The first photo had some easy to spot glitches and EXIF data that indicated the photo was nine years old.
The second photo was so obviously photoshopped it was ridiculous.
Clearly there's a business opportunity here, I know I could throw together much better fakes in under an hour and even if I billed them for a full day of labor it would probably still cost them less than what this horribly botched photoshop job cost them...
I buy hardbacks when they're available but a lot of times I find that a book is only available as paperback. With a few books it even seems that while there are no new hardbacks being printed libraries are still able to get the latest edition as a hardback from somewhere, no wonder hardback sales are down when you can't even buy them most of the time...
There are many situations in which modern operating systems will gladly let a single process hog a CPU core (it's often not "pure" CPU loads but the CPU ends up pegged due to other issues and everything else grinds to a halt).
Because when the mythical "Joe Sixpack" walks into a store to buy a new computer so that his intartubes will go faster he'll either fall for the sales pitch of find the machine with the best "big number to price" ratio and if you can sell crap at inflated prices because it's got a big number that's easy money.
And then there's the "prosumer", the guy who actually knows a bit, he/she will hopefully be confused and not realize the difference in performance between the 3782GXT CPU and the 4790GXT CPU is actually that the 4790GXT is clocked 200 MHz faster which doesn't justify the $140 price difference.
As for the actually knowledgable customer, well he or she most likely has already decided that a new CPU/computer is a necessity and will force him-/herself through the process of figuring out how the sequence numbers are supposed to work, most of these sales won't be lost by annoying the customer and the few that are lost are most likely made up for by the previous categories of customers.
Multicore plus enough RAM is generally a lot better performance-wise than singlecore plus low amount of RAM and an SSD.
If you're having performance issues in everyday office use that go away when switching from a regular hard drive to an SSD you could just try accepting that these days you need 1+ gigs of RAM instead of trying to implement a bunch of workarounds that don't address the actual problem (that your computer keeps swapping out stuff to the hard drive because you're running out of RAM).
Unfortunately it's pretty common to see regular office desktops with fast multicore CPUs and ridiculously low amounts of RAM (I've seen C2D 2+ GHz CPUs coupled with 512 megs of RAM, it ran slower than a low-end P4 with 2 gigs of RAM).
The average consumer just thinks "bigger is better" and by creating a mess of hard to understand sequence numbers they can make it harder for the semi-knowledgable customer to pick the right CPU. The same can be seen with graphics cards and many other products (if there is some kind of system behind your sequence numbers you do have to remember to change the system every now and then to further confuse everyone).
Comparing the availability of fast internet access in the EU and US makes a lot of sense, since both are relatively tightly integrated socio-economic areas.
But the EU isn't nearly as tightly integrated as the US, there's a reason companies are known as "US companies" but rarely as "EU companies" because they are often based in a single european nation and while they may do some business in other european nations their main market is still a single nation.
Still very different -- the population density of the EU is 6 times higher;...
And here comes the problem, different european nations have completely different population densities. As my previous example stated, here in Sweden the population density is a lot lower than in other european countries. Also, the companies that build, own and maintain the backbones are mainly companies based in Sweden or other scandinavian countries, you don't see France Telecom or BT pulling fiber in Sweden, it's generally Telenor, Skanova (TeliaSonera), Tele2, Stokab or some other company or organization based in scandinavia (most of these also have fiber running to major exchanges down south and on other continents but their main networks are all in scandinavia.
Then there's the matter of the last mile and how it's maintained (and by whom), once again this is completely different between different countries in the EU (admittedly there are some differences between US states but they're not as big.
There's also the matter of how the different countries as a whole are organized, in the US you can be pretty sure it goes Federal - State - County - "Local". Here in Sweden it's (EU - ) national/federal - län - kommun but this isn't necessarily how it's done in other EU countries. Basically, european nations are still too different to be counted as one unless you're just doing it so americans can go "see? see? We're not number 37! We're number 2! At least if you call all these countries one country, ignore those others over there and..."
Not necessarily sociopaths, there are plenty of people online who are either just so desensitized that they don't really react anymore (as long as it's not happening IRL but on-screen) and others who are just able to apply very heavy "mental filters" to cope with stuff. Now, being able to tell the difference between these people and sociopaths at a job interview, that may be a bit of a challenge.
