China doesn't produce cheap crap. China just produces. The West places orders for cheap crap and then cry about it when something doesn't go quite right.

Oh? Is that why the great capacitor scandal went down in China?

The fact is that China does produce cheap crap. Anything they make "themselves" is a faithful copy of someone else's product, right down to the flaws. That tendency was noted when they first began manufacturing for the rest of us. They were copying machine tools, including the boneheaded mistakes. Problem is, they also use inferior materials for these cheap copies, so they wear rapidly and fail. The only bright spot is that you can use the replacement parts from the original, which are of much higher quality.

As well, people who attempt to have things made in China often find that they come back under spec. Sometimes this is true even in the demo parts, but the quality often slips at a later date and if you're not continually inspecting parts, the quality can go downhill without warning. This is why only big corporations can afford to sell stuff made in China year after year, they can eat the losses and they have learned which suppliers will try to screw them, and how hard. It's also why you pay twice as much for the same shit made in the same place if you buy it off a shelf instead of off of eBay. The product may well be shit, in fact it is highly likely, and the corporation has to handle the cost of processing the returns and landfilling the garbage product.

Can this happen with parts coming out of any nation? Sure. But China is known for it. It's well-known that you can't simply contract them for parts of any complexity and then wait for them to arrive, they will arrive with obvious spec violations and you will pay for the privilege.

The OP's point is that China produces to the quality you specify. If you're willing to pay for it, they can produce very high quality goods (see Apple). If not, they can produce to your price point.

And that includes crap they copy. Because the copied crap must sell for less and most Chinese (who are VERY well versed in basic economics) know that to maximize profits, you minimize cost, means they will cut every corner possible because a penny saved is a penny more in profit.

So no, they're not going to pay for Apple-level quality, or even the cheapest western brand-name level quality. They want even cheaper than that, and basically pay not a penny more.

Of course, the product does often end up as crap because it's shoddily made and barely has more structural integrity than the box it came in.

I mean, if you're willing to buy an Apple for $2000, and it costs Apple say, $1000 to make, if they can make a copy for $200, that's $1800 in pure profit - 80% more than Apple! Of course, there's a reason why Apple spent so much, so your Chinese Apple clone would be a deathtrap. But it'll be made, somehow because hell, if Apple can do it, so can they.

(And you have to know the value system is based on how hard something is to copy. Software is worthless because it's easily copied (open-source even more so, but try getting the source code from them!)), etc.

It's like that electric car thing where you still need to generate power somewhere, and if you're not using clean energy, you're just moving the location of the pollution.

However, overall efficiency is still higher for electric cars even after repeated transformations. An ICE is like a traditional incandescent lightbulb - it converts energy to heat primarily. Side effect is you get a tiny amount of useful energy emitted as well - either as motion or light. But most of the energy stored ends up dumped as heat.

And honestly, it's far easier to clean up a dirty power plant than it is to clean up a million tailpipes. It did take a long while for catalytic converters to basically be standard, and mostly because old cars without catalytic converters were scrapped. Whereas a power plant can be cleaned up in a few years and even modern coal power plants are far more efficient than an ICE.

Okay the cups are probably greater magnitude of waste but still, unused coffee does have a higher cost than just "pour it down the drain".

You can make smaller pots of coffee quite easily.

The real reason people like Keurig is because it's far more convenient - cup under spout, pod in top, hit two buttons (power and cup) and coffee in 30 seconds. Especially at inconvenient times of the day, say after waking up.

Some 10 years ago I received a warning related to "self-plagiarism" because I had copied the definition of a problem from one of my previous papers (one column, the rest of the paper was completely new). Since then, I know I have to change the text of the problem definition between two papers, even if it is the same.

So why not just quote yourself then? I mean, self-plagiarism is just like plagiarism (except you're presenting existing ideas as new, rather than other's ideas as yours).

Is it too hard to cite oneself? Is it frowned upon? Or does it just not seem like plagiarism when you're the one doing it to yourself?

For instance:

- Are these apps installed via a custom store, or distributed/managed using a internal company server? I'm assuming they don't exist on the Apple store -- or do they?
- Screen shots of the apps?
- Names of the apps?

As it stands it's pretty much a press release that's not really "news for nerds" ... 10 more apps is a rounding error of a rounding error of apps already in the App Store.

Given they're enterprise apps, "custom" app store (actually, Enterprise signing certificate + device provisioning and app-push) would be most likely since that's a way around the App Store.

I don't think there are names for them or screenshots since they're frameworks at best - every client of those apps will request customizations from IBM prior to deploying.

