Your car's engine can deliver a certain amount of power, but if you tried using it at 100% load continuously, it'd probably last a few hours before it tore itself apart. Ever wonder why a soccer-mom SUV can have a 500hp engine, while an 18-wheeler makes do with about the same amount of power? The truck engine is rated for continuous load: it's five times as heavy and costs five times as much.
So it is with bandwidth: if you want a product that can deliver 50mbit in bursts, you'll get it for $40/month.
If you want something that will deliver 50mbit, guaranteed, continuously, you'll have to pay what that service actually costs.
That said, we know from Korea, Japan, Germany, etc that consumer-level connections can be far better than they are in the US, and for far less money.
Magellan's trips were made notable for the fact that new lands were being discovered and mapped. Of course, advances were also being made in the science of sailing... advances that eventually spread to the whole world, advances that built empires. Compare this to putting some solar panels on a boat and slowly propelling yourself from waypoint to waypoint on your GPS.
A more recent example of a truly notable expedition: Nautilus breaking through the ice at the north pole, proving the viability of nuclear submarines and, at the same time, doing something that had never been done.
My problem with solar is that, as a means of propulsion, it's a dead end. Doing things that have been done using technology that can never be useful to anyone is practically the definition of uselessness. A solar cell doesn't need to be proven by being put on a boat: doing so accomplishes nothing.
We know what solar panels can do. We know what electric motors can do. Putting the two together in a boat does not a novel invention make. Sailing it around the world is not a notable achievement.
It's the same as all those ridiculous solar-powered races across Australia: they don't bring a solar-powered car one iota closer to reality, because a solar powered car will never produce more than a few kilowatts, and that will never be enough to overcome the air resistance of a vehicle in which a person can sit somewhat upright.
Technology doesn't advance to overcome the laws of physics. Solar powered transportation of any sort will never do anything more than make possible novelty journeys for people with more money than sense.
My experience, on windows: enable IrDA on phone. Put phone next to laptop. Phone recognized, systray icon pops up. Send files.
IrDA was the closest we ever came to solving the still-unsolved problem of how to transfer files wirelessly between two machines sitting next to each other. It's telling that the de-facto standard now is to carry around USB flash drives: god help you if you've lost whatever cereal-box prize you were using.
Compared to the dicking around we have to do with bluetooth - which, incidentally, is still brutally slow - IrDA was awesome. It wasn't fast, but files weren't big ten years ago.
1. Remove the mechanism by which a forgotten password can be bypassed. Forgot your password? Tough shit. Now that you've bricked your phone, maybe you won't be so forgetful next time.
2. No USB access of any kind when the phone is locked. It's a huge vulnerability.
3. Full disk encryption. Granted, the phone spends most of its time operating with the key in memory, but...
4. Phone turns off when you remove the back cover or otherwise try to get inside of it. Not hard to do.
An extremely dedicated attacker could potentially bypass these measures, but not your average traffic cop or border patrol agent on a fishing expedition.
Instead, phones are designed to make it inconvenient for John to pick up Suzie's phone and read her text messages, and to make sure Suzie can easily reset her password so her carrier doesn't have to deal with a whiny tech support call.
What you can do, however, if you have a reasonably user-serviceable phone, is cut the data lines going to the USB jack. It'll charge slower (500mA limit), but plugging in a USB cable won't grant a casual snoop any access. File transfer can be handled via wi-fi.
Please provide some evidence that the spread of disease was deliberate rather than incidental. Or that people even understood that blankets could be a vector for disease transmission.
You cannot vote for a third party without weakening your side's position. Fragmenting the liberal vote while the conservative vote is unified has cost the liberal side the electoral victory in the very recent past. You cannot vote for a third party under a first-past-the-post voting scheme. A two-party state is a stable and inevitable endpoint of first-past-the-post voting.
If you think about it, this makes a lot more sense than vaccinating girls...... mainly because American christian hypocrisy is much more comfortable with the idea of boys having sex than with girls doing the same. Vaccinating our good old boys against crotch-rot is more politically acceptable than vaccinating little Suzie against the risks of the sex she's not supposed to have.
