Alternatively, *charge* for "minor enhancements that shouldn't affect the schedule".
Pay the money out as a bonus to the employees who have to accommodate the change if they don't let the schedule slip. This stops you appearing to be an asshat to your customers (while reminding them that your department's work has value), and shows the workforce you're fighting their corner, and appreciate their workload.
On your first 6 questions, it's likely that she'll sit with the existing green block, and leverage voting with them on these issues to gain backing on key Pirate issues. On corruption, the Pirate Party movement was founded on 4 key issues, one of which is Government openness, so you can expect a her to expose a lot of what goes on behind closed doors at the EU.
I understand why you think we're all about copyright, as that's the issue where we get the vast majority of our press coverage, but we also have a lot to say on other core issues: patents; open government and monopoly abuse. It's a real struggle to get the media to pay attention to anything other than our copyright policy though.
Boards judge potential CEOs on their negotiating skills. The only negotiation the board has with potential CEOs is their pay and severance package. Therefore, boards agree to being swindled out of huge pay and severance deals because the fact that the new CEO talked them into it is cast iron proof that he's exactly the kind of money-oriented cutthroat negotiator they want.
I would assume that the issue is moving capital between markets quickly, if trading programs spot a good selling deal in New York, then a good buying deal in London 10ms later, then they are probably racing against each other to get money across the Atlantic.
Well, I'm no wiser about the submission system policy than you, but I guess that any other party that submitted something coherent and relevant would probably get it featured too. Any pro-Pirate bias probably comes from the fact that we're submitting stuff and the others are not.
Personally, I'd love to see the other parties engaging with the Slashdot crowd, talking to a well informed non-partisan audience about digital matters could really help them make good decisions on digital (and civil rights) issues.
The interesting thing is that none of the parties (with the exception of us Pirates, of course) even has a solid position on civil rights. With almost any other issue, Labour will go one way, Conservatives the other, and the Liberals will suggest a compromise. Membership of the European Union and the legal status of fox hunting are the only other issues that the big parties can't seem to make up their minds on, and falling out over both has caused a lot of internal damage to the parties.
On digital (and to a lesser extent civil) rights, all the other parties are flip-flopping or in internal disagreement. The really odd thing about this is (unlike fox hunting or EU membership) it doesn't represent the mood of the general public, who either don't care or are strongly in favour.
I'm shocked that neither of the 2 big parties have jumped on to the digital and civil rights bandwagon, forcing the opposition to take a less popular stance against them. It's a sure-fire vote winner, that doesn't have a economic big cost to implement.
The function of rating agencies is not to be 'trustworthy', their function is to outsource blame.
If you are ever called on to make an multi-million dollar investment decision on behalf of other people, you don't want the buck to stop with you. Ratings agencies exist so you can outsource it. They make guesses for you, so you can say to angry investors 'not my fault, I did my due dilligence and took the best advice available'.
They are not required to guess correctly, they are simply required to be the best available professional financial guessers. The problem comes with the word 'available'. If you are good at financial guessing (or even just able to scrape 50.1% accuracy) you have a huge incentive to go off and be a fund manager who gets a cut of theoretically unlimited profits, as opposed to being a flat rate financial guesser who would be guilty insider dealing if he actually bet on his own guesses.
Nobody will actually buy the phone sight unseen, unless they scrupulously avoid every media outlet in the world for the week of release. The problem is (as with so much market research) we don't know exactly what the question was, so we can't draw any sensible conclusions from the results.
For example "69 percent of consumers indicated that they would prefer Appleâ(TM)s iPhone 5 as a gift." - all this means is that 69% of people interpreted this question as meaning 'do you like free stuff'. As for the other 31%, as worded, their answer rather improbably implies they wouldn't take an iPhone 5 even if it was free, but in reality they probably thought 'they can't really be asking if I would rather pay money for things or not pay money for things, can they?' and assumed the question meant something different - quite possibly something to do with paying the very high tariffs needed to to get the phone 'free'.
Sorry, but that looks like a circular argument to me, It looks to me as if you're saying C is the limit because the limit is C. Why is the limit C? Does something break if you exceed C?
I'm still struggling to understand this - You've given an example of making actions appear in the wrong order for an observer, but I don't understand why this would be impossible. If we replace your references to light with sound, we'd get:
Imagine setting off a pulse of sound, then traveling faster than the speed of sound toward an observer, then setting off a second pulse. The observer would hear the second pulse arrive first and therefore that event would happen before the first one (in the frame of our observer).
