Pointing out that Valve perpetuates a legally questionable business model (actually illegal in California) that most Slashdot readers find obnoxious and obscene, not to mention draconian (DRM + no first-sale doctrine rights) is not "flamebait." Further, mentioning a negative fact about Valve in a discussion about Valve's "good deeds" is quite on topic, contrary to the poor moderation present here. Moderation without liability begets abuse in all cases. Moderators who incorrectly moderate posts like we've seen here should be banned from ever moderating again on/.. It's pretty clear why this site is in the gutter.
It's Valve. Mandatory DRM and an each-purchase-is-non-refundable-and-permanently-bound-to-just-you approach to software distribution. I really could care less if you open-sourced every thing you've ever made, the damage done in the name of greed by your company overshadows any good deed you could possibly do.
Phone companies and Facebook sell the information, they don't typically directly use it. In that sense, power companies wouldn't really care about your usage, but other parties might, and they do need to have regulations in place that prevent them from sharing that information with anyone without approval and/or without a court issued warrant, granted. I do see potentially good things -- nabbing illegal operations in homes, efficient police patrolling in areas that are prone to break-ins when it's determined people are away, etc. I'm not sure how they can get both the good and the bad, unless it's taken on good faith.
Except they don't do this because it's not useful information for a provider. An individual's usage habits are uniquely worthless. Aggregating usage habits over thousands of people to see demand and map pricing information and for planning purposes is immensely more useful. Nobody at your power company cares about your consumption. Sure, somebody might have access to the information, and may even look at it for a legitimate reason, but people sitting there trying to analyze what you're doing are probably violating their employment contracts.
OTOH, that information is very useful and valuable to you and me, which is why we might be concerned that someone else is looking at it. We want it, providers only care about the immediacy of usage aggregations, not about what individuals are doing. There's a good reason they give you that information for your own personal use. If they didn't want you to use it as a tool, they'd just send you a bill like they do now. Your provider isn't going to force resource planning and informed consumption on you, but making you more responsible for and aware of you usage habits is a very effective way to suggest the behavior.
So I want to make it clear here. There are two parties who are interested in consumption data. You have providers and you have consumers. Providers don't care about your consumption habits individually; rather they care about your consumption habits in the context of their peak demand and as a function of trying to stabilize power output while minimizing waste, for outage management, and demand response. These things done at a fine-level by intelligent software powered by smart meters can save ENORMOUS amounts of money and make our grids much more efficient (in terms of less waste and fewer outages caused by a lack of sufficient power). This is what a provider cares about.
And then there are consumers. They care about what their devices are consuming. They care about analyzing their consumption habits. They care that it might "invade their privacy." Nobody but you is thinking about your power like that. Nobody. And nobody but you is going to analyze your power usage with knowledge of your usage habits and try to figure out exactly what you did to cause a certain usage trend in some interval. It's important that we have access to the ability to do this, but it's also important that we understand this is a tool of tremendous personal power, and less useful for our providers. They write customer-facing software that lets you analyze your resource consumption with fine-detail (down to the highest resolution their smart meters are capable of). They do this because it's immensely useful to you and me. To understand why our power consumption was a little high and play with our daily routine to try to optimize our consumption (to save us money but also balance out the peaks). To understand the cost of running a computer all night versus shutting it off, or leaving your TV on when you go to bed, in an evidence-based way, not a calculated manner. And when you consider time-of-use binning where high usage at peak hours is more expensive (if you're in such a plan), it allows you to plan your activities for off-peak times and save even more money. This is awesome. This is why this information is useful for consumers, and the side effect is that it's good for the providers. That's why they give you the information instead of just handing you a bill at the end of the month. They don't care about your usage, you do, and that's all that matters.
The problem is that you're analyzing your usage based on knowledge of your usage habits. If you know your usage habits, correlating that to usage is going to make it look like you can discern a lot more than you really can for a situation where the only information you have is the energy consumption.
