These cufflinks feature 2GB USB storage plus they provide a WiFi hotspot to multiple devices! You can also access media servers from the host computer. Perfect for business meetings, travel and techies everywhere.Indeed - the uses are endless!
We’re moving toward a world beyond plastic, where consumers will shop and pay in a way that best fits their needs and lifestyles with a simple tap, click or touch in-store, online or on a mobile device,” said Chris McWilton, President, U.S. Markets, MasterCard. “Our roadmap represents a transformational shift in the approach to payments and is not simply about EMV, chip and PIN. We’re focused on readying the ecosystem to drive future innovation and provide new consumer experiences to enhance the value of electronic payments. ”Whatever. Seriously. As long as we can finally get chip & pin into the U.S. (which means that my U.S. credit cards can finally start working in Europe!
Anybody who warns of an unavoidable capacity crisis on wireline or wireless networks is lying in order to sell you something. That may be a blunt assessment to some, but it's the only conclusion you can draw as we see time and time again that claims about a looming network apocalypse (remember the Exaflood?) violently overestimate future traffic loads and underestimate the ingenuity of modern network engineers. Fear sells. Drink orange juice or you'll die of cancer. Get more insurance or you're a bad family man. Vote for me or lose your job and see your grandma deported. Pay $2.50 per gigabyte or face Internet brown outs. Be afraid.
[...] As usual though, actually bothering to listen to and look at the data tells a different story. Nobody argues that spectrum is infinite, but buried below industry histrionics is data noting that there really isn't a spectrum crisis as much as a bunch of lazy and gigantic spectrum squatters, hoarding public-owned assets to limit competition, while skimping on network investment to appease short-sighted investors. Insiders at the FCC quietly lamented that the very idea of a spectrum crisis was manufactured for the convenience of government and industry. Now Dave Burstein this week bothered to actually look at wireless growth rates to (surprise surprise) find them to be completely reasonable:
For that matter, no social good is served by having the embezzler or the Ponzi schemer locked in a cage for the rest of his life, rather than having him bankrupt and doing community service in the South Bronx for the next decade or two. Would we actually have more fraud and looting of shareholder value if the perpetrators knew that they would lose their bank accounts and their reputation, and have to do community service seven days a week for five yearsBut I still think of this as criminal, not civil, and for the upper 0.1% (or whatever the heck P.E. CEOs are), these type of penalties should be exceptionally severe - e.g., picking up dog-poop along the Brooklyn waterfront every day, twice a day, for 20 years.
Bowing to mounting evidence that austerity alone cannot solve the debt crisis, European leaders are expected to conclude this week that what the debt-laden, sclerotic countries of the Continent need are a dose of economic growth.
A draft of the European Union summit meeting communiqué calls for ‘‘growth-friendly consolidation and job-friendly growth,’’ an indication that European leaders have come to realize that austerity measures, like those being put in countries like Greece and Italy, risk stoking a recession and plunging fragile economies into a downward spiral.Really?
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so
much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his
share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people
are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to
avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused
much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In
consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is,
why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves .
[...] Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be
sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other
times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than
ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have
increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is
actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help
to account for the fact that it is currently so great.
Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a
common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide
honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no
inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth
about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature.
... As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and
we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them.
Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in
experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the
truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts
about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical
dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial —
notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other
things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
The last thing I’d like to remind you is that the entry ticket for success in freemium is having an amazing product that creates value for people — one that people love and use. If you don’t have that, the smartest pricing model in the universe can’t help you.
And therein lies - potentially - the key to their salvation (to the extent that salvation is available, that is). They do seem to be approaching this with a coherent strategy, based on market realities. E-books are exploding, and maintaining price-levels is going to be difficult. Deploying a regimen of enforced scarcity is not really going to help (or work) - and the bookstores are useful entities, not the least because they serve a valuable alternate function They are to books, what Starbucks is to coffee.“That display space they have in the store is really one of the most valuable places that exists in this country for communicating to the consumer that a book is a big deal,” said Madeline McIntosh, president of sales, operations and digital for Random House.
Regarding the first of my questions, "Do we want to make poor people less poor", it may be that your sense of morality tells you that if someone is in a condition as a direct result of their own actions, it would be wrong to try to remove that person from that condition. Fine, good for you! But for my part, I often simply don't care. If I am getting mugged by a poor person, I quite frankly do not give a rodent's gluteal region whether that person is poor because he made bad life choices or because the circumstances of his birth made his poverty inevitable; I want him to stop mugging me, and if making him less poor will make him stop mugging me, then maybe this would be a good thing to do, regardless of whether he "deserves" it. When I witness the urban blight, violence, drug abuse, and other social ills that poverty may be causing, as a non-poor person I have an interest in preventing these things from affecting me, regardless of whether they are "deserved."Also, whether people are poor because of their own actions doesn't really tell us how to get them out of poverty. Scolding and finger-wagging does not work. Just because a person's actions got him into a situation doesn't mean that his actions can get him out of it. And even if poor people could raise themselves up out of poverty at any time, scolding and finger-wagging is not likely to induce them to suddenly do so. The conservative solution to poverty - make it really, really unpleasant to be poor, and then hope people will do the smart thing and avoid it - has failed and failed and failed again.So from my point of view, asking whether or not poor people "deserve" their poverty is asking the wrong question.That said, I think the Caplan definition of "deserve" is not as "uncontroversial" a moral premise as Caplan declares. The reason is that it is a partial-equilibrium definition, not a general-equilibrium one. If we live in a society in which X percent of the populace must be poor, then no matter what set of actions is taken by the population, some people will wind up in poverty. To see this, imagine that we lived in a society in which the hardest-working 50% of people get to be spectacularly rich, and the other 50% are forced to live in squalid poverty. In this society, if everyone raises their effort by 1000%, the number of people in poverty stays exactly the same. I doubt that most people would say that the lower half of the population "deserved" to stay in poverty after raising their effort by 1000%! But that is exactly what Caplan's definition implies.But anyway, that is a bit beside the point, because in my opinion the whole question is a bit of a pointless one.