What makes this experiment 'allowed' but yours 'prohibited'?
Actually, I think they probably would do a psychiatric evaluation on anyone who attempted to wear a mutilated penis on their head in an Australian driving licence photo.
The thing I find puzzling about the American resistance to roundabouts is that they actually contain no new concepts at all, you don't have to 'learn' anything to use them. Topologically, they are just a one way street with T-junctions.
Ever pulled out of a side street into one-way traffic? That's exactly what you do when you join a roundabout. Even turned off a one way street into a side street? That's exactly what you do when you leave.
To answer your question, have you ever walked along a main street and crossed a side street that didn't have traffic lights? That's exactly what you do when you cross at a roundabout.
The linked article implies that their business model for the roadster has succeeded, and they now have the cash reserves to switch production over to making a more affordable car, exactly the opposite of the conclusion drawn in the summary.
An even more useful article would explain the difference between what they are supposed to mean (generally that the item complies with the requirements of a standards body), and what they actually mean (generally that a standards body has mandated that all items of this type have their logo on it), and what they mean in practice (in my experience, that the vendor told the manufacturer they were worried about the lack of sufficient impenetrable logos).
If the article was really, really useful, it would dispel some of the myths that surround these logos - I've dealt with several small businesses who believe that the C E mark is a meaningless advert for the European Union that must appear on every part of every object in Europe, or the gnomes of Zurich will wreak unspecified havoc on them.
When it's put in context that quote, and Apple's actions, make perfect sense. Steve Jobs was talking about Amazon's Kindle, and saying the concept of a device that does nothing but let you read books was flawed because the market wasn't big enough. The fact that Apple later gave away the Kindle's functionality as a free upgrade for the iPhone reinforces, not contradicts the point he was making.
...is to think very carefully before you put the general public in the position of deciding which side of this 'war' they are on. I have no idea how big anonymous is now, but I have a pretty good idea that it would be a LOT bigger if the guys with nukes and uniforms declare war on ordinary teenagers who are trying (in the only way they know) to right a few percieved wrongs.
The problem for NATO (if they are anything like the journalists and politicians I've spoken to) is that they are incapable of understanding decentralisation. The idea that Anonymous is leaderless just does not compute to them. They will jump to all sorts of wild positions (including insisting they must follow an IRA-like cell structure, or even on more than one occasion telling me I must be in charge of them because I used to lead the Pirate Party here in the UK) to avoid coming to grips with the lack of organisatonal structure. Like abundance in the copyright 'wars', it's a concept that people who've lived in a rigidly top-down organisation for their whole lives can't deal with.
Well, I specified that it would be a non-trading company, and the whole stock market relies on new share issues not devaluing existing shareholdings, so that problem clearly has a known solution. Anonymity only becomes an issue if you hold a sufficient percentage of the company as that you have to formally register as a possible takeover bid, and decentalisation isn't an issue as the company would be an empty shell - it doesn't have to be decentalised as is doesn't actually do anything other than exist.
As for e-gold, I have no idea, I've never heard of them.
I know a more energy efficicent method of enforcing scarcity: a register of shareholders. Most of the world's wealth is held in them, with no problems.
I'd be interested to know how everything bitcoin does with it's 21 million possible coins could not have been done at no computational expense by simply setting up a non-trading limited company that holds 21 million shares in itself, and sells them at prices governed by the same difficulty curve that bitcoin uses. The upside of doing it this way is that the company would have a cash pile from sale of shares backing it, rather than no assets and a lot of distributed wasted cpu time.
The really odd thing is that this very generous model actually does lose sales. After wasting hours trying to deal with Maya's complete disregard for all Apple's usuability guidelines, and it's constant preference corruption, I've dropped all the animation modules from my university degree. If I hadn't been able to try before I buy I might actually have wasted £3500 on an unstable mess with one of the worst excuses for a user interface I've ever seen, after graduating.
Actually, it doesn't even have tires*, the wheels have to be machined from solid titanium in order to withstand 50,000g ( http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/car/wheels.cfm for details).
* going for a 1 point pedantry bonus: it's British, so the things it doesn't have are tyres.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, *charge* for "minor enhancements that shouldn't affect the schedule".
Pay the money out as a bonus to the employees who have to accommodate the change if they don't let the schedule slip. This stops you appearing to be an asshat to your customers (while reminding them that your department's work has value), and shows the workforce you're fighting their corner, and appreciate their workload.
