and current capacities in US wall outlets can electrocute you / start fires, etc. In Europe, it's even worse. UCs, with even offhand care in design, shouldn't offer "blinding flash" exposure to the user under any but the most extreme circumstances -- this is no reason not to use them.
Bottom line is that vehicles require lots and lots of energy. Right now, there are very few ways to compactly store lots of energy in a way that you can both get at it, and not get at it. So we have to pick something reasonable. UCs are reasonable, given an engineered design, rather than just gluing them all into an array and praying to $DIETY it'll not bite you in the posterior.
Odds are decent that batteries are on the way out -- ultracapacitors are the candidate for replacing them. Currently (pun intended) UC's don't have sufficient capacity, but the capacity curve has been steadily rising over time, and as the stored power required for a vehicle to go a certain distance is slowly dropping, they're likely to meet sooner or later. At that time, batteries become buggy whips in search of (missing) horses.
Aside from the present position on the total energy curve, UC's offer wider temperature ranges, less toxicity, much faster charging, essentially unlimited charge/discharge cycles, have such a long lifetime compared to a battery that they reduce the disposal/recycle problem to basically irrelevant (you could probably will your UC's a few generations down the road), and present less of a fire/explosive hazard and are easily fused in array form in safe fashion. Constant voltage output is easily obtained with off the shelf electronics, and as UCs don't age the way batteries do, determining the actual charge, as opposed to an estimate, for UCs is far more easily accomplished. Current in, self-discharge rate out, current out.
This applies from small loads to large ones; In fact, as small devices become more and more efficient, as has been the trend for some time, they are walking down the curve towards practical use of UCs even faster than vehicles are.
Speaking for myself, I wouldn't invest in a Lithium Ion startup today; it looks to me like the world's worst bet. And as for connectors and standards... it's just too early. A connector designed for the relatively anemic charge rates of a Li battery would probably go up in a flash if subjected to the current inrush that an equivalent capacity array of Uc's could demand -- and limiting the charge rate to Li rates is silly. It'll take quite a connector to provide a fast, efficient charge to an UC array, but it'll *so* be worth it. Electronics that monitor the voltage drop across the connector while aware of the available contact area could maintain a safe charge rate, pushing current at prodigious rates, potentially (hah) charging the vehicle in seconds -- far faster than either fueling up with gasoline *or* charging a battery. And contrariwise, a (relative) trickle from a could also charge the UCs overnight, leading to relatively simple and inexpensive home charging stations. Bucket-brigade techniques, where the home charger trickles itself while you're off elsewhere, then is able to quickly charge the vehicle require equivalent storage in the charger itself and so are more expensive, but again, would be so worth it.
The thing is, until all this settles out -- and it is very much in flux (hah) right now -- it doesn't make much sense to standardize on anything, unless it's a trivially replaceable connector system at the charging station.
No, it doesn 't. Period.
lol
Then, in the sequel.... turns out the gold was really pyrite, and no one had the heart to tell the kids. So they got a free jet trip home, and grew up to make flimsy, unspaceworthy craft - just like their parents. Just so heart warming. And there's a really cute dog involved.
[curtain draws to a close to an inspiring crescendo of melodic log-drumming]
I don't use the phone -- perfectly happy with face to face and written communications -- so WTF do I need a smartphone for?
The iPad might benefit from quite a few changes -- IR emitter, SD card slot, USB port, higher resolution, more CPU power, more memory, a less crippled OS, to name but a few -- but I'd rather have it than a smartphone (or a dumb one) any day of the week. And yeah, I own one (family owns several.) I also have laptops, desktops, etc... and it's *still* very useful. Mine sees use as a portable photographer's portfolio, an aurora analysis/warning tool, a GPS, a guitar tuner and music composition tool, an eBook reader, gives me free access to a great deal of the Internet without paying a phone company a penny, and yes, a seriously fun game machine. And more. I keep it with me at all times (lives in a handy pocket in my photographer's bag, which in turn is always with me, practically speaking.)
It's fine if you don't want/need one, for whatever reason. You are, no doubt about it, an expert on you. But your analysis of the actual worth of the item for other people is completely wrongheaded, because, believe it or not, we are not you.
For most of history, the length of a human generation has been well under 20 years. 5 generations/century, 50/millennia, 300 in 6000 years, 500 in 10000 years.
Well, it shouldn't -- but in our society today, it does, at least effectively. It is media driven hysteria, seized upon by politicians who aren't inclined to do the real work they should be doing, but instead engage in the easy pandering to that hysteria with endless production of "save the children at ANY cost to society" legislation, while reams of obsolete and improper laws remain on the books. The consequences of having too close a relationship -- or simply being accused of such a thing -- are draconian and final.
Public school teachers exist in a structured environment and so far, at least, have been able to use that to erect a protective wall between them and a student body that are now armed with trivially engaged accuse-and-destroy mechanisms. But mentors, big brother types, a whole range of support that used to exist for younger folks, has basically evaporated.
