It's a terribly designed site. At first glance, you can't tell what are links, and what is just plain text. There are just about zero visual clues as to where you should go, what you should do, or what you should be reading. There seems to be no coherent logic to the layout, either, and the dark background with white text does them no favours. If they paid $4 million for this, they got ripped off.
I can confirm this behaviour from first hand experience. A mate of mine has a car that's probably considered the type to be driven by a boy racer. On the way back from lunch one day, we noticed a cop car tailing us all the way back to our office. It even followed us up a private road and, when they saw us park and get out, they did a U-turn and drove off. I asked my mate what that was all about, and he said he often gets coppers following him for no reason. It's basically them looking for easy targets, probably to meet quotas.
Actually, it is a terrible idea for citizens, and whoever modded you insightful doesn't live in the UK. Past experience suggests that if you give an inch, they take a mile. Terror laws were introduced on the understanding that they would not be abused. Guess what? They were abused, and not just by the police harassing legitimate protesters, photographers, and just every day civilians. Councils used terror laws to justify snooping on people suspected of lying about where they lived so they could get their child into a local school, spying on suspected litterbugs, and spying on council employees. There's plenty other cases documenting the systematic exploitation of these laws.
The mere fact that these iditos knew full well there would be a public outcry, and that they should focus on shipping lanes and illegal immigrants in order to spin this, should sending warning bells across the UK. It's quite clear that the police view activists and legitimate protesters as "domestic extremists", so there's only one reason they want the capabilities of these drones: They're lying bastards who want to infiltrate what little privacy we have left in our lives even further to make us live in fear, and to stifle dissent.
Well, before we get on the love-Google bandwagon, it's equally possible that the threat of trade secrets/code being stolen, which could be passed on to a Chinese competitor, combined with Google's less than stellar market share in China, is a cost that far outweighs any possible gains by hanging on hoping the Chinese government throws them a few scraps. So, in order to turn a bad situation around, they state they're doing it because they object to the bad bad Chinese government, which helps in the PR department, and also applies pressure on Google's competitors like Bing/Yahoo etc. to do something similar.
China may have the potential to be the biggest market in the world, but they're inherently protectionist, and actively protect local industry first. Nothing is going to change that until China is the most powerful economy on earth, at which point they may adopt the "free market" because they'll be in a position of dominance to ensure they always win. The British did it this way, and so did the Americans, I don't see why China should behave any different.
You're talking about hypothetical trade, whereas you should be looking at reality. I can see the possible benefits of the free market, except trade as it stands has not become more free, and all have not benefited.
One historical example: the industrial revolution was built upon cheap cotton, which came from the US. The "vast, fertile land" was cleared by wiping out indigenous inhabitants, and it was not the market that kept cotton cheap, but primarily slavery. And other competitors, such as advanced textile industries in India, were destroyed, either through British force or protectionism, while its resources were sent to England. Hardly beneficial to everyone in this instance. Hell, India was highly advanced in steel manufacture, and was producing iron in such quantities that it rivalled all of Europe, and was producing locomotives competitively, but that too was wiped out by the British. Egypt was also blocked by the British from any independent development during this period.
The only reason England ever adopted the "free market" was after it had reached market dominance through such methods.
Do you really think it was tariffs that made America rich
Tariffs alone? Probably not, but it played a vital role in getting things off the ground. New England followed the same path of protectionism (high tariffs) against British textiles that Britain imposed on India, which essentially saved around half of their textile industry, which in turn had a massive impact on its industrial growth. The same applies to the steel industry in the United States, which essentially thrived because tariffs blocked British steel from competing.
Like England, America only adopted the free market doctrine once it was the most powerful and richest country in the world. Only then does free trade become appealing, because you can expect to win (no doubt China plans on following a similar pattern). Even then, the US has interfered greatly in the workings of the free market over the last several decades e.g. using aid to subsidize shipping and agriculture, as well as to undercut competitors. US intervention in South America is also instructive when demonstrating what little regard the US has for the free market.
I still cannot understand why intellectual monopoly protectionism — the exact opposite of "free trade" — gets included in free trade agreements.
You misunderstand the meaning of free trade/the free market. It's free as in free for the more advanced economies, but not for the rest. Historically, countries like Europe and America (and others) have strengthened their economies by violating free market principles, and enforcing them on others.
