True, I'm in Australia so things are a bit different. But it's still a case of the candidates having to raise money for their campaigns. They accepting donations from vested interests in return for their vote on certain policies. Is that not so?
What his guy doesn't mention is the value of Pages. Sure, Farmville etc. brings in the young-uns or people with nothing better to do. But it's Pages/Groups which are the REAL value of Facebook. Google didn't seem to understand this.
Sure, I could switch social networks if it were only a matter of me and my friends. But on Facebook, I'm hooked up to local shops, venues and social *events* that interest me.
That is why there's no value in Google+. They don't have my local community on board. The *real* community, the bricks and mortar one. Facebook is entrenched in communities, not just friend networks. It's invaluable to business, not just individuals.
Google should have realised (perhaps they did) that trying to replace that kind of real-world relevance would be an almost impossible task. What the answer is I have no idea - how do you get a community group or venue to change to G+ when they have thousands of FB likes?
I think FB has it pretty much sewn up. If they didn't have Pages/Groups, it would be a different story.
Party loyalty is responsible for many of our current problems.
No, you have to go deeper than that. The main problem underlying all others in the undue influence of money in politics. Whether it's from the Christian Right or Corporation X, policy is able to be bought by small vested interests at the expense of the wider public.
This is the root of all the climate change debate, and going back to how hard it was to legislate against smoking, asbestos, lead in petrol, you name it.
Party loyalty wouldn't matter so much if the parties themselves were free to make *rational* policy decisions not based around where they're getting their next campaign funding from.
The corruption of the democratic process by capitalism (ironic as that is) is the big problem of our time.
he bought the Doctor Who episodes on iTunes and then when he crossed the Canadian border his videos wouldn't play [...] That was something Jobs got when it came to media, make it simple, make it cheap, make it easy
"In assessing the situation, our greatest fears have been confirmed that not only was the production data erased during the attack, but also key backups, snapshots and other information that would allow us to reconstruct these servers from the remaining data."
It doesn't give me much faith in someone's ability to interpret complex data when he can't even construct a valid deduction from simple facts...
Your definition of "natural" is flawed. A stream has been running for many years, when along comes a beaver and builds a dam. The fish downstream cry, "this must stop, it's unnatural!" Nearby, David Attenborough is wrapping up his latest doco on the natural wonder of beaver dams.
Somewhere, a David Attenborough in space is quietly documenting the emergence of a strange form of intelligence on Earth, with distinctive behaviours which result in continual cycles of construction and discovery followed by complete collapse. The conclusion is that, in perhaps another 100,000 years or so, evolution will weed out its self-destructive behaviours.
I expect that the reason for this is quite sinister
It's not sinister at all, why it's perfectly legal and indeed encouraged. It's called Capitalism. And yes, it's inherently designed to eat up everything in sight. Still, no different to any other species that eats itself out of house and home on a regular basis. We are "smart", but not that smart.
Natural selection only "cares" (yes, i'm anthropomorphizing it, get over it) if you have kids and how many.
Not exactly. Natural selection also "cares" if you don't have kids. It doesn't put a spanner in evolution, it is part of the process. It will just result in less people who tend to abstain in the population, assuming something genetic determines that behaviour to some degree.
The upshot is that, as a population, nobody will abstain anymore, since the behaviour was bred out, therefore the advice to abstain is ultimately pointless.
On the positive side, if all priests, bishops, etc. weren't allowed to have kids, we'd end up as a species without the urge to form organised religion.
Just a thought, I'm no physicist. The speed of light can be affected by gravity. Light takes longer to get from the middle of the Sun to its edge, than it does to get from there to Earth. Light is affected by gravity.
There are some particles which do not interact with matter, and perhaps, hypothetically, others may not be affected by gravity. If a particle isn't affected by gravity, it would be travelling at *exactly* the cosmic speed limit. Whereas photons may only be able to get very very close.
So it may be that our measurement of the speed limit is slightly off. And it's not defined by the "speed of light", but we might start calling it the "speed of neutrinos" instead.
Personally, I feel that a "financial reformation" is needed in our society.
You can't change the entire world's way of doing business in one go. Note that the Protestant movement resulted in several wars, which I'm sure isn't something you're prescribing here.:)
No, passing a couple of laws would probably suffice. For example:
1. The primary responsibilities of the board should be to customers, employees and ethics, and *then* to shareholders.
2. The system of share trading should be slowly wound back, so that the value of a company is not defined by the value of shares on a share market.
