But you wouldn't expect to go into a physical Apple Store and have to inspect the merchandise to make sure it isn't fake, would you? It's up to the owner of a store to protect its reputation by ensuring the quality of the merchandise sold there. If Apple wants to give an experience equivalent to buying gear out of a cardboard box in an alley, that's up to them, but I'm not sure that's the smart move.
Nope. If you look at the website, it shows 150m lateral stand-off from "Crowds and built up areas", with no vertical limit, i.e. do not overfly crowds and built up areas at any height. The 50m exclusion is for small numbers of people/properties away from built up areas. So if you're flying out in the country, you can fly over some people or a property so long as you're above 50m.
Now what exactly is the definition of "built up area" I'm not sure, because those definitions could be taken to mean "don't fly in a city, full stop", which would be a bit of a pain. That doesn't seem to be clearly defined.
How much is too much? Basic business rules say that you charge as much as the market will bear. Since the biggest problem with selling the iPhone 7 at the moment seems to be getting enough of them in stock to satisfy demand, I would say that the market is bearing the current prices just fine. Thus they cannot be said to be charging "too much".
Apple's initial pricing scheme for the iPhone actually was different from the norm, but what Ballmer is missing is that it didn't work, and was dropped. So I'm not sure if Ballmer is talking about the initial unsuccessful model or the (as you say already widespread) traditional model that they reverted to. Not clever either way.
The pricing for 1st generation iPhone was a departure from the traditional wireless pricing model. Apple sold the phone to consumers at a modest discount and recouped their lost profit through kickbacks from AT&T in the form of a cut of the monthly service revenue. This was a great deal for Apple and AT&T but terrible for consumers. Consumers had to pay almost full price ($500-600) for an iPhone AND had to sign a 2-year contract. AT&T offered only 3 rate plans, which fortunately were price competitive with other carriers. These plans included an allocation of voice minutes, 200 text messages and unlimited data. However the original iPhone did not support 3G data or picture/video messaging, like a lot of the other phones on the market. Goldman Sachs predicted AT&T would activate 700,000 iPhones on launch weekend, they only activated 146,000.
While sales of the original iPhone were growing steadily, they were missing out on mass appeal because of the iPhone’s high initial cost. For the iPhone 3G, AT&T re-negotiated the revenue sharing deal and went back to a traditional handset subsidy model. Consumers would pay $200 less for the iPhone 3G. While $199 for an iPhone looked great, AT&T made some changes to the rate plans. The net result was that to get the same thing as you got with the original iPhone, (voice, unlimited data and 200 texts), you would pay $15 more per month ($10 for 3G data and $5 for 200 texts).
There are no intermissions or breaks on 3 hour long movies.
Slightly side-issue, but a lot of movies are way too long anyway. Sure, there's the odd Schindler's List or whatever that actually has three hours of story to tell. But Batman v Superman? F**k off with that. These shitty movie directors need to get their egos under control and realise that that kind of movie needs to be 90-100 minutes tops. More isn't necessarily better when you're telling a story that isn't actually very complicated or fundamentally interesting.
Yahoo! and AOL may be somewhat toxic amongst techies, but I'm not sure that's the case with the general public. Have a look at this, for example; they generally seem to have a pretty good rep. with Joe Public.
This is insanely stupid. Entities simulated in computer programs can't "break out" of the simulation: if you stop the simulation, they cease to exist.
That's two very separate statements. The latter is patently true; if you stop the simulation, entities within the simulation will cease to exist. The former, however, is not so simple. First you need to define what it means to "break out" of the simulation. The entities could certainly try to prove that they exist in a simulation. They could try and determine the nature and functioning of that simulation. And the could then try to hack the simulation itself, and therefore potentially be able to interact to some degree with things outside the simulation, for starting with whatever system the simulation is running on, which I would personally class as "breaking out" of the simulation.
Now if you want to talk about the entities actually existing entirely outside the simulation, that's a whole other level.