Right now, utility companies bill you on how much you used. Be it water, electric, gas, etc. They can either monitor your use remotely, but inaccurately (usually), or they need someone to drive around and check the numbers with a short-range reader (they don't usually walk up to meters and read them manually anymore). So what they get now is a big chunk of data showing how much you've used over the past 2 weeks or month. With smart meters, all the extra information they're getting is really interval data. Instead of getting a read every day (which they still get, as register reads), they can get reads as often as in 2 second intervals (15 and 30 minutes are much more common). That just shows the household's usage over that interval. It does not reveal anything about what was done with the resource. Yes, you can argue that there are ways to calculate the consumption of various resources of certain activities and guess what someone is doing or determine if someone is away, but it's purely conjecture and such an analysis would be incredibly inaccurate in a 15 minute interval (nobody stores 2 second intervals, unless Google got into the game). There's just no business use in it doing that, and I've never seen MDM software nor analytic software pointed at trying to guess what someone is doing with a resource.
There are, however, HANs (Home Area Networks) that are consumer-based only, and that don't transmit information to your ISP. They collect significantly more invasive information, primarily for your own monitoring purposes. They can collect information as specific as how much power a specific outlet used, how much power your AC/Heater or washer/dryer used, and can be modified with plugins to automatically rate-limit certain activities, like reducing A/C and heating costs when you're away automatically to save power. But this is entirely up to the consumer; this is a HAN, not a smart meter. What you do with that kind of data, whether you keep it for personal record keeping or publish it, is completely up to you.
To draw an analogy at why the smart metering thing is a non-issue really, both your bank and your credit lender already know "how much of a resource you're using" and earning, too. And your credit lender (for your credit card, eg) can potentially know much more about your purchases. So unless you buy EVERYTHING with cash, you're already giving very valuable data for advertisers over to people who actually want to know your spending habits. Not that I agree with the practice, but it's very real. So it's not really an argument to complain that "someone might know how much electricity I used over an arbitrary 15 minute interval" when someone knows exactly how much money you spent, and someone else knows exactly where you spent it.
In the end, your utility already knows your usage in month periods. Knowing it in 15 minute intervals isn't going to tell them that you were watching porn on 2 monitors while listening to Justin Bieber on your radio while cooking a Ramen Noodle, with your AC set to 71 degrees and 2 ceiling fans set to low with a total of 5 13W CFL lights on while drying a load of your underwear. Let's be realistic, people.
Design is not UX. Making something look cool and flashy and hip does not mean it's usable nor useful. In the world of software, function > form, almost always. I use some of the ugliest shit I've ever seen daily, but because the software is feature-complete and reliable, it doesn't matter. If tomorrow 90% of its screen elements were abstracted away into hidden bins and hovers and it had animations, rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, and tons of white space in lieu of that, I'd spend 90% of my time trying to find things, not doing my job. I mean really, stop and think, trying to make the screen as clean as possible is literally playing hide-and-seek with your features; no self-respecting UX designer would ever get caught doing that. Making something look good and making something usable are two VERY hard things to reconcile. The "UX designers" at Google are good at making something pretty, but terrible at designing usable interfaces.
To give a good and apt analogy, the equivalent in the world of APIs would be abstracting your entire API down to a single function, so all you need to know is 1 function, ever again. Yes, it has 40,000 arguments, but there's only 1 function! Look how clean it is.
It was Larry Page's decision, and his alone. He demanded they completely re-design everything. I think it's akin to a dog spraying everything he comes across with the scent of any other animal on it; he's gotta put his mark on it somehow, even though he has absolutely nothing to do with it.
And Larry Page letting the Google UX guys (the 18-20 year olds with 0 years experience and just a bunch of grand art classes and prototype drawings under their belts) redesign GMail (while completely ignoring 20 years of UX best practices). That didn't help either.
I'd still pay $5000 to continue using the classic interface, even if just on my business apps account. Call me old fashioned (or blame me for preferring a UI that isn't garbage). I mean Google effectively pulled a Ribbon on us. I thought they were better than that.