I think the problem is that the wrong examiners handle some obvious patents. Something that may be obvious to a software developer may not be obvious to someone with only a degree in chemistry and a single undergrad programming course (and vice versa) and once a patent has been granted it's a pain in the ass to get rid of it even if there is prior art so everyone just kind of seems to hope that those who get such patents granted realize that they'd be useless in a serious legal battle (against someone with the resources to find the prior art or demonstrate how the patent would be obvious to anyone in the field).
While most laws in the various nations that make up the EU originate from the EU the actual laws are written specifically for the individual countries by the respective countries' governments and a lot of times the EU only dictates that a law be made but keeps it fuzzy enough that laws can differ significantly between countries.
Also, once again, if you pick two random EU member states and compare them they differ a whole lot more than two US states. If you told a spaniard and a finn that they both lived in the same country they'd think you were nuts but you'd probably not get much of protest from a texan and a new yorker. Also, how many US states have hundreds of years of conflicts, alliances, entirely different cultural legacies, different languages (no, not "there are like, lots of them there mexican folk who don't speak english in California")?
Imagine if people in Ohio spoke Ohioan which belonged to a completely different family of languages than the Pennsylvanian spoken in Pennsylvania and the Indianian spoken in Indiana, that Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana had invaded, pillaged, betrayed and generally fought and hated each other for the last 500+ years and had their last war which killed millions only 60 or so years ago. The political and cultural situation is completely different, AT&T and Comcast aren't limited by the border between Florida and Georgia, sure the rules might be slightly different but they're both US companies. While a company like TeliaSonera does business in many countries both inside and outside of the EU they are still considered a swedish-finnish company (created through the merger of swedish Telia and finnish Sonera).
The term "member state" when used in the context of the EU refers to so-called "nation states" as opposed to US states. There are serious cultural differences between the different nations that make up the EU, not to mention that most countries have their own language and a long history of fighting with each other (not like US states who, with a few notable exceptions, have a history of pissing contests over random border lakes and the like).
Yes, there are forces in the EU who want to turn it into a country like the US but it's going kind of slow since even among politicians this is opposed by a lot of people.
Also, the population density of Delaware (top US state in that list) is 170.87/km^2, the population density of Sweden is on average 20.6/km^2 (the region I live in has a population density of 2.2/km^2). Sure, a large number of swedes live in the south but I personally live in the northern half of the country, I have a beautiful view of the mountains and a lake from my living room window and I have a 100/100 Mbps FTTH connection. The vast majority of swedes have access to faster connections than 13 Mbps, it's just that the "average joe" of the older generation generally goes with a dirt-cheap low-speed connection in the 1-8 Mbps range.
Actually, if he's 2+ meters he could be close to underweight at 90.7 kg (200 lbs). Factor in a large frame (no, not the "I'm big boned" excuse, some people really do have a larger frame than others) and being in good shape (meaning high percentage of bodyweight as muscles and low percentage of bodyweight as fat) then 90.7 kg could very well be considered slender at anything over 1.9 meters. Hell, I have a friend who's just under 1.8 meters who looks skinny at around 90 kg but he's also very fit which means he weighs more per unit of volume than someone who's got little muscle and a lot of fat.
I think that would depend a lot on where you work and how needed your expertise is.
Someone with two degrees, one in CS/CE and another in the field at hand could probably be considered very valuable although I'm sure there are stuck up researchers who would look down on you for "only" having two degrees in different fields instead of a single PhD.
And when it's sold as just plain DXM solution by dealers there are no dosage instructions so we get news stories about teenagers who down the DXM equivalent of chugging a gallon of vodka and then, believe it or not, die(!)...
Of course, DXM isn't much of a fun drug anyway, and it tastes like crap. If you just want to get fucked up there are much better drugs out there for that and if you want a psychedelic experience there are also tons of drugs out there that are better (hell, these days you can practically pick and choose which effects you want and there are plenty of reliable resources that will tell you if the pills/liquids you are about to ingest are dangerous).