If he got on the phone and called the airport, I may agree with you. But making a comment on his private Twitter account? What's next, imprisonment because you make a comment in an IRC chatroom as a joke to someone else? A private message on Messenger or Skype? Even if he made the comment on a public Twitter account, it's difficult to understand how anyone could've taken what he wrote as a serious, credible bomb threat. Frankly, the police in this country are out of control. I'm sick of total surveillance all the time, ordinary people being harassed for no good reason, and anti-terror legislation being misused for the most bogus purposes imaginable.
Umm, actually, that's not what happened (at least, that's not what was reported). As this news article makes clear, 'On 13 January, after apparently receiving a tip-off from a member of the public, police arrived at Mr Chambers' office.' Although, that doesn't make it any better to know that people have now been so conditioned in the UK that they've become snoops.
That is a good point. Whether speed of reading for programming is as important as equal spacing, or identifying unique characters etc. is something that is definitely debatable. We don't read code the same way as we read a novel, not to mention that overall code structure (spacing, indents etc.) has a lot more meaning than what you'd find in a book.
From what I understand, the way we process written words is based on the idea that each word is a like a "picture" made up of letters. So, the easier it is to identify the picture, the easier it is for us to read. This means that the width and height of letters plays an important part in creating unique pictures. It is for this reason (at least in print) serif fonts are much easier to read than sans-serif fonts. It's also for this reason that ALL CAPS is the most difficult way to read compared to just reading normal text. On this basis alone, it's likely that proportional fonts are better to read because they're likely to create better word pictures.
That's a good point, and I would agree. Where I work, we use multiple search engines all the time. I view most statistics purely as being interesting, but certainly not something I'd take as fact (lies, damn lies etc.) This story is pretty worthless anyway, and not worth the effort (a comment down below sums it up nicely).
Your analogy is flawed. It only works if you and your son share a pool of height, and the gain of one could induce a reduction in the other. As it stands, your respective heights are completely unrelated, unlike Google and Bing's share of the market. I agree with most of the rest of your statement, except that the interesting point in the article is not necessarily the gaining of market share, but the rate at which it did so.
I would disagree about "susceptible to manipulation".
If someone is going to act on any information, whether it's accurate or just FUD, then they are susceptible to manipulation, because you will be able to get more profits/more funding by overstating your case. This happens all the time, and is not a conspiracy: businesses seeking more funding, military seeking more funding, scientists seeking more funding etc. etc.
This is not a Hollywood movie; there are not global conspiracies by drug companies to push vaccines onto unsuspecting millions to.. do whatever
No, but that's not the "conspiracy" here. Big pharma operates like any business, and they will do whatever they can do to maximise profits. If that means they need to over-emphasis the threat of a pandemic to sell more drugs, then they will do that.
On the other hand, drug companies have likely taken a huge risk just delivering this stuff in a short period of time.
Unlikely, since by their own admission (in one of the articles linked to), GSK stated that they had been preparing for a pandemic for over three years: "GSK has been planning for a pandemic for three-and-a-half years has and spent more than £1bn to ensure its factories could crank up production at short notice. "We don't know how big this deal is going to be, but no one can say we aren't ready," says Witty."
I understand completely the scenarios you put forward, but the issue is not so much the decision made, but the information the decision was based on. Surely people are right to question whether there is a conflict of interest with regards to who is giving that information? In your scenario, the person making the decision is very, very susceptible to manipulation, because you're arguing that a decision must be made regardless of the quality or accuracy of the information.
In the words of Noam Chomsky: "Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favour of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favour of free speech."
In all seriousness, it's the theological implication I find interesting. Your journal entry link is interesting, thanks for the link; the idea they've put forward that aliens have their own Christ is quite fascinating. But what if the alien life we discover has no sentient intelligence? How would this evidence of life existing on another planet affect religion? Oh no, we were all wrong? Something God forgot to tell us about in religious texts? An early experiment that didn't work out?
I'm also curious what their evidence is. The Ars Technica article just has the quote used above: "The source IPs and drop server of the attack correspond to a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof." These accusations are being made by a company that possibly has a lot to gain by over-hyping the threat, so perhaps some healthy/. scepticism on this is necessary. Does anyone have access to the actual report to clarify what the evidence is? I had a look on the iDefense website, and couldn't see it anywhere.