Why not make it required that a person without insurance pay their bills instead of forcing us young people who have annual medical expenditures (covered by medical insurance, not dental/vision/etc) under $300 pa pay over $500/yr for decent coverage or over $900 in taxes? As it stands, I'm paying for a benefit I don't share in because I don't EVER go to the hospital. I exercise. I eat right. I've been sick once in the last 3 years, and it was a cold. My medical costs are entirely in my dental and vision, and those are separate. So I'm subsidizing the medical expenses of those over 35 who significantly tax the system. Yes, I may be one of those one day, but the last time we implemented a "pay into it, benefit later" system, it failed miserably (see social security).
I'd much rather have to pay the full bill whenever I go see the doctor and pay full price for medicines (I haven't actually consumed my deductible, ever) than to subsidize your medicine, just as much as you dislike subsidizing others' right now. I have the money to do that, and I don't have the expenses to match with what I'm forced to pay right now. But I have no choice.
So what this effectively means is that healthy, young people just got a tax increase. Those without the experience and years put into the work force to command high salaries. Of course, Obama and his administration will do anything they can to say that it's not a tax (for posterity) -- but this was just ruled constitutional by the Congress's ability to levy TAXES. It's a fucking tax, you dipshits. There's no denying it. Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bg-ofjXrXio#!
GPO abuse for "security" reasons to lock-down the usability of Windows is a major anti-feature. I'm not sure why Microsoft has left half of these things available to be enabled/disabled via Registry, they are fundamental usability systems built into Windows. The "recently used" stuff should be per-user anyway, so unless you are implementing the anti-pattern of always-signed-on-kiosk-account or everyone-uses-the-same-login type terminals, the benefits of such a feature have already been provided by account separation. But then again, I guess it was born of Admins using anti-patterns begging for the ability to require them to change nothing.
I routinely use and open 50 different applications on a daily basis. No, I don't want to pick 4 or 5 that I "almost always open" and put them on my pin list, because things that I use constantly are ALWAYS OPEN, which means I don't need them pinned. What I do, instead, is create a folder full of shortcuts or 1-off programs (like putty) to my desktop and add it to my PATH. Then Winkey + R and a very simple to remember word (which I can execute 1-2 seconds for every app I use often) launches it. I'm used to working in linux terminals for hours and so this setup is much more flexible and powerful to me than pins. It also has the benefit of only requiring me to copy that folder back to my desktop and add it to my PATH (this can be done with a simple script, too) whenever I reinstall windows, instead of needing to pin all of my apps to the taskbar and then ordering them so my winkey+\d shortcuts are consistent.
As a former IT professional who's used Windows more than any other OS and who's memorized most of the useful shortcuts and configured his desktop to allow me to get things done really quickly, even I still use the Start menu.
I have never once ever pinned anything on the task bar (Indeed I remove all the default pins and set it to show text unless the bar is full), because that would require me to click on an icon, and reduce task-bar real-estate for my apps. Horrible trade-off.
And a direct answer to their question: "What can we do with the Start menu to revive it, to give it some new identity, give it some new power?" -- remove pins. Pins and quickstart/recently used are the exact same fucking thing. I don't ever CLICK on the Start button, I hit my win key, which means it's not an extra click for me to access that menu, and it's vertically stacked which means I don't have this glob of icons. I hate that enough on OSX.
What it seems like is happening here is that Microsoft is trying to emulate OSX's Dock. The problem with that is that OSX also provides a start-menu of sorts, it's just got nowhere near as much power. So trying to emulate OSX but removing the one benefit you have over it seems like sawing off half of your foot so you can fit into designer sneakers. Good move, Microsoft. I won't use Win8 without a Start menu. Thanks, though.
get this IDLE crap off the front page. This is the dumbest article I've read on Slashdot all week! Here I was hoping we'd have a week devoid of worthless moronic headlines hitting the front page. This is most certainly not news that matters, to anyone.
