There are a number of exposure vectors for stuff like this. Certainly the average user does not want something that they buy/download to gain additional privileges and do unexpected things. Anything that makes that less likely is going to be required.
I believe these devices are WiFi only and do not have a great deal of radio power, but you can believe anything with a cell radio in it is going to be locked down as tightly as necessary to absolutely prevent changing radio parameters. The first hacker that gets into a cell radio and shows the world how they can disrupt cell communications in their corner of the world will prove the need for this kind of lockdown beyond any doubt. But I don't see how this would apply to these devices.
Certainly both devices are sold either at a loss or at a very, very thin margin with the expectation that they will be used to buy stuff from the parent company and mostly the parent company. Overall, Amazon has been quite generous with the Kindle line - supporting the 3G wireless access for web browsing, email reading, etc. Yes, you can download non-Amazon books through the Amazon-supported wireless access. I suspect with the Fire the capabilities are there to access free and paid content outside of Amazon, but the Amazon stuff is easier to get to. I have no idea what sort of capabilities the Nook has, but I am guessing both have NetFlix access just as an example. So the devices aren't really "owned" by their parent but the expectation that there will be future profits affect the price of the devices. Similar devices are normally priced a bit higher - as much as 50%.
I do not think the parent "subsidy" is the reason for the lockdown as to the average consumer they are no more locked down now than before. If you can still pay NetFlix and watch movies on the device, then it isn't locked to only Amazon or B&N content.
I think the only explanation that is reasonable is the absolute very last thing they want is any sort of downloaded software making its way onto one of these devices and taking it over. Anything that prevents that or makes it less likely is going get pushed out to the user community. Anyone criticizing this doesn't understand the risks or the incredible backlash that would follow from an exploit on one of these devices.
All traffic control devices in one way or another increase accidents. Stop signs are the beginning. Move up from a stop sign to a traffic light and the accidents will increase. Add a left turn arrow and more accidents happen.
Uncontrolled traffic where everyone knows their lives are in their hands constantly is probably the safest, most accident free way for roads to operate. Any controls, including speed limits, are simply arbitrary things that create accidents. The problem is, as we found out in the US around 1920 or so, without any controls beyond a rather low traffic density nobody has any respect for other drivers in the US. This doesn't seem to be a problem in Rome or Istambul, for example.
Google is very, very interested in both recipes and Christmas lists. Recipes need ingredients that you will be shopping for and Google can sell this information to someone that sells the ingredients. Christmas lists mean you will again be buying stuff that Google can sell to merchants that will offer to sell you what you are looking for.
On the Internet there is certainly some truth to the idea that the first thing that pops up is going to get more attention than something you find after doing an exhaustive search for the lowest possible price. So with Google "helping" you with your shopping is going to provide an edge to the merchants that deal with Google.
Oh, you don't think Google data-mines Gmail for such hints? Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
The problem here in Phoenix isn't the people chasing yellow lights. It is the people that simply ignore the red light altogether and go through the intersection using their personal force of will to clear the way ahead. Yes, what I am referring to is where the light has been red for 20-30 seconds and a car comes from nowhere to enter the intersection. Just zipping along counting on the fact that people will avoid a collision.
Sadly, there is nothing that can be done about this because the drivers fall into two broad categories: DGAS (doesn't give a shit) and Mexican. The DGAS factor comes from Scottsdale and such where you have someone driving a $200K car and just keeps paying fines. It is pretty much impossible to successfully fine a Mexican national with Mexican plates in the US today - the police will pull someone over and finding they speak no English and have a Mexican license will just wave them along. No point in writing a ticket up that they will just trash. And Mexico doesn't seem to cooperate to any extent with US law enforcement. Run a red light in Mexico and you will likely just find yourself in a Mexican jail for 10 years if you are a US citizen.
The problerm with that thinking is that none of the systems I have encountered consider you to be running a red like (and therefore take your picture) unless you enter the intersection while the light is red. Entering the intersection when the light is yellow doesn't count even if the light changes to red while you are in the intersection.
In the Phoenix area they now have a red line that is inside of both the "stop line" and the crosswalk that is the point at which you have to cross when the light is red. If you cross that line when the light is yellow, no problem. It may not be marked as clearly in other places as I haven't seen the red line like that anywhere else, but I am sure a similar point exists.
So I don't see much of a difference how long the yellow light is. If you are entering the intersection when the light is yellow you are OK. If you are entering the intersection a while after the light has turned yellow you are either going too fast for conditions or are simply not paying attention to the lights. Whether the yellow light stays up for 5 seconds or 20 seconds really doesn't matter.
Phoenix seems to be one of the top cities for people running red lights anyway. And the cameras do little good because if you have Sonora (Mexico) license plates they really can't do much to you. So you get a free pass. But Phoenix has more intersection cameras (video, not red light) than I have ever seen anywhere so they get nice clear video from five different angles (each of the four directions plus a wide-angle intersection view) for the insurance companies. Again, when the hitter has Sonoran plates it really doesn't matter much to the hitee or the hitee's insurance company. No insurance and no laws apply unless you want to sue in a Mexican court - which nobody ever does.
No, the standard law enforcement process never envisioned a country would sign onto a treaty and then decide not to enforce it.
Let's take extradition for murder, for instance. If a country signs an extradition treaty it is assumed that should a murderer flee there that they can and will be extradited to face trial where the crime was committed. In no case today do I believe this is not done. There are countries that have not signed extradition treaties and countries that place conditions upon extradition but that is a separate matter.
Today, we have countries that allow the hosting of web sites whose sole purpose is the removal of revenue from the sale of digital goods. If I set up a software store that sells pirated copies of high-value products for 1% of their original cost in the US it will be shut down within a day or so. If I do this in other countries - some of which that have signed copyright treaties - the site will continue without any problems.
Until this changes the US and Europe can only consider unilateral action against such countries.
It isn't just the old media. Anyone that attempts to distribute software on the Internet at a fair price is a target. Anyone selling a ebook at a fair price is a target. You want to go along to get along? Fine, start by reducing your price to zero. Anything that is above zero is a direct slap in the face of dedicated people that believe the Star Trek economy can be here tomorrow if they just work hard enough at it. And by redistributing anything digital for free they believe they are pushing the envelope and bringing the Star Trek economy one step closer to reality.