You could just spoof your MAC address. Many wireless cards, through their windows drivers, allow you to do so directly from the device property page. I'm sure there are other solutions on every platform.
Also, paying cash... what, as if the store logged the MAC addresses of wireless cards and tied them to customers' credit card numbers?
There are enough syntactic similarities to make feel familiar, and the IDE will help you out with a lot of the new methods... once your average VB programmer realizes that he can type a dot after an object name and get all of its methods listed in a neat little dropdown, he'll be productive.
Obviously VBA, descended as it is from VB6, needs to die. But.net made VB a respectable programming language, so why wouldn't microsoft simply move office macro development to that newer version instead? The learning curve would be pretty easy to climb for existing users, and there are a great many of those: entire businesses run on half-assed collections of excel macros.
Indeed, as an atheist, you'd have no sense of right / wrong, and without fear of judgment and damnation, you'd have no desire to be a decent human being. You'd make a rational calculation that their paying you what you consider to be unsatisfactory wage justifies fraud and theft.
If, on the other hand, you had your belief in Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of the LORD God in Heaven, you'd have the sort of strong moral fiber that would preclude your involvement in any such sociopathic actions. It's widely known that Christians do not sin.
And if you don't comply with the audit you've supposedly agreed to, what's their recourse? They can try to sue for breach of contract... a contract that they can't actually prove you've entered into.
There's pretty much no way the BSA's tactics can actually be legal. It seems to me like they put on a big show and take on a threatening posture, hoping that you'll be convinced to let them gather the evidence they need and then pay them whatever they're asking.
A bit of common sense: can a random individual or company come into your house or place of business and demand to see proof that you're complying with a private contract?
I too have read some of the drivel that "audiophiles" spewed forth on their forums. I was, however, able to resist the temptation to regurgitate it for everyone to read today.
Obviously there's no legal protection for the data on your phone - not that there shouldn't be, but your privacy rights only go one way in modern society, so don't hold your breath - but where are the technical measures? We've seen that police use forensics devices that attach the data port on the phone to give them immediate and complete access to the entire file system.
There's always a tradeoff between convenience and security, and it's time cell phones at least gave you the option to choose a bit more of the latter. How about not allowing read access via the USB port when the phone is locked? That's just basic common sense, but phone manufacturers and OS vendors don't take physical security seriously yet. How about cutting power to the phone when the back cover is removed? How about having a power-on password in addition to a lock-screen password, so the phone can't simply be put into recovery mode?
On a PC I can set a BIOS password, a hard drive password, and use full disk encryption of a sort that nobody will ever be able to break. If the machine is running but locked, suspended, or hibernating, even windows will ensure that there's no way to get at my data without actually having the proper credentials. There's no way to recover my passwords or encryption keys from memory, except for the rather technical, obscure, and time-sensitive technique of physically freezing the RAM and trying to read back its contents after a reboot. Compare this to joke that passes for file system encryption on the iphone.
In a lot of ways, smartphones store more valuable data than PCs do, and yet the options for protecting that data are virtually nonexistent.
Funny, I haven't seen any bazaars filled with $1 DVDs around here, which is the sort of thing that characterizes the rest of the entries on the list (except possibly Spain).
We have a cable / satellite duopoly for broadcast TV (nobody uses free OTA here; reception is nonexistent for most) that extracts $80-100/month out of almost every Canadian household - the same duopoly that supplies broadband internet to 90% of the population. Our communications regulator is a puppet of said duopoly: it recently approved regulations that dictate that nobody may offer better or cheaper internet service than the incumbents. We have the most expensive broadband and cellular in the developed world, and it's getting more expensive rather than less: the duopoly has started charging punitive rates for overages above caps that are set so low as to make streaming video services impossible to use.
What more does the USTR want? What more does it demand that Canada do to support the content industry's bottom line? Why are American special interests so butthurt over the state of the Canadian content market?
I think I know: no private citizen has gone before a court in this country over a copyright violation. Our court system doesn't permit the procedural tricks that allow thousands of people of unknown identity to be sued. Hollywood can't stand this.
The full title of this software is actually GREEN DAM YOUTH ESCORT.