That's still problematic. If I'm going to buy 10,000 shares of a stock at $2.00, and from the time it took me to click 'Buy' on my website to the time the server was able to process the purchase request the price fell to $1.99, I'm out 10,000 pennies, and an HFT will interject itself there and snatch up those 10,000 pennies for a cool $100. What did it cost them? Nothing, they knew more than I did. A $.002 surcharge per exchange would not prevent such abuses from happening. That's $100 that does NOT go to the holder of the stock (be it the owning company or an independent investor), rather some super-rich asshole middleman.
It'd be easier to instead provide transaction support on purchases. If I create a purchase, I have some 5000ms for my purchase to succeed at the given price, or it will fail, at which time I will have the price refreshed and try again. This would make HFT impossible, as minute millisecond-long changes in the value of a stock does not impact individual buyers on normal purchase time-scales. This is the solution we need. Transactional stock purchases.
Education -> guaranteed green card is a problematic route.
For one, if you put a priority on highly educated people, you increase the work force for skilled jobs, but not ones we still rely on (labor, tradeskills, etc).
For two, it breeds corruption in foreign schools (pay for a degree, or degrees become very easy to obtain), which damages both us and them.
Similarly, granting educated people here on H-1Bs without requiring an extreme effort (not just a local paper-ad and at 50% salary of fair market price) from companies to hire American citizens causes a huge disruption of the job ecosystem in America.
We may want them here, but there's really not a good way to do it that doesn't cause disruption in their homes or ours. I can't think of a better solution than for a business to just expand overseas and build up a company in another country rather than trying to import people into the US. That stimulates the US by creating a demand for local workers and the other country by stimulating the demand needed to maintain that company. We just need to ensure that companies operating like this pay appropriate taxes (instead of claiming 99% of their revenue in a country with no income tax, which seems to be the norm for international companies these days).
Slashdot Mirror
Pointing out that Valve perpetuates a legally questionable business model (actually illegal in California) that most Slashdot readers find obnoxious and obscene, not to mention draconian (DRM + no first-sale doctrine rights) is not "flamebait." Further, mentioning a negative fact about Valve in a discussion about Valve's "good deeds" is quite on topic, contrary to the poor moderation present here. Moderation without liability begets abuse in all cases. Moderators who incorrectly moderate posts like we've seen here should be banned from ever moderating again on /.. It's pretty clear why this site is in the gutter.
Couldn't*
I didn't do an editing pass, whoops.
It's Valve. Mandatory DRM and an each-purchase-is-non-refundable-and-permanently-bound-to-just-you approach to software distribution. I really could care less if you open-sourced every thing you've ever made, the damage done in the name of greed by your company overshadows any good deed you could possibly do.
Phone companies and Facebook sell the information, they don't typically directly use it. In that sense, power companies wouldn't really care about your usage, but other parties might, and they do need to have regulations in place that prevent them from sharing that information with anyone without approval and/or without a court issued warrant, granted. I do see potentially good things -- nabbing illegal operations in homes, efficient police patrolling in areas that are prone to break-ins when it's determined people are away, etc. I'm not sure how they can get both the good and the bad, unless it's taken on good faith.
Except they don't do this because it's not useful information for a provider. An individual's usage habits are uniquely worthless. Aggregating usage habits over thousands of people to see demand and map pricing information and for planning purposes is immensely more useful. Nobody at your power company cares about your consumption. Sure, somebody might have access to the information, and may even look at it for a legitimate reason, but people sitting there trying to analyze what you're doing are probably violating their employment contracts.
OTOH, that information is very useful and valuable to you and me, which is why we might be concerned that someone else is looking at it. We want it, providers only care about the immediacy of usage aggregations, not about what individuals are doing. There's a good reason they give you that information for your own personal use. If they didn't want you to use it as a tool, they'd just send you a bill like they do now. Your provider isn't going to force resource planning and informed consumption on you, but making you more responsible for and aware of you usage habits is a very effective way to suggest the behavior.
So I want to make it clear here. There are two parties who are interested in consumption data. You have providers and you have consumers. Providers don't care about your consumption habits individually; rather they care about your consumption habits in the context of their peak demand and as a function of trying to stabilize power output while minimizing waste, for outage management, and demand response. These things done at a fine-level by intelligent software powered by smart meters can save ENORMOUS amounts of money and make our grids much more efficient (in terms of less waste and fewer outages caused by a lack of sufficient power). This is what a provider cares about.