(The Star Trek economy postulates that everything is free and people only work for enjoyment. Maybe after we have replicators... or maybe not.)
Now for the point we agree on... Senators and the like to not give a rat's ass about your or my ability to get money for digital goods on the Internet and if someone outside the US is redistributing our work and insuring we never get another dime from it the fact that there is no recourse today is just too bad. It does not affect them in the slightest bit. The fact that the same rules apply to Disney and THEY have no recourse when someone is redistributing their stuff affects them a great deal. Right in the pocketbook. And potentially in their chance for reelection.
The issue is how do we keep them from throwing out the whole Internet while preserving revenue for you, me and Disney? The answer today of "you can't" is not acceptable, not to the Senate and not to Disney. The fact that they have come up with something is interesting and as a first cut at the problem isn't utterly absurd. It has some significant flaws, there is no getting away from that, but it is certainly something to point at and identify the good and bad points of it. Unfortunately all that has happened so far is pointing at it and saying it is completely bad and nothing should be done at all. That doesn't help you, me or Disney in the slightest little bit.
Something is going to be done, as the current state of affairs is not working very well. Having a situation where the Internet is a lawless zone the moment a country that does not enforce the treaties they have signed onto is not practical. And it isn't going to be tolerated much longer. So how does it get done right?
If the business has a clear policy of not providing tools, such as a lot of auto repair shops, then US income tax deductions are possible. Just barely possible but there can be complications.
In the usual commercial business world if you want to buy an iPhone for use at work there is no way it is going to be tax deductible unless you get the company to give you a letter stating it is a requirement of your job to buy the iPhone and that it will be used only for business purposes.
Absolutely the reason this is popular is cost shifting. You have 50 employees that you want to have iPhones... so the company can spend $25,000 or nothing. Gosh, who would have thought of that?
Now, if everyone buys iPhones there is very little problem with IT support. If 30 people buy iPhones, 10 people buy Android phones and the remaining buy a mix of Windows phones, Open Moko phones and something new that came out last week the IT job will be a nightmare. Same kind of problem happens where everyone buys a different tablet device brings them all to a meeting and someone has instructions for using some iPad-only app for displaying something important. Guess what? The help desk may not be able to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction.
This sounds like a lot of short-term thinking that saves some direct money immediately with a lot of long-term consequences and long-term expense. Mostly, it is really dumb move.
There is no escaping the fact that the entire Google-supplied Android software suite is half-done. There are hundreds of things that need "polishing" and most of these just make life more difficult for the user.
Is the phone a neat toy for geeks? Absolutely. I switched from a recent BlackBerry (Bold 9700) to a Galaxy S II a little over a month ago. There are probably some things that still could be done to "customize" the phone into a more usable state, but you have to contrast this with a phone that comes ready-to-use in an efficient and user-friendly form right out of the box. And in no way is any Android phone efficient or user-friendly right out of the box.
It is hard to blame Samsung for the problems with the phone because they are just taking advantage of a free phone software environment. Rather than spending lots of money developing the phone software they just picked it up free. Can't really say that isn't a really smart thing to do.
Google, on the other hand, supplied nearly all of the software on the phone and is clearly responsible for the ad-hoc unfinished way lots of stuff works. For example, why are there two email applications (Gmail and Exchange) and they are so completely different? One asks for confirmation for a delete, the other one does not. Probably somewhere this is a setting, but why would the shipping default settings be different? And why would the Gmail email client look so much better than the one for other transport types?
Then there is the touch screen keyboard. Incredibly sensitive so that it takes twice as long to type anything. No, they didn't put a lot of effort into figuring out what key you meant to press, they are just taking the first thing that seemed to get poked. The result is a huge number of errors. I haven't seen anyone using the keyboard on an Android phone that isn't being incredibly precise with it - basically because they learned how to use it. Contrast this with a phone where the software works with the user.
I am not a big Apple fan. But they actually spent some time on the software and got their phone working the way people use it. As soon as I can afford to do it, I will be replacing the Galaxy S II with an iPhone. Sadly, I have to switch carriers to do it - no iPhone with 3G on TMobile.
The problem is that reality might set in here. Just because you legalize drugs doesn't mean the prices are going to drop. California legal dispensary weed is the same prices as it is in Chicago on the street. And they aren't taxing it yet. Part of the problem is that the production is difficult enough that they have to pay lots to get people to do it.
There will always be plenty of competition from the cheaper illegal weed that isn't taxed. Want to keep it off the market? Well, then that is back to drug enforcement at the borders.
An alternative might be to take people that have run out of unemployment and put them up somewhere in the Southwest where they could be marijuana and coca growers. Basically free (room and board) labor for growing plants for the government. That might work. Except the Mexican cartels would probably shoot all the slave workers on the plantations. Ooops. Well, there isn't likely to be any shortage of workers any time soon.
Sorry, but legalization isn't going to work any better than saying "buy American" is going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Today marijuana is essentially legal in California and it is not taxed. So what would you expect the price for marijuana to be at California dispensaries? Well, it turns out that it is almost exactly the same price as illegal, imported marijuana is on the street in Chicago. Check it out.
Based on this, legal drugs are likely to always have strong competition from imported illegal drugs. The production costs are going to be much lower for the imports, even with payoffs to local officials. Should cities, states and the federal government start taxing drug sales imports will be significantly cheaper. And how will law enforcement be able to tell the difference between legal, taxed drugs and imported untaxed illegal drugs?
It is very unlikely that we are going to see prices plummet should there legalization. What you are going to see is a gradual eroding of enforcement as has happened over the last 10 years or so. The side effects of programs like California's and Arizona's (if it ever gets off the ground) is that it will be very, very difficult to implement any sort of drug testing for employment. You really can't test for and ban employment because of a legal substance. For example, it is not legal to exclude someone from a job based on alchohol use, although you can fire them later for being drunk on the job.
When does it stop being practical to do drug testing the results should be very interesting on city streets. Imagine the outcry when it is only possible to fire school bus drivers after an accident or two - it is not possible to deny employment to alchoholic candidates today.
It is probably simpler to think that they jammed the control frequency/frequencies in such a manner that the device went into a failure mode. Most UAV things these days have some sort of auto-landing logic that will land it safely if it loses communication. I would think a military aircraft would tolerate loss of communications for a bit longer than other civilian devices but then the question is self-destruct or land? At some point without communications you can't just fly in a straight line.