I didn't say it wasn't effective, just that it's an ugly hack which, when improperly implemented, can be a serious annoyance (these days it's rare to see MTAs configured to cause hour-long delays but it wasn't long ago that this seemed to be more common than not when dealing with greylisting).
I was thinking more along the lines of just "An ugly hack.". But then I've never had to resort to greylisting to deal with spam (but NAT is unfortunately necessary until we can get more people to start adopting IPv6).
Sure, they can create valid SPF records for their domains but if they're using their own machines (rented or owned) then that ISP is most likely shady and will end up getting on a few blacklists. If they're using botnets then overly broad SPF records could be filtered (since they can't control reverse DNS for the zombie machines they're using to send spam).
The biggest problem with using reverse lookup is that it's a horrible method. Sure, ten or fifteen years ago it was a half-decent method for filtering but these days lots of companies have broken reverse DNS pointers, even big companies (one I've seen with many companies here in Sweden is that email from user@company.se from a server claiming to be mailhost.company.se is sent from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx for which a reverse lookup gives mailhost.company.com or something like ext-12-sthlm.se.company.com).
Personally I prefer relying on SpamAssassin to sort out the spam, it works quite well as long as you keep everything updated. Also, since july 1st I've noticed a sharp drop in the amount of spam hitting my personal mail server (down to about 25% of what it used to be).
Then there's SPF which would also seriously help if more sysadmins would just get around to implementing it.
The problem is, that IT people dream up all these "write only" applications that record data, without any rational plan for what the data might actually be used for in the business.
These plans mostly come into being because us "IT people" (read: developers) know that the "business people" love changing the specs and they'll blame us if they want to start using data they didn't ask us to save and we tell them we can't save data retroactively (really, they'll basically blame the developers for not being able to time-travel). This is why we'd rather save everything than not save enough.
Dont expect Apple to ever offer you opengl or Windows to ever be stable...
Actually OS X supports OpenGL just fine or were you thinking of a specific version or feature which isn't supported to your liking?
As for Windows, it can be quite stable, not exactly on-par with clustered OpenVMS setups and the like but stable enough that you shouldn't have any problems (my current work laptop which is the only windows machine I use on a daily basis has so far only crashed three times and all those times were when restoring from hibernation, haven't had this problem since I updated all drivers I could to the latest stable version I could find).
I know there have been some problems with Firefox supporting SVG in img tags but I was still sort of hoping they would've sorted it out for 4.x, it's a nice feature (and from a security standpoint they could just go with one of the "lesser" SVG standards that don't include scripting).
Try living in a college town in a rural area, lots of call centers love setting up shop in these places because there are plenty of smart students and recent grads who would rather do tech support than flip burgers until they graduate or find a real job.
Of course this does have the side effect of creating large numbers of burned-out and cynical young people who's first impression of having a job is that the employer only cares about working you to the bone and then spits you out when you burn out or make the tiniest of mistakes at the wrong time (wrong time is here defined as: when the boss is looking to lay some people off, right after you questioned anything the boss said or any number of other reasons).
You must have matured slowly, myself I grew up using SV-BASIC on an SVI-328, then Commodore Amigas, a few years running MS/PC-DOS before switching over to Linux in the mid-90s and then around 1997 this little startup named Google showed up. But then I'm slightly older than you are (not much though, I find it strange that you wouldn't remember a world without Google).
Yet there are plenty of situations in which a desktop is far superior to a laptop, a tablet or a cellphone-like device. I'd like to see you do serious graphics work on a 15" laptop, or even a 17" (yes, most artists have portable devices as well but for most these are not their main tool, merely something they need to have as well, in my experience these devices are mainly used to showcase work to employers (it's easier to bring your data to them than it is to try and download it to one of their locked down corporate desktops and then display it when the only 3rd party software on the machine is some IBM terminal emulator for the customer service system). And please don't link some iPhone/Android fingerpainting app pictures, comparing that to the output you can achieve with a good desktop machine + good large monitor + wacom tablet is laughable...
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The first photo had some easy to spot glitches and EXIF data that indicated the photo was nine years old.