Note that it's a French bank. In Europe (at least the UK where I live and the other parts of Europe that I've travelled to), we use chip cards, which means that that is already a solved problem here; cloning the magnetic strip doesn't get you the PIN number, and you can't do anything without that. So you don't need any fancy changing card number to solve that problem, you north-Americans just need to get with the program. As long as you can make transactions with just something as easily cloneable as the magnetic strip, you're going to have that problem.
That depends on the bitrate of the source video. For example, it would certainly be reasonable to compress h.264 video from a BluRay disc to h.265, since people already compress that to h.264 with what are generally considered to be acceptable results.
So what's your problem? There's no reason to believe that other than changing the branding, there's going to be any major change in direction. They probably want to drive some slightly more interesting hardware designs, as the Nexus phones have become a little boring.
I had a Nexus S back in the day (still in a drawer somewhere actually), with the contoured Super AMOLED screen; that was an interesting and distinctive phone at the time. By comparison, there's not much exciting about my Nexus 5, it's a good phone at a decent price, but that's as exciting as it gets. So if they're going to make things more interesting again with the hardware, I'm all for it.
Except it is peer-to-peer, it uses Google servers to initially set up the call, but the actual call traffic is direct. Don't take your facts from a random AC without a bit of checking.
I don't think this will be of any interest or make any difference to impatient drivers, who already use the obvious ways of knowing when the light is about to go green.
On the other hand, all the slow-witted people who seem to fall asleep when the light turns red, and then take forever to start moving when it goes green, might well benefit from this. It would benefit further from a loud alarm at the 5 second mark, and maybe a flashing red display on the dash saying "FOCUS!", but maybe that's asking too much.
I don't see anything in the article about the bot fighting evictions of non-paying tenants. It's talking about helping people who are already homeless to successfully apply for emergency council housing, and helping them get in touch with housing charities.
There's nothing to stop non-British websites from being rated by a UK body, and blocked by British ISPs if necessary; they already block non-UK pirate sites for example. They could easily set criteria such as revenue or visitors per day, so sites with say more than 500 visitors per day, or sites with a certain amount of traffic per day would need to be rated, or whatever.
That's not to say the whole idea isn't incredibly dumb and impractical, but there's no technical barrier to those parts, other than scale. The bottleneck would be actually doing the rating, which would be pretty much impossible unless you're talking an incredibly small subset of websites.
The primary driving factor in the design of passenger aircraft in recent decades has been getting the cost per passenger down, so a solution against which can be said "the whole obsolete airport and airline infrastructure must be rebuilt" has pretty much zero chance of happening, since that would be somewhat expensive.
As far as the safety aspect, the idea of having a detachable passenger compartment that can separately parachute-land in the event of a disaster is also not new, and the obvious issues mentioned in that article seem to apply here also. Big increase in cost to achieve a questionable and at best marginal overall safety improvement in what is already the safest for of transport is just dumb.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see people working on this kind of thing, and I don't want to be that guy that dismisses every futuristic conceptbecause of a few practical obstacles, but I do wish tech journalists would present such things in a more realistic way. Lines like "... and his team are preparing to build a small-scale Clip-Air prototype. They have already initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry" tries to make it sound like this is something on the path to possibly being implemented, whereas the reality is "contacts with the aerospace industry" might not mean much at all.
But the reality is that incidents like this are almost an everyday occurrence. We're averaging about one terrorist incident per day this year (see a month-by-month breakdown), including shootings, suicide bombings, and vehicular attacks. Several a month have comparable death tolls to this latest Istanbul attack. It just isn't a big enough event to warrant it being on slashdot; non-tech "stuff that matters" can't be stuff that happens every day. If the death toll was in the hundreds, then maybe.