I seriously doubt these things have enough internal navigation to return to base autonomously. My guess is that during testing the self-destruct option was ruled out as being too brash. Ooops.
I would suspect there might be a rush order for autonomously return to base capabilities on these things. The one problem there of course is how do you integrate a returning (autonomous) drone into the flight control pattern at a busy air base. No, I think that problem is going to have to be solved with shutting everything down until the thing lands if you can't regain control over it.
Did the Iranians take over the control frequency and start flying it? I can't imagine even with an unencrypted control channel that this would be possible.
Marketing is the difference between the book being something that nobody has ever heard of and is ranked dead last in a huge pile of books vs. a book that has been reviewed and rated highly. Getting your Aunt Sally to review the book doesn't count - getting someone with an audience counts. It is not optional, it does matter and if you leave it out you end up unknown with a product that doesn't sell.
Proofreading can be done by the author, but they suffer from the usual problem that they know what is supposed to be there regardless of what is really on the page. Editing is a far different problem - even some very well known authors need editors to cut out a lot of crap that doesn't need to be there.
Typesetting translates 100% into book design. It is not just a pile of text without any form. Ignoring book design is probably error #3 on the self-publishing checklist with 1 and 2 being proofreading and editing.
Illustrations for self-published authors often end up being done by the soccer mom down the street that used to be a graphic artist. Cover design also - which is what all the book catalogs show. A crappy cover on Amazon ends up meaning fewer sales. So sure, authors can hire out the work, but how much are they spending on it?
The answer on all of this is not enough importance is placed on important things and never enough is spent on it. So you end up with a book that would have been interesting and readable but because of a lack of editing it is tedious to read and nobody likes it. You end up with an ugly cover that nobody likes and it turns off browsers. You don't pay enough attention to marketing your book and nobody reads it - the people that do find it after wading through thousands of similar titles see it is rated poorly and nobody they ever heard of reviewed it.
$5K? That might be for a first-time author in a very small niche. Heck, I got a $6K advance on a book about CD and DVD forensics that has sold around 2000 copies.
A published author with any kind of track record of sales is going to be able to command more like $50K as an advance. Of course, how do you get there? By getting a $5K advance on the first few books that do well.
Also, once you are established and have a real name in the marketplace you can make a deal for no advance but a much higher royality rate. So you are getting 15-20%% of every book sold instead of 8%. This is possible when the publisher knows they are going to spend $40K on getting the book out and make $200K from it.
Part of the problem with self-published books is no matter how good the author is, they are never going to spend $40K on publishing a book, ever. You are going to have a cover that was done by a neighbor that once used to be a graphic artist before they became a soccer mom. You are going to have a book design straight out of a word processor sample template. And it will have been proofread by five people that are astounded by the author's vocabulary. Editing? Probably none at all, or just some suggestions from someone the author plays golf with.
Your rights to modify the hardware and/or software need to stop at the point where it even potentially interferes with other's use of the network.
There is no logical reason why an exploit for cell towers cannot be found which would allow your calls and only your calls to go through. As the cell tower programming is dealing with a known entity it likely has as many back doors and security exposures as the phone network in the 1960s and 1970s did. Still. Blue boxes are illegal to own today and it is likely modified firmware for a cell phone is going to be put in the same status by some crafty hackers. I'd guess sooner rather than later.
Same thing goes for gaming networks. Your use of the hardware needs to be limited by what the gaming network allows. Now, can you take the gaming console and use if for something else? Sure, but only to the extent that it becomes impossible to connect it once again to the gaming network while it has modified firmware/programming.
The Supreme Court decision on AT&T devices also had registration requirements for hardware that was designed by others to connect to the US phone network. And in no way can Sony's proprietary gaming network be compared to the US telephone network.
One worry in the 1970s was that people would connect things like large outdoor bells to the phone network that would draw too much ring current. Hence the "Ringer Equivalence Number" or REN that is required on all devices connecting to the phone network. There were other concerns as well and many of them well-founded. It turns out that with a lot of standards being published and some FCC guidance to manufacturers there hasn't been a publicized case where a mass-market device would screw up the phone network.
Cell phones? Well, we are still waiting to see what might happen. My guess is that someone will come up with a nifty set of firmware or app for a Android phone that will make their calls go through better, less likely to be dropped, etc. Or, just being able to listen in on some other phone's calls. Of course it does this at the expense of every other phone on that tower, but heck, who cares? Do you have any idea how long it would take to figure this out? Or what might be able to be done once something like this was out in the wild? The options might be pretty limited depending on exactly what was being exploited.
This is probably the biggest concern both the handset manufacturers and cell carriers have today. There is no doubt that it is going to happen, probably pretty soon. And you can expect the response to be initially pathetic and then overwhelming - like Federal Marshals searching for phones with the right app/firmware. House to house. With guns.
Yes, but the taxes make all the difference in the world.
In the US you have the employee's salary as an expense. Plus the taxes and benefits which is at least 75% of the salary today. Then there is the cost of the desk, floor space, computer, telephone, etc. Plan on 2x salary and you are going to be a little low but not absurdly so.
Compare this to the offshore contractor at 75% of the US salary. This ends up being around 1/3rd of the cost of a US programmer. That is the key to understanding this, and if you are just looking at salary you are missing the point.
Also, for the company accounting the costs and tax writeoffs are quite different for an employee vs. a contractor. So it can easily end up being the outsourced programmer ends up costing the company 20% of what a US programmer would in real dollars at the end of the year.
Absolutely. A huge problem with dealing with outsourcing is that the specs required are nothing like what people are used to. Your average Indian contracting company will work to the spec and nothing but the spec. If the spec does not say that function calls should be checked for error returns, they will not be. If the spec does not say what each and every error message must be you will get a single question mark for the ones not clearly specified.
My wife has worked with this sort of thing. Management was very happy in moving all the programming jobs to Ireland and India while (short term) keeping the spec writing in the US. What was never understood was that the volume and detail level of the specifications needed to increase 5-10x from what it was. This might have been obvious to anyone that had dealt with outsourced programming before, but it was never factored in.