And then there are consumers. They care about what their devices are consuming. They care about analyzing their consumption habits. They care that it might "invade their privacy." Nobody but you is thinking about your power like that. Nobody. And nobody but you is going to analyze your power usage with knowledge of your usage habits and try to figure out exactly what you did to cause a certain usage trend in some interval. It's important that we have access to the ability to do this, but it's also important that we understand this is a tool of tremendous personal power, and less useful for our providers. They write customer-facing software that lets you analyze your resource consumption with fine-detail (down to the highest resolution their smart meters are capable of). They do this because it's immensely useful to you and me. To understand why our power consumption was a little high and play with our daily routine to try to optimize our consumption (to save us money but also balance out the peaks). To understand the cost of running a computer all night versus shutting it off, or leaving your TV on when you go to bed, in an evidence-based way, not a calculated manner. And when you consider time-of-use binning where high usage at peak hours is more expensive (if you're in such a plan), it allows you to plan your activities for off-peak times and save even more money. This is awesome. This is why this information is useful for consumers, and the side effect is that it's good for the providers. That's why they give you the information instead of just handing you a bill at the end of the month. They don't care about your usage, you do, and that's all that matters.
The problem is that you're analyzing your usage based on knowledge of your usage habits. If you know your usage habits, correlating that to usage is going to make it look like you can discern a lot more than you really can for a situation where the only information you have is the energy consumption.
Right now, utility companies bill you on how much you used. Be it water, electric, gas, etc. They can either monitor your use remotely, but inaccurately (usually), or they need someone to drive around and check the numbers with a short-range reader (they don't usually walk up to meters and read them manually anymore). So what they get now is a big chunk of data showing how much you've used over the past 2 weeks or month. With smart meters, all the extra information they're getting is really interval data. Instead of getting a read every day (which they still get, as register reads), they can get reads as often as in 2 second intervals (15 and 30 minutes are much more common). That just shows the household's usage over that interval. It does not reveal anything about what was done with the resource. Yes, you can argue that there are ways to calculate the consumption of various resources of certain activities and guess what someone is doing or determine if someone is away, but it's purely conjecture and such an analysis would be incredibly inaccurate in a 15 minute interval (nobody stores 2 second intervals, unless Google got into the game). There's just no business use in it doing that, and I've never seen MDM software nor analytic software pointed at trying to guess what someone is doing with a resource.
There are, however, HANs (Home Area Networks) that are consumer-based only, and that don't transmit information to your ISP. They collect significantly more invasive information, primarily for your own monitoring purposes. They can collect information as specific as how much power a specific outlet used, how much power your AC/Heater or washer/dryer used, and can be modified with plugins to automatically rate-limit certain activities, like reducing A/C and heating costs when you're away automatically to save power. But this is entirely up to the consumer; this is a HAN, not a smart meter. What you do with that kind of data, whether you keep it for personal record keeping or publish it, is completely up to you.
To draw an analogy at why the smart metering thing is a non-issue really, both your bank and your credit lender already know "how much of a resource you're using" and earning, too. And your credit lender (for your credit card, eg) can potentially know much more about your purchases. So unless you buy EVERYTHING with cash, you're already giving very valuable data for advertisers over to people who actually want to know your spending habits. Not that I agree with the practice, but it's very real. So it's not really an argument to complain that "someone might know how much electricity I used over an arbitrary 15 minute interval" when someone knows exactly how much money you spent, and someone else knows exactly where you spent it.
In the end, your utility already knows your usage in month periods. Knowing it in 15 minute intervals isn't going to tell them that you were watching porn on 2 monitors while listening to Justin Bieber on your radio while cooking a Ramen Noodle, with your AC set to 71 degrees and 2 ceiling fans set to low with a total of 5 13W CFL lights on while drying a load of your underwear. Let's be realistic, people.
