I've been saying this for years. Unless we want true mass unemployment to really shake the foundations of society within our lifetimes at least, we need to move on this, soon. A basic income guarantee would do much to soften the blow for those left without a job even as the productivity of the economy increases. A massive underclass of unemployed people leads both to a large increase in hopelessness and by extension crime and, in the long term, political instability.
Just look at what's happening in North Africa right now, you're kidding yourself if you think that's happenning because of a lack of democracy, even if pro-democracy activists are trying to use the situation to their advantage. The revolutions are happening because of the feeling of hopelessness and severe economic situation of large portions of the population in those societies, and the same thing can happen in the western world if things turn ugly engogh for a sufficiently large portion of the population.
Well if you (Americans in general) weren't so gung-ho about how unions are "evil" and want to do everything all on your own, you would actually have a way to collectively stop these practices.
Very true, and it goes far beyond copyright. Even here in Sweden, once a society where solidarity was the guiding spirit, corporations are now running charter schools for profit with taxpayer money. They are saving on things like libraries, gyms, etc. that public schools are obliged to have, and sending the profits to their venture-capitalist owners. Corporations will stop at nothing to earn that extra buck, and we happen to have a neo-liberal government which is more than happy to help them along...
It doesn't matter how secure the actual voting is, it's the counting that is the problem. In any democratic system, it has to be transparent, anyone has to be able to monitor the counting process, that's simply not possible with electronic voting. Not to mention that the process you mentioned makes it dead easy for votes to be bought, or stolen by threat of force. It makes it easy for a dominant life-partner to force his/her partner to vote for a specific party. It endangers the whole principle of electorate secrecy.
It's precisely because Slashdotters know what can go wrong that we are so critical of electronic voting, it has nothing to do with being Luddites. Electronic voting is not at all transparent to regular people, the counting process is not even transparent to those of us with the technical knowledge.
For an election to be transparent and verifiable, there has to be a paper trail and the counting process has to be open for anyone to observe. A machine count alone doesn't cut it, if there is machine counting election night, there has to at least be a manual count overseen by any member of the public interested to verify the machine count for the official result.
This has always bothered me. "Free-market" fundamentalist (usually neo-liberals here in Sweden) seem to think of the "market" as a living organism that has precedence over all else, including human life (except their own of course). We all have different values I suppose, live to work or work to live, but they just seem completely out of touch with the real world to me...
Not if there was a reasonable explanation like there is here. Only optimizing code that is repeatedly executed is common practice in any VM an it makes sense.
I've never really seen much of a need for an "office suite". LaTeX is much better at producing documents, spreadsheets may be of use for some minor calculations occasionally but for the things many companies use it for, a database would be better suited for the job. For presentations I recently discovered the powerdot package for LaTeX, it really works great and it's very easy to produce presentations that actually look good unlike the ones I've tried making in OO Impress...
I couldn't find any exact figures, but Nokia said "more than 100 000 in the first 5 weeks".. I'd say that's pretty decent considering the complete absence of marketing...
Seems to work between Symbian and MeeGo/Maemo, and there's still a few hundred million Symbian devices out there remember, they're not going away overnight...
http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/ And this is just the work of a single volunteer... Qt apps look pretty damn native on Windows and OSX, I'm sure the Qt guys can figure out a way to make it look integrated into Android as well...
They've already announced that Qt won't be ported to WP7, which to me seems like suicide.. They pushed Qt hard as their unified development platform for all their devices, a lot of people learned it and loved it, and now they're completely abandoning that strategy. A move like this really upsets developers, and I think they're much more likely to move to Android now than to develop for WP7...
If Nokia abandons Qt, maybe Intel or some other interested party could buy it from Nokia and continue, or if no suitable buyer can be found, maybe the Trolltech guys can fork it and start up Trolltech again.
Symbian may not be good, but MeeGo is.. There was no reason to go for the WP7 platform over MeeGo, especially since there is no clear migration path for developers between Symbian and WP7. Qt was what made the exisiting strategy of moving the high-end to MeeGo and keeping and keeping Symbian for the low end great, you could develop for both using the same tools, making sure that the huge developer base that exists for Symbian would stay and develop for MeeGo as well. There is no such strategy with WP7, they have announced that Qt will not be ported to WP7 (even though it would probably be trivial, a volunteer managed to port Qt to Android single-handedly) and have thus fragmented the development platform for Nokia phones, I doubt very much that Symbian developers that have learned and love Qt will want to move to the.NET platform.