Completely agree. Sequels should be about fresh ideas and new stories, maybe reusing some old characters, or allowing you to import save data from the old game. Otherwise, what you end up with is the computer game equivalent of some never-ending TV series. It's incredibly frustrating to play through to the end and have no conclusion, and have no real idea whether the end will be in sight at all. At the very least, if a game company plans on angling for the sequel, then make sure you've got the funding to design the release of your game as a trilogy or similar so that it's clearly marketed as such, like with books.
Pretty good? You're kidding, right? Spiderman was awful, and its sequels got progressively worse. The acting was pretty standard, the dialogue mediocre, and the plot lines weren't exactly that interesting, either. I mean, let's be serious, who sat through those films and thought, 'I have no idea what's going to happen next?' Tobey Maguire was also very meh when it came down to it, and the love story, while central to understanding Spiderman, was triggering my gag reflex every ten minutes. I love Raimi's other work, but he was really treading water on this series, and it could've been so much more than it was. I didn't bother watching Spiderman II or III until it hit television, and thank God I did, because they really were awful. I'll guarantee you that, after the success of Batman Begins and especially The Dark Knight, Spiderman 1 - 3 are being viewed in the same fashion as what the original Batman franchise became with Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
I must also add that one of the central problems I have with "superhero" movies is that you cannot watch them and ever feel as if the central character is actually threatened in any way whatsoever. Take the Wolverine film, for example: it was just one mindless action sequence after another, because there is no possible way that he can be harmed. It destroys the entire tension of the film. Same with Spiderman. Not once do we think, Mary Jane is in real trouble, or Peter Parker. The same holds true for a huge majority of the superheroes that have made it to the screen. I would possibly make an exception with regards to Batman, purely because he's so dark, twisted and tortured as a human being, that what's really threatened there is his psyche. That, and the fact that Nolan had no qualms about killing off central plot characters (or at least fooling us into believing he had). Perhaps some superheroes don't actually work that well in film, except maybe for kids?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a terribly designed site. At first glance, you can't tell what are links, and what is just plain text. There are just about zero visual clues as to where you should go, what you should do, or what you should be reading. There seems to be no coherent logic to the layout, either, and the dark background with white text does them no favours. If they paid $4 million for this, they got ripped off.
I can confirm this behaviour from first hand experience. A mate of mine has a car that's probably considered the type to be driven by a boy racer. On the way back from lunch one day, we noticed a cop car tailing us all the way back to our office. It even followed us up a private road and, when they saw us park and get out, they did a U-turn and drove off. I asked my mate what that was all about, and he said he often gets coppers following him for no reason. It's basically them looking for easy targets, probably to meet quotas.
Actually, it is a terrible idea for citizens, and whoever modded you insightful doesn't live in the UK. Past experience suggests that if you give an inch, they take a mile. Terror laws were introduced on the understanding that they would not be abused. Guess what? They were abused, and not just by the police harassing legitimate protesters, photographers, and just every day civilians. Councils used terror laws to justify snooping on people suspected of lying about where they lived so they could get their child into a local school, spying on suspected litterbugs, and spying on council employees. There's plenty other cases documenting the systematic exploitation of these laws.
The mere fact that these iditos knew full well there would be a public outcry, and that they should focus on shipping lanes and illegal immigrants in order to spin this, should sending warning bells across the UK. It's quite clear that the police view activists and legitimate protesters as "domestic extremists", so there's only one reason they want the capabilities of these drones: They're lying bastards who want to infiltrate what little privacy we have left in our lives even further to make us live in fear, and to stifle dissent.
Please tell me you didn't use this line to get into your sister's pants ...
They tried to change it, but once a password's been set to Chuck Norris, password changes just get fucked up.
Well, before we get on the love-Google bandwagon, it's equally possible that the threat of trade secrets/code being stolen, which could be passed on to a Chinese competitor, combined with Google's less than stellar market share in China, is a cost that far outweighs any possible gains by hanging on hoping the Chinese government throws them a few scraps. So, in order to turn a bad situation around, they state they're doing it because they object to the bad bad Chinese government, which helps in the PR department, and also applies pressure on Google's competitors like Bing/Yahoo etc. to do something similar.
