You obviously know nothing about Facebook, probably because you have never used it. Facebook isn't just for kids. None of my Friends are under 30.
Go to Facebook and plug a few of your long-lost friends' or relatives' names into the search field. I think you'll find you have a number of friends you use Facebook.
Are you sure you're using FB Purity correctly? When you see one of those app spam messages on your home page, mouse around to the right of it and a label "Hide" will appear. Click on that and you get the option: hide messages about that app, or hide messages about that Friend. One click later and that particular pita is gone forever.
I have Friends who play these games, but they're still my friends - mostly real world friends from whom I am seperated by great distance. I don't don't want to block my friends just because they play stupid games in their spare time. God knows, many of them think some of my interests are rather... obscure.
Your question should be "Who in their right minds plays Mafia Wars?" I am relatively sane (posting in this madhouse notwithstanding) but I have Friends on F***B*** who spend an inordinate amount of time playing that game. I am interested in other things they do, but I prefer not to wade through thousands of messages like "X will give you a box of bullets if you help him massacre the Anthill Mob".
The thing I like most about my EeePC is that I can drop it over and over and over again and it just keeps working. Do that to a laptop with HDD and you can kiss it goodbye.
Yeah I know I'm a careless, clumsy klutz. But so are a great many other laptop/netbook users. The ability to treat your equipment like a shack of sit without fear of malfunction is priceless.
But do you really *need* to carry all 30GB of music around with you on your laptop? My music collection adds up to a pitiful 10GB or so, and that represents quite a few songs. I couldn't listen to all of them in one working day even if I wanted to.
I've got one of those EeePC 701s, the one with the 4GB SSD. I'll put some music on it when I'm going out and believe I'll want to listen to some sounds. Meanwhile my entire collection is on a hard drive at home.
Back in my youth, I had a Walkman. I also had up to 50 cassettes of music; and I *never* felt the need to take it all out with me. I'd slip a cassette or two in my pocket, and the rest stayed in my bedroom. Why would I feel the need to carry my entire collection all the time now?
I think this is a pretty good idea. There are a lot of people who are unable to make online purchases - they can't get plastic for a variety of reasons, same with PayPal - and it can be a serious disadvantage.
The only problem I envisage is children spending money they shouldn't, and parents having to foot the bill. The $25 limit is one way to tackle this; another would be to make it an opt-in service that can be authorized only by an adult; maybe even limiting the service to prepay (pay as you go) accounts, so it is impossible to spend money you don't already have in the account, similar to how a debit card works. But I can't imagine the cellphone companies will want to erect too many hoops for their customers to jump through.
Incidentally, this isn't a completely new idea. O2 in the UK have something similar called Cash Manager, and Vodafone in Egypt have Vodafone Cash. I'm sure there are other examples too. But these are more on the lines of debit cards that are linked to the phone account. However, I do have a vague memory of something like this being set up in the UK, by Vodafone I think. A quick google didn't turn up anything about it, though I'm sure someone else will be more successful in hunting for a reference.
Google may be prepared to "exit" as in get kicked out, but they are not leaving China on their own. They are however stopping censorship - the real question here is how will China respond?
It seems pretty clear to me: if Google serves uncensored search results to Chinese users, China will block Google - using its Great Firewall or similar means. The Chinese government really values its ability to control what its people can know, and it will maintain the status quo any way it can.
From a marketing standpoint, they can take the high-road here and look brilliant and doing no evil. They are also the only ones who can claim they don't censor
This is where Google really is going to score a "win". Falling into line with the other search sites and agreeing to censor its results didn't do Google any favours at all. The whole "Don't be evil" thing was revealed to be a lie: we were all horrified to learn that actually Google is a corporation like any other and will be as evil as it needs to be to make a buck. Now Google can claim it's pulling out of China because of the censorship issue, and sappy public opinion will believe it. Google isn't evil after all; whereas Bing drowns kittens for fun. Heck, I think I'm falling in love with Google all over again. I just hope the bitch doesn't cheat on me like last time...
South Africa had some diamonds, krugerrands and a nice line in citrus fruit. Fairly painless to boycott. China is a major industrial player. Boycotting that would be unthinkable.
Google is saying "hey, we have a motto and doing business with such a government is not in keeping with it".
