It will take some serious bandwidth to serve the new Slashdot. A central server will not be sufficient. A distributed design is needed, one that is both scalable and secure. Perhaps some BitTorrent foundation can be used. Ideally, the new Slashdot would exist "in the network," but not on any one server. Such schemes were proposed in FreeNet.
But if the Classic mode is officially killed, Slashdot will be forked; I have no doubt about that. I am reading/. in Classic mode, with JavaScript disabled (using NoScript.) If that function is no longer available, I will never see the "other" Slashdot; I'm certainly not going to enable JS for that.
It's always a great idea to question architectural plans once you bulldozed the entire neighborhood:-)
The problem is that old policies are dead and buried. Any new policy that is issued under the "old" system would cost twice as much, simply because (a) insurers lost a ton of money already on all those changes, and (b) it's a good time to raise the prices across the board (now that all insurers are in a similar position.)
The only winning move was to not play. Leave the sleeping dogs alone. A change in healthcare should have started with one simple question: where is the money going to come from? Right now a government goon just puts a gun to your head and orders you to pay up - even if you, as a free person, may elect to not have an insurance. Maybe you are young and healthy; maybe you are rich; maybe you are a fatalist; maybe you are a gambler; maybe you just need the money.
The problem is very simple: (a) healthcare is expensive, and (b) many people are poor. Obamacare does not change anything here. Costs go even higher, and people do not get new jobs and new income. All that happens is that a small group of people gets the privilege to pay for healthcare of a much larger group.
Can't say I'm too bothered with the live tiles on a desktop machine
There are few enough live tiles and they can be deleted by hand. What you cannot delete by hand[*] is the Start Screen entries that are created by software that you install:
> dir "C:\Users\tftp\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"/s
[...]
Total Files Listed:
52 File(s) 77,633 bytes
77 Dir(s) 395,226,988,544 bytes free
> dir "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"/s
[...]
Total Files Listed:
485 File(s) 743,447 bytes
401 Dir(s) 395,092,660,224 bytes free
How long will it take you to scroll horizontally through 537 tiles that all look alike?
[*] You can delete the tiles from the start screen; however you have to do it one by one, and instead of using the DEL button you need to use the right-click and then select from menu at the bottom. It can take quite a while before you figure out what needs to be deleted and then delete it. Worse still, some of that may be still necessary, but there is no backup. It's insane for millions of people to be forced to do such things in this day.
Windows <8 has this problem taken care of by using hierarchical start menus. MSVC may drop 50 shortcuts into the menu when you install it, but you will never see them until you need one... and if you use it often you can copy it into the next tier of access (Pin to Start, Pin to toolbar, copy to desktop, assign a hot key.) The idea of the Start Screen comes from mobile world where one application has at most one launcher. This is not how it works on a PC - a large application may have tens of sub-components that are all independent applications, and you may need to run them from time to time.
Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.
To rephrase: It's relatively easy to ensure that this HDD does not store any data. However it is nearly impossible to ensure that this data is not stored on any HDD.
That's another way to formulate the Broken Window Fallacy. In this case, though, an immaterial object (your time) is destroyed instead of a material one (glass.)
Percentage-wise, cash is used primarily for legal activities. Its role is diminishing with proliferation of alternative payment instruments (plastic, checks, online transfers, Bill Pay services) but so far cash has plenty of legitimate uses.
On the other hand, BTC shines in gray economy, where you need to pay online but do not want your identity to be known. See the case of BitInstant - the exchange was heavily dependent on Silk Road. BTC is either pointless, or inconvenient, or financially unattractive to pay for gas or for coffee. Credit cards are far more convenient - the transaction gets confirmed instantly, and you get insurance against fraud. Many banks also offer one-time, unique c/c numbers that you may use with a vendor who you do not trust. All the benefits of BTC (for legal stuff) and no hassle.
If they're being charged with Money Laundering, doesn't that mean the BitCoin is now considered "Money" by the Feds?
It may well be that BTC was declared money specifically to smother it in regulations that all banks follow. If BTC exchanges have to follow those regulations (as BitInstant had to) then all the advantages[*] of BTC magically disappear, leaving people only with disadvantages.
[*] The list of advantages is already pretty short. The main one was that it could be used as cash over the Internet. But this is no longer safe, since you can be sure that computers at TLAs are happily chewing the blockchain and building the graphs of all wallets and money transfers. Once the cash ends up at a monitored location (such as at exchange that got the memo) the wallet can be associated with a person. Governments always love to count money in other people's pockets. With that advantage gone, what else remains?
no evidence he had done anything other than write his dreams and fantasies down onto paper
So what would you say if you find someone with a detailed plan of a bank, its vault, and nearby houses? Can the owner just say that he just put his thoughts on paper without ever intending to dig the tunnel that is depicted right there?