China may have the potential to be the biggest market in the world, but they're inherently protectionist, and actively protect local industry first. Nothing is going to change that until China is the most powerful economy on earth, at which point they may adopt the "free market" because they'll be in a position of dominance to ensure they always win. The British did it this way, and so did the Americans, I don't see why China should behave any different.
You're talking about hypothetical trade, whereas you should be looking at reality. I can see the possible benefits of the free market, except trade as it stands has not become more free, and all have not benefited.
One historical example: the industrial revolution was built upon cheap cotton, which came from the US. The "vast, fertile land" was cleared by wiping out indigenous inhabitants, and it was not the market that kept cotton cheap, but primarily slavery. And other competitors, such as advanced textile industries in India, were destroyed, either through British force or protectionism, while its resources were sent to England. Hardly beneficial to everyone in this instance. Hell, India was highly advanced in steel manufacture, and was producing iron in such quantities that it rivalled all of Europe, and was producing locomotives competitively, but that too was wiped out by the British. Egypt was also blocked by the British from any independent development during this period.
The only reason England ever adopted the "free market" was after it had reached market dominance through such methods.
Tariffs alone? Probably not, but it played a vital role in getting things off the ground. New England followed the same path of protectionism (high tariffs) against British textiles that Britain imposed on India, which essentially saved around half of their textile industry, which in turn had a massive impact on its industrial growth. The same applies to the steel industry in the United States, which essentially thrived because tariffs blocked British steel from competing.
Like England, America only adopted the free market doctrine once it was the most powerful and richest country in the world. Only then does free trade become appealing, because you can expect to win (no doubt China plans on following a similar pattern). Even then, the US has interfered greatly in the workings of the free market over the last several decades e.g. using aid to subsidize shipping and agriculture, as well as to undercut competitors. US intervention in South America is also instructive when demonstrating what little regard the US has for the free market.
Actually, you're wrong. I wrote quickly, and chose my words poorly, like your assumption.
LOL I know, sorry, slip there, but you know what I mean :)
You misunderstand the meaning of free trade/the free market. It's free as in free for the more advanced economies, but not for the rest. Historically, countries like Europe and America (and others) have strengthened their economies by violating free market principles, and enforcing them on others.
If he got on the phone and called the airport, I may agree with you. But making a comment on his private Twitter account? What's next, imprisonment because you make a comment in an IRC chatroom as a joke to someone else? A private message on Messenger or Skype? Even if he made the comment on a public Twitter account, it's difficult to understand how anyone could've taken what he wrote as a serious, credible bomb threat. Frankly, the police in this country are out of control. I'm sick of total surveillance all the time, ordinary people being harassed for no good reason, and anti-terror legislation being misused for the most bogus purposes imaginable.
Umm, actually, that's not what happened (at least, that's not what was reported). As this news article makes clear, 'On 13 January, after apparently receiving a tip-off from a member of the public, police arrived at Mr Chambers' office.' Although, that doesn't make it any better to know that people have now been so conditioned in the UK that they've become snoops.
That is a good point. Whether speed of reading for programming is as important as equal spacing, or identifying unique characters etc. is something that is definitely debatable. We don't read code the same way as we read a novel, not to mention that overall code structure (spacing, indents etc.) has a lot more meaning than what you'd find in a book.
From what I understand, the way we process written words is based on the idea that each word is a like a "picture" made up of letters. So, the easier it is to identify the picture, the easier it is for us to read. This means that the width and height of letters plays an important part in creating unique pictures. It is for this reason (at least in print) serif fonts are much easier to read than sans-serif fonts. It's also for this reason that ALL CAPS is the most difficult way to read compared to just reading normal text. On this basis alone, it's likely that proportional fonts are better to read because they're likely to create better word pictures.
Pretty sure when I quoted the article originally it said £18,000, but it's now saying $18,000, which is £11,000.
That's a good point, and I would agree. Where I work, we use multiple search engines all the time. I view most statistics purely as being interesting, but certainly not something I'd take as fact (lies, damn lies etc.) This story is pretty worthless anyway, and not worth the effort (a comment down below sums it up nicely).
Would give you mod points if I had 'em. Thanks for the info.