While the partnership is IBM+Apple, you have to remember Apple is doing fine by themselves, and IBM is the one looking at the enterprise market. IBM's experience may help shape the MDM side of Apple to be more enterprise-friendly, but for the most part, IBM will be the one doing enterprise support. So Big Blue will be the go-to folks for the apps customized for htem.

It's just a PR so folks who are in those industries may start inquiring more about it.

They both get entry into a new market they traditionally haven't been strong at - IBM gets into mobile devices (again - they did have Simon but that was a flop), Apple into enterprise (traditionally weak) and do so with a strong partner in those areas (IBM knows enterprise, Apple knows mobile).

Perhaps advertisers should finally move away from the current revenue system that pays per-click and should instead move towards a profit sharing system where the referring website receives a commission based on any sales or executed transactions.

Which would result in the ad-supported websites dying because very little people actually purchase based on a click through. Instead they'll probably click it, then browse around a bit then come back later and do the transaction.

I'm sure advertisers probably already thought about that, and advertising is less about selling and more about mindshare. Just getting word out that your product is there is often what is needed moreso than sales. Especially in B2B because the sales may come long after the ad - the only reason is the person buying remembered seeing the collateral.

You say that as though Sony's security practices are not normal for all Fortune 500 companies. There are probably a few shining examples of good behavior, but I haven't worked for a company in the last 15 years that cared to do more than the bare minimum. Even then it was only if they HAD to do it.

One of the more famous hacks happened a few years ago, where hacks broke into one Sony website, then used the same vulnerability the next day to break into other Sony websites in another country. And repeated the same for several days.. Each day slurping up more data.

It's one thing to have a vulnerability. It's another to not have it patched on all vulnerable sites.

Looks like it would be about $9.50 on average in CA. However this is also assuming the router is being used a max power 24/7 when it's sharing and would be completely idle 24/7 if it wasn't. It's more likely people would be using their own router so it wouldn't be idle in which case it would use a negligible amount for sharing.

So it's ok to steal as long as you're stealing a little bit from lots of people?

Sure it's only up to $10 a month. But that doesn't make it right, and in fact, the amount stolen is small enough that mots people would eat the electricity bill because going to court is much more expensive. Hence a class-action lawsuit because stealing $1M from one person is just as bad as stealing $1 from 1M people. Just that those 1M people have far less recourse because the amount stolen is far lower. Do it right and a company can make billions by doing this.

Businesses often get rates cut if they set up a public hotspot using their Comcast account, which is why a lot of hotspots are in front of businesses. Why shouldn't home users get the same?

I am all for poisoning that well. For those of us who use adblock it won't affect what we see and will cost the advertisers money as they will have to pay the site we visited for those clicks. So really no down side from my perspective.

You aren't that naive, are you?

You think if you're poisoning the well that advertisers don't notice? Or rather, Google since Google's the one doing all the advertising these days.

Face it, sites aren't paid by the click anymore. They're paid by the legit click. Google's already done it by detecting fraudulent clicks and reducing their payment to websites as a result.

The end result is that websites will simply get less money, so either you'll see more ads on your favourite sites, or you'll see more and more stuff go behind paywalls that were formerly free.

And no, just because it's a fraudulent click doesn't mean it's not counted. It's counted against the website so not only does the website not get the money from that click, they are paid less per click overall.

Requires windows..

Which is about as much of a selling point for people who don't use windows as saying that something requires an iphone for people only use Android. In other words, it's an anti-selling point.

Or it depends. Perhaps someone writing Android apps uses Linux right now but uses Windows on a regular basis. They could easily switch.

Not everyone using Linux or Android is doing so as an "Anti-Microsoft" or "Anti-Apple" reason. They may be doing it because that's what their company provides. I know we have a Windows infrastructure, and do Android development, so every developer has a Windows PC and a Linux PC. I do all my work on Windows using Samba and everything (because I find Linux GUIs fairly sluggish and to be honest, ugly as sin). So for me, my Linux PC is remoted into for building and accessing project files. If I rarely need to, I even have an X server on Windows for the few GUI tools I have.

If the Windows Android emulator is faster, that makes my life a lot easier (and one less X app to manage).

People don't always choose alternatives to "be different". There are (way too) many people who balked at buying an iPhone due to cost, then their cellular dealers simply said "here's Android. It's like iPhone" except it's either free or half the price. (Yeah, you're not getting flagship phone here. You can tell who's the hardcore Android users because those will actually use GOOD Android phones).