The second photo was so obviously photoshopped it was ridiculous.
Clearly there's a business opportunity here, I know I could throw together much better fakes in under an hour and even if I billed them for a full day of labor it would probably still cost them less than what this horribly botched photoshop job cost them...
Great, now the chinese are going to actually implement the ideas from Project Thor, orbital tungsten rods of doom...
I buy hardbacks when they're available but a lot of times I find that a book is only available as paperback. With a few books it even seems that while there are no new hardbacks being printed libraries are still able to get the latest edition as a hardback from somewhere, no wonder hardback sales are down when you can't even buy them most of the time...
Sadly, we dont.
There are many situations in which modern operating systems will gladly let a single process hog a CPU core (it's often not "pure" CPU loads but the CPU ends up pegged due to other issues and everything else grinds to a halt).
Because when the mythical "Joe Sixpack" walks into a store to buy a new computer so that his intartubes will go faster he'll either fall for the sales pitch of find the machine with the best "big number to price" ratio and if you can sell crap at inflated prices because it's got a big number that's easy money.
And then there's the "prosumer", the guy who actually knows a bit, he/she will hopefully be confused and not realize the difference in performance between the 3782GXT CPU and the 4790GXT CPU is actually that the 4790GXT is clocked 200 MHz faster which doesn't justify the $140 price difference.
As for the actually knowledgable customer, well he or she most likely has already decided that a new CPU/computer is a necessity and will force him-/herself through the process of figuring out how the sequence numbers are supposed to work, most of these sales won't be lost by annoying the customer and the few that are lost are most likely made up for by the previous categories of customers.
Multicore plus enough RAM is generally a lot better performance-wise than singlecore plus low amount of RAM and an SSD.
If you're having performance issues in everyday office use that go away when switching from a regular hard drive to an SSD you could just try accepting that these days you need 1+ gigs of RAM instead of trying to implement a bunch of workarounds that don't address the actual problem (that your computer keeps swapping out stuff to the hard drive because you're running out of RAM).
Unfortunately it's pretty common to see regular office desktops with fast multicore CPUs and ridiculously low amounts of RAM (I've seen C2D 2+ GHz CPUs coupled with 512 megs of RAM, it ran slower than a low-end P4 with 2 gigs of RAM).
The average consumer just thinks "bigger is better" and by creating a mess of hard to understand sequence numbers they can make it harder for the semi-knowledgable customer to pick the right CPU. The same can be seen with graphics cards and many other products (if there is some kind of system behind your sequence numbers you do have to remember to change the system every now and then to further confuse everyone).
None of this is really relevant.
Actually, it is.
Comparing the availability of fast internet access in the EU and US makes a lot of sense, since both are relatively tightly integrated socio-economic areas.
But the EU isn't nearly as tightly integrated as the US, there's a reason companies are known as "US companies" but rarely as "EU companies" because they are often based in a single european nation and while they may do some business in other european nations their main market is still a single nation.
Still very different -- the population density of the EU is 6 times higher;...
And here comes the problem, different european nations have completely different population densities. As my previous example stated, here in Sweden the population density is a lot lower than in other european countries. Also, the companies that build, own and maintain the backbones are mainly companies based in Sweden or other scandinavian countries, you don't see France Telecom or BT pulling fiber in Sweden, it's generally Telenor, Skanova (TeliaSonera), Tele2, Stokab or some other company or organization based in scandinavia (most of these also have fiber running to major exchanges down south and on other continents but their main networks are all in scandinavia.
Then there's the matter of the last mile and how it's maintained (and by whom), once again this is completely different between different countries in the EU (admittedly there are some differences between US states but they're not as big.
There's also the matter of how the different countries as a whole are organized, in the US you can be pretty sure it goes Federal - State - County - "Local". Here in Sweden it's (EU - ) national/federal - län - kommun but this isn't necessarily how it's done in other EU countries. Basically, european nations are still too different to be counted as one unless you're just doing it so americans can go "see? see? We're not number 37! We're number 2! At least if you call all these countries one country, ignore those others over there and..."
