Actually, the revenue is a lot more complex than that. Newspapers are loaded with advertisements, and I can assure you that the dollar you spend on the paper is more than matched by the money advertisers pay to get those ads inserted. Also, keep in mind that the number of papers sold is not equal to the number of readers: newspapers are often given from one person to another, left on a bench or a subway train, etc.
Actually, if you are referring to the bibles that the Gideon society leaves in hotel rooms, that is in modern English. You can tell it is in modern English because, as a native English speaker, you have little difficulty reading it. Also, "wife" is not spelled "wyf," as it would be in middle English, and it does not read like German or contain any "ash" (æ) characters, at it would if it were actually old English.
Certain sex offenses do have a high recidivism rate. Child molesters -- I'll be specific and note that I mean prepubescent children -- are very likely to commit their crime over and over again, even after a prison sentence. On the other hand, a healthy, normal 20 year old who goes to a party and sleeps with a 15 year old (who looks like an 18 year old) is not likely to commit his crime again, especially if he goes to jail for it.
The real problem is that we have a habit of grouping all "sex offenders" together, as do our politicians. There are many kinds of sex offenses, ranging from the truly disturbing child predator variety to simply urinating in a park when you are drunk. If the voting public demands laws that allow the government to monitor the activities of a child molester 24x7, the laws should be written to reflect a specific intent to target convicted child molesters, and avoid the broad "sex offender" term.
It may not be entirely uninformed speculation; Red Hat has been picking up a lot of higher level projects and companies over the past few years, and the focus of the Fedora project (which is Red Hat's official desktop strategy) is mostly on improving the userland. The acquisition of JBOSS and Metamatrix are key steps in the direction of a more application-centric focus; as a case in point, roughly half of the supported JBOSS installations worldwide are running on Windows.
This is not to say that Red Hat is not interested in the Linux kernel. All the work on virtualization requires a decent kernel team, as does a lot of the security/SELinux work, and the support for RHEL. However, the main focus of Red Hat will probably continue to shift toward applications, which is where the money really is (you can only make so much money supporting a kernel and basic GNU userland).
"Science is a hard sell since robots can do maybe 95% of the same work with maybe 5% of the budget."
Exactly, and that was even the case during the Apollo missions. Kennedy had been told that, in terms of science, all the work planned for human astronauts could be done by robots, which would be less dangerous and less expensive. Of course, non-scientists are not really aware of this...
Exactly. Microsoft has essentially reached the same position that IBM reached: huge, almost a monopoly, and never really going to vanish. Microsoft will undoubtedly fall from the #1 position in some markets, just like IBM did, but they will not vanish altogether.
Privacy and the right to privacy have nothing to do with terrorism either. The illegal mass wiretapping performed by the federal government had nothing to do with terrorism, and neither did the war in Iraq. Just because someone utters the words "war on terror" does not mean that everything they do is in some way related to capturing terrorists. As a case in point, several FBI agents have been discovered working undercover in peace groups, under the veil of "terrorism related investigations."
Just look at websites like Facebook and Myspace. You are basically telling those companies, through their website, who you are, who your friends are, where you like to hang out, etc. There is a rapidly decreasing margin of privacy for the government to encroach on; just quickly looking through someone's Facebook profile tells you who their friends are, and which of those friends they hang out with the most (based on which friends are most likely to appear in pictures with the target of interest). That's enough information to track down and capture a person, and nobody had to leave their office or interview anyone. The worst part? People are voluntarily giving this information to Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, and so forth.
Senators do protect trade secrets when they are investigating an industry. Investigations into the health complications of soft drinks never resulted in the formula for coca cola being stored in the national archives or any other public record. It is not an official protection, but it is still protected by the senators on their own, as part of an effort to keep everything "friendly" (that is to say, not force congress to invoke the courts every time they need information from some industry).
"From what I read on Techdirt, it claims that communications between Hubble and Earth cost around $18/MB; in conclusion, I'd say the rates I pay for texting are actually a bargain."
Unless your girlfriend lives on the ISS, you are comparing apples to oranges.