But his case would be easy compared to those two that you mention. Taken alone, a plan of a bank is not illegal. It may become circumstantial evidence later on, if you do commit the crime. It would be evidence of intent. But the plan itself is just a piece of paper. Those plans are stored in the architect's office, and building maintenance people have copies.
The second person in your story, OTOH, could be guilty of manufacturing a CP book. I do not know what the law says about legality of such literature - it's probably similar to CP cartoons, where no actual C's are harmed. But the society may be sufficiently upset even by fantasies, and it may make laws to forbid such books and such cartoons in order to stomp out such behavior. Otherwise if there are books, songs, cartoons, forums, this creates an infrastructure where people can embrace their inner desires - and some of them will want more. If there is no such infrastructure, there is hope that those desires will starve and die, and become replaced with something that is legal and can be practiced.
The law, in its infinite wisdom, forbids both rich and poor alike from panhandling, digging through trashcans, and sleeping under bridges.
The law also forbids rich and poor alike from trading stocks during certain periods of time, and from insider trading, and from failing to correctly account for profits of their corporations, and from failing to pay inheritance taxes, and from speeding in their Ferraris, and from paying less than minimum wage to their employees...
Certainly they'll look at them and if they have dying parents that should be pretty much the end of it. It's reality and the world we live in.
The reality of the world is that US or UK police cannot possibly prove or disprove that Mr. X went to Syria to see his relatives or to play a soldier. How do you propose to "look at them" if they were in a war-torn country? Should they just ask politely? What kind of an answer will they get?
There is even no way to prove that someone from UK went to Syria. The border between Turkey and Syria is wide open, and you can take a taxi from one country to another. There will be no records, no visas, no stamps in the passport. Once you are out of UK you can go anywhere and do anything you want. Short of being photographed, none of that can be proven. Many fighters keep their faces covered (which is not a bad idea in a desert anyway.)
The monitoring net, done poorly (as you can do it only poorly,) will only snag innocents who are stupid enough to admit that they went to Syria or other hotspots. The bad people will lie to you, and you can't do anything about it. As result, you not only have bad people against you, but also you push the innocents into the hands of bad people if you mistreat them. If you do not want people to go from UK to Syria, why do you admit Syrians into the country in the first place?
Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery.
And so was burning of witches. But we got better.
There are plenty of people in Syria, and they have relatives who live in other countries. Should those relatives be waterboarded in UK if they go to safe areas of Syria just to see their dying parents?
Because of side effects of new technologies. You can say the same thing about nuclear power, for example. If you buy the light side of it - easy power with little fuel - then you have to also buy the dark side of it (potential contamination of large territories that cannot be cleaned for a hundred generations.)
In this case the only thorny issue of GG is its camera - that may or may not record you. You are not important to millions of other people, but you are important to you. It may well be that I will see your face in a GG video and will never realize who you are; but your friends will recognize you; and your parents; and your GF; and your boss; and all the other people that you know and who know you. Is this important? Usually it is not. However sometimes it is important; GF #1 does not need to know who GF #2 is; your boss does not need to know that you are not sick at home but running an essential family errand that you could not wiggle out of. People like to keep private things to themselves. Sure, being in public already breaks this intent somewhat, but you can manage it as people managed that risk for thousands of years - you do not show up where you can be recognized. GG changes that - you can be recognized even if you are on the other side of the planet.
Note also that many techies are joining the crowd of those neo-Luddites - not because they are despising the technology, but because they are concerned about what this technology brings us. Not all new technology is automatically good for the society. This here new and shiny collar may be new and shiny, but if you look carefully, it is a slave's collar. Do not wear it, even if it is artfully made.
Bluetooth operates at low power (1 mW for Class 3, 100 mW for Class 1.) GG is not likely to run at anything but the lowest power - it costs battery life. GG will not harm you. However it remains to be seen if your eyesight will be affected. EM radiation issues were studied by many teams; however, as I understand, GG was never studied by eye doctors and medical researchers. There are several aspects of a HUD like GG that may be relevant (focusing of the eye; shifting of the view center; and probably a dozen more that I know nothing about.)
'What exactly does having this thing attached to my face do to make up for having this thing attached to my face?'