Of course the end result was that the added costs for spec writing and design ended up pushing those jobs offshore as well. If you are going to spend 10x as many hours on a job, it might as well be done at a cheaper rate. It will be humorous to see what happens to this in the end, but it will take a long while to collapse.
Same company bought a building and all the upper level people were congratulating the VP that pushed the deal through because the building was already wired for networking. Of course it was wired for Token Ring and they were using 100BaseT Ethernet so ever bit of wire had to be ripped out and redone, but that was long after the congratulations. Probably cost them 2-3x what a bare building would have, but nobody figured that out until much, much later.
Simple answer to the employment crisis as well as what to do with all those people streaming over the border from Mexico and points south: more hand labor, less mechanized farming.
Get more people out in the fields and we will all be better off. It was good enough 2000 years ago, it should be good enough today.
You go out on the street and intimidate some poor sop into handing over their phone. Some folks resist mightily and even in peacable Australia, this can lead to some risk for the thief. In Australia I would hope the police might take it as a personal affront to have such a thief operating in their area, so there is that risk as well.
In the US this level of crime is beneath notice for the police so there is no chance of getting arrested. Maybe if you are trying to sell your stock of 500 phones at a table on a street corner there is a little bit of risk.
In exchange for this trouble and risk the phone company promptly disables the phone? What? Why would they do that? How is a thief supposed to have a phone, anyway? Their credit is no good and their finances aren't stable enough for a regular bill in the mail. I guess a prepaid phone might work, but where's the fun in that?
In the US it is much simpler. The phone continues to work and sometimes the original owner keeps getting the bill.
Sorry, but one direction things have gone in since 1980 is the requirement for computer systems to be administered. Not just large mainframe systems, but microcomputers - which today have more lines of code in the operating system than the mainframe systems in the 1980s.
Without knowledgeable administration what you have is a mess. You get computers with thousands of trojans which have been knowingly or unknowningly installed by their users. The user isn't competent to decide that MakeMyComputerFaster.exe is or is not safe to install. If it says it will do something good for the user, they aren't going to care - let's try it!
Today there are some "remote administration" services, but very few and very few that don't come with high fees. So what does the average user do? Go without, and pick up whatever is laying around for them to pick up. The end result for the users of the world is that their computers aren't working for them anymore. So every year or so they have to either take their computer somewhere for "service" or just get a new one.
The App Store model is a way out of this nightmare. It turns the computer into an appliance that is not capable of having random bits of software installed on it. With the user taken out of the equation, you can have a truely secure operating system with little or no opportunity for malware of any sort. Is this what every person on the planet needs? No, and I don't see it being forced on anyone. However, it is the only model that is going to work for 99% of the "users" out there. The alternative is likely just a continuation until the users of the world just give up on home computers entirely because they simply do not work for the user - they work for the malware writer.
Plastic recycling is extremely complicated. Adding the ring on a plastic soda bottle to the mix ruins the entire batch which must then be discarded. So it is extremely important when sorting plastics for recycling that the caps and rings go in a different place than the bottle itself.
This applies to virtually all plastic recycling.
Today in the US there is a great deal of recycling collection but very little actual recycling. Post-consumer paper is almost never actually recycled as there is (a) almost no market for the output and (b) it is extremely susceptible to contamination from coated paper. There is no possibility of recycling coated paper, like magazines and advertising flyers today. Plastic recycling is almost as bad because of the contamination issues. Metals are much easier to deal with and there is actually a market for recycled metal so that does work pretty well. The rest? Not so well. To the point that most recycling collection is sorted into metal and everything else.
I can't imagine composting working very well in a city because of contamination issues. Composting works because of living organisms in the compost heap but if you kill them off (because of contaimination), it stops working.
Whyever would you think that these worms would be "released" into the Martian environment?
Currently, I would offer that such worms would have a lifespan of about 30 seconds in the naked Martian environment, although that does led the potential pollution of the native environment, it doesn't say much about the worms. There would be no utility in doing this.
I suppose you might consider an end-of-experiment strategy of simply dumping the container of worms on the Martian ground, but this would seem to be a highly irresponsible thing to do. I would think that after some period of observation the nutrient supply for the worms would be exhausted and their sealed environment would simply become their nice compact worm-tomb. In theory, this would leave the lander sitting there on the Martian surface waiting for some random Martian lifeform to come along and pry open the container releasing the dead worms. I would offer that if we haven't seen any signs of large Martian lifeforms that would be capable of this action we are probably pretty safe.
I suppose a random meteor could impact the lander opening the worm habitat, but I'd guess the chances of that happening are about equal before or after the worms expired. Similarly, such a meteor could be carrying unknown biological materials and cause as much, if not greater environmental pollution. Because of the much thinner atmosphere, meteors impacting Mars are not going to be subjected to as friction heating as it would impacting Earth, thus preserving whatever might have made the trip through deep space.
So, OK, a complete idiot designing this experiment would probably vote for dumping the worms out into the Martian environment at the end of the experiment. Anything above the level of complete idiot would not consider such an option.
I can buy a book and give it away. If I buy a pdf, I can give that away. If you find someone distributing copies of your book, you can take action against them. Tell the authors that they should be so lucky as to have enough people interested in their book for people to take the effort to redistribute it.
No, you cannot do anything about redistribution online. It is generally done in an untraceable manner - if I upload a PDF to a file sharing site how can it possibly be traced back to me? Once this is done it is not 100% certain there will never be another sale but the word does get out. You can assume at least an 80% drop if the "customers" are inspired to use Google. Why would anyone pay for something they can get for free?
Suggesting to the author that they should be grateful that people have deemed their work worthy to pirate is likely to get you a punch in the nose. Unfortunately, the way things are going if the author was actually planning on getting money from their work they better start looking for a real job.
Yes, you would think that. Except it takes more than an author to write a book that is readable. What the current ebook "revolution" has allowed is authors to publish works in mainstream ways without doing any of the things that make a book readable - they have left out the proofreading, the editing and the design work. End result is unreadable crap.
Amazon has many examples of this, a lot of which are free. Worth exactly what you paid for them.
You would think someone would be able to put together a team that would assist an author in getting a book polished and into a finished form that is readable. You know, sort of like a publisher would.
There is still a need for publishers and it is a very important role. Eliminate the publishers and there will be a huge outpouring of new work from authors... except almost all of it will all be unreadable crap.