As for casual associations with students online... they really aren't advisable, because the laws enabling trivially easy accusations of improprieties with huge consequences make them extremely dangerous. You can have draconian laws that draw ridiculous age lines in the sand, or you can have adults that interact normally with teenage students. But you can't have both. And since, at least at the moment, we do have those laws... I can't see why an adult should take the risk of saying anything more than hello and goodbye to anyone under the age of consent.
Yes, that's part of it. But it comes from more than one place in culture. Is the programmer fat? Yes, that'll impact the bottom line (via private insurance), but it also has social aspects... your odds of getting hired drop as you fall out of the various social norms. Is the programmer older? Again, that'll hit the private insurance rates, but there's also a cultural issue.
When it comes to cheap, remember a corporation is bound to do what it can legally to maximize earnings. If part A or service B comes from overseas, will do the job, and costs less.... well of course they're going to choose it. In a world where cost of living varies hugely downwards from what we experience here, either we reduce our own cost of living, or erect a legal wall that prevents goods and services from leveraging that advantage, or we see our jobs and services outsourced.
We can effectively erect a legal wall if we accept that our market subsequent to that will be considerably more concentrated within our own borders. This, I think, would bring our economy much further back online, and faster, than anything else we can put on the table. Reducing our own cost of living, while technically feasible, isn't culturally feasible, at least IMHO. Protectionism isn't popular, though, and there are significant ethical questions about the impact such a trade wall has on other cultures -- in other words, perhaps we can save our economy, but a significant portion of that save will be done at the cost of reducing other people's ability to earn as we make our own markets less accessible to them.
Personally, I think the US -- as a society -- has made a very serious error by allowing private insurance companies to serve as the arbiter of most worker's healthcare. By not going with a universal model, it becomes not just practical, but advisable, for the insurance companies to lock out entire classes of workers based on non-job performance issues like age, weight, preexisting health conditions, even your credit rating and various government records -- anything that tweaks the actuarial positioning of the worker is fair game as far as they're concerned. If we simply "manned up" and declared that we were going to single-payer, everyone covered, and cut the insurance companies out of the deal, we'd save the costs (and paperwork) of the middleman, while bringing a whole bunch of workers back into the fold. This is one of the many reasons that government single-payer is better than the mish-mosh of predatory middlemen we have now. I'll not argue that the government would be more efficient (it's highly doubtful) but the effect of universal heathcare extends much further into the economy than just administrative issues.
In the end, I don't think it's fair to point the finger at companies that are trying to produce goods and services; they have to deal with the culture, economy and resources that are available to them, and they can only exist if they are economically viable. If we want them to make decisions that are more favorable to local workers, we're going to have to stop making hiring local workers such a hurdle to overcome. There are implications all over the map: just about everything associated with unions, unemployment insurance rates that spike if a company decides to discharge a worker, the lack of trade barriers at the border for goods and services produced in environments that have significantly different costs of living, the hugely complex legal and tax environment that businesses have to deal with.
You can -- and we have -- justified each of these things on its own, but taken together, our own cultural and political baggage has combined to be the concrete boots that are pulling us inexorably to the bottom of the economic river, where I think we're going to sit until we run out of air. At that point, we either take the shoes off, or we die, economically speaking.
Opportunities for those who can avoid the system's pitfalls will last the lon
Do I remember the GNAA? Sure I do. I read slashdot at -1 at all times, simply because the moderation here is unbelievably wrongheaded. So I see every troll post. And they don't bother me one bit -- I would much rather see what an Anonymous Coward has to say than subject myself to Slashdot's rather pitiful offering of preemptively devaluing the anonymous remarks. Quite often, the anonymous remarks contain more valuable content than the "highly rated" remarks. Part of that is that moderation here is so badly broken, but part of it stems directly from the fact that as an anonymous speaker, people do indeed have wider latitude in what they can say. I'm not only interested in the things we're allowed, or supposed, to say. I want to hear what people think as they actually choose to express it in the most unfettered manner possible. GNAA? That stuff is utterly pitiful, and takes just about zero effort to recognize and skip over. An anonymous post containing material unsanctioned at the source from someone in Washington, from within congress (yeah, we have posts like that here), or Iraq, or Google, for that matter... now *that's* something I'm interested in reading. And those posts would not exist in the same form if they were signed by Real Name.
The thing about slashdot is that although the corporate culture leans strongly towards the muzzling of the anonymous, it does NOT enforce this -- it leaves that up to the individual user. So I see everyone. Others choose, that is CHOOSE, to stick with the results of moderation and the default low ranking of anonymous posts.
Google's corporate culture path here is, apparently, not going to allow the users any choice about how they manage their circles. It would be as simple as Slashdot's "browse at -1" option; "only let people into my particular circle(s) if they have the "real name" thing in their profile, and then allow individual lockouts on top of that. Control it at circle granularity, and it's workable. I could have circles that were unrepressed, and others could bask in the knowledge that so-and-so is using their "Real Name."
But Google, as you point out, isn't in this for the users. That whole "do no evil" thing? Utter nonsense. As these policies show, when it comes to a choice between money and not doing people harm, money wins. And that *is* a choice they can make. And we can just look at "do no evil" as just another marketing slogan. Which I guess is exactly what it is.