You, sir, seem to be describing GMail Classic. I think we all agree -- nothing even comes close. Unfortunately, I prefer even Outlook over GMail 2.0.
Design is not UX. Making something look cool and flashy and hip does not mean it's usable nor useful. In the world of software, function > form, almost always. I use some of the ugliest shit I've ever seen daily, but because the software is feature-complete and reliable, it doesn't matter. If tomorrow 90% of its screen elements were abstracted away into hidden bins and hovers and it had animations, rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, and tons of white space in lieu of that, I'd spend 90% of my time trying to find things, not doing my job. I mean really, stop and think, trying to make the screen as clean as possible is literally playing hide-and-seek with your features; no self-respecting UX designer would ever get caught doing that. Making something look good and making something usable are two VERY hard things to reconcile. The "UX designers" at Google are good at making something pretty, but terrible at designing usable interfaces.
To give a good and apt analogy, the equivalent in the world of APIs would be abstracting your entire API down to a single function, so all you need to know is 1 function, ever again. Yes, it has 40,000 arguments, but there's only 1 function! Look how clean it is.
It was Larry Page's decision, and his alone. He demanded they completely re-design everything. I think it's akin to a dog spraying everything he comes across with the scent of any other animal on it; he's gotta put his mark on it somehow, even though he has absolutely nothing to do with it.
And Larry Page letting the Google UX guys (the 18-20 year olds with 0 years experience and just a bunch of grand art classes and prototype drawings under their belts) redesign GMail (while completely ignoring 20 years of UX best practices). That didn't help either.
What happened to it? Best interface ever -- gone forever :(. That's what I signed up for, not this GMail w/ Ribbon 2.0 thing.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/ -- "Everything your business needs." Yep, even a mail program that has mandatory usability downgrades at no charge!
How is a comment about GMail's interface in a discussion about GMail "off topic." Some people just shouldn't get mod points.
I'd still pay $5000 to continue using the classic interface, even if just on my business apps account. Call me old fashioned (or blame me for preferring a UI that isn't garbage). I mean Google effectively pulled a Ribbon on us. I thought they were better than that.
Why not make it required that a person without insurance pay their bills instead of forcing us young people who have annual medical expenditures (covered by medical insurance, not dental/vision/etc) under $300 pa pay over $500/yr for decent coverage or over $900 in taxes? As it stands, I'm paying for a benefit I don't share in because I don't EVER go to the hospital. I exercise. I eat right. I've been sick once in the last 3 years, and it was a cold. My medical costs are entirely in my dental and vision, and those are separate. So I'm subsidizing the medical expenses of those over 35 who significantly tax the system. Yes, I may be one of those one day, but the last time we implemented a "pay into it, benefit later" system, it failed miserably (see social security).
I'd much rather have to pay the full bill whenever I go see the doctor and pay full price for medicines (I haven't actually consumed my deductible, ever) than to subsidize your medicine, just as much as you dislike subsidizing others' right now. I have the money to do that, and I don't have the expenses to match with what I'm forced to pay right now. But I have no choice.
So what this effectively means is that healthy, young people just got a tax increase. Those without the experience and years put into the work force to command high salaries. Of course, Obama and his administration will do anything they can to say that it's not a tax (for posterity) -- but this was just ruled constitutional by the Congress's ability to levy TAXES. It's a fucking tax, you dipshits. There's no denying it. Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bg-ofjXrXio#!
GPO abuse for "security" reasons to lock-down the usability of Windows is a major anti-feature. I'm not sure why Microsoft has left half of these things available to be enabled/disabled via Registry, they are fundamental usability systems built into Windows. The "recently used" stuff should be per-user anyway, so unless you are implementing the anti-pattern of always-signed-on-kiosk-account or everyone-uses-the-same-login type terminals, the benefits of such a feature have already been provided by account separation. But then again, I guess it was born of Admins using anti-patterns begging for the ability to require them to change nothing.