The share market is what causes, in my mind, 90% of the problems in capitalism, as it forces public companies to ensure their profits *increase* over time.
A family business is happy with a consistent profit. A public company must have increasing profits - continual growth. We should know by now this is a completely toxic situation for everyone. It forces companies to find ever cheaper labour and materials, etc. until something gives.
Eventually the board and CEOs get the feeling it's all coming unstuck, and that results in panic moves to ensure their own personal financial security. Which is understandable in a way, because they were trapped into doing what they did, by a system that demands the impossible - continual growth.
What wrong with adding killable civilians, but when they're killed your "bad press" score goes up, which then affects the... the.. erm I can't quite put my finger on what that affects. Oh, elections, right.
And yet under communist rule there are still wealthy power brokers who know how to game the system for their own profit.
Capitalism or otherwise, it's all the same. It comes down to human behaviour. People follow leaders and leadership is culturally defined, in this case whomever has the most money and/or political* influence.
You only have to look at the famous Stanford prisoner experiment to see how any system of power is inherently dangerous simply because it involves human beings. People in power will often take advantage of it, whether it's economic, political or social.
Basically, it's not the systems which are to blame. The systems are a result of human nature. The evolution of those systems have mainly been to put safeguards in place to minimise the natural emergence of corruption and abuse.
The problem is that those in power don't want safeguards, they want more freedom to exercise power. That's the *main* issue. There are very few people who deal with power in a humble way. Those who seek power are usually the least worthy of it.
What we need to reform is not just how power is wielded, but how it is given.
There is a major problem with having a real identity online, which is a disconnect from how we live in the real world. In the real world, if you do something stupid, you get another chance. You can move house, whatever, and nobody knows you. You can start again. Make new friends.
If everyone has a universal online identity, you can never put your stupid remarks and old opinions behind you. Even you remember to set privacy settings on *every service* that uses your identity, assuming their privacy statements don't change every other week, Big Brother will be able to connect it all, and I'm not really sure that's going to lead anywhere good.
After all, it's corporations and governments that should be more transparent, not us. It's not the average citizen who starts wars, damages the environment, mismanages the economy and entrenches poverty.
The "scientists are tricking us" motif is already well cemented in the minds of the GW deniers.
I think this is partly a failure of science commentators. They need to communicate the fact that "doubt" is exactly why science IS so great, and exactly why we have come so far.
Asking questions, debate, challenging assumptions - this happens all the time in science, and must be shown to the public as the *norm* and a good thing, so that shock-jocks cannot take advantage of it to say there is "no consensus" etc.
There is rarely consensus about big topics. There isn't consensus about the Big Bang, the number of quarks, what happens in a vacuum or if it's going to rain tomorrow.
Unfortunately, when faced with criticism, the response I hear is: Yes there is consensus; researchers who disagree are not climate scientists or in the pocket of Big Business, and so on. That is not the correct response.
The correct response is to say: Well, that's science people. Scientists don't always agree. But if we waited till everyone agreed on quantum theory, we wouldn't have GPS and various life-saving treatments today. Science IS healthy debate. Science IS rational argument, back and forth. But when something is important, you have to go with the preponderance of evidence, even if there is still argument (when is there not) especially when the alternative is to risk a lot more than just losing an argument.
But what I hear mostly from science journos is defensiveness and the kind of "of course we're right" that makes the other side even more defensive themselves. That's not the way to conduct an important public debate, keeping in mind the public is stuck in the middle going "what the fuck"?
But... bosses? In Deus Ex?? Pre-animated takedowns? I don't know, that doesn't sound like the immersive Deus Ex games I enjoyed playing. Contrivances take you out of the game.
As does the "uncanny valley" of photo-quality textures on badly-animated people. A sign of poor animation is that someone cowering is fear looks like their strategy to avoid danger is to stand in one place and pretend to be a bunny rabbit.
I loved the Deux Ex games to bits, I hope this one has more attention to story and gameplay than graphics and the all-too-common contrivances of modern games.
Even more so when you consider than an entire article was written around those three points.
You're missing the broader reasons.:) It's good that an article like this is on a big site like Discovery and will be read by a lot of people. This article is probably for the vast majority that doesn't think twice about it and hopefully will now.
[...] several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research. [Reasons may be] the concept tried in this experiment was too novel and, thus, too risky for consideration.