Not necessarily sociopaths, there are plenty of people online who are either just so desensitized that they don't really react anymore (as long as it's not happening IRL but on-screen) and others who are just able to apply very heavy "mental filters" to cope with stuff. Now, being able to tell the difference between these people and sociopaths at a job interview, that may be a bit of a challenge.
I think the problem is that the wrong examiners handle some obvious patents. Something that may be obvious to a software developer may not be obvious to someone with only a degree in chemistry and a single undergrad programming course (and vice versa) and once a patent has been granted it's a pain in the ass to get rid of it even if there is prior art so everyone just kind of seems to hope that those who get such patents granted realize that they'd be useless in a serious legal battle (against someone with the resources to find the prior art or demonstrate how the patent would be obvious to anyone in the field).
You are cherry-picking your facts.
While most laws in the various nations that make up the EU originate from the EU the actual laws are written specifically for the individual countries by the respective countries' governments and a lot of times the EU only dictates that a law be made but keeps it fuzzy enough that laws can differ significantly between countries.
Also, once again, if you pick two random EU member states and compare them they differ a whole lot more than two US states. If you told a spaniard and a finn that they both lived in the same country they'd think you were nuts but you'd probably not get much of protest from a texan and a new yorker. Also, how many US states have hundreds of years of conflicts, alliances, entirely different cultural legacies, different languages (no, not "there are like, lots of them there mexican folk who don't speak english in California")?
Imagine if people in Ohio spoke Ohioan which belonged to a completely different family of languages than the Pennsylvanian spoken in Pennsylvania and the Indianian spoken in Indiana, that Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana had invaded, pillaged, betrayed and generally fought and hated each other for the last 500+ years and had their last war which killed millions only 60 or so years ago. The political and cultural situation is completely different, AT&T and Comcast aren't limited by the border between Florida and Georgia, sure the rules might be slightly different but they're both US companies. While a company like TeliaSonera does business in many countries both inside and outside of the EU they are still considered a swedish-finnish company (created through the merger of swedish Telia and finnish Sonera).
The term "member state" when used in the context of the EU refers to so-called "nation states" as opposed to US states. There are serious cultural differences between the different nations that make up the EU, not to mention that most countries have their own language and a long history of fighting with each other (not like US states who, with a few notable exceptions, have a history of pissing contests over random border lakes and the like).
Yes, there are forces in the EU who want to turn it into a country like the US but it's going kind of slow since even among politicians this is opposed by a lot of people.
Also, the population density of Delaware (top US state in that list) is 170.87/km^2, the population density of Sweden is on average 20.6/km^2 (the region I live in has a population density of 2.2/km^2). Sure, a large number of swedes live in the south but I personally live in the northern half of the country, I have a beautiful view of the mountains and a lake from my living room window and I have a 100/100 Mbps FTTH connection. The vast majority of swedes have access to faster connections than 13 Mbps, it's just that the "average joe" of the older generation generally goes with a dirt-cheap low-speed connection in the 1-8 Mbps range.
Actually, if he's 2+ meters he could be close to underweight at 90.7 kg (200 lbs). Factor in a large frame (no, not the "I'm big boned" excuse, some people really do have a larger frame than others) and being in good shape (meaning high percentage of bodyweight as muscles and low percentage of bodyweight as fat) then 90.7 kg could very well be considered slender at anything over 1.9 meters. Hell, I have a friend who's just under 1.8 meters who looks skinny at around 90 kg but he's also very fit which means he weighs more per unit of volume than someone who's got little muscle and a lot of fat.
I think that would depend a lot on where you work and how needed your expertise is.
Someone with two degrees, one in CS/CE and another in the field at hand could probably be considered very valuable although I'm sure there are stuck up researchers who would look down on you for "only" having two degrees in different fields instead of a single PhD.
And when it's sold as just plain DXM solution by dealers there are no dosage instructions so we get news stories about teenagers who down the DXM equivalent of chugging a gallon of vodka and then, believe it or not, die(!)...
Of course, DXM isn't much of a fun drug anyway, and it tastes like crap. If you just want to get fucked up there are much better drugs out there for that and if you want a psychedelic experience there are also tons of drugs out there that are better (hell, these days you can practically pick and choose which effects you want and there are plenty of reliable resources that will tell you if the pills/liquids you are about to ingest are dangerous).