"When I get the reply "Doesn't happen on my PC" I could cry.
What else, as a user, can I possibly do?"
Accept their solution, and physically swap machines with the tech support guy when he goes out to lunch.
On your first 6 questions, it's likely that she'll sit with the existing green block, and leverage voting with them on these issues to gain backing on key Pirate issues. On corruption, the Pirate Party movement was founded on 4 key issues, one of which is Government openness, so you can expect a her to expose a lot of what goes on behind closed doors at the EU.
I understand why you think we're all about copyright, as that's the issue where we get the vast majority of our press coverage, but we also have a lot to say on other core issues: patents; open government and monopoly abuse. It's a real struggle to get the media to pay attention to anything other than our copyright policy though.
I misread it as K'nex based start-ups, which would be a lot more fun, if not as profitable.
Boards judge potential CEOs on their negotiating skills. The only negotiation the board has with potential CEOs is their pay and severance package. Therefore, boards agree to being swindled out of huge pay and severance deals because the fact that the new CEO talked them into it is cast iron proof that he's exactly the kind of money-oriented cutthroat negotiator they want.
I blame the MPAA.
Anything that resembles a conscience is a security threat.
I would assume that the issue is moving capital between markets quickly, if trading programs spot a good selling deal in New York, then a good buying deal in London 10ms later, then they are probably racing against each other to get money across the Atlantic.
Well, I'm no wiser about the submission system policy than you, but I guess that any other party that submitted something coherent and relevant would probably get it featured too. Any pro-Pirate bias probably comes from the fact that we're submitting stuff and the others are not.
Personally, I'd love to see the other parties engaging with the Slashdot crowd, talking to a well informed non-partisan audience about digital matters could really help them make good decisions on digital (and civil rights) issues.
The interesting thing is that none of the parties (with the exception of us Pirates, of course) even has a solid position on civil rights. With almost any other issue, Labour will go one way, Conservatives the other, and the Liberals will suggest a compromise. Membership of the European Union and the legal status of fox hunting are the only other issues that the big parties can't seem to make up their minds on, and falling out over both has caused a lot of internal damage to the parties.
On digital (and to a lesser extent civil) rights, all the other parties are flip-flopping or in internal disagreement. The really odd thing about this is (unlike fox hunting or EU membership) it doesn't represent the mood of the general public, who either don't care or are strongly in favour.
I'm shocked that neither of the 2 big parties have jumped on to the digital and civil rights bandwagon, forcing the opposition to take a less popular stance against them. It's a sure-fire vote winner, that doesn't have a economic big cost to implement.
The function of rating agencies is not to be 'trustworthy', their function is to outsource blame.
If you are ever called on to make an multi-million dollar investment decision on behalf of other people, you don't want the buck to stop with you. Ratings agencies exist so you can outsource it. They make guesses for you, so you can say to angry investors 'not my fault, I did my due dilligence and took the best advice available'.
They are not required to guess correctly, they are simply required to be the best available professional financial guessers. The problem comes with the word 'available'. If you are good at financial guessing (or even just able to scrape 50.1% accuracy) you have a huge incentive to go off and be a fund manager who gets a cut of theoretically unlimited profits, as opposed to being a flat rate financial guesser who would be guilty insider dealing if he actually bet on his own guesses.
Nobody will actually buy the phone sight unseen, unless they scrupulously avoid every media outlet in the world for the week of release. The problem is (as with so much market research) we don't know exactly what the question was, so we can't draw any sensible conclusions from the results.
For example "69 percent of consumers indicated that they would prefer Appleâ(TM)s iPhone 5 as a gift." - all this means is that 69% of people interpreted this question as meaning 'do you like free stuff'. As for the other 31%, as worded, their answer rather improbably implies they wouldn't take an iPhone 5 even if it was free, but in reality they probably thought 'they can't really be asking if I would rather pay money for things or not pay money for things, can they?' and assumed the question meant something different - quite possibly something to do with paying the very high tariffs needed to to get the phone 'free'.
Sorry, but that looks like a circular argument to me, It looks to me as if you're saying C is the limit because the limit is C. Why is the limit C? Does something break if you exceed C?