The one thing consumers -- which is what we are with relation to Google -- have as our little bit of leverage is that we can vote with our value to the company; That's why you won't find me on Google+ (or Facebook.) I've never opted into either one. I always found Facebook's TOS to be odious (yeah, I actually read site TOS declarations) and Google's whole "we must know who everyone is" simply makes me want to be somewhere else where I can interact with the people they leave out.
When you opt into this real name thing, you're leaving behind those who have been stalked, those who are political rebels or pariahs,
those who the state (or the feds) have declared outcasts, those on "lists", justifiably or not, people in countries where free speech is a free ticket to a machete party... me, I have no interest in this sanitized "we know who you are" world. That's a very bad, even immoral, choice for me. But I won't say you're bad because you want to go there. I'll just view it as a place containing the people I *don't* need to be listening to. The sheep. The ones who all say the same thing, think the same thing, and are happy to have the ostracized folks living under bridges -- and would just as soon forget they exist.
I lean strongly libertarian; I think Google should be able to do what they want. But when they do things I consider odious, then *I* get to do what I want, too, and that is to not engage the company in what I consider to be less than good practices. Google+ is odious, as I presently understand it. As long as that is the case, "teh social" is "teh worthless."
Weeds, hell. Add it to lawn grass, and make it aggressive, so it takes over the lawn in no time. :)
"Leroy, what'choo doin' out there?"
"Mowin' the lawn, ma!"
"Agin????"
"Needs mowin', ma. Really, really needs mowin. Could you make me a snack?"
I understand the point. The problem is, as I said, that the POD equipment is expensive, "real" books are dropping in popularity (regardless of how they are produced) and that generally speaking, the "feel" of a real book is more troublesome than the "feel" of an eBook. Personally -- and I readily admit this is just an opinion, but it *is* an opinion from someone who reads about a book a day -- real books seem to be to be more a matter of nostalgia than actual functionality; most of us reading today grew up with real books, and I think there is a hangover type of thing going on. In terms of actual benefits of a real book in the normal types of uses they undergo... there are very few.
There are potential "gotchas" for eBooks, but so far, they've been able to keep those experiences to a minimum, and as long as they do... eBooks will clobber real books.
Speaking as an owner of a literary agency as well as a fellow with many thousands of physical books in my library, IMHO POD had its market potential nuked by the same forces that are impacting normal print. That is (a) the ability to carry an entire library in a Kindle, iP[od|ad|hone], general purpose Android device, other dedicated readers like the Nook, your home computer, laptop, etc; (b) the ability to put a title you want to read in your hands in seconds, (c) the ability to read what would have been a heavy volume on a relatively light device. Print (not POD) also suffers from (d) the eBook and POD ability to get a book from "last word written/edited" to the sales channel in what is effectively zero time.
Good POD devices are expensive; and demand, like demand for any physical book, is dropping as more and more people hop on the eBook bandwagon. This makes payback for the POD device an uncertain proposition for the host business.
The entire book business is in flux. One reason authors are interested (and understandably so) in Amazon's all-in-one model is the horrible royalty conditions the legacy publishers have imposed upon eBooks. With a normal book, the tradition is an advance, then royalties. With an eBook, the approach so far has almost always been give the publisher the book, they'll charge all costs to its account, and when it pays them off, they'll come with a (very small) royalty. There are several consequences to this, one of which is critical. For an established author who isn't top tier (meaning, can't demand an up front royalty), income from the previous traditionally published book fades away in the normal fashion as buzz for it dies down, but income for a new eBook via the same route won't even start for a year or more -- and in the meantime, the publishers still expect the author to do a great deal of the marketing out of pocket. That's a very tough situation to find yourself in, particularly if you are trying to make it as a full time writer.
Look! A religious troll!
Some RealDolls(tm) would tell you otherwise. If they could.
Camera. Keylogger. Drugs. A dull, but ragged edged knife. Waterboarding. Possession of your daughter. Need I go on? There are always new attacks. Security is not what you think it is; consequently, neither is encryption, from ROT13 to the most advanced thing you're aware of (which is unlikely to be the most advanced thing the government is aware of, btw.)
All encryption does is secure one avenue. There are always others.
Look. Brute force: Division... divide a million by three, by subtracting three from the dividend and counting how many times it happens before the dividend rolls past zero. 333k cycles. Now do long division. 8 cycles. Snap, it's done.
Now jump forward a decade or two... quantum computing... probabilistic algorithms... Snap, AES is cracked. Never assume that today's technology will be applied to tomorrow's problems. If you do -- everything you come up with is very likely to be wrong.
Finally -- never assume the NSA and it's sibling agencies are using what YOU consider to be today's technology. Also very likely to be wrong.
funny... that's what I call it when the motorcycle rider falls off...
incompetent and/or lazy programmers have increasingly turned away from native compilation in favor of managed-code environments such as Java and .Net
Um... I don't think MABEL needs caps to sound like a "terrifying, clanking metal horror" -- did you turn up your volume? lol
Try to suppress your interior decorator / wedding planner tendencies. It's a font. A cute one. Not the end of the calligraphic world.