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There are a number of exposure vectors for stuff like this. Certainly the average user does not want something that they buy/download to gain additional privileges and do unexpected things. Anything that makes that less likely is going to be required.
I believe these devices are WiFi only and do not have a great deal of radio power, but you can believe anything with a cell radio in it is going to be locked down as tightly as necessary to absolutely prevent changing radio parameters. The first hacker that gets into a cell radio and shows the world how they can disrupt cell communications in their corner of the world will prove the need for this kind of lockdown beyond any doubt. But I don't see how this would apply to these devices.
Certainly both devices are sold either at a loss or at a very, very thin margin with the expectation that they will be used to buy stuff from the parent company and mostly the parent company. Overall, Amazon has been quite generous with the Kindle line - supporting the 3G wireless access for web browsing, email reading, etc. Yes, you can download non-Amazon books through the Amazon-supported wireless access. I suspect with the Fire the capabilities are there to access free and paid content outside of Amazon, but the Amazon stuff is easier to get to. I have no idea what sort of capabilities the Nook has, but I am guessing both have NetFlix access just as an example. So the devices aren't really "owned" by their parent but the expectation that there will be future profits affect the price of the devices. Similar devices are normally priced a bit higher - as much as 50%.
I do not think the parent "subsidy" is the reason for the lockdown as to the average consumer they are no more locked down now than before. If you can still pay NetFlix and watch movies on the device, then it isn't locked to only Amazon or B&N content.
I think the only explanation that is reasonable is the absolute very last thing they want is any sort of downloaded software making its way onto one of these devices and taking it over. Anything that prevents that or makes it less likely is going get pushed out to the user community. Anyone criticizing this doesn't understand the risks or the incredible backlash that would follow from an exploit on one of these devices.
All traffic control devices in one way or another increase accidents. Stop signs are the beginning. Move up from a stop sign to a traffic light and the accidents will increase. Add a left turn arrow and more accidents happen.
Uncontrolled traffic where everyone knows their lives are in their hands constantly is probably the safest, most accident free way for roads to operate. Any controls, including speed limits, are simply arbitrary things that create accidents. The problem is, as we found out in the US around 1920 or so, without any controls beyond a rather low traffic density nobody has any respect for other drivers in the US. This doesn't seem to be a problem in Rome or Istambul, for example.
Google is very, very interested in both recipes and Christmas lists. Recipes need ingredients that you will be shopping for and Google can sell this information to someone that sells the ingredients. Christmas lists mean you will again be buying stuff that Google can sell to merchants that will offer to sell you what you are looking for.
On the Internet there is certainly some truth to the idea that the first thing that pops up is going to get more attention than something you find after doing an exhaustive search for the lowest possible price. So with Google "helping" you with your shopping is going to provide an edge to the merchants that deal with Google.
Oh, you don't think Google data-mines Gmail for such hints? Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
The problem here in Phoenix isn't the people chasing yellow lights. It is the people that simply ignore the red light altogether and go through the intersection using their personal force of will to clear the way ahead. Yes, what I am referring to is where the light has been red for 20-30 seconds and a car comes from nowhere to enter the intersection. Just zipping along counting on the fact that people will avoid a collision.
Sadly, there is nothing that can be done about this because the drivers fall into two broad categories: DGAS (doesn't give a shit) and Mexican. The DGAS factor comes from Scottsdale and such where you have someone driving a $200K car and just keeps paying fines. It is pretty much impossible to successfully fine a Mexican national with Mexican plates in the US today - the police will pull someone over and finding they speak no English and have a Mexican license will just wave them along. No point in writing a ticket up that they will just trash. And Mexico doesn't seem to cooperate to any extent with US law enforcement. Run a red light in Mexico and you will likely just find yourself in a Mexican jail for 10 years if you are a US citizen.
The problerm with that thinking is that none of the systems I have encountered consider you to be running a red like (and therefore take your picture) unless you enter the intersection while the light is red. Entering the intersection when the light is yellow doesn't count even if the light changes to red while you are in the intersection.
In the Phoenix area they now have a red line that is inside of both the "stop line" and the crosswalk that is the point at which you have to cross when the light is red. If you cross that line when the light is yellow, no problem. It may not be marked as clearly in other places as I haven't seen the red line like that anywhere else, but I am sure a similar point exists.
So I don't see much of a difference how long the yellow light is. If you are entering the intersection when the light is yellow you are OK. If you are entering the intersection a while after the light has turned yellow you are either going too fast for conditions or are simply not paying attention to the lights. Whether the yellow light stays up for 5 seconds or 20 seconds really doesn't matter.
Phoenix seems to be one of the top cities for people running red lights anyway. And the cameras do little good because if you have Sonora (Mexico) license plates they really can't do much to you. So you get a free pass. But Phoenix has more intersection cameras (video, not red light) than I have ever seen anywhere so they get nice clear video from five different angles (each of the four directions plus a wide-angle intersection view) for the insurance companies. Again, when the hitter has Sonoran plates it really doesn't matter much to the hitee or the hitee's insurance company. No insurance and no laws apply unless you want to sue in a Mexican court - which nobody ever does.
No, the standard law enforcement process never envisioned a country would sign onto a treaty and then decide not to enforce it.
Let's take extradition for murder, for instance. If a country signs an extradition treaty it is assumed that should a murderer flee there that they can and will be extradited to face trial where the crime was committed. In no case today do I believe this is not done. There are countries that have not signed extradition treaties and countries that place conditions upon extradition but that is a separate matter.
Today, we have countries that allow the hosting of web sites whose sole purpose is the removal of revenue from the sale of digital goods. If I set up a software store that sells pirated copies of high-value products for 1% of their original cost in the US it will be shut down within a day or so. If I do this in other countries - some of which that have signed copyright treaties - the site will continue without any problems.
Until this changes the US and Europe can only consider unilateral action against such countries.
It isn't just the old media. Anyone that attempts to distribute software on the Internet at a fair price is a target. Anyone selling a ebook at a fair price is a target. You want to go along to get along? Fine, start by reducing your price to zero. Anything that is above zero is a direct slap in the face of dedicated people that believe the Star Trek economy can be here tomorrow if they just work hard enough at it. And by redistributing anything digital for free they believe they are pushing the envelope and bringing the Star Trek economy one step closer to reality.
