"When you've only got one provider, who makes the rules? The provider makes the rules."

When you've got a hundred providers, who makes the rules? The provider. I suspect Mr Wheeler is being disingenuous here. He wants to be the one to make the rules. Central rule making by government has never been shown to be a way to encourage "more providers" of a service. If anything it has the opposite effect. Mostly this comes through the increase regulations' cost to startups. More intense regulatory burdens, from administrative to functional, nearly always benefit the larger companies. This works against a desire to increase options and competition. Plus, from a regulatory commission standpoint, the fewer, and larger, players you have the better it is for you because that means more lobbying.

"the question becomes, will giant companies be able to exploit their monopoly position?"

Monopoly abuses is not part of your job, Mr. Wheeler. We already have laws for that, and a means to enforce them. If your concern is abuse of monopoly, talk to the FTC. The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for dealing with that, not the Federal Communications Commission.

"Who is going to stand up for consumers? Who is going to stand up for innovation? And who is going to stand up for the most important network for determining our future in the 21st century?"

Not the FCC. The FCC can't stand for innovation, it moves too slow and enshrines technological choices into law/regs which are too slow to be corrected, and the penalties of them are applied nationally rather than locally. The FTC has the role of "standing up for consumers", not the FCC. The "most important network of our future" is still people, so the FCC would be stretching very heavily to even attempt to "stand up" for that.

Basically, if he wants to feel like he is standing up for consumers, he needs to transfer to the FTC.
 

The last bastion is the human reading it. Let not poor typography or color choices excuse not taking caution to read the whole thing before announcing. There were several failure points here, not just one. If we are going to rightly lay some fault at the accountant for not handing out the right card envelope due to being not paying proper attention, then Faye also rightly deserves some for not paying proper attention. Perfect typography won't prevent someone from reading part of the text and ignoring the rest.

No it hasn't. The only difference is, currently you can browse the Amazon ebook store and purchase using the Amazon Kindle app.

Written by someone who clearly has never actually done this, since the Kindle App does not do in-app purchases at all, but redirects to a browser.

As far as the content - why would people around the country want to be locked into The Daily's content when they could aggregate content from multiple sources - including Fox or other Murdoch publications if they wish to.

So you are saying that by using The Daily, people find their iPads have all other news sources deleted and you can't install any other news apps? Wow. Quite the leap there.

Seems pretty arrogant to me to assume that anyone wanting to or being willing to pay for news content has zero other options, or are somehow precluded from doing so.

This is no more nefarioius then a restauranteur eating at a competitor's restaurant on a Saturday night and noticing what other patrons are ordering. You find out what the people want then give them what they want.

No, it isn't. The restaurant owner seeing what is popular still has to go and actually come up with a dish to satisfy the demand. Chefs an owners do in fact visit other places. They do it openly. And often they chat with the competition.

It would be more like me giving you a flower to pin on your lapel and saying it will tell me where you go, but really it also records and tells me what you order to eat and where you ordered it at. Then imagine me doing that to thousands of people - people who don't like my restaurant but like my competitor's and you'd be getting warmer.

What you are describing would be more like MS doing searches on Google's site directly, and incorporating those results into their own rankings. Or more like a portal realizing people want to search for things on the Internet and get useful results, and then making a search engine to do that.

... but where it fails is the business model. It assumes that people are willing to pay to access a single aggregation service when so many already exist free of charge.

Personally, it depends on the price and the actual user experience. Most of the "free" stuff makes you pay in other ways, such as painful UI decisions and ugly intrusive advertising. If the price is right I'd take a single-source that works *well* and doesn't abuse my senses. Particularly since having one does not preclude the others.

Walking freely and an expensive sports car can both get me from home to work. But that doesn't mean the experience is the same, and the fact that more people choose buying a car (even a cheap one) over walking illustrates that we do in fact place a value on each of those and act based on our own valuations. However, despite the fact I bought the sports car, I still walk some places.