From what I've read, this is what the US investors wanted, other investors, not so much. US investors essentially installed Elop to initiate a Microsoft takeover. Presumably, they thought they would get the best short term returns from this.. They obviously listened to ignorant US analysts who tend to have a very limited scope in their analysis of Nokia, ignoring any market outside the US, a relatively small market for Nokia, and a strange one where operators get to decide what phones customers will have access to.
They've already announced that Qt will not be available for WP7.. It seems to me that they are essentially dumping Qt, so question is what the Trolls will do now? Start up Trolltech again?
I was planning on buying the first MeeGo device when it eventually came to market, but now that WP7 is the "primary OS" for smartphones, it doesn't feel as if they're going to invest the resources they needs to pull it off properly, if at all...
Even worse, they're essentially abandoning Qt. They've announced that there will be no Qt support on their WP7 devices. They had a great plan to use Qt for both MeeGo and Symbian devices, allowing cross-platform application development. It really was a great strategy. What is going to happen to Qt now? Symbian will eventually be phased out, MeeGo on Nokia appears to be essentially dead.. Nokia will have no use for it anymore.
Symbian will be phased out completely, and the future of MeeGo appears unclear, they might make a single device, probably not giving the team sufficient resources to do it. It seems to me that Nokia (or rather Elop, I highly doubt this is an engineering decision) is dumping Qt, what possible use could they have for it if they're not going to use Symbian or MeeGo, and aren't going to port it to WP7?
The PIN code is in use for purchases everywhere there's a card terminal over here, probably 90+% of merchants use them, they've even started cropping up in bars (where they otherwise don't check your ID even though it's required by law, and is full of people who've had a bit too much to drink to pay attention to where their card is after a buying another beer, a bad combination;))
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I would like a MeeGo phone that doubles as a portable PC. Unlike Android it's got a full standard GNU/Linux stack, including an X-server.
I've been saying this for years. Unless we want true mass unemployment to really shake the foundations of society within our lifetimes at least, we need to move on this, soon. A basic income guarantee would do much to soften the blow for those left without a job even as the productivity of the economy increases. A massive underclass of unemployed people leads both to a large increase in hopelessness and by extension crime and, in the long term, political instability.
Just look at what's happening in North Africa right now, you're kidding yourself if you think that's happenning because of a lack of democracy, even if pro-democracy activists are trying to use the situation to their advantage. The revolutions are happening because of the feeling of hopelessness and severe economic situation of large portions of the population in those societies, and the same thing can happen in the western world if things turn ugly engogh for a sufficiently large portion of the population.
That is an insane "norm". I can't see it being the case anywhere that actually has laws and unions protecting the rights of the workers...
Well if you (Americans in general) weren't so gung-ho about how unions are "evil" and want to do everything all on your own, you would actually have a way to collectively stop these practices.
Very true, and it goes far beyond copyright. Even here in Sweden, once a society where solidarity was the guiding spirit, corporations are now running charter schools for profit with taxpayer money. They are saving on things like libraries, gyms, etc. that public schools are obliged to have, and sending the profits to their venture-capitalist owners. Corporations will stop at nothing to earn that extra buck, and we happen to have a neo-liberal government which is more than happy to help them along...
What is up with the insane puritanical censorship from Google? A nipple? Come one, we get that regularly on public television and *noone* cares.
It doesn't matter how secure the actual voting is, it's the counting that is the problem. In any democratic system, it has to be transparent, anyone has to be able to monitor the counting process, that's simply not possible with electronic voting. Not to mention that the process you mentioned makes it dead easy for votes to be bought, or stolen by threat of force. It makes it easy for a dominant life-partner to force his/her partner to vote for a specific party. It endangers the whole principle of electorate secrecy.
It's precisely because Slashdotters know what can go wrong that we are so critical of electronic voting, it has nothing to do with being Luddites. Electronic voting is not at all transparent to regular people, the counting process is not even transparent to those of us with the technical knowledge.
For an election to be transparent and verifiable, there has to be a paper trail and the counting process has to be open for anyone to observe. A machine count alone doesn't cut it, if there is machine counting election night, there has to at least be a manual count overseen by any member of the public interested to verify the machine count for the official result.