Your analogy is flawed. It only works if you and your son share a pool of height, and the gain of one could induce a reduction in the other. As it stands, your respective heights are completely unrelated, unlike Google and Bing's share of the market. I agree with most of the rest of your statement, except that the interesting point in the article is not necessarily the gaining of market share, but the rate at which it did so.
If someone is going to act on any information, whether it's accurate or just FUD, then they are susceptible to manipulation, because you will be able to get more profits/more funding by overstating your case. This happens all the time, and is not a conspiracy: businesses seeking more funding, military seeking more funding, scientists seeking more funding etc. etc.
No, but that's not the "conspiracy" here. Big pharma operates like any business, and they will do whatever they can do to maximise profits. If that means they need to over-emphasis the threat of a pandemic to sell more drugs, then they will do that.
Unlikely, since by their own admission (in one of the articles linked to), GSK stated that they had been preparing for a pandemic for over three years: "GSK has been planning for a pandemic for three-and-a-half years has and spent more than £1bn to ensure its factories could crank up production at short notice. "We don't know how big this deal is going to be, but no one can say we aren't ready," says Witty."
I understand completely the scenarios you put forward, but the issue is not so much the decision made, but the information the decision was based on. Surely people are right to question whether there is a conflict of interest with regards to who is giving that information? In your scenario, the person making the decision is very, very susceptible to manipulation, because you're arguing that a decision must be made regardless of the quality or accuracy of the information.
In the words of Noam Chomsky: "Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favour of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favour of free speech."
In all seriousness, it's the theological implication I find interesting. Your journal entry link is interesting, thanks for the link; the idea they've put forward that aliens have their own Christ is quite fascinating. But what if the alien life we discover has no sentient intelligence? How would this evidence of life existing on another planet affect religion? Oh no, we were all wrong? Something God forgot to tell us about in religious texts? An early experiment that didn't work out?
I'm also curious what their evidence is. The Ars Technica article just has the quote used above: "The source IPs and drop server of the attack correspond to a single foreign entity consisting either of agents of the Chinese state or proxies thereof." These accusations are being made by a company that possibly has a lot to gain by over-hyping the threat, so perhaps some healthy /. scepticism on this is necessary. Does anyone have access to the actual report to clarify what the evidence is? I had a look on the iDefense website, and couldn't see it anywhere.
Completely agree. Sequels should be about fresh ideas and new stories, maybe reusing some old characters, or allowing you to import save data from the old game. Otherwise, what you end up with is the computer game equivalent of some never-ending TV series. It's incredibly frustrating to play through to the end and have no conclusion, and have no real idea whether the end will be in sight at all. At the very least, if a game company plans on angling for the sequel, then make sure you've got the funding to design the release of your game as a trilogy or similar so that it's clearly marketed as such, like with books.
Pretty good? You're kidding, right? Spiderman was awful, and its sequels got progressively worse. The acting was pretty standard, the dialogue mediocre, and the plot lines weren't exactly that interesting, either. I mean, let's be serious, who sat through those films and thought, 'I have no idea what's going to happen next?' Tobey Maguire was also very meh when it came down to it, and the love story, while central to understanding Spiderman, was triggering my gag reflex every ten minutes. I love Raimi's other work, but he was really treading water on this series, and it could've been so much more than it was. I didn't bother watching Spiderman II or III until it hit television, and thank God I did, because they really were awful. I'll guarantee you that, after the success of Batman Begins and especially The Dark Knight, Spiderman 1 - 3 are being viewed in the same fashion as what the original Batman franchise became with Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
I must also add that one of the central problems I have with "superhero" movies is that you cannot watch them and ever feel as if the central character is actually threatened in any way whatsoever. Take the Wolverine film, for example: it was just one mindless action sequence after another, because there is no possible way that he can be harmed. It destroys the entire tension of the film. Same with Spiderman. Not once do we think, Mary Jane is in real trouble, or Peter Parker. The same holds true for a huge majority of the superheroes that have made it to the screen. I would possibly make an exception with regards to Batman, purely because he's so dark, twisted and tortured as a human being, that what's really threatened there is his psyche. That, and the fact that Nolan had no qualms about killing off central plot characters (or at least fooling us into believing he had). Perhaps some superheroes don't actually work that well in film, except maybe for kids?