With a reported 500,000/week to support it, it only takes 500,001 people in the world to choose the 99c/week option to make it a net (yet tiny) profit. Sure, if Apple gets half, that means News Corp has to get 1,000,001 subscribers. This assumes there is no in-app advertising they get money from as well. Will they get that? I'd say absolutely - provided the app itself is a quality one (unlike the Safari Books app O'Reilly put out -and pulled- last year). Succeeding in business doesn't necessarily mean outrunning the bear. Sometimes it just means outrunning the other hikers. News Corp. doesn't need all iPad owners to subscribe, just a portion of them.

It's my phone and my apps. I don't like apple deciding what apps get offered.

Yes, it is your phone. And once on your phone the apps are ostensibly yours. On the other hand, it is Apple's Store and Apple's infrastructure supporting the distribution of those apps. Apple pays the bandwidth for the store

Macy's decides what goes in their store and under what conditions. So does Walmart and local Mom & Pop stores. You knew going into the phone purchase what the Apple Store did, or you should have.

As you said, it's a genuine problem, both for Apple and users, and there is no ideal solution. However it is ultimately Apple's problem to solve how they see fit because it is their store. If Amazon (which has rules of their own for their store) doesn't like the rules, they don't have to put apps in Apple's store. Just as you can't buy everything "home related" at Walmart, you won't be able to get everything in the Apple store as not everyone agrees to the terms.

In a sense, apps that exist solely to be advertising and marketing routes to websites to sell stuff are a pollutant to the iTunes ecosystem. Consider an analogue. Consider what would be the effect of say Walmart, Sears, or a Mall, charging companies a percentage of sales to set up a booth selling things on their premises. Happens quite often actually. And we don't gripe about that. Now consider what would happen if those kiosk stores instead were giving out boxes that were nothing more than a collection of advertisements. For Free.

Now, we have the same situation. The company that owns/manages the premises is getting nothing in return for the services they provide. Of course we'd be saying that it would be their own fault for not charging a minimum fee and that's tough luck for them being stupid. On the other hand, here we have Apple *not* making that mistake (any longer) and instead we want to blame them and label them the bad guys. Really, they are just enforcing the rules int eh SDK anyway.

If Amazon wanted in app purchasing in their Kindle app, they could, and would, have done it. That they didn't is good on them because they read the SDK agreement and abided by it. Of course, that is the reason I don't use the kindle app so much because I have to go to their website and deal with it's idiosyncrasies to buy an eBook. So that means I won't be affected by this. I'd wager the Kindle app isn't affected at all since it does not do in-app purchasing anyway.

Neither Apple nor Amazon are the idiots being made out here on /.. Unlike most of the posters here today, Amazon knew that doing in-app purchasing in the Kindle app would subject them to Apple percentage requirements. So they didn't implement it (to my annoyance but w/e). Apple doesn't expect Amazon to suddenly start paying them because the Kindle doesn't fit the criteria.

Perhaps Amazon's Windowshop app lets you purchase items directly, I've not tried. I'd be suprised if it didn't simply take you to the website when you wanted to purchase. Mostly because as I read it that would be a violation of the SDK agreement. So even that app would not likely be affected here.

Well sort of. Since 11.3 applies to *physical* goods, then yeah the hardcopy book you bought through the imaginary IAP Amazon Kindle app that let you buy physical books could not be read on your Kindle, PC, or Mac.

But since that would be obvious and a non-issue, and no Kindle iPhone app has in-app purchasing (be it physical or electronic books), it's rather a pointless statement.

Garibaldi: Think they'll ever find that transmitter you slipped G'Kar?
Sinclair: No. because there isn't one.
Garibaldi: There isn't? Wait—
Sinclair: I lied. I figured if there were a transmitter, sooner or later they'd find it and remove it. But if I just told them there was, they'd keep looking. Indefinitely.
Garibaldi: Commander, do you have any idea of the tests they'll put him through, the things they'll do to him trying to find a transmitter that's not there?
Sinclair: Yes.