This has always bothered me. "Free-market" fundamentalist (usually neo-liberals here in Sweden) seem to think of the "market" as a living organism that has precedence over all else, including human life (except their own of course). We all have different values I suppose, live to work or work to live, but they just seem completely out of touch with the real world to me...
Not if there was a reasonable explanation like there is here. Only optimizing code that is repeatedly executed is common practice in any VM an it makes sense.
I've never really seen much of a need for an "office suite". LaTeX is much better at producing documents, spreadsheets may be of use for some minor calculations occasionally but for the things many companies use it for, a database would be better suited for the job. For presentations I recently discovered the powerdot package for LaTeX, it really works great and it's very easy to produce presentations that actually look good unlike the ones I've tried making in OO Impress...
I couldn't find any exact figures, but Nokia said "more than 100 000 in the first 5 weeks".. I'd say that's pretty decent considering the complete absence of marketing...
Seems to work between Symbian and MeeGo/Maemo, and there's still a few hundred million Symbian devices out there remember, they're not going away overnight...
http://code.google.com/p/android-lighthouse/
And this is just the work of a single volunteer... Qt apps look pretty damn native on Windows and OSX, I'm sure the Qt guys can figure out a way to make it look integrated into Android as well...
Greed.. They're hoping for short-term profits, no matter the impact on the long term, they'll have bailed out by then.
Stephen Elop kept using the word "disruption", I'm don't think even he even knows exactly what he means by that...
They've already announced that Qt won't be ported to WP7, which to me seems like suicide.. They pushed Qt hard as their unified development platform for all their devices, a lot of people learned it and loved it, and now they're completely abandoning that strategy. A move like this really upsets developers, and I think they're much more likely to move to Android now than to develop for WP7...
If Nokia abandons Qt, maybe Intel or some other interested party could buy it from Nokia and continue, or if no suitable buyer can be found, maybe the Trolltech guys can fork it and start up Trolltech again.
Symbian may not be good, but MeeGo is.. There was no reason to go for the WP7 platform over MeeGo, especially since there is no clear migration path for developers between Symbian and WP7. Qt was what made the exisiting strategy of moving the high-end to MeeGo and keeping and keeping Symbian for the low end great, you could develop for both using the same tools, making sure that the huge developer base that exists for Symbian would stay and develop for MeeGo as well. There is no such strategy with WP7, they have announced that Qt will not be ported to WP7 (even though it would probably be trivial, a volunteer managed to port Qt to Android single-handedly) and have thus fragmented the development platform for Nokia phones, I doubt very much that Symbian developers that have learned and love Qt will want to move to the .NET platform.
From what I've read, this is what the US investors wanted, other investors, not so much. US investors essentially installed Elop to initiate a Microsoft takeover. Presumably, they thought they would get the best short term returns from this.. They obviously listened to ignorant US analysts who tend to have a very limited scope in their analysis of Nokia, ignoring any market outside the US, a relatively small market for Nokia, and a strange one where operators get to decide what phones customers will have access to.
Your PIN code is on your card? That sort of defeats the purpose of it doesn't it? :P
They've already announced that Qt will not be available for WP7.. It seems to me that they are essentially dumping Qt, so question is what the Trolls will do now? Start up Trolltech again?
I was planning on buying the first MeeGo device when it eventually came to market, but now that WP7 is the "primary OS" for smartphones, it doesn't feel as if they're going to invest the resources they needs to pull it off properly, if at all...
Even worse, they're essentially abandoning Qt. They've announced that there will be no Qt support on their WP7 devices. They had a great plan to use Qt for both MeeGo and Symbian devices, allowing cross-platform application development. It really was a great strategy.
What is going to happen to Qt now? Symbian will eventually be phased out, MeeGo on Nokia appears to be essentially dead.. Nokia will have no use for it anymore.
Symbian will be phased out completely, and the future of MeeGo appears unclear, they might make a single device, probably not giving the team sufficient resources to do it. It seems to me that Nokia (or rather Elop, I highly doubt this is an engineering decision) is dumping Qt, what possible use could they have for it if they're not going to use Symbian or MeeGo, and aren't going to port it to WP7?
The PIN code is in use for purchases everywhere there's a card terminal over here, probably 90+% of merchants use them, they've even started cropping up in bars (where they otherwise don't check your ID even though it's required by law, and is full of people who've had a bit too much to drink to pay attention to where their card is after a buying another beer, a bad combination ;))