At any house brand computer store in China the computers come windows installed and activated but no disks. If you insist on an install disk the price for it is, amazingly, the same as buying windows retail. The whole activation system is fundamentally flawed, but the question is, how to make it 1) less of a pain for legit users and 2) harder for pirates? These two goals seem exclusive, alas.

You missed an important criteria - the ability to be pirated in certain locales.

You think Microsoft isn't intentionally turning a blind eye to Chinese pirates? I can tell you the main reason is that if people are getting free Windows, they're not using Linux or any other OS. And using free Office means they're not using OpenOffice or LibreOffice or whatever. Ditto Photoshop and any other market standard products.

Microsoft knows if they hook users, they're unlikely to switch. Why use Linux when they can use Windows and do all the stuff there? Same "price" and in the end, locks one more user to Windows. Ditto a program like Photoshop - ok, so maybe they use pirated photoshop all their life and need to edit a photo on a new machine. They try GIMP and get hopelessly confused, lost and "it sucks". Another winner for Adobe who continues their Photoshop dominance and holds down GIMP.

Sure, there's no revenue from pirates, but there is lock in and if you get people stuck on using Office, Windows, Photoshop, etc., they're likely o find the alternatives unappealing, stupid, or "it sucks". And nothing is better for any of them to say "I tried Linux, it sucks - it doesn't work like Windows and blah blah blah".

What TFA and Wikipedia don't say are what game his original prototype actually was. Presumably it was similar to one of the early Odyssey games.

He invented the Brown Box, which later became the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey is unlike what we'd call a console today in that it didn't run a stored program - instead it was a collection of analog circuits and the "cartridges" really were plugboards that connected the circuits in various ways.

Basically it ended up being games like tennis, table tennis (a bit more complex than pong), and other bat-and-ball style games.

What are you talking about? I think some very early plasma screens cheated on the horizontal resolution a bit, but otherwise any HDTV (720p or 1080p) uses square pixels.

Depends on the resolution in use.

1080p and 720p use square pixels. 480p uses rectangular pixels, which is why 480p (720x480) has both a 16:9 and 4:3 mode even though they are the same number of pixels across.

EDTVs had to have non-square pixels because of this, and HDTVs do processing to ensure the aspect ratio is maintained when passed in 480p content (e.g., DVD, which is fixed 720x480, but allows both 4:3 and 16:9 content).

You are correct in asserting that the bank will know it's me. But nobody else needs to know that I've visited my bank. My ISP, government, and neighbours on wifi don't need to even know that I have a bank account.

Your ISP is paid for somehow. Probably a credit card, tied to a bank.

The government ALREADY KNOWS you have a bank account! In fact, they probably already know how much is in it, and how much profit you made in your savings account, your trading account, etc.

Neighbours on WiFi? What, you running an open wifi that your neighbours can use? If you're doing that and accessing the bank, you have bigger problems. WPA2 ensures that your neighbours can't see your traffic even if they're on the same network (each node gets a unique encryption key). But still... if you're letting your neighbours on your wifi, you should be hitting your bank over Ethernet.

The thing is, Intel pretty much buys the same equipment that everyone else has access to for fab technology.

The problem is the fab equipment is REALLY expensive and sourced from Japan, and it has to be that way in order to produce usable chips. With each wafer costing $1-3K each, sub-standard equipment brings the cost up VERY quickly.

In fact, this technology is pretty much open - even Intel has opened FinFETs to everyone, not because they're not cutting edge, but because if you can do it, you're already quite advanced (hint: it's not easy).

No, the biggest IP violations is not the fabs, it's the stuff the fabs make - the chips themselves. Because the next-gem chips are made there 6-12 months before they show up in products, if you can get at those, there's a very big advantage.

Fabs are expensive and require a ton of money. Intel has that. If China wanted, they could open their own fab, but they haven't. But it's not the fab that's important, it's the stuff the fab makes as they're often the latest and greater technology.

In fact, it helps businesses that do accept cash because they have a percentage of transactions that are not subject to merchant service fees so they make more profit by giving a slight discount meaning a business has no incentive to refuse cash.

Depends on the business. Small businesses do see the discount since the amount of cash is small enough that the cost of handling cash is basically nil.

Larger businesses can find the cost of handling cash is larger than the merchant fees - cash handlers get special training because they need to know how to reconcile their cash box, then there's actually making the cash deposits. Those can be big enough that whoever's carrying the wallet is a nice target of robbery. A big game release or something can easily mean a $50,000 take in cash in a single day, requiring hiring guards and armored vehicles to transport it to the bank.