Actually, it was designed with the intention of taking humans up. The big hurdle in humans is the vibration and "physical displacement of occupants" for launch to space. The engines were designed and built with that in mind, and Musk intends to strap the engines onto larger rockets configurations (Falcon X and Falcon X Heavy IIRC). Musk's goal is Mars and he asserts that the Falcon 9H could, if assembled and launched from LEO, take us there. Last I ran the numbers base don estimated lift tonnage, it could do with a multiple launch mission profile and be launched from Earth. A few years ago when I was running the numbers on an orbital "assembly" mission profile, it would certainly work just fine for taking us to Mars. And while it does take more to go to the Moon than Mars (you actually need a bigger rocket to go to the Moon), the Falcon 9 heavy could probably do the same for going to the Moon.

It is these days. And why not? Open science is better than "protected" science, or "sanitized" science. The Science Establishement letting the people see what science is really like, and doing it in the open, is one of the best things we can do for science.

So "just lobbing hunks of metal into orbit" > "just lobbing meatbags to the nearest satellite"?? Talk about a perversion of difficulty and complexity. Successfully placing people on other celestial bodies and bringing them back is far more difficult than some measly hunks of metal, rubber, and electronics. After putting people on the moon and bringing them back, lobbing satellites is well .. just lobbing satellites. It's like winning the Indy 500 and then spending the next several decades bragging about driving 5 MPH over the speed limit. In town. In a school zone.

The reality of it is, NASA could well send people to Mars and back, and on it's current budget. The reason they don't? They are a federally funded bureaucracy. I'll elaborate a bit.

When NASA was about space exploration, and specifically human space exploration, they were focus on it. As the political will for it diminished they PtB looked for something else they could include so they could continue to exist. So they expanded their definition of what space exploration meant. This continued over the course of the last several decades to the extent that NASA doing "research" in terrestrial lakes is included in it.

Let that last bit sink in some more. Conducting research on terrestrial lakes is considered "space exploration". That certainly fits my criteria for a bloated agency. The reality is that NASA has a lot of "wasted" funding. If they focused their efforts on space exploration instead of "anything science related" they could actually get some real accomplishments under their belt instead of floundering in Low Earth Orbit for 30 years. If they put actual efficiency as a higher priority than "spreading the wealth among the congressional candidates" they could recapture the imagination, and dare I say hearts and minds, of the voters.

No, the reality is that objectively NASA's "performance" has plummeted. The rovers? They did not massively outlive their expected life. They outlived their requested mission duration. And it was stated back then the rovers were capable of far more than their window. And really, what was NASAs "science" in that? They were a carrier. They lobbed those hunks of metal and electronics to the "next satellite" of the sun. Oh and they provided some people to monitor them. We have automated rovers here on this planet, so the whole autonomous robot aspect is nothing new, and hence not an accomplishment to be proud of anymore than a team that wins the Superbowl can consider a victory over a high school team an accomplishment. Terrestrial weather research is not an aspect of space exploration.

NASA has shown year over year, time and again, that they -as an organization- are not interested in doing real space exploration work, just getting the money for it. They've had plans by experts (their own people even) that they themselves determine would be an order of magnitude cheaper, and many times safer. Yet hey turn them down because they don't constitute a large enough budget increase to appeal to a wide state selection of senators. Anytime the bigger ticket is the "preferred" option to a less expensive but safer journey with a higher ROI you've got a classic case of "just give us money so we can push pencils around". And we the people have seen it.

That isn't to say there aren't good scientists at NASA, they do exist. But they are held into a form of bondage by the bureaucracy that NASA has become.

And given NASAs *full* track record, don't count on anything they say they will do in the future, especially something 3 years out. Your selections too are biased in favor of their small tasks. When you look at the list of stuff they "tried" or "wanted" to do but then killed them off for non-space exploration stuff it really is severely unbalanced toward the "no significant accomplishments" side of the scale.

Ahh now we see the bias come out further. We could roughly double the NASA budget by shifting the money spent on corn subsidies to NASA, but you go after national defense. You think the PP is Obama or a member of Congress? It isn't "her/his" budget anymore than it is mine. Defense spending amounts are debatable as to when they go from needed/efficient to bloated (and ftr: I think they are very bloated currently). Subsidies, however, are fundamentally flawed and cause more harm than good. For the latest prime example look at health care: it is so expensive because of the subsidies it gets.