What you seem to not understand is that when we say "non-removable battery", it generally doesn't mean that you can't replace it when it's failed. It means it takes five minutes to replace, and probably requires some tools, as opposed to just unclipping a cover by hand and pulling it out, that's all. Few phones have batteries so glued in or whatever that it actually can't be replaced. Certainly with my Nexus 5 "non-removable" battery, you only have to pop off the back cover with a pry tool and the battery is accessible, you could probably swap it out in two minutes if you were in a hurry.
Could someone wrap up in a few words how you could scam money from people who want to SELL something?
I was wondering that. There's probably a lot of different scams, but a commonly documented one seems to be that the "buyer" will send you a fake cheque for a larger value than what you are selling the item for under some pretext or other, and ask you to cash it and send them the difference via various hard to trace means. Often banks will cash the cheque and not discover the fraud until later, when you will be on he hook to pay the bank back the full value of the cheque.
Interestingly, Chrome was the first to kill the laptop in the video streaming test at 4 hours and 19 minutes. Firefox closely followed its rival at 5 hours and 9 minutes, while Opera (running on the same tech as Chrome) managed to hit 6 hours and 18 minutes. In Microsoft's tests, it was found that Edge was best of the bunch when it came to enjoying a video online, lasting for 7 hours and 22 minutes.
Was this an HTML5 video, or was it playing in Flash player or some other plugin? It doesn't seem to say in the article, unless I missed it (I only skimmed), but I'm thinking that would make a big difference.
I do go to youtube for music (I don't use any streaming service, so if I want to check out some artist that's not in my collection, youtube is a pretty good way to check out a few songs), and 99% of the time it's the artist's VEVO or whatever official channel. TBH I'm not really aware of having heard any unlicensed music on youtube, although I guess there will have been background music that I wouldn't particularly know or notice if it was licensed or not.
To be honest, the "I think any free-tiered service is not fair." quote gives the game away here; it's not stolen content Reznor is concerned about, it's free content. The moaning about stolen content is just a red herring. What they really want is for all free sources of music to start charging, or otherwise increase monetization, and give them a nice fat cut.
I have one, and it's great, but it sure isn't the "rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet" that the submitter is asking for. But I think the submitter needs to explain why he thinks he needs those specs, because the fact is tablet specs actually don't suck, since they're good enough for the task most people use them for, and I can't see how most people would benefit from the specs he's asking for.
apparently these days cheap is all that matters - quality doesn't
This.
Nobody is interested in making a good product, only a cheap product.
The issue is that nobody is willing to pay for high-end tablets. A few years ago, there were more premium tablets around, and they didn't sell.
The fact is that high end phones sell because a) many people get them on contract with low up-front cost, and b) people carry their phones around and use them a lot every single day, so it's easier to justify. By constrast, you mostly have to pay up-front for a tablet, and for many people it's used a lot less than a phone, and so for the majority, a cheap tablet is just fine, especially since today's premium tablet will be outperformed by budget tablets in less than two years.
Wow. I'm not on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, but I do have a twitter account. Which I only use for following porn stars and for trolling. Guess I won't be renting via any agency that uses this service;).
In all honesty, I highly doubt this will stand up. In connection with employers asking for social media passwords of employees;
A spokesman for the ICO [Information Commissioner's Office] said: "The UK Data Protection Act clearly says that organisations shouldn't hold excessive information about individuals, and it's questionable why they would need that information in the first place." [...] "In the UK, however, it would potentially put employers in breach of the Data Protection Act because it would constitute "excessive" information about an individual, the ICO indicated. "We would have very serious concerns if this practice was to become the norm in the UK," (article).
If that's true for employers, I'd say it's way more true for landlords and letting agencies, so I'd expect the ICO to have a few things to say on this. Seems like a probable violation of the Data Protection Act.
Slashdot Mirror
But you wouldn't expect to go into a physical Apple Store and have to inspect the merchandise to make sure it isn't fake, would you? It's up to the owner of a store to protect its reputation by ensuring the quality of the merchandise sold there. If Apple wants to give an experience equivalent to buying gear out of a cardboard box in an alley, that's up to them, but I'm not sure that's the smart move.