Google can make pretty penny on selling GG to people who already have an answer to that question. Numbers of those people are growing every day. Those people are absolutely certain that everything that happens to them is so precious, important and valuable that they just must, as a service to humanity, carry GG on their face all day and all night, lest we, poor peons, miss one of their exciting adventures. Those people consider it perfectly normal, social, and entirely not offensive, to [threaten to] record other people against their wishes. They also wear GG while operating two-ton vehicles on freeways and then claim that "GG was not turned on," as if anyone can prove it one way or another. Why not - nothing bad can ever happen to those people; they do not need to be careful at all.
Considering the Princeton grad was working for the A&M grad, I'm not sure the contacts and networking were working out as he expected.
It cannot be determined without knowing more. For example, the Princeton grad could be 23 years old and new to the company, whereas the A&M grad could be 60 years old and own the company.
Computer literacy used to involve typing a terminal command. All the PC folks in the 80's and 90's did it.
Yes, all the 0.07% of the population. The rest was in fear of the computer, for a good reason. Back then computers were not very useful unless you were a programmer, or your specific need was covered (MS Word, Excel, WP.)
If you can't "write it yourself" in this instance, which amounts to running an operation across a set of files, then sorting the result, then you do not know how to use a computer. You know how to use some applications and input devices. It's a big difference.
So what? Most people today who use computers on daily basis cannot do any of the above. Does not mean anything. They can use a few applications, and that's all they need. They do not know that the computer can also calculate pi for them. They do not need that. Hell, I'm working with computers for many years, and I can't tell you off the top of my head how can I program MS Word to open all.docx files that match a pattern and then replace one string inside with another. I'd have to study on this scripting and automation thing that I never needed to do before. Does it mean that I don't know how to use computers? You just can't know everything.
Now go press the Towel key to open Window8's start screen. Start typing...
And observe how much backlash this decision caused - to the extent that many people refuse to buy Win8 boxes. People are just not that good at typing; but they are pretty good at finding icons on the desktop and clicking on them. Typing requires being able to type fast, and being able to remember what to type. None of that is a certainty.
The OS exposes your computer's features to you. If you do not know how to write a simple set of instructions for it to follow, then you do not know how to use a computer.
Again, it's just a matter of definitions. For one man, "how to use" means "being able to access Gmail in a browser." For another man, "how to use" means ability to program a new OS from scratch, using their own compiler.
Last time I checked (a month ago) Xilinx ISE and Vivado did not work under Win8 (Java issues,) and Xilinx had no roadmap to fix this. You cannot sit on your hands for an undefined number of months, waiting for a fix, when a perfectly good Win7 runs all that just fine and right now. You take that Win8 and scrap it. Win8 is too troubled to be even considered in a business.
I would rather walk 30 meters on a cobblestone road to my local shop, surrounded by thousand year-old architecture, then spend 30 seconds in a car suffocated in concrete and traffic.
It's not an option to select. Not here, at least. Many US roads are not designed for walking. You can be killed by a car, or arrested for jaywalking. There are no sidewalks on many roads. The road that I live on does not have sidewalks for at least 5 miles. It's just a property of the locale. You can, of course, find a place to live that is more designed for walking... it's called ghetto. You will find plenty of people walking there. Just don't come close to them. IMO, 50 miles would be a good, safe distance.
The food too is not even comparable for the crap that passes in the U.S. In Europe, you can be relatively poor and live like a king.
Well, the only way to eat reasonably healthy food here is either to cook it for yourself, or to pay big bucks for dinner at a good restaurant. (Note: Olive Garden and Red Lobster do not qualify. At Denny's you can be assaulted. I do not even know where a good, not franchised, restaurant might be nearby.)
Almost everything you purchase is locally grown, locally made, and locally sold. It's a completely different way of living that Americans don't understand.
In the USA you will find megastores, megaparking, and megaconsumption. Those tiny stores would have a hard time surviving. They wouldn't have access to anything local because in most places there is nothing local. Territories specialize in something, and that's it. When I buy apples, they likely were grown a thousand miles away, if not more. I have lemons in my backyard, and plums, and peaches, and some apples (in season.) Those are local. Everything else is coming from all over the world.
Who in their right mind would spend 30 minutes in a store? You don't have to do that Europe. Most of your shopping consists of little artisan shops that provide local produce, cheese, wine, meats, and takes you only a minute to order.
Our stores can easily be 100 x 100 meters long. It will take you a while to get to the right shelf even if you know where it is. However every store has its own layout, even stores of the same company.