All fairly accurate. I think he misses one point though - I don't think most conservatives actually believe the 'make it really really unpleasant to be poor' option, its just something that keeps the buzz going, a-la Fannie, Freddie, and Chewbacca. To quoteThe rest are just Bullshitting. That is, they don’t really care what the truth is one way or the other. This is just a way to gesture in the general direction of the federal government and say Urrhh!!!
Graphene is a form of carbon. It is a flat layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two-dimensional honeycomb arrangement.
Dr Nair said: "Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our (graphene) membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment."Imagine the possibilities!
So yeah, this is pretty accurate, and pretty much describes all the chaos that I've dealt with in the past with our production telecommunications platform running flat-out, at scale, where we spent aeons figuring out that magical set of metrics for startup memory, heap, load, scale-factors, tint-control, astrological signs, etc. that would keep things from crashing unexpectedly.An improvement in the Java virtual machine (JVM) can make a world of difference.E-commerce application failures can often be sourced back to limitations of conventional JVMs, which constrain application resources and make it challenging to scale apps beyond a few gigabytes of memory, which can effect performance under load.Conventional JVMs also suffer from stop-the-world pauses because the JVM needs to clean up its internal memory, the impact of which causes applications to freeze and become unresponsive.Programmers must tune Java to work around the JVM’s limited scalability and very carefully manage the amount of memory a given application uses. For e-tailers, this is bad news, because e-commerce applications must handle users loads that are never static and require more memory for each user and transaction to ensure consistent user response times and high sustained throughput.What if e-tailers had a JVM that could elastically manage application memory allocation before it ever became a limitation?The Java runtime (i.e. the JVM) would sense the demands of the application in real-time and grow its memory beyond the static limitation of conventional JVMs and never encounter those nasty stop-the-world pauses. Rather than freezing during demand surges and peak requirements, e-commerce applications would stay highly available and responsive. Such a JVM would enable the Java runtime to be consistent regardless of sales volume.
Characters in Dungeons & Dragons progress by gaining experience points which relate to the complexity of the quests they undertake and the level of the foes they defeat. If they do something themselves all that learning goes to them. However if they are part of a team the experience is typically distributed amongst everybody. So the more quests you undertake, and the bigger those quests are, the more you’ll progress in your careers. If you play infrequently and only accept easy challenges it can take you ages to move forward, while if you work with a small but experienced team on tricky adventures you’ll grow much faster.The same is true with the web. Learning comes through experience and the more projects you undertake the better you’ll get. If you accept simple projects with little risk you’ll have an easy life but you won’t push yourself. It’s only by taking risks and working on projects that are slightly outside your comfort zone will you learn new skills and push your career forward apace.With some character classes, new skills become available at higher levels. You could argue the same is true on the web. There are certain skills you would typically only pick up at higher experience levels and are unlikely to be present in junior practitioners. As such, your level of experience really does impact what you can and cant contribute to a project.
That is what survey after survey around the globe shows that the world’s populations wants. Despite a relentless propaganda campaign of misinformation, fabricated data and false narratives, the public has not been fooled by the 1%. The best efforts of a well funded group of ideologues — Free Market absolutists, anti-Democracy and Randians — these pro-corporate radicals has not yet succeeded in fooling all of the world’s population all of the time.A particularly relevant point - Imagine the entertainment if Nuclear Power wasn't regulated at all Energy Exploration - the disaster in the Niger Delta, Banking - you need to ask?)
How do we know this? A 25 country survey last year by Edelman. They asked the question: “When it comes to government regulation of business, do you think that your government regulates business too much, not enough or about the right amount?”
...
One major caveat: I would imagine the major events of the past few years probably has people thinking of disasters in specific industries: Banking, Energy Exploration and Nuclear Power. If the questions were asked about those specific industries, I believe the response for more regs would be much higher. And if the question was asked, “outside of banking, deep water oil drilling and nuclear plants” I assume we would get lower numbers.