And voice traffic increases in such situations as well (perhaps not as much for your stadium, but that is really an edge case). Go to your local urban intercity rail station; you'll see a lot of people talking on their phones. You'll also see a lot of people typing text messages. If you had the equipment, you would also see that the station is covered by multiple towers from multiple carriers, and that the number of people simultaneously sending texts, as opposed to typing the text and preparing to send it, does not exceed a couple hundred per second. It is very unlikely that the limit on text bandwidth would be reached before the limit on voice bandwidth; possible, sure, but not very likely.
"I imagine the operators have found the ideal text/voice ratio and are pricing the product so that the maximum capacity of the current network is in use."
Except that is not even close to how it works. The network is not at its maximum capacity, except in a few very heavily populated areas, and even there, new towers are constantly put up to prevent the usage from remaining at maximum capacity for long.
"I don't know about USA, but at least in Europe the youths prefer using text messages over talking, so keeping the ratio in the sweet spot might be somewhat hard."
Unless you have colonies of youths living together, it is not likely that the ratio of text to voice traffic is disproportionate. Keep in mind that a single tower can handle a much larger volume of text messages than voice traffic.
"In Finland cost for both voice-per-minute and text are 6,9 eurocents (that's what? 8 american cents?), pretty much from every operator you can name. How much do they cost in your part of the world?"
Depends on the carrier. My carrier (T-Mobile), had I not been smart and taken the text message deal (500 messages for $3/mo, and I do actually text enough to make it worth that price over the non-deal price) when it was offered 7 years ago, would charge me 20 cents per text message, and 15 cents per minute over my plan (1000min/mo.). This is for both incoming and outgoing calls and texts.
I am only responding to you, an AC, because you clearly missed an important fourth leg of the US IP system: trade secrets. Trade secrets live just beyond the law, but the government still protects them when possible. These cell carriers probably told the senator that the information they sent him constituted a trade secret, and nothing more needs to be said. You see the same sort of behavior in courts, presumably keeping everything in public records, except trade secrets, which may be discussed privately with the judge.
Yes, the control channel is bandwidth limited, but a text message is only 160 bytes. The control channel has a transmission rate of 270kbps. Do the math; literally hundreds of text messages per second could be sent over the air via a single cell.
It is almost always the case that voice channel usage and text message usage increase in proportion with each other. A cell can handle far more simultaneous text messages than voice calls, however, so new cells would need to be installed to take care of the voice channels first, and so as the NY Times article points out, it literally costs the cell provider nothing to provide text messaging.
They have the same policy. The fact that I could not purchase an IBM z10 mainframe was the reasons I chose not to sign.
No really, I have to wonder why IBM is not guilty, when they control 90% of the mainframe market and force you to rent the mainframe from them, with no option for purchase. Is this not a violation of the Sherman act?
Still wrong. Patents are for preventing others from making use of your ideas without your permission. It has nothing at all to do with benefits, from a legal standpoint, and there are many cases of companies strategically patenting competing technology with no intention of allowing anyone to use that technology.
If it is a con with DSP hardware, it might be interesting to attach an ultrasound SONAR or IRDAR detection mechanism to it, and create a control system that automatically tracks targets. We did something similar in a robotics class once, but it was Lego mindstorms and the tracking was pitiful, because instead of using DSP we just had a simple nonlinear filter in software (if the signal increases when turning left, turn more until the signal decreases); better hardware should yield better results. The watergun part would make for a really cool demonstration for your child's show-and-tell.
"Apart from that, the main advantage of windows is that all the "popular" apps and peripherals in the senior citizen crowd (think of, web-browsing, photo viewing, photo-printing, web-cams etc.) are much more readily available for windows than for linux."