If you live your life going from point A to point B, you will find it severely lacking. You miss out on the good stuff. You will consequently have fewer friends, less sex, and fewer thoughts.
It is often said that work, work and more work is a national obsession of americans. Europeans are laughed at for taking long vacations and working sparingly. I, personally, prefer to work; not necessarily for the man - I have plenty of hobbies. But none of them involve socialization. I deal with machines - they can be trusted. Humans... maybe in some parallel Universe.
Case in point: When I lived in Europe, I got a little something extra from the baker's cute daughter.:)
I hope that it was easily treatable. Modern medicine is pretty good:-)
if you shop frequently, your average time in the store per visit is more like 5-10 minutes. You know exactly where everything is, since you go there so frequently, and you figure out ways to make it more efficient (like always using the "15 items or less" check-out lane when possible).
There are fixed costs of going into the store (getting to and from, standing in line) and variable costs (walking and picking items; loading time.) The fixed component is significant enough. You do not want to stand in line even for five minutes every day - this amounts to loss of 10 hours per week. The "fast" check-out lane is often the longest, by the way, and it doesn't move any faster.
You can plan your daily buying pattern to get the best goods from those small shops that specialize
Small grocery stores do not exist anymore in the USA. There is a bakery, but it specializes in birthday cakes and such, and I wouldn't want to spend $10 on a loaf of simple bread. Their costs are necessarily higher. Probably 7/11 can be called a small shop, but they do not send anything substantial there. I haven't been to a small shop since 1991, probably. Today most of remaining small shops are franchised restaurants.
What the heck do you think people did before cars? Do you think no one ever bought in bulk?
They used horses and carts; or just a wheelbarrow. Carrying things in hands is just not efficient.
Guess what -- they make insulated bags for just these kinds of situations!
I have and use those. The 40 minute drive home is far longer than walking for 200 meters.
But, from a broader perspective, when you shop daily, you need to buy less frozen food. You can just buy fresh vegetables and fruits when they are season
I have no desire to replace frozen meat with fresh one. I prefer it to be frozen - it is safer this way, and more convenient. I can eat it whenever I want - today or a week later. I have no schedule what to eat on any given day. Not all vegetables are sensitive to storing in a refrigerator. Cabbage can be stored for months, for example. You only need your salad to be fresh. I eat them when I have them; and at other times I can get a sandwich somewhere. This is a non-problem.
We have self-service lanes in some stores, like Home Depot, but not in grocery stores. The potential for fraud is extreme. I do like those machines, and they indeed make shopping much faster. However food comes in too many shapes and forms; one has to look at it to correctly identify it. With many items being bought, it's a huge temptation for many to scan that bottle of alcohol as a bottle of vinegar. Or "forget" to scan it at all. The culture and responsibility of US population is far from being uniform. There are people who will approach you and hit you in the face just for sport. Some victims get killed this way. There are places ("food deserts") that have no grocery stores at all, because the locals will steal everything that is on the shelves; and then they steal the shelves.
Wouldn't it be more practical to replace a VAX with an R-Pi or BBB? You gain performance this way, and save a lot of electric power:-)
Regardless, I seriously doubt that there are recent builds of any other software for VAX; so what's the point of having BSD on them if there isn't much else to run?
In other words, the number of stupid questions is inversely proportional to your perceived value to the company. An experienced employee can easily walk away if he does not like your questions - and what then will you tell your boss who is desperate to fill that Project Lead position? Especially if the boss was also present at the interview? Good Project Leads are hard to find. You won't even talk to a good Code Monkey every day.
Sorry, I haven't noticed this little detail. I obtained my textbooks from the university's library... for free. I never had to buy textbooks. This is one of few things that the old, bad USSR got right.
A significant portion of the group "Christians" can't read well enough to read their holy book, even if they wanted to, let alone comprehend it.
Most, if not all, holy books cannot be comprehended even if you know the language and can read the words. The books are just too illogical, and they are never written in a plain, simple language. Quite contrary to that ideal, they are written from multiple, conflicting viewpoints, and they depict the same events differently, and they use archaic phrases. Translation further destroyed some of the original content. This is why every priest has to "explain" what this or that passage means; his explanation, of course, is subjective.
If you are looking for a holy book that is consistent, you may pick this one up.
Slashdot Mirror
It will take some serious bandwidth to serve the new Slashdot. A central server will not be sufficient. A distributed design is needed, one that is both scalable and secure. Perhaps some BitTorrent foundation can be used. Ideally, the new Slashdot would exist "in the network," but not on any one server. Such schemes were proposed in FreeNet.