I didn't say it wasn't effective, just that it's an ugly hack which, when improperly implemented, can be a serious annoyance (these days it's rare to see MTAs configured to cause hour-long delays but it wasn't long ago that this seemed to be more common than not when dealing with greylisting).
I was thinking more along the lines of just "An ugly hack.". But then I've never had to resort to greylisting to deal with spam (but NAT is unfortunately necessary until we can get more people to start adopting IPv6).
Sure, they can create valid SPF records for their domains but if they're using their own machines (rented or owned) then that ISP is most likely shady and will end up getting on a few blacklists. If they're using botnets then overly broad SPF records could be filtered (since they can't control reverse DNS for the zombie machines they're using to send spam).
The biggest problem with using reverse lookup is that it's a horrible method. Sure, ten or fifteen years ago it was a half-decent method for filtering but these days lots of companies have broken reverse DNS pointers, even big companies (one I've seen with many companies here in Sweden is that email from user@company.se from a server claiming to be mailhost.company.se is sent from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx for which a reverse lookup gives mailhost.company.com or something like ext-12-sthlm.se.company.com).
Personally I prefer relying on SpamAssassin to sort out the spam, it works quite well as long as you keep everything updated. Also, since july 1st I've noticed a sharp drop in the amount of spam hitting my personal mail server (down to about 25% of what it used to be).
Then there's SPF which would also seriously help if more sysadmins would just get around to implementing it.
The problem is, that IT people dream up all these "write only" applications that record data, without any rational plan for what the data might actually be used for in the business.
These plans mostly come into being because us "IT people" (read: developers) know that the "business people" love changing the specs and they'll blame us if they want to start using data they didn't ask us to save and we tell them we can't save data retroactively (really, they'll basically blame the developers for not being able to time-travel). This is why we'd rather save everything than not save enough.
Dont expect Apple to ever offer you opengl or Windows to ever be stable...
Actually OS X supports OpenGL just fine or were you thinking of a specific version or feature which isn't supported to your liking?
As for Windows, it can be quite stable, not exactly on-par with clustered OpenVMS setups and the like but stable enough that you shouldn't have any problems (my current work laptop which is the only windows machine I use on a daily basis has so far only crashed three times and all those times were when restoring from hibernation, haven't had this problem since I updated all drivers I could to the latest stable version I could find).
I know there have been some problems with Firefox supporting SVG in img tags but I was still sort of hoping they would've sorted it out for 4.x, it's a nice feature (and from a security standpoint they could just go with one of the "lesser" SVG standards that don't include scripting).
Try living in a college town in a rural area, lots of call centers love setting up shop in these places because there are plenty of smart students and recent grads who would rather do tech support than flip burgers until they graduate or find a real job.
Of course this does have the side effect of creating large numbers of burned-out and cynical young people who's first impression of having a job is that the employer only cares about working you to the bone and then spits you out when you burn out or make the tiniest of mistakes at the wrong time (wrong time is here defined as: when the boss is looking to lay some people off, right after you questioned anything the boss said or any number of other reasons).
You must have matured slowly, myself I grew up using SV-BASIC on an SVI-328, then Commodore Amigas, a few years running MS/PC-DOS before switching over to Linux in the mid-90s and then around 1997 this little startup named Google showed up. But then I'm slightly older than you are (not much though, I find it strange that you wouldn't remember a world without Google).
Yet there are plenty of situations in which a desktop is far superior to a laptop, a tablet or a cellphone-like device. I'd like to see you do serious graphics work on a 15" laptop, or even a 17" (yes, most artists have portable devices as well but for most these are not their main tool, merely something they need to have as well, in my experience these devices are mainly used to showcase work to employers (it's easier to bring your data to them than it is to try and download it to one of their locked down corporate desktops and then display it when the only 3rd party software on the machine is some IBM terminal emulator for the customer service system). And please don't link some iPhone/Android fingerpainting app pictures, comparing that to the output you can achieve with a good desktop machine + good large monitor + wacom tablet is laughable...