My post was definitely not the best I've done on Slashdot, and much of it came from not really knowing much about Europe. My ideas are vague and intentionally intensified to provoke some kind of meeting in the middle. Thank you shitzu for actually knowing something.
I think though that my original point may have some merit thinking about how everyone in Europe uses GSM. Didn't American cell carriers have fragmented technologies because the technology still wasn't mature yet? Maybe it goes back to the 80s and not the 90s, but generally the first adopters don't have the kind of standards to work off of that formed the basis of Europe's cell networks.
Fleecing the customer is more dominant in the US because the US networks are shitty. Somebody said T-Mobile essentially has a 1990s network in the 2010s. Well, there are no 1990s networks outside of the US. Everything was built up later, after the tech was more mature. It's the same reason internet speeds are slower in the US than in Europe, and the same reason they still cost more regardless. The infrastructure is old, the pricing structure is old, and the customers have to pay for that somehow so they might as well get shiny new technology at the same time to make up for it.
Either that or the EU is socialist and regulates its industries better.
Running obsolete systems isn't quite on par with typical security through obscurity. It's not a matter of guessing the right URL to access elevated permissions. It's a matter of procuring 50-year old technology, which by the way nobody outside of the US ever actually got good at producing. How exactly would you go about hacking into a system not connected to any networks and controlled by 8" floppy disks? Especially since, in addition to the obscurity, there are armed guards everywhere?
It's also important to note that newer is not always better. Newer is most often more complex, and in computer security, complexity is the enemy. Add to that the much higher engineering standards of software more than 30 years old, and I'd say it isn't really just obscurity that makes an obsolete system more secure.
If like me you want to know what the "procedural mistakes" were, and not read what is almost certainly someone's unnecessary diatribe about why the end result is wrong (hint: it's wrong, so, so wrong, and we all know why), let me help you find them. Use the last link in the summary, copied here:
Summary: The case is about whether Lavabit should have been held in contempt, which hinges upon whether the court had the right to demand what it was demanding. However, Levison did not make any legal argument against the demand at the time. Therefore, it was justifiably held in contempt. The issue of whether the court had the right to demand private keys is important, but the issue needed to be raised sooner and with more force. Now it's irrelevant to further proceedings.
I am not a lawyer and I have not actually finished reading the article yet.
You say that governments print money and control the money because government wants more of it. In America, my friend, the government is the people. In the words of the great Republican Abraham Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Our government is not an entity of its own, clawing away for every advantage. Our government is a body of leaders representing all people living within our nation: a Republic.
Therefore when one thinks of the ways that our government takes away our wealth, takes away our freedoms, takes away our dignity, we must not think of it as a great leviathan, secure in itself by virtue of its ability to lay waste to the lesser people. It is not some abstract deity that takes from us. It is ourselves. It is the political circus we have all become part of. And whether or not all the elephants recognize them, every circus has ringleaders.
Who benefits from all this taking? Who benefits from the government printing money while still taxing it from the people who earned it? Who really holds the power that is being sucked into Congress? You're right about one thing: it's not us. But I guarantee you that if the government itself reaped the benefits, we would not have a deficit in the trillions.
By 'prescription', I mean approval by a homeopath. Obviously there is no licensing set up to ensure such people to be legitimate. I considered suggesting to set one up, but since homeopathy is not a science it's not really possible to do so practically.
What I would like to see is for homeopathic remedies to require the statement "these claims have not been approved by the FDA" and prevent them from using "Drug Facts" labels that make them look legitimate. This would not affect "real" homeopathy as far as I can tell; practitioners ought to be trusting the person concocting their prescription, not the drug companies. It would only affect the shams. And it shouldn't preclude the FDA from following the manufacturing processes either.
It's about damn time something was done to fix this homeopathic mess. Read the Wikipedia article on Homeopathy for a moment. The thing that struck me about it is not the "diluting makes it stronger" part. Everybody knows that. What struck me is that "homeopathic remedies" are basically always prescription-only.
Why do we allow non-prescription drugs to bypass FDA inspection because they are labelled "homeopathic"? I mean, truly homeopathic drugs should not be any cause for concern, but then they should also only be taken by prescription. What we have instead is a menagerie of sham drugs claiming to be "homeopathic" to avoid drug testing. Nothing 1x or 2x diluted should ever seriously be sold as "homeopathic".
It's about damn time to get rid of the special treatment altogether. Slapping a "homeopathic" label on a drug must not be enough to excuse it from proper testing. I could understand it it was diluted 10x, but then that only applies to the "active ingredient". What we have here is a drug with an "inactive ingredient" that happens to be penicillin (whether it was intentionally added or not - and excuse me, but what part of diluting a homeopathic drug involves "fermentation"?).
Alternative medicine is one thing, but it's something else if the producers themselves mix the product with real medicine because they think it is actually snake oil.
I know you were talking about equal pixel density, but I don't think AC was:
Yet I would kill to have those kind of resolutions on my 12" laptop.
"Resolution" generally refers to the number of pixels on the whole screen, not the number of pixels per area. So the field of a 12" screen at 2560x1440 will not drop by over a factor of four over a 5" screen at 2560x1440. I get your point though that a 12" screen more like 6400x3600 to have a similar DPI would have a terrible yield.
God dammit when will these resolutions be available on normal-sized desktop screens? If they can pack 2560x1440 into a 5" screen for $600, why does it have to cost more than that to get any desktop monitor with that many pixels? It shouldn't have to be 27". All kinds of laptop screens are racing towards 4K-like resolutions, but you simply cannot get the same 3200x1800 resolution at any size on the desktop you can in 14" laptops. At least until you get to 4K TVs.
2560x1440 or even better, 2560x1600 is a magical resolution for a computer screen. It's the resolution where you can fit two programs side-by-side with a full 1280 pixels of horizontal space, which has been the standard available for the last 15 years. Unless something is designed for wide screens (and then hey, it will probably scale to the whole massive space of your desktop) it's like having two screens side-by-side, except with amazing vertical space, no bezel in the middle, and a cinematic capability for displaying video and games.
This screen resolution is practical on a desktop computer. If we can get it on 5" screens where it's nothing more than marketing (more than 300dpi is a waste) why can't we get it somewhere useful?
fortune: cpu time/usefulness ratio too high -- core dumped.