Second, perhaps if the government sponsored scientists would spend more time on useful science instead of things that are of no significant value, the public would not think (in many cases rightly so) that the government is wasting money on junky science. For example, spending taxpayer money on "why does the shower curtain suck in the way it does in a shower" versus say ... "how can we better stop rapid outbreaks of deadly diseases" the average Joe might consider supporting more scientific research by the government. When you take my money away form me, I expect a benefit to me. Satisfying your curiosity about why certain things smell the way they do with no practical benefit to me at all (even remotely) is not a good way to get me to give you more.

People (except perhaps the latest generation(s) who have not been taught history) understand the wave of technological, practical benefits the moon race *directly* brought them. From cooking foil to lighter vehicles and appliances.

But that doesn't happen these days because NASA isn't doing that kind of science. Only things you can't objectively measure and demonstrate their value. Like any "good" bureaucracy.

17 BILLION dollars isn't a small amount of money, and NASA isn't doing "amazing things" with it. We the people are basically getting ripped off to the tune of probably 16 Billion dollars per year by the NASA administrators.

And finally, your argument relies on the fallacy that we can, or should, continue to take more and more form the people who get out and are *productive* members of the economy and redistribute it around for such things as space exploration as opposed to letting the people decide for themselves. Really, NASA needs to refocus it's mission. Get back down to space exploration; do things the private sector simply isn't willing to front the costs for - if NASA is to *do* any of it. And NASA/the FedGov needs get the hell out of the way of private space exploration. We already have a private space launch capacity of many billions per year, well exceeding the budget of NASA. Hell, most of the satellites are launched on private rockets. Technically, the government didn't own the shuttle program; it just mismanaged it to the ground.

Yeah, violating someone's privacy is wrong. But does it deserve a year in prison? That is what people are objecting to...the overly harsh penalties assigned to crimes regarding computers.

No, slashdotters are reacting so strongly because, being slashdotters, they didn't RTFA and see that he didn't get a year in prison, nor did he get a year's sentenced for violation someone's privacy. The incarceration is for "obstruction of justice". This felony provides for a maximum of 20 years incarceration, yet the guidelines applied to this case recommend 15-18 months. The *total* term sought by the prosecution was 18 months. How is either the request or the result out of the range in the guidelines? Neither the notoriety of the case nor the perp can be credited with affecting the incarceration term. In this case the guy outright posted his goal was to "disrupt her campaign". The breach of privacy was merely a vessel to his goal, and the end punishment of a felony was for destroying evidence during a federal investigation of his criminal activity.

The misdemeanor penalty he got for the computer offense is apparently too small to be reported on, and/or is "rolled into" the 18 month request.

But would it have electrolytes?

Another source would include the possibility of freeze/thaw cycles. There is also another method suggested last year involving radiolytic H2reacting in a non-bioligic manner with CO2 dissolved in water. That process would be neither biological nor geological. There are other atmospheric/radiological possibilities too (such as UV interacting with the atmosphere).

Yet another method is one you throw out sarcastically. Last year, as I recall, there was a hypothesis put forth that meteorites released methane as they burn up on entry. They do, in fact. However, the problem with that hypothesis is that this source is not significant enough to account for the large volumes of Methane required to support the cycles shown in the data this report discusses (10kg/year compared to a couple hundred tons/year). Subsurface deposits melting were also proposed as a source.

So yes, that actually does narrow it down. It narrows it down very significantly, and further if you accept the hypothesis that Mars is a 'dead' planet geologically. "Geological processes" are not as broad as you seem to believe. Geology is a rather specific field. Mars is considered dead geologically. Thus, if you accept that all other sources of Methane have been eliminated you are left with the following two possibilities:
1) Biological - life of some sort
2) Mars isn't geologically dead, and it is a geological process.

Either result is pretty damned important. Though technically it could be a third option: Both.

Further, the bigger quandary isn't so much *how* it is produced, but why does the Martian air "lose" so much methane so quickly? It is removed from the atmosphere faster than the usual suspects.

Your analogy would work if rocks could be formed atmospherically, biologically, or radiologically.