Nope. If you look at the website, it shows 150m lateral stand-off from "Crowds and built up areas", with no vertical limit, i.e. do not overfly crowds and built up areas at any height. The 50m exclusion is for small numbers of people/properties away from built up areas. So if you're flying out in the country, you can fly over some people or a property so long as you're above 50m.
Now what exactly is the definition of "built up area" I'm not sure, because those definitions could be taken to mean "don't fly in a city, full stop", which would be a bit of a pain. That doesn't seem to be clearly defined.
How much is too much? Basic business rules say that you charge as much as the market will bear. Since the biggest problem with selling the iPhone 7 at the moment seems to be getting enough of them in stock to satisfy demand, I would say that the market is bearing the current prices just fine. Thus they cannot be said to be charging "too much".
Apple's initial pricing scheme for the iPhone actually was different from the norm, but what Ballmer is missing is that it didn't work, and was dropped. So I'm not sure if Ballmer is talking about the initial unsuccessful model or the (as you say already widespread) traditional model that they reverted to. Not clever either way.
The pricing for 1st generation iPhone was a departure from the traditional wireless pricing model. Apple sold the phone to consumers at a modest discount and recouped their lost profit through kickbacks from AT&T in the form of a cut of the monthly service revenue. This was a great deal for Apple and AT&T but terrible for consumers. Consumers had to pay almost full price ($500-600) for an iPhone AND had to sign a 2-year contract. AT&T offered only 3 rate plans, which fortunately were price competitive with other carriers. These plans included an allocation of voice minutes, 200 text messages and unlimited data. However the original iPhone did not support 3G data or picture/video messaging, like a lot of the other phones on the market. Goldman Sachs predicted AT&T would activate 700,000 iPhones on launch weekend, they only activated 146,000.
While sales of the original iPhone were growing steadily, they were missing out on mass appeal because of the iPhone’s high initial cost. For the iPhone 3G, AT&T re-negotiated the revenue sharing deal and went back to a traditional handset subsidy model. Consumers would pay $200 less for the iPhone 3G. While $199 for an iPhone looked great, AT&T made some changes to the rate plans. The net result was that to get the same thing as you got with the original iPhone, (voice, unlimited data and 200 texts), you would pay $15 more per month ($10 for 3G data and $5 for 200 texts).
(from AT&T and the iPhone
How could Amazon ensure that they can reach out and delete books from your Kindle if they are stored on a removable card?
There are no intermissions or breaks on 3 hour long movies.
Slightly side-issue, but a lot of movies are way too long anyway. Sure, there's the odd Schindler's List or whatever that actually has three hours of story to tell. But Batman v Superman? F**k off with that. These shitty movie directors need to get their egos under control and realise that that kind of movie needs to be 90-100 minutes tops. More isn't necessarily better when you're telling a story that isn't actually very complicated or fundamentally interesting.
Yahoo! and AOL may be somewhat toxic amongst techies, but I'm not sure that's the case with the general public. Have a look at this, for example; they generally seem to have a pretty good rep. with Joe Public.
This is insanely stupid. Entities simulated in computer programs can't "break out" of the simulation: if you stop the simulation, they cease to exist.
That's two very separate statements. The latter is patently true; if you stop the simulation, entities within the simulation will cease to exist. The former, however, is not so simple. First you need to define what it means to "break out" of the simulation. The entities could certainly try to prove that they exist in a simulation. They could try and determine the nature and functioning of that simulation. And the could then try to hack the simulation itself, and therefore potentially be able to interact to some degree with things outside the simulation, for starting with whatever system the simulation is running on, which I would personally class as "breaking out" of the simulation.
Now if you want to talk about the entities actually existing entirely outside the simulation, that's a whole other level.