Really? Here's me experience:
Web browsing -- FireFox, done
Photo viewing -- Gwenview, digiKam, or any of the thousands of others
Photo printing --...click on print, select quality. Better, just set the default quality for your parents, so that they never even know it had to be done. Just like Windows, really
Web cams -- This is juicy. I'm in college, my mom and grandma want to use a web cam with me while I'm away. Cool, except that the university decides to put in place some moronically configured firewall. It totally kills Skype, totally kills Yahoo! messenger's webcam, and so forth. Oddly enough, it doesn't kill SIP, and so I just go with Ekiga on Fedora Linux. Grandma's setup works, my setup works...Mom wants to keep windows, and the nightmare begins. Ekiga for Windows crashes every few minutes, no other SIP compatible softphone could be found (I am sure one exists), and in the end, Mom gives up and doesn't want to even touch the setup for Grandma, who cannot turn the computer on and needs help. Had everyone been running Linux, this entire situation would have worked just fine from day 1.
Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, etc. have all become easier to use, and more reliable for "senior citizen tasks" than Windows. Nothing more needs to be said, people just need to get over the assumption that "Linux is too hard." For people who just want web access and photos, Linux is there.
Let's not forget the cousins, Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL. Some of the design patterns and techniques covered in those books apply to other programming languages as well. Also, it is old, but C++ Unleashed, which covers projects that deal with both C++ and Java, CORBA (like I said, a bit old), and other topics of interest for large project developers; and to be fair, Java Unleashed.
The problem with the system you described is that it relies on end users to understand what is happening. Most FF or IE users have no understanding of what a certificate even is, how it works, or how a MITM attack works. If you told end users that they would pay for identification services, every scam artist on earth would be setting up their own CA and charging users for the root signing certificate, which would then be used for MITM attacks. Worse, the idea that end users could try and verify self-signed certificates is preposterous also, and again, scam artists would be all over it.
From a security standpoint, the current system is pretty much the best you can hope for. People who presumably know what they are doing select your CA roots for you; a mistake there is equivalent to a buffer overflow that allows an attacker to install a key logger. The CAs, wishing to remain in business, have an incentive to do some level of checking on who they issue certificates to: if it became known that a CA was just signing any CSR, with no checks whatsoever, software makers would stop shipping their public key, and legitimate users would not pay for a signature. This, by the way, is the incentive for site owners to buy signatures from competent CAs: an incompetent CA is likely to not have their public key shipped with popular software, so their signatures are worthless.
It's not common for a CA public key to be removed from a software package, because of the ruckus it would create (potentially thousands of websites suddenly having untrusted certificates), but if a CA has truly incompetent practices, then yes, their public key will be removed. In general, software makers try to hold CAs to high standards to get their public key shipped with the software in the first place, so unless the CA itself allows its practices to worsen, it is unlikely that they would find themselves in that position.
Trusting a third party for security is tough, but if you are smart enough to be aware of that, then you should also be aware that you can personally add or remove CA public keys from any software that you use. If you feel that Comodo is untrustworthy, remove their public key, and every time you get a warning, report it to the owner of the website you were trying to visit.
Not my experience. My experience is that people do not find DRM significantly interfering with their use of media, and that when they do, they consider it to be "OK" because they feel that it is meant to prevent illegal copying, which they consider a worthwhile goal of media companies. Take DVDs as an example: yes, it is possible to copy them using deCSS, but most of the people I have in mind would have trouble even going that far. Yet, none of them have any problem buying or renting DVDs, and when they discover that they cannot copy or rip the disc, they just shrug and figure that's the way it "should" be.
It requires no marketing on Apple's part, because most people do not care about DRM. In terms of the restrictions DRM imposes, Apple and other DRM makers have done their research on how people use their music, and have tried to craft their DRM to have minimal interference with those use cases. Apple has a trust factor going -- people assume that Apple will "do the right thing," so it is hard to convince people that there is any risk of Apple disabling their music later on. Worst of all, many people I speak with seem to think that they deserve DRM, because of all the peer-to-peer copying.
So yes, this boycott will fail, and Apple will be able to simply ignore it.
The thing is, you can always just send your mom/wife/girlfriend/grandma/sister (sorry about the misogynist leaning here) a shell script that will do the editing for them, so long as you know what their root password is (you should if you are trying to help). Better, you can just leave sshd running on their machine, and fix it that way (assuming that is an option). Or, if you are in a really bizarre situation (suddenly, their network card fails and you happened to have the foresight to install a modem and hook up a phone line), you could fall back on uucp/uux to do the work of shuttling a script and its output back and forth. There are literally dozens of ways to troubleshoot someone if you are not immediately next to their computer.