(The Star Trek economy postulates that everything is free and people only work for enjoyment. Maybe after we have replicators... or maybe not.)
Now for the point we agree on... Senators and the like to not give a rat's ass about your or my ability to get money for digital goods on the Internet and if someone outside the US is redistributing our work and insuring we never get another dime from it the fact that there is no recourse today is just too bad. It does not affect them in the slightest bit. The fact that the same rules apply to Disney and THEY have no recourse when someone is redistributing their stuff affects them a great deal. Right in the pocketbook. And potentially in their chance for reelection.
The issue is how do we keep them from throwing out the whole Internet while preserving revenue for you, me and Disney? The answer today of "you can't" is not acceptable, not to the Senate and not to Disney. The fact that they have come up with something is interesting and as a first cut at the problem isn't utterly absurd. It has some significant flaws, there is no getting away from that, but it is certainly something to point at and identify the good and bad points of it. Unfortunately all that has happened so far is pointing at it and saying it is completely bad and nothing should be done at all. That doesn't help you, me or Disney in the slightest little bit.
Something is going to be done, as the current state of affairs is not working very well. Having a situation where the Internet is a lawless zone the moment a country that does not enforce the treaties they have signed onto is not practical. And it isn't going to be tolerated much longer. So how does it get done right?
If the business has a clear policy of not providing tools, such as a lot of auto repair shops, then US income tax deductions are possible. Just barely possible but there can be complications.
In the usual commercial business world if you want to buy an iPhone for use at work there is no way it is going to be tax deductible unless you get the company to give you a letter stating it is a requirement of your job to buy the iPhone and that it will be used only for business purposes.
Absolutely the reason this is popular is cost shifting. You have 50 employees that you want to have iPhones... so the company can spend $25,000 or nothing. Gosh, who would have thought of that?
Now, if everyone buys iPhones there is very little problem with IT support. If 30 people buy iPhones, 10 people buy Android phones and the remaining buy a mix of Windows phones, Open Moko phones and something new that came out last week the IT job will be a nightmare. Same kind of problem happens where everyone buys a different tablet device brings them all to a meeting and someone has instructions for using some iPad-only app for displaying something important. Guess what? The help desk may not be able to resolve this to everyone's satisfaction.
This sounds like a lot of short-term thinking that saves some direct money immediately with a lot of long-term consequences and long-term expense. Mostly, it is really dumb move.
There is no escaping the fact that the entire Google-supplied Android software suite is half-done. There are hundreds of things that need "polishing" and most of these just make life more difficult for the user.
Is the phone a neat toy for geeks? Absolutely. I switched from a recent BlackBerry (Bold 9700) to a Galaxy S II a little over a month ago. There are probably some things that still could be done to "customize" the phone into a more usable state, but you have to contrast this with a phone that comes ready-to-use in an efficient and user-friendly form right out of the box. And in no way is any Android phone efficient or user-friendly right out of the box.
It is hard to blame Samsung for the problems with the phone because they are just taking advantage of a free phone software environment. Rather than spending lots of money developing the phone software they just picked it up free. Can't really say that isn't a really smart thing to do.
Google, on the other hand, supplied nearly all of the software on the phone and is clearly responsible for the ad-hoc unfinished way lots of stuff works. For example, why are there two email applications (Gmail and Exchange) and they are so completely different? One asks for confirmation for a delete, the other one does not. Probably somewhere this is a setting, but why would the shipping default settings be different? And why would the Gmail email client look so much better than the one for other transport types?
Then there is the touch screen keyboard. Incredibly sensitive so that it takes twice as long to type anything. No, they didn't put a lot of effort into figuring out what key you meant to press, they are just taking the first thing that seemed to get poked. The result is a huge number of errors. I haven't seen anyone using the keyboard on an Android phone that isn't being incredibly precise with it - basically because they learned how to use it. Contrast this with a phone where the software works with the user.
I am not a big Apple fan. But they actually spent some time on the software and got their phone working the way people use it. As soon as I can afford to do it, I will be replacing the Galaxy S II with an iPhone. Sadly, I have to switch carriers to do it - no iPhone with 3G on TMobile.
The problem is that reality might set in here. Just because you legalize drugs doesn't mean the prices are going to drop. California legal dispensary weed is the same prices as it is in Chicago on the street. And they aren't taxing it yet. Part of the problem is that the production is difficult enough that they have to pay lots to get people to do it.
There will always be plenty of competition from the cheaper illegal weed that isn't taxed. Want to keep it off the market? Well, then that is back to drug enforcement at the borders.
An alternative might be to take people that have run out of unemployment and put them up somewhere in the Southwest where they could be marijuana and coca growers. Basically free (room and board) labor for growing plants for the government. That might work. Except the Mexican cartels would probably shoot all the slave workers on the plantations. Ooops. Well, there isn't likely to be any shortage of workers any time soon.
Sorry, but legalization isn't going to work any better than saying "buy American" is going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Today marijuana is essentially legal in California and it is not taxed. So what would you expect the price for marijuana to be at California dispensaries? Well, it turns out that it is almost exactly the same price as illegal, imported marijuana is on the street in Chicago. Check it out.
Based on this, legal drugs are likely to always have strong competition from imported illegal drugs. The production costs are going to be much lower for the imports, even with payoffs to local officials. Should cities, states and the federal government start taxing drug sales imports will be significantly cheaper. And how will law enforcement be able to tell the difference between legal, taxed drugs and imported untaxed illegal drugs?
It is very unlikely that we are going to see prices plummet should there legalization. What you are going to see is a gradual eroding of enforcement as has happened over the last 10 years or so. The side effects of programs like California's and Arizona's (if it ever gets off the ground) is that it will be very, very difficult to implement any sort of drug testing for employment. You really can't test for and ban employment because of a legal substance. For example, it is not legal to exclude someone from a job based on alchohol use, although you can fire them later for being drunk on the job.
When does it stop being practical to do drug testing the results should be very interesting on city streets. Imagine the outcry when it is only possible to fire school bus drivers after an accident or two - it is not possible to deny employment to alchoholic candidates today.
It is probably simpler to think that they jammed the control frequency/frequencies in such a manner that the device went into a failure mode. Most UAV things these days have some sort of auto-landing logic that will land it safely if it loses communication. I would think a military aircraft would tolerate loss of communications for a bit longer than other civilian devices but then the question is self-destruct or land? At some point without communications you can't just fly in a straight line.