We wouldn't want Australians playing violent video games, would we? It might turn them into criminals!
For some reason we Australians always find this amusing. Maybe it's the suggestion we're all rugged ruffians and sexy scoundrels, handsomely Han Solo-ing our way through life.
Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason the law was changed was because the industry said restrictions just make people pirate games more.
Just like a movie or series that takes ages to come here, everyone ends up downloading it, which is why they started to release stuff here more quickly than in the past.
I think it means something other than what they think it means. Innovation is not just trying to find ways to compressing the menus and icons into as small a space as possible. That's called moving shit around to save space.
Changing the Addons section from a dialog into a tab was a great idea, but the idea was Chrome's, not Mozilla's. Not that I'd call that innovation really.
Anyway, what's so great about having *less* space for tabs? Suddenly the tabs are sharing space with - everything else. As long as that can be changed, fine, but seems idiotic to put that much effort into saving 30 pixels. 30 pixels! I know everyone loves the 80's but some things (just a few) have improved since then. One of them is monitor size.
if you coded this GPL code on their time, it's their copyright anyway, and they're free to use it any way they see fit.
I'm a freelance developer.. I know that working full-time as an employee means the your work belongs to the employer, but what about freelancing?
A lot of my work is without any formal contract, so just wondering when I stand there, in terms of copyright, ie. my ability to reuse my own code for other clients without risk.
In terms of a contract, is it fair to state that I own copyright to the code, while imparting a non-exclusive licence to my client to use it as they see fit (sell, modify, derive, etc). Is that fair enough?
Or do I automatically own copyright because I'm not an employee?
Slashdot Mirror
True, I'm in Australia so things are a bit different. But it's still a case of the candidates having to raise money for their campaigns. They accepting donations from vested interests in return for their vote on certain policies. Is that not so?
What his guy doesn't mention is the value of Pages. Sure, Farmville etc. brings in the young-uns or people with nothing better to do. But it's Pages/Groups which are the REAL value of Facebook. Google didn't seem to understand this.
Sure, I could switch social networks if it were only a matter of me and my friends. But on Facebook, I'm hooked up to local shops, venues and social *events* that interest me.
That is why there's no value in Google+. They don't have my local community on board. The *real* community, the bricks and mortar one. Facebook is entrenched in communities, not just friend networks. It's invaluable to business, not just individuals.
Google should have realised (perhaps they did) that trying to replace that kind of real-world relevance would be an almost impossible task. What the answer is I have no idea - how do you get a community group or venue to change to G+ when they have thousands of FB likes?
I think FB has it pretty much sewn up. If they didn't have Pages/Groups, it would be a different story.
I have to disagree. What's the point in voting for one part or the other, if both are beholden to commercial interests over the greater good?
Why do you think people are apathetic about voting in the first place?
Party loyalty is responsible for many of our current problems.
No, you have to go deeper than that. The main problem underlying all others in the undue influence of money in politics. Whether it's from the Christian Right or Corporation X, policy is able to be bought by small vested interests at the expense of the wider public.
This is the root of all the climate change debate, and going back to how hard it was to legislate against smoking, asbestos, lead in petrol, you name it.
Party loyalty wouldn't matter so much if the parties themselves were free to make *rational* policy decisions not based around where they're getting their next campaign funding from.
The corruption of the democratic process by capitalism (ironic as that is) is the big problem of our time.
he bought the Doctor Who episodes on iTunes and then when he crossed the Canadian border his videos wouldn't play [...] That was something Jobs got when it came to media, make it simple, make it cheap, make it easy
Sorry, I just love pointing out contradictions. :)
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/4800-aussie-sites-evaporate-after-hack-20110621-1gd1h.html
"In assessing the situation, our greatest fears have been confirmed that not only was the production data erased during the attack, but also key backups, snapshots and other information that would allow us to reconstruct these servers from the remaining data."
It doesn't give me much faith in someone's ability to interpret complex data when he can't even construct a valid deduction from simple facts...
Your definition of "natural" is flawed. A stream has been running for many years, when along comes a beaver and builds a dam. The fish downstream cry, "this must stop, it's unnatural!" Nearby, David Attenborough is wrapping up his latest doco on the natural wonder of beaver dams.