My mom uses Windows, my girlfriend uses Fedora. For my mom, I wind up needing to use VNC, which means a complex setup involving forwarding port 5900 over an SSH connection to some other computer in the house, then connecting over VNC. For my girlfriend, it is a matter of sending scripts and having her run them (enabling the execute bit is not an issue for her, it is pretty basic and can be done without a terminal).
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Who the hell modded your post informative?
Actually, the revenue is a lot more complex than that. Newspapers are loaded with advertisements, and I can assure you that the dollar you spend on the paper is more than matched by the money advertisers pay to get those ads inserted. Also, keep in mind that the number of papers sold is not equal to the number of readers: newspapers are often given from one person to another, left on a bench or a subway train, etc.
My bible is in Hebrew, you insensitive clod!
Actually, if you are referring to the bibles that the Gideon society leaves in hotel rooms, that is in modern English. You can tell it is in modern English because, as a native English speaker, you have little difficulty reading it. Also, "wife" is not spelled "wyf," as it would be in middle English, and it does not read like German or contain any "ash" (æ) characters, at it would if it were actually old English.
Certain sex offenses do have a high recidivism rate. Child molesters -- I'll be specific and note that I mean prepubescent children -- are very likely to commit their crime over and over again, even after a prison sentence. On the other hand, a healthy, normal 20 year old who goes to a party and sleeps with a 15 year old (who looks like an 18 year old) is not likely to commit his crime again, especially if he goes to jail for it.
The real problem is that we have a habit of grouping all "sex offenders" together, as do our politicians. There are many kinds of sex offenses, ranging from the truly disturbing child predator variety to simply urinating in a park when you are drunk. If the voting public demands laws that allow the government to monitor the activities of a child molester 24x7, the laws should be written to reflect a specific intent to target convicted child molesters, and avoid the broad "sex offender" term.
It may not be entirely uninformed speculation; Red Hat has been picking up a lot of higher level projects and companies over the past few years, and the focus of the Fedora project (which is Red Hat's official desktop strategy) is mostly on improving the userland. The acquisition of JBOSS and Metamatrix are key steps in the direction of a more application-centric focus; as a case in point, roughly half of the supported JBOSS installations worldwide are running on Windows.
This is not to say that Red Hat is not interested in the Linux kernel. All the work on virtualization requires a decent kernel team, as does a lot of the security/SELinux work, and the support for RHEL. However, the main focus of Red Hat will probably continue to shift toward applications, which is where the money really is (you can only make so much money supporting a kernel and basic GNU userland).
"Science is a hard sell since robots can do maybe 95% of the same work with maybe 5% of the budget."
Exactly, and that was even the case during the Apollo missions. Kennedy had been told that, in terms of science, all the work planned for human astronauts could be done by robots, which would be less dangerous and less expensive. Of course, non-scientists are not really aware of this...
Exactly. Microsoft has essentially reached the same position that IBM reached: huge, almost a monopoly, and never really going to vanish. Microsoft will undoubtedly fall from the #1 position in some markets, just like IBM did, but they will not vanish altogether.
Privacy and the right to privacy have nothing to do with terrorism either. The illegal mass wiretapping performed by the federal government had nothing to do with terrorism, and neither did the war in Iraq. Just because someone utters the words "war on terror" does not mean that everything they do is in some way related to capturing terrorists. As a case in point, several FBI agents have been discovered working undercover in peace groups, under the veil of "terrorism related investigations."
Just look at websites like Facebook and Myspace. You are basically telling those companies, through their website, who you are, who your friends are, where you like to hang out, etc. There is a rapidly decreasing margin of privacy for the government to encroach on; just quickly looking through someone's Facebook profile tells you who their friends are, and which of those friends they hang out with the most (based on which friends are most likely to appear in pictures with the target of interest). That's enough information to track down and capture a person, and nobody had to leave their office or interview anyone. The worst part? People are voluntarily giving this information to Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, and so forth.