I seriously doubt these things have enough internal navigation to return to base autonomously. My guess is that during testing the self-destruct option was ruled out as being too brash. Ooops.
I would suspect there might be a rush order for autonomously return to base capabilities on these things. The one problem there of course is how do you integrate a returning (autonomous) drone into the flight control pattern at a busy air base. No, I think that problem is going to have to be solved with shutting everything down until the thing lands if you can't regain control over it.
Did the Iranians take over the control frequency and start flying it? I can't imagine even with an unencrypted control channel that this would be possible.
Marketing is the difference between the book being something that nobody has ever heard of and is ranked dead last in a huge pile of books vs. a book that has been reviewed and rated highly. Getting your Aunt Sally to review the book doesn't count - getting someone with an audience counts. It is not optional, it does matter and if you leave it out you end up unknown with a product that doesn't sell.
Proofreading can be done by the author, but they suffer from the usual problem that they know what is supposed to be there regardless of what is really on the page. Editing is a far different problem - even some very well known authors need editors to cut out a lot of crap that doesn't need to be there.
Typesetting translates 100% into book design. It is not just a pile of text without any form. Ignoring book design is probably error #3 on the self-publishing checklist with 1 and 2 being proofreading and editing.
Illustrations for self-published authors often end up being done by the soccer mom down the street that used to be a graphic artist. Cover design also - which is what all the book catalogs show. A crappy cover on Amazon ends up meaning fewer sales. So sure, authors can hire out the work, but how much are they spending on it?
The answer on all of this is not enough importance is placed on important things and never enough is spent on it. So you end up with a book that would have been interesting and readable but because of a lack of editing it is tedious to read and nobody likes it. You end up with an ugly cover that nobody likes and it turns off browsers. You don't pay enough attention to marketing your book and nobody reads it - the people that do find it after wading through thousands of similar titles see it is rated poorly and nobody they ever heard of reviewed it.
$5K? That might be for a first-time author in a very small niche. Heck, I got a $6K advance on a book about CD and DVD forensics that has sold around 2000 copies.
A published author with any kind of track record of sales is going to be able to command more like $50K as an advance. Of course, how do you get there? By getting a $5K advance on the first few books that do well.
Also, once you are established and have a real name in the marketplace you can make a deal for no advance but a much higher royality rate. So you are getting 15-20%% of every book sold instead of 8%. This is possible when the publisher knows they are going to spend $40K on getting the book out and make $200K from it.
Part of the problem with self-published books is no matter how good the author is, they are never going to spend $40K on publishing a book, ever. You are going to have a cover that was done by a neighbor that once used to be a graphic artist before they became a soccer mom. You are going to have a book design straight out of a word processor sample template. And it will have been proofread by five people that are astounded by the author's vocabulary. Editing? Probably none at all, or just some suggestions from someone the author plays golf with.
Your rights to modify the hardware and/or software need to stop at the point where it even potentially interferes with other's use of the network.
There is no logical reason why an exploit for cell towers cannot be found which would allow your calls and only your calls to go through. As the cell tower programming is dealing with a known entity it likely has as many back doors and security exposures as the phone network in the 1960s and 1970s did. Still. Blue boxes are illegal to own today and it is likely modified firmware for a cell phone is going to be put in the same status by some crafty hackers. I'd guess sooner rather than later.
Same thing goes for gaming networks. Your use of the hardware needs to be limited by what the gaming network allows. Now, can you take the gaming console and use if for something else? Sure, but only to the extent that it becomes impossible to connect it once again to the gaming network while it has modified firmware/programming.
The Supreme Court decision on AT&T devices also had registration requirements for hardware that was designed by others to connect to the US phone network. And in no way can Sony's proprietary gaming network be compared to the US telephone network.
One worry in the 1970s was that people would connect things like large outdoor bells to the phone network that would draw too much ring current. Hence the "Ringer Equivalence Number" or REN that is required on all devices connecting to the phone network. There were other concerns as well and many of them well-founded. It turns out that with a lot of standards being published and some FCC guidance to manufacturers there hasn't been a publicized case where a mass-market device would screw up the phone network.
Cell phones? Well, we are still waiting to see what might happen. My guess is that someone will come up with a nifty set of firmware or app for a Android phone that will make their calls go through better, less likely to be dropped, etc. Or, just being able to listen in on some other phone's calls. Of course it does this at the expense of every other phone on that tower, but heck, who cares? Do you have any idea how long it would take to figure this out? Or what might be able to be done once something like this was out in the wild? The options might be pretty limited depending on exactly what was being exploited.
This is probably the biggest concern both the handset manufacturers and cell carriers have today. There is no doubt that it is going to happen, probably pretty soon. And you can expect the response to be initially pathetic and then overwhelming - like Federal Marshals searching for phones with the right app/firmware. House to house. With guns.
Yes, but the taxes make all the difference in the world.
In the US you have the employee's salary as an expense. Plus the taxes and benefits which is at least 75% of the salary today. Then there is the cost of the desk, floor space, computer, telephone, etc. Plan on 2x salary and you are going to be a little low but not absurdly so.
Compare this to the offshore contractor at 75% of the US salary. This ends up being around 1/3rd of the cost of a US programmer. That is the key to understanding this, and if you are just looking at salary you are missing the point.
Also, for the company accounting the costs and tax writeoffs are quite different for an employee vs. a contractor. So it can easily end up being the outsourced programmer ends up costing the company 20% of what a US programmer would in real dollars at the end of the year.
Absolutely. A huge problem with dealing with outsourcing is that the specs required are nothing like what people are used to. Your average Indian contracting company will work to the spec and nothing but the spec. If the spec does not say that function calls should be checked for error returns, they will not be. If the spec does not say what each and every error message must be you will get a single question mark for the ones not clearly specified.
My wife has worked with this sort of thing. Management was very happy in moving all the programming jobs to Ireland and India while (short term) keeping the spec writing in the US. What was never understood was that the volume and detail level of the specifications needed to increase 5-10x from what it was. This might have been obvious to anyone that had dealt with outsourced programming before, but it was never factored in.