But if the Classic mode is officially killed, Slashdot will be forked; I have no doubt about that. I am reading /. in Classic mode, with JavaScript disabled (using NoScript.) If that function is no longer available, I will never see the "other" Slashdot; I'm certainly not going to enable JS for that.
It's always a great idea to question architectural plans once you bulldozed the entire neighborhood :-)
The problem is that old policies are dead and buried. Any new policy that is issued under the "old" system would cost twice as much, simply because (a) insurers lost a ton of money already on all those changes, and (b) it's a good time to raise the prices across the board (now that all insurers are in a similar position.)
The only winning move was to not play. Leave the sleeping dogs alone. A change in healthcare should have started with one simple question: where is the money going to come from? Right now a government goon just puts a gun to your head and orders you to pay up - even if you, as a free person, may elect to not have an insurance. Maybe you are young and healthy; maybe you are rich; maybe you are a fatalist; maybe you are a gambler; maybe you just need the money.
The problem is very simple: (a) healthcare is expensive, and (b) many people are poor. Obamacare does not change anything here. Costs go even higher, and people do not get new jobs and new income. All that happens is that a small group of people gets the privilege to pay for healthcare of a much larger group.
Can't say I'm too bothered with the live tiles on a desktop machine
There are few enough live tiles and they can be deleted by hand. What you cannot delete by hand[*] is the Start Screen entries that are created by software that you install:
> dir "C:\Users\tftp\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" /s /s
[...]
Total Files Listed:
52 File(s) 77,633 bytes
77 Dir(s) 395,226,988,544 bytes free
> dir "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"
[...]
Total Files Listed:
485 File(s) 743,447 bytes
401 Dir(s) 395,092,660,224 bytes free
How long will it take you to scroll horizontally through 537 tiles that all look alike?
[*] You can delete the tiles from the start screen; however you have to do it one by one, and instead of using the DEL button you need to use the right-click and then select from menu at the bottom. It can take quite a while before you figure out what needs to be deleted and then delete it. Worse still, some of that may be still necessary, but there is no backup. It's insane for millions of people to be forced to do such things in this day.
Windows <8 has this problem taken care of by using hierarchical start menus. MSVC may drop 50 shortcuts into the menu when you install it, but you will never see them until you need one... and if you use it often you can copy it into the next tier of access (Pin to Start, Pin to toolbar, copy to desktop, assign a hot key.) The idea of the Start Screen comes from mobile world where one application has at most one launcher. This is not how it works on a PC - a large application may have tens of sub-components that are all independent applications, and you may need to run them from time to time.
With no Windows Updates, and with no WGA, MS would have no way of knowing which XP out there is pirated and which isn't.
Ignoring the fact that copies exist (and everyone involved knew that), physical destruction is in fact the recommended way to destroy the data on a hard drive, SSD drive, flash memory, etc. etc.
To rephrase: It's relatively easy to ensure that this HDD does not store any data. However it is nearly impossible to ensure that this data is not stored on any HDD.
That's another way to formulate the Broken Window Fallacy. In this case, though, an immaterial object (your time) is destroyed instead of a material one (glass.)
Percentage-wise, cash is used primarily for legal activities. Its role is diminishing with proliferation of alternative payment instruments (plastic, checks, online transfers, Bill Pay services) but so far cash has plenty of legitimate uses.
On the other hand, BTC shines in gray economy, where you need to pay online but do not want your identity to be known. See the case of BitInstant - the exchange was heavily dependent on Silk Road. BTC is either pointless, or inconvenient, or financially unattractive to pay for gas or for coffee. Credit cards are far more convenient - the transaction gets confirmed instantly, and you get insurance against fraud. Many banks also offer one-time, unique c/c numbers that you may use with a vendor who you do not trust. All the benefits of BTC (for legal stuff) and no hassle.
If they're being charged with Money Laundering, doesn't that mean the BitCoin is now considered "Money" by the Feds?
It may well be that BTC was declared money specifically to smother it in regulations that all banks follow. If BTC exchanges have to follow those regulations (as BitInstant had to) then all the advantages[*] of BTC magically disappear, leaving people only with disadvantages.