Somewhere, a David Attenborough in space is quietly documenting the emergence of a strange form of intelligence on Earth, with distinctive behaviours which result in continual cycles of construction and discovery followed by complete collapse. The conclusion is that, in perhaps another 100,000 years or so, evolution will weed out its self-destructive behaviours.
For now, mostly harmless.
Microsoft playing the checkmate card its been threatening for a long long time.
But that's a valid move in any game of chess.
I expect that the reason for this is quite sinister
It's not sinister at all, why it's perfectly legal and indeed encouraged. It's called Capitalism. And yes, it's inherently designed to eat up everything in sight. Still, no different to any other species that eats itself out of house and home on a regular basis. We are "smart", but not that smart.
Natural selection only "cares" (yes, i'm anthropomorphizing it, get over it) if you have kids and how many.
Not exactly. Natural selection also "cares" if you don't have kids. It doesn't put a spanner in evolution, it is part of the process. It will just result in less people who tend to abstain in the population, assuming something genetic determines that behaviour to some degree.
The upshot is that, as a population, nobody will abstain anymore, since the behaviour was bred out, therefore the advice to abstain is ultimately pointless.
On the positive side, if all priests, bishops, etc. weren't allowed to have kids, we'd end up as a species without the urge to form organised religion.
Just a thought, I'm no physicist. The speed of light can be affected by gravity. Light takes longer to get from the middle of the Sun to its edge, than it does to get from there to Earth. Light is affected by gravity.
There are some particles which do not interact with matter, and perhaps, hypothetically, others may not be affected by gravity. If a particle isn't affected by gravity, it would be travelling at *exactly* the cosmic speed limit. Whereas photons may only be able to get very very close.
So it may be that our measurement of the speed limit is slightly off. And it's not defined by the "speed of light", but we might start calling it the "speed of neutrinos" instead.
Personally, I feel that a "financial reformation" is needed in our society.
You can't change the entire world's way of doing business in one go. Note that the Protestant movement resulted in several wars, which I'm sure isn't something you're prescribing here. :)
No, passing a couple of laws would probably suffice. For example:
1. The primary responsibilities of the board should be to customers, employees and ethics, and *then* to shareholders.
2. The system of share trading should be slowly wound back, so that the value of a company is not defined by the value of shares on a share market.
The share market is what causes, in my mind, 90% of the problems in capitalism, as it forces public companies to ensure their profits *increase* over time.
A family business is happy with a consistent profit. A public company must have increasing profits - continual growth. We should know by now this is a completely toxic situation for everyone. It forces companies to find ever cheaper labour and materials, etc. until something gives.
Eventually the board and CEOs get the feeling it's all coming unstuck, and that results in panic moves to ensure their own personal financial security. Which is understandable in a way, because they were trapped into doing what they did, by a system that demands the impossible - continual growth.
What wrong with adding killable civilians, but when they're killed your "bad press" score goes up, which then affects the... the.. erm I can't quite put my finger on what that affects. Oh, elections, right.
Nevermind, carry on.
And yet under communist rule there are still wealthy power brokers who know how to game the system for their own profit.
Capitalism or otherwise, it's all the same. It comes down to human behaviour. People follow leaders and leadership is culturally defined, in this case whomever has the most money and/or political* influence.
You only have to look at the famous Stanford prisoner experiment to see how any system of power is inherently dangerous simply because it involves human beings. People in power will often take advantage of it, whether it's economic, political or social.
Basically, it's not the systems which are to blame. The systems are a result of human nature. The evolution of those systems have mainly been to put safeguards in place to minimise the natural emergence of corruption and abuse.
The problem is that those in power don't want safeguards, they want more freedom to exercise power. That's the *main* issue. There are very few people who deal with power in a humble way. Those who seek power are usually the least worthy of it.
What we need to reform is not just how power is wielded, but how it is given.
Now, I'm not usually one to suggest that just because an effect is demonstrated in a lab animal that it won't apply to humans
Haven't you read Of Mice and Men?
TFA: "Provides keyboard shortcuts for every command in the ribbon, something many people have been asking for."
Seriously, I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft deemed keyboard shortcuts an afterthought. Something went very wrong there.
There is a major problem with having a real identity online, which is a disconnect from how we live in the real world. In the real world, if you do something stupid, you get another chance. You can move house, whatever, and nobody knows you. You can start again. Make new friends.