The quotation first came from Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania, according to his friend Joseph Bigler, as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's lawpublished in 1980 titled Murphy's Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong.[1] The name was inspired by Occam's razor.[2]A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story "Logic of Empire" ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the Jargon File,[3] with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor". "Heinlein's Razor" has since been defined as variations on Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice.[4] Yet another similarepigram ("Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence") has been widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.[5] Another similar quote appears in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent."A common (and more laconic) British English variation, coined by Sir Bernard Ingham, is the saying "cock-up before conspiracy", deriving from this quotation:Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory.—Sir Bernard Ingham[6]
To summarize, Apple doesn't have the right to prevent you from doing whatever you want. At worst you breach the EULA. The thing is, by breaching the EULA, you *are* causing damage to Apple, but the damage has nothing to do with the book you wrote (remember, Apple has no copyright claim on your book). It basically looks like you'll have to refund the cost of the software, which was free!...in the end, the iBooks Author EULA leaves both Apple and the author in a strange stand-off: Apple doesn’t actually have the right to tell the author not to take their work somewhere else, but the author can’t do that without breaching the EULA — even though they retain full rights in their copyright.But Apple has been too clever by half here: if an author does breach the EULA (by not subsequently signing the written agreement after having used the “free” software) and distributes their iBooks-created-work elsewhere, what are Apple’s damages? Because Apple doesn’t have a copyright interest in the book (like an exclusive license), they can’t claim lost royalties as the damage. Instead, they have to claim that an author breached the EULA of a program that users did not have to pay for in money.
No-one likes airports, but NFC technology could go some way to reducing the stress a little. That's the possibility raised by a proof of concept from Orange Business Services and air transport research lab SITA, who have demonstrated how integrating NFC into mobile SIM cards may get you through the airport more smoothly. The idea centers around storing boarding pass information on the SIM card, meaning that you'd be able to check in, open security gates, or get easy access to airport lounges by simply waving your phone over a reader rather than searching for the papers in your bag or the QR code in an app. Because the data is written directly to the SIM card, it'll work even if the phone is powered off. SITA is owned by the aviation...Oh, FWIW, I *always* carry a printed boarding pass now, kinda negating the whole QR code point...
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Most brands participate in many, many social networks. But they use them purely as a messaging tool, which isn’t what social networks are built for. There are six common myths regarding what it means to go social:
- Myth 1: Social media are all the same. Wrong, wrong, wrong! There are two major types of social media – networks and communities. Social networks maintain established relationships, but those relationships were initially established and strengthened in communities. Facebook is an example of a social network, while brand pages, Wikipedia and Yelp are communities. Knowing the differences between the two types of social media and what motivates customers to participate in them is important; it can help you build new campaigns that play to customers’ most durable interests and desires rather than forcing them to think or behave outside of their normal mode.
- Myth 2: If we go social, we have to be on every channel. No you don’t. One high-quality social network or community will do far more for you than a hundred half-hearted cameos. So concentrate your energies on a few social networks or communities that are relevant to your most influential customers.
- Myth 3: Being there is enough. Joining a social network or community isn’t enough. While marketing was once product-based and driven by outbound campaigns, online is based on customer relationships. Since repeat purchases, rather than the initial point-of-sale generate most revenues, the point-of-sale is the beginning of a very long relationship. Strengthening those relationships is what communities are for. Without an integrated social strategy, a haphazard presence can backfire. Lots of fan sites can devolve into forums of rants and spam that end up costing brands tremendous opportunities.
- Myth 4: Social channels are an opportunity to broadcast direct, outbound marketing campaigns to a massive audience. Social networks and communities – brace yourself – are designed for socializing. In a forum designed for dialogue, one-way messages come off as spam. That’s why direct ad campaigns broadcast on Facebook tend to annoy more than persuade people. A community’s success depends on interaction, so think of your brand as a party host. A good host brings something amazing to the table, facilitates interesting and ongoing conversations, and listens more than talks.
- Myth 5: OMG, going social means I have to make every customer my BFF. Contacting all of your customers is insanity, plain and simple. Instead, you need to discover the small number of “superfans” who want deeper engagement and then harness their enthusiasm to manage and strengthen other customer relationships on behalf of the brand. That’s the real power of community – you tend to the 1% who tend the other 99%.
- Myth 6: I am the authority on my company, products, and services. Maybe. On the other hand, a customer who uses your products daily often knows them better and differently than you do. The other issue is a bit more abstract: Whose recommendation do you trust more: that of a sales rep or that of a long-time customer with honest expertise and enthusiasm for a product? Our data says people trust long-time customers much more. It’s a crucial trend to recognize because you can use social networks and communities to privilege the voices of customers who are the most trusted and respected authorities.
Overwhelmed yet? I don’t blame you. Thinking about making an investment in social can look overwhelming from the outside. You’re not just considering price and return on investment. You’re also thinking about how much up-front time and attention it’s going to take for you to launch and integrate; how you’re going to scale; and how you’re going to staff it. While it seems like a big pill to swallow now, going social for real and cultivating “superfans” and relationships is a business strategy that can save brands a huge amount of time, effort, and money.
Many principles behind the science of social aren’t really that new, because people and the way we interact and do business haven’t change all that much for the past millennia. Yet, for the first time, we have the capacity to capture, store and analyze human behavioral data at a planetary scale. This enables us to really discover new principles and rediscover old ones that govern how customers behave. And this is just the beginning.