That might be what Google is saying, but it's pretty clear that Google's pulling out because they believe the Chinese government was involved in the "hacking" incident. For some years Google operated the way they were told to. If you think they just decided, all of a sudden, that China's rules are too repugnant to play by, I've got a bridge you might like to buy.
The mere existence of the Chinese government and who they will be supportive of creates a safe environment for more of the same to blossom in different places.
Can you explain what you mean by that? Who/what is China prepared to support? How does China's support of the Mysterons encourage other regimes to ally themselves with the Mysterons? What on earth are you talking about?
It's not like the red scare or anything
Really? That's precisely what it sounds like to me...
But is a potential loss really an actual loss? If I chose different lottery numbers last week I would now be a millionaire. So have I actually lost all those millions?
I really don't understand the situation wrt Hong Kong. When Britain handed back the island, China made certain promises about freedom and stuff. Okay, I get that. What I don't get is why China needs to keep their promises. Hong Kong belongs to China. If the Chinese government decide to harmonize Hong Kong law with that of the mainland, what is anyone going to do about it? Is Britain going to take the island back by force? Uh, no. Is the UN Security Council going to impose sanctions? Of course not - China is a permanent member of the Security Council and can veto anything it wants to prevent. Is the "free world" going to take unilateral economic measures? Hell no, we've all got far too much invested in China to walk away from. China keeps its promises because it is in China's interests to look good. But if they decide that looking good isn't important after all, they'll do what they like. And there is nothing that anyone can do about it.
Of course everything I just wrote may be wrong. If so, please correct me.
Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.
The Google management are either extremely stupid or extremely heartless. Regardless of whether or not their Chinese employees should be held responsible for the US executives' decisions, the fact is that the Chinese government certainly can hold them responsible. If China decides that Google is an "enemy of the people", the Chinese employees will also be "enemies of the people", "capitalist lackeys" and so on.
It is a sad fact that many Communist justice systems didn't/don't really care about objective truth. Appearance is everything. To forgive Google's Chinese employees would be a sign of weakness. And I doubt that the Chinese government has all of a sudden decided that looking weak is good.
Yeah right, nuke all the population centres. That'll free the people.
Outside interference wouldn't be much use. If the Chinese people want to be "freed", they're going to have to "free" themselves. It will be awfully difficult, awfully messy, and it will probably take a few tries before it works. But history shows us that no regime can survive when its people decide they've had enough.
But if the Chinese people want rulers who treat them like mushrooms and run them down with tanks... well, we all end up with the government we deserve.
Even though hospitals and emergency ambulance/paramedic services both fall under the umbrella term "healthcare" they are very different beasts. You can have 2 (or more) hospitals in an area all competing for the same customers (patients) - "Come to Hospital X, it's better than Hospital Y!" - but how exactly would you have competing ambulance services? You dial 999 (emergency calls in UK, same as US 911) and the operator says "Which service do you require?".... "Ambulance"... "Which ambulance service do you want: Paramedix-R-Us with its 2-for-1 deal,Rapido Ambulance who guarantee a 10-minute response time or you pay nothing, or Luxury Ambu-Limousine?"... "Uh I dunno, which will get here faster?"... "Well Rapido claims..." - by which time the casualty is dead and you can start shopping round for a hearse instead.
The fact is, you're going to have a monopoly on ambulance services - either a government-owned service, or a private company that has got the contract through some sort of competitive tender. In both cases, cost is going to be an important factor in their decision-making. Whether this happens as part of an overall socialized healthcare regime or something else is irrelevant. Tax-payers and shareholders will want those costs kept down.
I fail to understand how a committee which includes (competent) physicians would expect a telephone operator following a script no more sophisticated than one used in an Indian call center to be able to take correct medical decisions when the same physicians would be hesitant to take the same decision on the phone - out of concern for a fellow human being or perhaps out of concern of being held professionally liable and literally having their "asses sued off".
I don't know how it works where you live, but here in the UK doctors don't get their asses sued off. They may lose their money, job, home, even liberty, but they generally get to keep their butts.
I like the way you play up the ability of "the US and Western Europe" to protect itself and downplay the fact that a seriously-threatened North Korea or potential future Iran will fling nukes at targets in the middle east, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc etc. Also you ignore the fact that a strike on North Korea might provoke China, who has a military arsenal quite capable of reaching the USA and Europe. And how about the probability that Iran in its death throes would launch a nuclear strike on Israel - and if Israel responds with it's nukes, that would drag in all its hostile-minded neighbours, which would result in a regional Armageddon?