If everyone has a universal online identity, you can never put your stupid remarks and old opinions behind you. Even you remember to set privacy settings on *every service* that uses your identity, assuming their privacy statements don't change every other week, Big Brother will be able to connect it all, and I'm not really sure that's going to lead anywhere good.
After all, it's corporations and governments that should be more transparent, not us. It's not the average citizen who starts wars, damages the environment, mismanages the economy and entrenches poverty.
The "scientists are tricking us" motif is already well cemented in the minds of the GW deniers.
I think this is partly a failure of science commentators. They need to communicate the fact that "doubt" is exactly why science IS so great, and exactly why we have come so far.
Asking questions, debate, challenging assumptions - this happens all the time in science, and must be shown to the public as the *norm* and a good thing, so that shock-jocks cannot take advantage of it to say there is "no consensus" etc.
There is rarely consensus about big topics. There isn't consensus about the Big Bang, the number of quarks, what happens in a vacuum or if it's going to rain tomorrow.
Unfortunately, when faced with criticism, the response I hear is: Yes there is consensus; researchers who disagree are not climate scientists or in the pocket of Big Business, and so on. That is not the correct response.
The correct response is to say: Well, that's science people. Scientists don't always agree. But if we waited till everyone agreed on quantum theory, we wouldn't have GPS and various life-saving treatments today. Science IS healthy debate. Science IS rational argument, back and forth. But when something is important, you have to go with the preponderance of evidence, even if there is still argument (when is there not) especially when the alternative is to risk a lot more than just losing an argument.
But what I hear mostly from science journos is defensiveness and the kind of "of course we're right" that makes the other side even more defensive themselves. That's not the way to conduct an important public debate, keeping in mind the public is stuck in the middle going "what the fuck"?
But... bosses? In Deus Ex?? Pre-animated takedowns? I don't know, that doesn't sound like the immersive Deus Ex games I enjoyed playing. Contrivances take you out of the game.
As does the "uncanny valley" of photo-quality textures on badly-animated people. A sign of poor animation is that someone cowering is fear looks like their strategy to avoid danger is to stand in one place and pretend to be a bunny rabbit.
I loved the Deux Ex games to bits, I hope this one has more attention to story and gameplay than graphics and the all-too-common contrivances of modern games.
Even more so when you consider than an entire article was written around those three points.
You're missing the broader reasons. :) It's good that an article like this is on a big site like Discovery and will be read by a lot of people. This article is probably for the vast majority that doesn't think twice about it and hopefully will now.
[...] several pharmaceutical companies declined to pay for the research. [Reasons may be] the concept tried in this experiment was too novel and, thus, too risky for consideration.
Too risky to profit margins that is.
Fuel? No.
Yeah, the mention of antimatter always invokes Star Trek in the press. Apart from scarcity, there are lots of problems using antimatter for fuel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter#Fuel
We wouldn't want Australians playing violent video games, would we? It might turn them into criminals!
For some reason we Australians always find this amusing. Maybe it's the suggestion we're all rugged ruffians and sexy scoundrels, handsomely Han Solo-ing our way through life.
Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if the only reason the law was changed was because the industry said restrictions just make people pirate games more.
Just like a movie or series that takes ages to come here, everyone ends up downloading it, which is why they started to release stuff here more quickly than in the past.
I think it means something other than what they think it means. Innovation is not just trying to find ways to compressing the menus and icons into as small a space as possible. That's called moving shit around to save space.
Changing the Addons section from a dialog into a tab was a great idea, but the idea was Chrome's, not Mozilla's. Not that I'd call that innovation really.
Anyway, what's so great about having *less* space for tabs? Suddenly the tabs are sharing space with - everything else. As long as that can be changed, fine, but seems idiotic to put that much effort into saving 30 pixels. 30 pixels! I know everyone loves the 80's but some things (just a few) have improved since then. One of them is monitor size.
Put that effort into memory conservation guys!!!
if you coded this GPL code on their time, it's their copyright anyway, and they're free to use it any way they see fit.
I'm a freelance developer.. I know that working full-time as an employee means the your work belongs to the employer, but what about freelancing?
A lot of my work is without any formal contract, so just wondering when I stand there, in terms of copyright, ie. my ability to reuse my own code for other clients without risk.
In terms of a contract, is it fair to state that I own copyright to the code, while imparting a non-exclusive licence to my client to use it as they see fit (sell, modify, derive, etc). Is that fair enough?
Or do I automatically own copyright because I'm not an employee?