Of course the end result was that the added costs for spec writing and design ended up pushing those jobs offshore as well. If you are going to spend 10x as many hours on a job, it might as well be done at a cheaper rate. It will be humorous to see what happens to this in the end, but it will take a long while to collapse.
Same company bought a building and all the upper level people were congratulating the VP that pushed the deal through because the building was already wired for networking. Of course it was wired for Token Ring and they were using 100BaseT Ethernet so ever bit of wire had to be ripped out and redone, but that was long after the congratulations. Probably cost them 2-3x what a bare building would have, but nobody figured that out until much, much later.
Simple answer to the employment crisis as well as what to do with all those people streaming over the border from Mexico and points south: more hand labor, less mechanized farming.
Get more people out in the fields and we will all be better off. It was good enough 2000 years ago, it should be good enough today.
Ethical? Come on, think of the thief here.
You go out on the street and intimidate some poor sop into handing over their phone. Some folks resist mightily and even in peacable Australia, this can lead to some risk for the thief. In Australia I would hope the police might take it as a personal affront to have such a thief operating in their area, so there is that risk as well.
In the US this level of crime is beneath notice for the police so there is no chance of getting arrested. Maybe if you are trying to sell your stock of 500 phones at a table on a street corner there is a little bit of risk.
In exchange for this trouble and risk the phone company promptly disables the phone? What? Why would they do that? How is a thief supposed to have a phone, anyway? Their credit is no good and their finances aren't stable enough for a regular bill in the mail. I guess a prepaid phone might work, but where's the fun in that?
In the US it is much simpler. The phone continues to work and sometimes the original owner keeps getting the bill.
Sorry, but one direction things have gone in since 1980 is the requirement for computer systems to be administered. Not just large mainframe systems, but microcomputers - which today have more lines of code in the operating system than the mainframe systems in the 1980s.
Without knowledgeable administration what you have is a mess. You get computers with thousands of trojans which have been knowingly or unknowningly installed by their users. The user isn't competent to decide that MakeMyComputerFaster.exe is or is not safe to install. If it says it will do something good for the user, they aren't going to care - let's try it!
Today there are some "remote administration" services, but very few and very few that don't come with high fees. So what does the average user do? Go without, and pick up whatever is laying around for them to pick up. The end result for the users of the world is that their computers aren't working for them anymore. So every year or so they have to either take their computer somewhere for "service" or just get a new one.
The App Store model is a way out of this nightmare. It turns the computer into an appliance that is not capable of having random bits of software installed on it. With the user taken out of the equation, you can have a truely secure operating system with little or no opportunity for malware of any sort. Is this what every person on the planet needs? No, and I don't see it being forced on anyone. However, it is the only model that is going to work for 99% of the "users" out there. The alternative is likely just a continuation until the users of the world just give up on home computers entirely because they simply do not work for the user - they work for the malware writer.
Plastic recycling is extremely complicated. Adding the ring on a plastic soda bottle to the mix ruins the entire batch which must then be discarded. So it is extremely important when sorting plastics for recycling that the caps and rings go in a different place than the bottle itself.
This applies to virtually all plastic recycling.
Today in the US there is a great deal of recycling collection but very little actual recycling. Post-consumer paper is almost never actually recycled as there is (a) almost no market for the output and (b) it is extremely susceptible to contamination from coated paper. There is no possibility of recycling coated paper, like magazines and advertising flyers today. Plastic recycling is almost as bad because of the contamination issues. Metals are much easier to deal with and there is actually a market for recycled metal so that does work pretty well. The rest? Not so well. To the point that most recycling collection is sorted into metal and everything else.
I can't imagine composting working very well in a city because of contamination issues. Composting works because of living organisms in the compost heap but if you kill them off (because of contaimination), it stops working.
Whyever would you think that these worms would be "released" into the Martian environment?
Currently, I would offer that such worms would have a lifespan of about 30 seconds in the naked Martian environment, although that does led the potential pollution of the native environment, it doesn't say much about the worms. There would be no utility in doing this.
I suppose you might consider an end-of-experiment strategy of simply dumping the container of worms on the Martian ground, but this would seem to be a highly irresponsible thing to do. I would think that after some period of observation the nutrient supply for the worms would be exhausted and their sealed environment would simply become their nice compact worm-tomb. In theory, this would leave the lander sitting there on the Martian surface waiting for some random Martian lifeform to come along and pry open the container releasing the dead worms. I would offer that if we haven't seen any signs of large Martian lifeforms that would be capable of this action we are probably pretty safe.
I suppose a random meteor could impact the lander opening the worm habitat, but I'd guess the chances of that happening are about equal before or after the worms expired. Similarly, such a meteor could be carrying unknown biological materials and cause as much, if not greater environmental pollution. Because of the much thinner atmosphere, meteors impacting Mars are not going to be subjected to as friction heating as it would impacting Earth, thus preserving whatever might have made the trip through deep space.
So, OK, a complete idiot designing this experiment would probably vote for dumping the worms out into the Martian environment at the end of the experiment. Anything above the level of complete idiot would not consider such an option.
I can buy a book and give it away. If I buy a pdf, I can give that away. If you find someone distributing copies of your book, you can take action against them. Tell the authors that they should be so lucky as to have enough people interested in their book for people to take the effort to redistribute it.
No, you cannot do anything about redistribution online. It is generally done in an untraceable manner - if I upload a PDF to a file sharing site how can it possibly be traced back to me? Once this is done it is not 100% certain there will never be another sale but the word does get out. You can assume at least an 80% drop if the "customers" are inspired to use Google. Why would anyone pay for something they can get for free?
Suggesting to the author that they should be grateful that people have deemed their work worthy to pirate is likely to get you a punch in the nose. Unfortunately, the way things are going if the author was actually planning on getting money from their work they better start looking for a real job.
Yes, you would think that. Except it takes more than an author to write a book that is readable. What the current ebook "revolution" has allowed is authors to publish works in mainstream ways without doing any of the things that make a book readable - they have left out the proofreading, the editing and the design work. End result is unreadable crap.
Amazon has many examples of this, a lot of which are free. Worth exactly what you paid for them.
You would think someone would be able to put together a team that would assist an author in getting a book polished and into a finished form that is readable. You know, sort of like a publisher would.
There is still a need for publishers and it is a very important role. Eliminate the publishers and there will be a huge outpouring of new work from authors... except almost all of it will all be unreadable crap.