Senators do protect trade secrets when they are investigating an industry. Investigations into the health complications of soft drinks never resulted in the formula for coca cola being stored in the national archives or any other public record. It is not an official protection, but it is still protected by the senators on their own, as part of an effort to keep everything "friendly" (that is to say, not force congress to invoke the courts every time they need information from some industry).
"From what I read on Techdirt, it claims that communications between Hubble and Earth cost around $18/MB; in conclusion, I'd say the rates I pay for texting are actually a bargain."
Unless your girlfriend lives on the ISS, you are comparing apples to oranges.
And voice traffic increases in such situations as well (perhaps not as much for your stadium, but that is really an edge case). Go to your local urban intercity rail station; you'll see a lot of people talking on their phones. You'll also see a lot of people typing text messages. If you had the equipment, you would also see that the station is covered by multiple towers from multiple carriers, and that the number of people simultaneously sending texts, as opposed to typing the text and preparing to send it, does not exceed a couple hundred per second. It is very unlikely that the limit on text bandwidth would be reached before the limit on voice bandwidth; possible, sure, but not very likely.
"I imagine the operators have found the ideal text/voice ratio and are pricing the product so that the maximum capacity of the current network is in use."
Except that is not even close to how it works. The network is not at its maximum capacity, except in a few very heavily populated areas, and even there, new towers are constantly put up to prevent the usage from remaining at maximum capacity for long.
"I don't know about USA, but at least in Europe the youths prefer using text messages over talking, so keeping the ratio in the sweet spot might be somewhat hard."
Unless you have colonies of youths living together, it is not likely that the ratio of text to voice traffic is disproportionate. Keep in mind that a single tower can handle a much larger volume of text messages than voice traffic.
"In Finland cost for both voice-per-minute and text are 6,9 eurocents (that's what? 8 american cents?), pretty much from every operator you can name. How much do they cost in your part of the world?"
Depends on the carrier. My carrier (T-Mobile), had I not been smart and taken the text message deal (500 messages for $3/mo, and I do actually text enough to make it worth that price over the non-deal price) when it was offered 7 years ago, would charge me 20 cents per text message, and 15 cents per minute over my plan (1000min/mo.). This is for both incoming and outgoing calls and texts.
I am only responding to you, an AC, because you clearly missed an important fourth leg of the US IP system: trade secrets. Trade secrets live just beyond the law, but the government still protects them when possible. These cell carriers probably told the senator that the information they sent him constituted a trade secret, and nothing more needs to be said. You see the same sort of behavior in courts, presumably keeping everything in public records, except trade secrets, which may be discussed privately with the judge.
Yes, the control channel is bandwidth limited, but a text message is only 160 bytes. The control channel has a transmission rate of 270kbps. Do the math; literally hundreds of text messages per second could be sent over the air via a single cell.
It is almost always the case that voice channel usage and text message usage increase in proportion with each other. A cell can handle far more simultaneous text messages than voice calls, however, so new cells would need to be installed to take care of the voice channels first, and so as the NY Times article points out, it literally costs the cell provider nothing to provide text messaging.
They have the same policy. The fact that I could not purchase an IBM z10 mainframe was the reasons I chose not to sign.
No really, I have to wonder why IBM is not guilty, when they control 90% of the mainframe market and force you to rent the mainframe from them, with no option for purchase. Is this not a violation of the Sherman act?
Still wrong. Patents are for preventing others from making use of your ideas without your permission. It has nothing at all to do with benefits, from a legal standpoint, and there are many cases of companies strategically patenting competing technology with no intention of allowing anyone to use that technology.
If it is a con with DSP hardware, it might be interesting to attach an ultrasound SONAR or IRDAR detection mechanism to it, and create a control system that automatically tracks targets. We did something similar in a robotics class once, but it was Lego mindstorms and the tracking was pitiful, because instead of using DSP we just had a simple nonlinear filter in software (if the signal increases when turning left, turn more until the signal decreases); better hardware should yield better results. The watergun part would make for a really cool demonstration for your child's show-and-tell.