Note that it's a French bank. In Europe (at least the UK where I live and the other parts of Europe that I've travelled to), we use chip cards, which means that that is already a solved problem here; cloning the magnetic strip doesn't get you the PIN number, and you can't do anything without that. So you don't need any fancy changing card number to solve that problem, you north-Americans just need to get with the program. As long as you can make transactions with just something as easily cloneable as the magnetic strip, you're going to have that problem.
That depends on the bitrate of the source video. For example, it would certainly be reasonable to compress h.264 video from a BluRay disc to h.265, since people already compress that to h.264 with what are generally considered to be acceptable results.
So what's your problem? There's no reason to believe that other than changing the branding, there's going to be any major change in direction. They probably want to drive some slightly more interesting hardware designs, as the Nexus phones have become a little boring.
I had a Nexus S back in the day (still in a drawer somewhere actually), with the contoured Super AMOLED screen; that was an interesting and distinctive phone at the time. By comparison, there's not much exciting about my Nexus 5, it's a good phone at a decent price, but that's as exciting as it gets. So if they're going to make things more interesting again with the hardware, I'm all for it.
Except it is peer-to-peer, it uses Google servers to initially set up the call, but the actual call traffic is direct. Don't take your facts from a random AC without a bit of checking.
I don't think this will be of any interest or make any difference to impatient drivers, who already use the obvious ways of knowing when the light is about to go green.
On the other hand, all the slow-witted people who seem to fall asleep when the light turns red, and then take forever to start moving when it goes green, might well benefit from this. It would benefit further from a loud alarm at the 5 second mark, and maybe a flashing red display on the dash saying "FOCUS!", but maybe that's asking too much.
I don't see anything in the article about the bot fighting evictions of non-paying tenants. It's talking about helping people who are already homeless to successfully apply for emergency council housing, and helping them get in touch with housing charities.
Yes, but any fashionista will tell you that nothing stays in fashion for four years.
There's nothing to stop non-British websites from being rated by a UK body, and blocked by British ISPs if necessary; they already block non-UK pirate sites for example. They could easily set criteria such as revenue or visitors per day, so sites with say more than 500 visitors per day, or sites with a certain amount of traffic per day would need to be rated, or whatever.
That's not to say the whole idea isn't incredibly dumb and impractical, but there's no technical barrier to those parts, other than scale. The bottleneck would be actually doing the rating, which would be pretty much impossible unless you're talking an incredibly small subset of websites.
I've heard something similar proposed several times, for example Airbus Patent Shows Modular, Removable Aircraft Cabins, and the same issues are discussed every time.
The primary driving factor in the design of passenger aircraft in recent decades has been getting the cost per passenger down, so a solution against which can be said "the whole obsolete airport and airline infrastructure must be rebuilt" has pretty much zero chance of happening, since that would be somewhat expensive.
As far as the safety aspect, the idea of having a detachable passenger compartment that can separately parachute-land in the event of a disaster is also not new, and the obvious issues mentioned in that article seem to apply here also. Big increase in cost to achieve a questionable and at best marginal overall safety improvement in what is already the safest for of transport is just dumb.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see people working on this kind of thing, and I don't want to be that guy that dismisses every futuristic conceptbecause of a few practical obstacles, but I do wish tech journalists would present such things in a more realistic way. Lines like "... and his team are preparing to build a small-scale Clip-Air prototype. They have already initiated some contacts with the aerospace industry" tries to make it sound like this is something on the path to possibly being implemented, whereas the reality is "contacts with the aerospace industry" might not mean much at all.
But the reality is that incidents like this are almost an everyday occurrence. We're averaging about one terrorist incident per day this year (see a month-by-month breakdown), including shootings, suicide bombings, and vehicular attacks. Several a month have comparable death tolls to this latest Istanbul attack. It just isn't a big enough event to warrant it being on slashdot; non-tech "stuff that matters" can't be stuff that happens every day. If the death toll was in the hundreds, then maybe.