For guarding of the youth, to making safe and happy social harmony. Great and capable software for glorious ten thousand year nation. Code is not stolen; developed by brilliant engineers at November 23 People's Collective Software Refinery.
If the article were on CNN, I'd have said "fuck you, CNN." Anyone can write badly on things they don't understand: it's a media company's job to ensure that they employ competent staff and then review their output before it goes up for the world to see. Clearly, nobody at foxnews.com even proofread that article, much less verified its technical accuracy.
Wow, that was one of the worst articles I've ever read.
"To create incredible power requires incredible energy. After all, the more power one puts into a laser accelerator, the more powerful and precise the light beam that comes out on the other end."
So to "create power" requires energy. Uh, ok... I'm with you, sort of.
"Scientists there, in coordination with the Office of Naval Research (ONR), injected a sustained 500 kilovolts (KV) of juice into a prototype accelerator where the existing limit had been 320 kV..."
OK, so they "injected" 500kV of "juice." Fuck you, fox news.
"According to ONR officials, that laser beam will eventually perform at a staggering âoemegawatt class,â a measure of the laser's strength. Right now, the accelerator at Jefferson Lab is performing at just 14 Kilowatts."
So wait, the power output of this thing is actually 14kW, and the goal of the program is to reach 1MW. But apparently they were at 10kW four years ago... so what's this article actually about? The fact that they increased the voltage to 500kV from the previous 320kV? Why does that matter?
"Today, Neil and others have shown that they have the ability to harness super-conducting electron power."
Oh ok, I guess the big development here is that they're using superconductors... or something. It's tough to tell, because "super-conducting electron power" is a series of words that, when strung together, don't mean a fucking thing.
"Clearly, the day's events were a feather in everyoneâ(TM)s cap."
You have *satellite* internet access. That means there's a $50M machine in geosync orbit serving you porn and tech news.
Despite this insane cost, which the owner has to recover on the backs of just a few thousand rural subscribers, there's a finite and very limited amount of bandwidth on that bird. That isn't because they hate you and want to make your life difficult, but rather because of the laws of physics: how much signal you can transmit depends on the SNR and the frequency of the link.
Even with modern spot-beam technology, a few megabits of throughput has to service thousands of square miles.
Now you may bitch and complain that you can't get wireline broadband, and that's a different matter, but don't complain about the caps and limits on your satellite connection. They're not just arbitrary and punitive like they are on wireline broadband.
For what it's worth, you can get a dedicated satellite connection... I've seen such a setup. 1.5 mbit up/down delivered over two meter-wide C-band dishes, and probably $10,000 / month. That's what real dedicated sat service costs. You should probably be thankful you can get any at all for $150/month.
Symbian on Nokia is goddamn awful; as the owner of an E72, I know.
Illogical and bizarre menu layout and options, features not working out of the box (SIP support, anyone? good luck with that), neutered hardware (128MB of RAM, same as its predecessor from two years prior), miserably broken connection management (use wifi when available, cellular when not... that should NOT be hard, nor should it be something I have to configure on a per-application basis), an inbox/outbox/sent/drafts folder system for SMS messages (like phones had ten years ago), no meaningful app development from anyone but nokia themselves... I could go on.
Suffice it to say that Symbian is a handset OS dating back to monochrome displays and the original GSM spec, hacked and hacked to look, superficially, like something modern.
The only positive thing I can say about my phone is that it's a bluetooth cellular modem right out of the box.
It doesn't even do properly the things it was advertised as doing, to say nothing of the impressive things that third party software lets android or even apple phones do.
Nokia got it's last dollar out of me with the E72; I don't care what they make after this, pure spite will keep me from ever buying it.
Part of the reason why investors demand constant growth from a company is that so many - Dell included - don't pay dividends. In the absence of those, the only reason to hold shares in a company is the expectation of higher future value.
Dell has been around for over two decades. At some point it became obvious that they weren't going to take over the world: their growth had peaked. They weren't going to completely crush the consumer / business desktop computing competition, and they weren't going to enter other markets in a meaningful way... so why didn't they start disbursing the profits of their business to the owners of the company?