I routinely use and open 50 different applications on a daily basis. No, I don't want to pick 4 or 5 that I "almost always open" and put them on my pin list, because things that I use constantly are ALWAYS OPEN, which means I don't need them pinned. What I do, instead, is create a folder full of shortcuts or 1-off programs (like putty) to my desktop and add it to my PATH. Then Winkey + R and a very simple to remember word (which I can execute 1-2 seconds for every app I use often) launches it. I'm used to working in linux terminals for hours and so this setup is much more flexible and powerful to me than pins. It also has the benefit of only requiring me to copy that folder back to my desktop and add it to my PATH (this can be done with a simple script, too) whenever I reinstall windows, instead of needing to pin all of my apps to the taskbar and then ordering them so my winkey+\d shortcuts are consistent.
Apple menu vs Start menu.
Unless you're driving a train :). Maybe Microsoft wants to turn all cars into trains!
As a former IT professional who's used Windows more than any other OS and who's memorized most of the useful shortcuts and configured his desktop to allow me to get things done really quickly, even I still use the Start menu.
I have never once ever pinned anything on the task bar (Indeed I remove all the default pins and set it to show text unless the bar is full), because that would require me to click on an icon, and reduce task-bar real-estate for my apps. Horrible trade-off.
And a direct answer to their question: "What can we do with the Start menu to revive it, to give it some new identity, give it some new power?" -- remove pins. Pins and quickstart/recently used are the exact same fucking thing. I don't ever CLICK on the Start button, I hit my win key, which means it's not an extra click for me to access that menu, and it's vertically stacked which means I don't have this glob of icons. I hate that enough on OSX.
What it seems like is happening here is that Microsoft is trying to emulate OSX's Dock. The problem with that is that OSX also provides a start-menu of sorts, it's just got nowhere near as much power. So trying to emulate OSX but removing the one benefit you have over it seems like sawing off half of your foot so you can fit into designer sneakers. Good move, Microsoft. I won't use Win8 without a Start menu. Thanks, though.
get this IDLE crap off the front page. This is the dumbest article I've read on Slashdot all week! Here I was hoping we'd have a week devoid of worthless moronic headlines hitting the front page. This is most certainly not news that matters, to anyone.
I've never stolen a movie, but babies.. mmm.. delicious.
That's still problematic. If I'm going to buy 10,000 shares of a stock at $2.00, and from the time it took me to click 'Buy' on my website to the time the server was able to process the purchase request the price fell to $1.99, I'm out 10,000 pennies, and an HFT will interject itself there and snatch up those 10,000 pennies for a cool $100. What did it cost them? Nothing, they knew more than I did. A $.002 surcharge per exchange would not prevent such abuses from happening. That's $100 that does NOT go to the holder of the stock (be it the owning company or an independent investor), rather some super-rich asshole middleman.
It'd be easier to instead provide transaction support on purchases. If I create a purchase, I have some 5000ms for my purchase to succeed at the given price, or it will fail, at which time I will have the price refreshed and try again. This would make HFT impossible, as minute millisecond-long changes in the value of a stock does not impact individual buyers on normal purchase time-scales. This is the solution we need. Transactional stock purchases.
Education -> guaranteed green card is a problematic route.
For one, if you put a priority on highly educated people, you increase the work force for skilled jobs, but not ones we still rely on (labor, tradeskills, etc).
For two, it breeds corruption in foreign schools (pay for a degree, or degrees become very easy to obtain), which damages both us and them.
Similarly, granting educated people here on H-1Bs without requiring an extreme effort (not just a local paper-ad and at 50% salary of fair market price) from companies to hire American citizens causes a huge disruption of the job ecosystem in America.
We may want them here, but there's really not a good way to do it that doesn't cause disruption in their homes or ours. I can't think of a better solution than for a business to just expand overseas and build up a company in another country rather than trying to import people into the US. That stimulates the US by creating a demand for local workers and the other country by stimulating the demand needed to maintain that company. We just need to ensure that companies operating like this pay appropriate taxes (instead of claiming 99% of their revenue in a country with no income tax, which seems to be the norm for international companies these days).