[*] The list of advantages is already pretty short. The main one was that it could be used as cash over the Internet. But this is no longer safe, since you can be sure that computers at TLAs are happily chewing the blockchain and building the graphs of all wallets and money transfers. Once the cash ends up at a monitored location (such as at exchange that got the memo) the wallet can be associated with a person. Governments always love to count money in other people's pockets. With that advantage gone, what else remains?
no evidence he had done anything other than write his dreams and fantasies down onto paper
So what would you say if you find someone with a detailed plan of a bank, its vault, and nearby houses? Can the owner just say that he just put his thoughts on paper without ever intending to dig the tunnel that is depicted right there?
But his case would be easy compared to those two that you mention. Taken alone, a plan of a bank is not illegal. It may become circumstantial evidence later on, if you do commit the crime. It would be evidence of intent. But the plan itself is just a piece of paper. Those plans are stored in the architect's office, and building maintenance people have copies.
The second person in your story, OTOH, could be guilty of manufacturing a CP book. I do not know what the law says about legality of such literature - it's probably similar to CP cartoons, where no actual C's are harmed. But the society may be sufficiently upset even by fantasies, and it may make laws to forbid such books and such cartoons in order to stomp out such behavior. Otherwise if there are books, songs, cartoons, forums, this creates an infrastructure where people can embrace their inner desires - and some of them will want more. If there is no such infrastructure, there is hope that those desires will starve and die, and become replaced with something that is legal and can be practiced.
The law, in its infinite wisdom, forbids both rich and poor alike from panhandling, digging through trashcans, and sleeping under bridges.
The law also forbids rich and poor alike from trading stocks during certain periods of time, and from insider trading, and from failing to correctly account for profits of their corporations, and from failing to pay inheritance taxes, and from speeding in their Ferraris, and from paying less than minimum wage to their employees...
Certainly they'll look at them and if they have dying parents that should be pretty much the end of it. It's reality and the world we live in.
The reality of the world is that US or UK police cannot possibly prove or disprove that Mr. X went to Syria to see his relatives or to play a soldier. How do you propose to "look at them" if they were in a war-torn country? Should they just ask politely? What kind of an answer will they get?
There is even no way to prove that someone from UK went to Syria. The border between Turkey and Syria is wide open, and you can take a taxi from one country to another. There will be no records, no visas, no stamps in the passport. Once you are out of UK you can go anywhere and do anything you want. Short of being photographed, none of that can be proven. Many fighters keep their faces covered (which is not a bad idea in a desert anyway.)
The monitoring net, done poorly (as you can do it only poorly,) will only snag innocents who are stupid enough to admit that they went to Syria or other hotspots. The bad people will lie to you, and you can't do anything about it. As result, you not only have bad people against you, but also you push the innocents into the hands of bad people if you mistreat them. If you do not want people to go from UK to Syria, why do you admit Syrians into the country in the first place?
Oh come on. Guilt by association has always been a part of the scenery.
And so was burning of witches. But we got better.
There are plenty of people in Syria, and they have relatives who live in other countries. Should those relatives be waterboarded in UK if they go to safe areas of Syria just to see their dying parents?
Because of side effects of new technologies. You can say the same thing about nuclear power, for example. If you buy the light side of it - easy power with little fuel - then you have to also buy the dark side of it (potential contamination of large territories that cannot be cleaned for a hundred generations.)
In this case the only thorny issue of GG is its camera - that may or may not record you. You are not important to millions of other people, but you are important to you. It may well be that I will see your face in a GG video and will never realize who you are; but your friends will recognize you; and your parents; and your GF; and your boss; and all the other people that you know and who know you. Is this important? Usually it is not. However sometimes it is important; GF #1 does not need to know who GF #2 is; your boss does not need to know that you are not sick at home but running an essential family errand that you could not wiggle out of. People like to keep private things to themselves. Sure, being in public already breaks this intent somewhat, but you can manage it as people managed that risk for thousands of years - you do not show up where you can be recognized. GG changes that - you can be recognized even if you are on the other side of the planet.
Note also that many techies are joining the crowd of those neo-Luddites - not because they are despising the technology, but because they are concerned about what this technology brings us. Not all new technology is automatically good for the society. This here new and shiny collar may be new and shiny, but if you look carefully, it is a slave's collar. Do not wear it, even if it is artfully made.
Bluetooth operates at low power (1 mW for Class 3, 100 mW for Class 1.) GG is not likely to run at anything but the lowest power - it costs battery life. GG will not harm you. However it remains to be seen if your eyesight will be affected. EM radiation issues were studied by many teams; however, as I understand, GG was never studied by eye doctors and medical researchers. There are several aspects of a HUD like GG that may be relevant (focusing of the eye; shifting of the view center; and probably a dozen more that I know nothing about.)