This has only tangential relevance to the whole bad-capacitor issue: I'm more taking issue with your assertion that companies have to compromise their core values and strengths in search of endless growth. There's another option.
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Actually, the car analogy isn't far off the mark.
Your car's engine can deliver a certain amount of power, but if you tried using it at 100% load continuously, it'd probably last a few hours before it tore itself apart. Ever wonder why a soccer-mom SUV can have a 500hp engine, while an 18-wheeler makes do with about the same amount of power? The truck engine is rated for continuous load: it's five times as heavy and costs five times as much.
So it is with bandwidth: if you want a product that can deliver 50mbit in bursts, you'll get it for $40/month.
If you want something that will deliver 50mbit, guaranteed, continuously, you'll have to pay what that service actually costs.
That said, we know from Korea, Japan, Germany, etc that consumer-level connections can be far better than they are in the US, and for far less money.
Magellan's trips were made notable for the fact that new lands were being discovered and mapped. Of course, advances were also being made in the science of sailing... advances that eventually spread to the whole world, advances that built empires. Compare this to putting some solar panels on a boat and slowly propelling yourself from waypoint to waypoint on your GPS.
A more recent example of a truly notable expedition: Nautilus breaking through the ice at the north pole, proving the viability of nuclear submarines and, at the same time, doing something that had never been done.
My problem with solar is that, as a means of propulsion, it's a dead end. Doing things that have been done using technology that can never be useful to anyone is practically the definition of uselessness. A solar cell doesn't need to be proven by being put on a boat: doing so accomplishes nothing.
We know what solar panels can do. We know what electric motors can do. Putting the two together in a boat does not a novel invention make. Sailing it around the world is not a notable achievement.
It's the same as all those ridiculous solar-powered races across Australia: they don't bring a solar-powered car one iota closer to reality, because a solar powered car will never produce more than a few kilowatts, and that will never be enough to overcome the air resistance of a vehicle in which a person can sit somewhat upright.
Technology doesn't advance to overcome the laws of physics. Solar powered transportation of any sort will never do anything more than make possible novelty journeys for people with more money than sense.
My experience, on windows: enable IrDA on phone. Put phone next to laptop. Phone recognized, systray icon pops up. Send files.
IrDA was the closest we ever came to solving the still-unsolved problem of how to transfer files wirelessly between two machines sitting next to each other. It's telling that the de-facto standard now is to carry around USB flash drives: god help you if you've lost whatever cereal-box prize you were using.
Compared to the dicking around we have to do with bluetooth - which, incidentally, is still brutally slow - IrDA was awesome. It wasn't fast, but files weren't big ten years ago.
Would you maybe care to explain just what it is that you're on about? Seriously, not a single thing you've written makes any sense.
How to make phone operating systems more secure:
1. Remove the mechanism by which a forgotten password can be bypassed. Forgot your password? Tough shit. Now that you've bricked your phone, maybe you won't be so forgetful next time.
2. No USB access of any kind when the phone is locked. It's a huge vulnerability.
3. Full disk encryption. Granted, the phone spends most of its time operating with the key in memory, but...
4. Phone turns off when you remove the back cover or otherwise try to get inside of it. Not hard to do.
An extremely dedicated attacker could potentially bypass these measures, but not your average traffic cop or border patrol agent on a fishing expedition.
Instead, phones are designed to make it inconvenient for John to pick up Suzie's phone and read her text messages, and to make sure Suzie can easily reset her password so her carrier doesn't have to deal with a whiny tech support call.
What you can do, however, if you have a reasonably user-serviceable phone, is cut the data lines going to the USB jack. It'll charge slower (500mA limit), but plugging in a USB cable won't grant a casual snoop any access. File transfer can be handled via wi-fi.
[Citation needed]
Please provide some evidence that the spread of disease was deliberate rather than incidental. Or that people even understood that blankets could be a vector for disease transmission.
You cannot vote for a third party without weakening your side's position. Fragmenting the liberal vote while the conservative vote is unified has cost the liberal side the electoral victory in the very recent past. You cannot vote for a third party under a first-past-the-post voting scheme. A two-party state is a stable and inevitable endpoint of first-past-the-post voting.