Really? Here's me experience:
Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, etc. have all become easier to use, and more reliable for "senior citizen tasks" than Windows. Nothing more needs to be said, people just need to get over the assumption that "Linux is too hard." For people who just want web access and photos, Linux is there.
Let's not forget the cousins, Effective C++, More Effective C++, and Effective STL. Some of the design patterns and techniques covered in those books apply to other programming languages as well. Also, it is old, but C++ Unleashed, which covers projects that deal with both C++ and Java, CORBA (like I said, a bit old), and other topics of interest for large project developers; and to be fair, Java Unleashed.
The problem with the system you described is that it relies on end users to understand what is happening. Most FF or IE users have no understanding of what a certificate even is, how it works, or how a MITM attack works. If you told end users that they would pay for identification services, every scam artist on earth would be setting up their own CA and charging users for the root signing certificate, which would then be used for MITM attacks. Worse, the idea that end users could try and verify self-signed certificates is preposterous also, and again, scam artists would be all over it.
From a security standpoint, the current system is pretty much the best you can hope for. People who presumably know what they are doing select your CA roots for you; a mistake there is equivalent to a buffer overflow that allows an attacker to install a key logger. The CAs, wishing to remain in business, have an incentive to do some level of checking on who they issue certificates to: if it became known that a CA was just signing any CSR, with no checks whatsoever, software makers would stop shipping their public key, and legitimate users would not pay for a signature. This, by the way, is the incentive for site owners to buy signatures from competent CAs: an incompetent CA is likely to not have their public key shipped with popular software, so their signatures are worthless.
It's not common for a CA public key to be removed from a software package, because of the ruckus it would create (potentially thousands of websites suddenly having untrusted certificates), but if a CA has truly incompetent practices, then yes, their public key will be removed. In general, software makers try to hold CAs to high standards to get their public key shipped with the software in the first place, so unless the CA itself allows its practices to worsen, it is unlikely that they would find themselves in that position.
Trusting a third party for security is tough, but if you are smart enough to be aware of that, then you should also be aware that you can personally add or remove CA public keys from any software that you use. If you feel that Comodo is untrustworthy, remove their public key, and every time you get a warning, report it to the owner of the website you were trying to visit.
Not my experience. My experience is that people do not find DRM significantly interfering with their use of media, and that when they do, they consider it to be "OK" because they feel that it is meant to prevent illegal copying, which they consider a worthwhile goal of media companies. Take DVDs as an example: yes, it is possible to copy them using deCSS, but most of the people I have in mind would have trouble even going that far. Yet, none of them have any problem buying or renting DVDs, and when they discover that they cannot copy or rip the disc, they just shrug and figure that's the way it "should" be.
It requires no marketing on Apple's part, because most people do not care about DRM. In terms of the restrictions DRM imposes, Apple and other DRM makers have done their research on how people use their music, and have tried to craft their DRM to have minimal interference with those use cases. Apple has a trust factor going -- people assume that Apple will "do the right thing," so it is hard to convince people that there is any risk of Apple disabling their music later on. Worst of all, many people I speak with seem to think that they deserve DRM, because of all the peer-to-peer copying.
So yes, this boycott will fail, and Apple will be able to simply ignore it.
The thing is, you can always just send your mom/wife/girlfriend/grandma/sister (sorry about the misogynist leaning here) a shell script that will do the editing for them, so long as you know what their root password is (you should if you are trying to help). Better, you can just leave sshd running on their machine, and fix it that way (assuming that is an option). Or, if you are in a really bizarre situation (suddenly, their network card fails and you happened to have the foresight to install a modem and hook up a phone line), you could fall back on uucp/uux to do the work of shuttling a script and its output back and forth. There are literally dozens of ways to troubleshoot someone if you are not immediately next to their computer.
My mom uses Windows, my girlfriend uses Fedora. For my mom, I wind up needing to use VNC, which means a complex setup involving forwarding port 5900 over an SSH connection to some other computer in the house, then connecting over VNC. For my girlfriend, it is a matter of sending scripts and having her run them (enabling the execute bit is not an issue for her, it is pretty basic and can be done without a terminal).