I'm still struggling to understand this - You've given an example of making actions appear in the wrong order for an observer, but I don't understand why this would be impossible. If we replace your references to light with sound, we'd get:
Imagine setting off a pulse of sound, then traveling faster than the speed of sound toward an observer, then setting off a second pulse. The observer would hear the second pulse arrive first and therefore that event would happen before the first one (in the frame of our observer).
What makes this experiment 'allowed' but yours 'prohibited'?
Actually, I think they probably would do a psychiatric evaluation on anyone who attempted to wear a mutilated penis on their head in an Australian driving licence photo.
The thing I find puzzling about the American resistance to roundabouts is that they actually contain no new concepts at all, you don't have to 'learn' anything to use them. Topologically, they are just a one way street with T-junctions.
Ever pulled out of a side street into one-way traffic? That's exactly what you do when you join a roundabout. Even turned off a one way street into a side street? That's exactly what you do when you leave.
To answer your question, have you ever walked along a main street and crossed a side street that didn't have traffic lights? That's exactly what you do when you cross at a roundabout.
The linked article implies that their business model for the roadster has succeeded, and they now have the cash reserves to switch production over to making a more affordable car, exactly the opposite of the conclusion drawn in the summary.
An even more useful article would explain the difference between what they are supposed to mean (generally that the item complies with the requirements of a standards body), and what they actually mean (generally that a standards body has mandated that all items of this type have their logo on it), and what they mean in practice (in my experience, that the vendor told the manufacturer they were worried about the lack of sufficient impenetrable logos).
If the article was really, really useful, it would dispel some of the myths that surround these logos - I've dealt with several small businesses who believe that the C E mark is a meaningless advert for the European Union that must appear on every part of every object in Europe, or the gnomes of Zurich will wreak unspecified havoc on them.
When it's put in context that quote, and Apple's actions, make perfect sense. Steve Jobs was talking about Amazon's Kindle, and saying the concept of a device that does nothing but let you read books was flawed because the market wasn't big enough. The fact that Apple later gave away the Kindle's functionality as a free upgrade for the iPhone reinforces, not contradicts the point he was making.
...is to think very carefully before you put the general public in the position of deciding which side of this 'war' they are on. I have no idea how big anonymous is now, but I have a pretty good idea that it would be a LOT bigger if the guys with nukes and uniforms declare war on ordinary teenagers who are trying (in the only way they know) to right a few percieved wrongs.
The problem for NATO (if they are anything like the journalists and politicians I've spoken to) is that they are incapable of understanding decentralisation. The idea that Anonymous is leaderless just does not compute to them. They will jump to all sorts of wild positions (including insisting they must follow an IRA-like cell structure, or even on more than one occasion telling me I must be in charge of them because I used to lead the Pirate Party here in the UK) to avoid coming to grips with the lack of organisatonal structure. Like abundance in the copyright 'wars', it's a concept that people who've lived in a rigidly top-down organisation for their whole lives can't deal with.
Well, I specified that it would be a non-trading company, and the whole stock market relies on new share issues not devaluing existing shareholdings, so that problem clearly has a known solution. Anonymity only becomes an issue if you hold a sufficient percentage of the company as that you have to formally register as a possible takeover bid, and decentalisation isn't an issue as the company would be an empty shell - it doesn't have to be decentalised as is doesn't actually do anything other than exist.
As for e-gold, I have no idea, I've never heard of them.
I know a more energy efficicent method of enforcing scarcity: a register of shareholders. Most of the world's wealth is held in them, with no problems.
I'd be interested to know how everything bitcoin does with it's 21 million possible coins could not have been done at no computational expense by simply setting up a non-trading limited company that holds 21 million shares in itself, and sells them at prices governed by the same difficulty curve that bitcoin uses. The upside of doing it this way is that the company would have a cash pile from sale of shares backing it, rather than no assets and a lot of distributed wasted cpu time.
Brussels is in Switzerland, for very large values of Switzerland.
The really odd thing is that this very generous model actually does lose sales. After wasting hours trying to deal with Maya's complete disregard for all Apple's usuability guidelines, and it's constant preference corruption, I've dropped all the animation modules from my university degree. If I hadn't been able to try before I buy I might actually have wasted £3500 on an unstable mess with one of the worst excuses for a user interface I've ever seen, after graduating.
Actually, it doesn't even have tires*, the wheels have to be machined from solid titanium in order to withstand 50,000g ( http://www.bloodhoundssc.com/car/wheels.cfm for details).
* going for a 1 point pedantry bonus: it's British, so the things it doesn't have are tyres.