The only answer is electoral reform.
If you think about it, this makes a lot more sense than vaccinating girls... ... mainly because American christian hypocrisy is much more comfortable with the idea of boys having sex than with girls doing the same. Vaccinating our good old boys against crotch-rot is more politically acceptable than vaccinating little Suzie against the risks of the sex she's not supposed to have.
You could just spoof your MAC address. Many wireless cards, through their windows drivers, allow you to do so directly from the device property page. I'm sure there are other solutions on every platform.
Also, paying cash... what, as if the store logged the MAC addresses of wireless cards and tied them to customers' credit card numbers?
There are enough syntactic similarities to make feel familiar, and the IDE will help you out with a lot of the new methods... once your average VB programmer realizes that he can type a dot after an object name and get all of its methods listed in a neat little dropdown, he'll be productive.
Obviously VBA, descended as it is from VB6, needs to die. But .net made VB a respectable programming language, so why wouldn't microsoft simply move office macro development to that newer version instead? The learning curve would be pretty easy to climb for existing users, and there are a great many of those: entire businesses run on half-assed collections of excel macros.
Indeed, as an atheist, you'd have no sense of right / wrong, and without fear of judgment and damnation, you'd have no desire to be a decent human being. You'd make a rational calculation that their paying you what you consider to be unsatisfactory wage justifies fraud and theft.
If, on the other hand, you had your belief in Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of the LORD God in Heaven, you'd have the sort of strong moral fiber that would preclude your involvement in any such sociopathic actions. It's widely known that Christians do not sin.
Steam has an off-line mode; I often make use of it when traveling. This probably won't.
And if you don't comply with the audit you've supposedly agreed to, what's their recourse? They can try to sue for breach of contract... a contract that they can't actually prove you've entered into.
There's pretty much no way the BSA's tactics can actually be legal. It seems to me like they put on a big show and take on a threatening posture, hoping that you'll be convinced to let them gather the evidence they need and then pay them whatever they're asking.
A bit of common sense: can a random individual or company come into your house or place of business and demand to see proof that you're complying with a private contract?
The BSA has no law enforcement powers.
I too have read some of the drivel that "audiophiles" spewed forth on their forums. I was, however, able to resist the temptation to regurgitate it for everyone to read today.
Obviously there's no legal protection for the data on your phone - not that there shouldn't be, but your privacy rights only go one way in modern society, so don't hold your breath - but where are the technical measures? We've seen that police use forensics devices that attach the data port on the phone to give them immediate and complete access to the entire file system.
There's always a tradeoff between convenience and security, and it's time cell phones at least gave you the option to choose a bit more of the latter. How about not allowing read access via the USB port when the phone is locked? That's just basic common sense, but phone manufacturers and OS vendors don't take physical security seriously yet. How about cutting power to the phone when the back cover is removed? How about having a power-on password in addition to a lock-screen password, so the phone can't simply be put into recovery mode?
On a PC I can set a BIOS password, a hard drive password, and use full disk encryption of a sort that nobody will ever be able to break. If the machine is running but locked, suspended, or hibernating, even windows will ensure that there's no way to get at my data without actually having the proper credentials. There's no way to recover my passwords or encryption keys from memory, except for the rather technical, obscure, and time-sensitive technique of physically freezing the RAM and trying to read back its contents after a reboot. Compare this to joke that passes for file system encryption on the iphone.
In a lot of ways, smartphones store more valuable data than PCs do, and yet the options for protecting that data are virtually nonexistent.
It forces motherboard manufacturers, rather than Intel, to bear the cost of a bent/damaged pin.
Funny, I haven't seen any bazaars filled with $1 DVDs around here, which is the sort of thing that characterizes the rest of the entries on the list (except possibly Spain).
We have a cable / satellite duopoly for broadcast TV (nobody uses free OTA here; reception is nonexistent for most) that extracts $80-100/month out of almost every Canadian household - the same duopoly that supplies broadband internet to 90% of the population. Our communications regulator is a puppet of said duopoly: it recently approved regulations that dictate that nobody may offer better or cheaper internet service than the incumbents. We have the most expensive broadband and cellular in the developed world, and it's getting more expensive rather than less: the duopoly has started charging punitive rates for overages above caps that are set so low as to make streaming video services impossible to use.