'What exactly does having this thing attached to my face do to make up for having this thing attached to my face?'
Google can make pretty penny on selling GG to people who already have an answer to that question. Numbers of those people are growing every day. Those people are absolutely certain that everything that happens to them is so precious, important and valuable that they just must, as a service to humanity, carry GG on their face all day and all night, lest we, poor peons, miss one of their exciting adventures. Those people consider it perfectly normal, social, and entirely not offensive, to [threaten to] record other people against their wishes. They also wear GG while operating two-ton vehicles on freeways and then claim that "GG was not turned on," as if anyone can prove it one way or another. Why not - nothing bad can ever happen to those people; they do not need to be careful at all.
Considering the Princeton grad was working for the A&M grad, I'm not sure the contacts and networking were working out as he expected.
It cannot be determined without knowing more. For example, the Princeton grad could be 23 years old and new to the company, whereas the A&M grad could be 60 years old and own the company.
Computer literacy used to involve typing a terminal command. All the PC folks in the 80's and 90's did it.
Yes, all the 0.07% of the population. The rest was in fear of the computer, for a good reason. Back then computers were not very useful unless you were a programmer, or your specific need was covered (MS Word, Excel, WP.)
If you can't "write it yourself" in this instance, which amounts to running an operation across a set of files, then sorting the result, then you do not know how to use a computer. You know how to use some applications and input devices. It's a big difference.
So what? Most people today who use computers on daily basis cannot do any of the above. Does not mean anything. They can use a few applications, and that's all they need. They do not know that the computer can also calculate pi for them. They do not need that. Hell, I'm working with computers for many years, and I can't tell you off the top of my head how can I program MS Word to open all .docx files that match a pattern and then replace one string inside with another. I'd have to study on this scripting and automation thing that I never needed to do before. Does it mean that I don't know how to use computers? You just can't know everything.
Now go press the Towel key to open Window8's start screen. Start typing...
And observe how much backlash this decision caused - to the extent that many people refuse to buy Win8 boxes. People are just not that good at typing; but they are pretty good at finding icons on the desktop and clicking on them. Typing requires being able to type fast, and being able to remember what to type. None of that is a certainty.
The OS exposes your computer's features to you. If you do not know how to write a simple set of instructions for it to follow, then you do not know how to use a computer.
Again, it's just a matter of definitions. For one man, "how to use" means "being able to access Gmail in a browser." For another man, "how to use" means ability to program a new OS from scratch, using their own compiler.
Last time I checked (a month ago) Xilinx ISE and Vivado did not work under Win8 (Java issues,) and Xilinx had no roadmap to fix this. You cannot sit on your hands for an undefined number of months, waiting for a fix, when a perfectly good Win7 runs all that just fine and right now. You take that Win8 and scrap it. Win8 is too troubled to be even considered in a business.
I would rather walk 30 meters on a cobblestone road to my local shop, surrounded by thousand year-old architecture, then spend 30 seconds in a car suffocated in concrete and traffic.
It's not an option to select. Not here, at least. Many US roads are not designed for walking. You can be killed by a car, or arrested for jaywalking. There are no sidewalks on many roads. The road that I live on does not have sidewalks for at least 5 miles. It's just a property of the locale. You can, of course, find a place to live that is more designed for walking... it's called ghetto. You will find plenty of people walking there. Just don't come close to them. IMO, 50 miles would be a good, safe distance.
The food too is not even comparable for the crap that passes in the U.S. In Europe, you can be relatively poor and live like a king.
Well, the only way to eat reasonably healthy food here is either to cook it for yourself, or to pay big bucks for dinner at a good restaurant. (Note: Olive Garden and Red Lobster do not qualify. At Denny's you can be assaulted. I do not even know where a good, not franchised, restaurant might be nearby.)
Almost everything you purchase is locally grown, locally made, and locally sold. It's a completely different way of living that Americans don't understand.
In the USA you will find megastores, megaparking, and megaconsumption. Those tiny stores would have a hard time surviving. They wouldn't have access to anything local because in most places there is nothing local. Territories specialize in something, and that's it. When I buy apples, they likely were grown a thousand miles away, if not more. I have lemons in my backyard, and plums, and peaches, and some apples (in season.) Those are local. Everything else is coming from all over the world.
Who in their right mind would spend 30 minutes in a store? You don't have to do that Europe. Most of your shopping consists of little artisan shops that provide local produce, cheese, wine, meats, and takes you only a minute to order.