What you seem to not understand is that when we say "non-removable battery", it generally doesn't mean that you can't replace it when it's failed. It means it takes five minutes to replace, and probably requires some tools, as opposed to just unclipping a cover by hand and pulling it out, that's all. Few phones have batteries so glued in or whatever that it actually can't be replaced. Certainly with my Nexus 5 "non-removable" battery, you only have to pop off the back cover with a pry tool and the battery is accessible, you could probably swap it out in two minutes if you were in a hurry.
Could someone wrap up in a few words how you could scam money from people who want to SELL something?
I was wondering that. There's probably a lot of different scams, but a commonly documented one seems to be that the "buyer" will send you a fake cheque for a larger value than what you are selling the item for under some pretext or other, and ask you to cash it and send them the difference via various hard to trace means. Often banks will cash the cheque and not discover the fraud until later, when you will be on he hook to pay the bank back the full value of the cheque.
Interestingly, Chrome was the first to kill the laptop in the video streaming test at 4 hours and 19 minutes. Firefox closely followed its rival at 5 hours and 9 minutes, while Opera (running on the same tech as Chrome) managed to hit 6 hours and 18 minutes. In Microsoft's tests, it was found that Edge was best of the bunch when it came to enjoying a video online, lasting for 7 hours and 22 minutes.
Was this an HTML5 video, or was it playing in Flash player or some other plugin? It doesn't seem to say in the article, unless I missed it (I only skimmed), but I'm thinking that would make a big difference.
I do go to youtube for music (I don't use any streaming service, so if I want to check out some artist that's not in my collection, youtube is a pretty good way to check out a few songs), and 99% of the time it's the artist's VEVO or whatever official channel. TBH I'm not really aware of having heard any unlicensed music on youtube, although I guess there will have been background music that I wouldn't particularly know or notice if it was licensed or not.
To be honest, the "I think any free-tiered service is not fair." quote gives the game away here; it's not stolen content Reznor is concerned about, it's free content. The moaning about stolen content is just a red herring. What they really want is for all free sources of music to start charging, or otherwise increase monetization, and give them a nice fat cut.
I have one, and it's great, but it sure isn't the "rugged 16GB RAM / 1TB Storage / 20-hour battery tablet" that the submitter is asking for. But I think the submitter needs to explain why he thinks he needs those specs, because the fact is tablet specs actually don't suck, since they're good enough for the task most people use them for, and I can't see how most people would benefit from the specs he's asking for.
apparently these days cheap is all that matters - quality doesn't
This.
Nobody is interested in making a good product, only a cheap product.
The issue is that nobody is willing to pay for high-end tablets. A few years ago, there were more premium tablets around, and they didn't sell.
The fact is that high end phones sell because a) many people get them on contract with low up-front cost, and b) people carry their phones around and use them a lot every single day, so it's easier to justify. By constrast, you mostly have to pay up-front for a tablet, and for many people it's used a lot less than a phone, and so for the majority, a cheap tablet is just fine, especially since today's premium tablet will be outperformed by budget tablets in less than two years.
Wow. I'm not on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram, but I do have a twitter account. Which I only use for following porn stars and for trolling. Guess I won't be renting via any agency that uses this service ;).
In all honesty, I highly doubt this will stand up. In connection with employers asking for social media passwords of employees;
A spokesman for the ICO [Information Commissioner's Office] said: "The UK Data Protection Act clearly says that organisations shouldn't hold excessive information about individuals, and it's questionable why they would need that information in the first place." [...] "In the UK, however, it would potentially put employers in breach of the Data Protection Act because it would constitute "excessive" information about an individual, the ICO indicated. "We would have very serious concerns if this practice was to become the norm in the UK," (article).
If that's true for employers, I'd say it's way more true for landlords and letting agencies, so I'd expect the ICO to have a few things to say on this. Seems like a probable violation of the Data Protection Act.