What more does the USTR want? What more does it demand that Canada do to support the content industry's bottom line? Why are American special interests so butthurt over the state of the Canadian content market?
I think I know: no private citizen has gone before a court in this country over a copyright violation. Our court system doesn't permit the procedural tricks that allow thousands of people of unknown identity to be sued. Hollywood can't stand this.
The full title of this software is actually GREEN DAM YOUTH ESCORT.
For guarding of the youth, to making safe and happy social harmony. Great and capable software for glorious ten thousand year nation. Code is not stolen; developed by brilliant engineers at November 23 People's Collective Software Refinery.
If the article were on CNN, I'd have said "fuck you, CNN." Anyone can write badly on things they don't understand: it's a media company's job to ensure that they employ competent staff and then review their output before it goes up for the world to see. Clearly, nobody at foxnews.com even proofread that article, much less verified its technical accuracy.
Wow, that was one of the worst articles I've ever read.
So to "create power" requires energy. Uh, ok... I'm with you, sort of.
OK, so they "injected" 500kV of "juice." Fuck you, fox news.
So wait, the power output of this thing is actually 14kW, and the goal of the program is to reach 1MW. But apparently they were at 10kW four years ago... so what's this article actually about? The fact that they increased the voltage to 500kV from the previous 320kV? Why does that matter?
Oh ok, I guess the big development here is that they're using superconductors... or something. It's tough to tell, because "super-conducting electron power" is a series of words that, when strung together, don't mean a fucking thing.
Clearly.
You have *satellite* internet access. That means there's a $50M machine in geosync orbit serving you porn and tech news.
Despite this insane cost, which the owner has to recover on the backs of just a few thousand rural subscribers, there's a finite and very limited amount of bandwidth on that bird. That isn't because they hate you and want to make your life difficult, but rather because of the laws of physics: how much signal you can transmit depends on the SNR and the frequency of the link.
Even with modern spot-beam technology, a few megabits of throughput has to service thousands of square miles.
Now you may bitch and complain that you can't get wireline broadband, and that's a different matter, but don't complain about the caps and limits on your satellite connection. They're not just arbitrary and punitive like they are on wireline broadband.
For what it's worth, you can get a dedicated satellite connection... I've seen such a setup. 1.5 mbit up/down delivered over two meter-wide C-band dishes, and probably $10,000 / month. That's what real dedicated sat service costs. You should probably be thankful you can get any at all for $150/month.
Symbian on Nokia is goddamn awful; as the owner of an E72, I know.
Illogical and bizarre menu layout and options, features not working out of the box (SIP support, anyone? good luck with that), neutered hardware (128MB of RAM, same as its predecessor from two years prior), miserably broken connection management (use wifi when available, cellular when not... that should NOT be hard, nor should it be something I have to configure on a per-application basis), an inbox/outbox/sent/drafts folder system for SMS messages (like phones had ten years ago), no meaningful app development from anyone but nokia themselves... I could go on.
Suffice it to say that Symbian is a handset OS dating back to monochrome displays and the original GSM spec, hacked and hacked to look, superficially, like something modern.
The only positive thing I can say about my phone is that it's a bluetooth cellular modem right out of the box.
It doesn't even do properly the things it was advertised as doing, to say nothing of the impressive things that third party software lets android or even apple phones do.
Nokia got it's last dollar out of me with the E72; I don't care what they make after this, pure spite will keep me from ever buying it.
Part of the reason why investors demand constant growth from a company is that so many - Dell included - don't pay dividends. In the absence of those, the only reason to hold shares in a company is the expectation of higher future value.
Dell has been around for over two decades. At some point it became obvious that they weren't going to take over the world: their growth had peaked. They weren't going to completely crush the consumer / business desktop computing competition, and they weren't going to enter other markets in a meaningful way... so why didn't they start disbursing the profits of their business to the owners of the company?
This has only tangential relevance to the whole bad-capacitor issue: I'm more taking issue with your assertion that companies have to compromise their core values and strengths in search of endless growth. There's another option.