Our stores can easily be 100 x 100 meters long. It will take you a while to get to the right shelf even if you know where it is. However every store has its own layout, even stores of the same company.
If you live your life going from point A to point B, you will find it severely lacking. You miss out on the good stuff. You will consequently have fewer friends, less sex, and fewer thoughts.
It is often said that work, work and more work is a national obsession of americans. Europeans are laughed at for taking long vacations and working sparingly. I, personally, prefer to work; not necessarily for the man - I have plenty of hobbies. But none of them involve socialization. I deal with machines - they can be trusted. Humans... maybe in some parallel Universe.
Case in point: When I lived in Europe, I got a little something extra from the baker's cute daughter. :)
I hope that it was easily treatable. Modern medicine is pretty good :-)
if you shop frequently, your average time in the store per visit is more like 5-10 minutes. You know exactly where everything is, since you go there so frequently, and you figure out ways to make it more efficient (like always using the "15 items or less" check-out lane when possible).
There are fixed costs of going into the store (getting to and from, standing in line) and variable costs (walking and picking items; loading time.) The fixed component is significant enough. You do not want to stand in line even for five minutes every day - this amounts to loss of 10 hours per week. The "fast" check-out lane is often the longest, by the way, and it doesn't move any faster.
You can plan your daily buying pattern to get the best goods from those small shops that specialize
Small grocery stores do not exist anymore in the USA. There is a bakery, but it specializes in birthday cakes and such, and I wouldn't want to spend $10 on a loaf of simple bread. Their costs are necessarily higher. Probably 7/11 can be called a small shop, but they do not send anything substantial there. I haven't been to a small shop since 1991, probably. Today most of remaining small shops are franchised restaurants.
What the heck do you think people did before cars? Do you think no one ever bought in bulk?
They used horses and carts; or just a wheelbarrow. Carrying things in hands is just not efficient.
Guess what -- they make insulated bags for just these kinds of situations!
I have and use those. The 40 minute drive home is far longer than walking for 200 meters.
But, from a broader perspective, when you shop daily, you need to buy less frozen food. You can just buy fresh vegetables and fruits when they are season
I have no desire to replace frozen meat with fresh one. I prefer it to be frozen - it is safer this way, and more convenient. I can eat it whenever I want - today or a week later. I have no schedule what to eat on any given day. Not all vegetables are sensitive to storing in a refrigerator. Cabbage can be stored for months, for example. You only need your salad to be fresh. I eat them when I have them; and at other times I can get a sandwich somewhere. This is a non-problem.
We have self-service lanes in some stores, like Home Depot, but not in grocery stores. The potential for fraud is extreme. I do like those machines, and they indeed make shopping much faster. However food comes in too many shapes and forms; one has to look at it to correctly identify it. With many items being bought, it's a huge temptation for many to scan that bottle of alcohol as a bottle of vinegar. Or "forget" to scan it at all. The culture and responsibility of US population is far from being uniform. There are people who will approach you and hit you in the face just for sport. Some victims get killed this way. There are places ("food deserts") that have no grocery stores at all, because the locals will steal everything that is on the shelves; and then they steal the shelves.
Wouldn't it be more practical to replace a VAX with an R-Pi or BBB? You gain performance this way, and save a lot of electric power :-)
Regardless, I seriously doubt that there are recent builds of any other software for VAX; so what's the point of having BSD on them if there isn't much else to run?
In other words, the number of stupid questions is inversely proportional to your perceived value to the company. An experienced employee can easily walk away if he does not like your questions - and what then will you tell your boss who is desperate to fill that Project Lead position? Especially if the boss was also present at the interview? Good Project Leads are hard to find. You won't even talk to a good Code Monkey every day.
Sorry, I haven't noticed this little detail. I obtained my textbooks from the university's library... for free. I never had to buy textbooks. This is one of few things that the old, bad USSR got right.
A significant portion of the group "Christians" can't read well enough to read their holy book, even if they wanted to, let alone comprehend it.
Most, if not all, holy books cannot be comprehended even if you know the language and can read the words. The books are just too illogical, and they are never written in a plain, simple language. Quite contrary to that ideal, they are written from multiple, conflicting viewpoints, and they depict the same events differently, and they use archaic phrases. Translation further destroyed some of the original content. This is why every priest has to "explain" what this or that passage means; his explanation, of course, is subjective.
If you are looking for a holy book that is consistent, you may pick this one up.