Your vision of precision strikes and low levels of collateral damage is all very nice. But IRL, war ain't like that. As you will find, as Chinese or Russian ICBMs rain down on your hometown.
Earth will have great historic, nostalgic, spiritual and commercial value. It is the homeworld - the place where the human race began - the trade in trashy souvenirs alone will be huge. We can't let all that get knocked out by some no-name comet.
3. Send it on a collision course with a neutron star. When they collide, the combined mass increases the gravity so much, that they explode in an even bigger supernova and result in a black hole..
But if we can reroute the star in question, why destroy it? Why not just reroute it..?
...Never mind. I like fireworks as much as the next kid. Carry on.
More seriously, look what happened to Alan Turing (father of the computer); if the Brits had had this policy in place and denied him any serious work in the war effort, computer technology would have set way back (and perhaps the decoding of Enigma and the winning of the war). As it is, they only managed to get him to commit suicide AFTER he had done some incredibly important work.
Turing lost his security clearance because he got a criminal conviction. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain back then. If the authorities had known of Turing's homosexuality during the war, they would have refused him clearance because of the blackmail risk. But that was at a time of war, and when homosexuality was a crime. I think the JPL case is a little different.
That was the case a while back. And I guess there still are places where some folk would fear being outed so much that they might be susceptible to blackmail. But I wouldn't have tagged Pasadena CA as one of those places.
Being gay isn't illegal or immoral. Therefore the blackmail theory doesn't hold much water. I know people who would fear being outed as a Tottenham Hotspur supporter, but I doubt a background check would redflag that.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously know nothing about Facebook, probably because you have never used it. Facebook isn't just for kids. None of my Friends are under 30.
Go to Facebook and plug a few of your long-lost friends' or relatives' names into the search field. I think you'll find you have a number of friends you use Facebook.
Are you sure you're using FB Purity correctly? When you see one of those app spam messages on your home page, mouse around to the right of it and a label "Hide" will appear. Click on that and you get the option: hide messages about that app, or hide messages about that Friend. One click later and that particular pita is gone forever.
I have Friends who play these games, but they're still my friends - mostly real world friends from whom I am seperated by great distance. I don't don't want to block my friends just because they play stupid games in their spare time. God knows, many of them think some of my interests are rather... obscure.
Your question should be "Who in their right minds plays Mafia Wars?" I am relatively sane (posting in this madhouse notwithstanding) but I have Friends on F***B*** who spend an inordinate amount of time playing that game. I am interested in other things they do, but I prefer not to wade through thousands of messages like "X will give you a box of bullets if you help him massacre the Anthill Mob".
The thing I like most about my EeePC is that I can drop it over and over and over again and it just keeps working. Do that to a laptop with HDD and you can kiss it goodbye. Yeah I know I'm a careless, clumsy klutz. But so are a great many other laptop/netbook users. The ability to treat your equipment like a shack of sit without fear of malfunction is priceless.
But do you really *need* to carry all 30GB of music around with you on your laptop? My music collection adds up to a pitiful 10GB or so, and that represents quite a few songs. I couldn't listen to all of them in one working day even if I wanted to. I've got one of those EeePC 701s, the one with the 4GB SSD. I'll put some music on it when I'm going out and believe I'll want to listen to some sounds. Meanwhile my entire collection is on a hard drive at home. Back in my youth, I had a Walkman. I also had up to 50 cassettes of music; and I *never* felt the need to take it all out with me. I'd slip a cassette or two in my pocket, and the rest stayed in my bedroom. Why would I feel the need to carry my entire collection all the time now?
I think this is a pretty good idea. There are a lot of people who are unable to make online purchases - they can't get plastic for a variety of reasons, same with PayPal - and it can be a serious disadvantage.
The only problem I envisage is children spending money they shouldn't, and parents having to foot the bill. The $25 limit is one way to tackle this; another would be to make it an opt-in service that can be authorized only by an adult; maybe even limiting the service to prepay (pay as you go) accounts, so it is impossible to spend money you don't already have in the account, similar to how a debit card works. But I can't imagine the cellphone companies will want to erect too many hoops for their customers to jump through.
Incidentally, this isn't a completely new idea. O2 in the UK have something similar called Cash Manager, and Vodafone in Egypt have Vodafone Cash. I'm sure there are other examples too. But these are more on the lines of debit cards that are linked to the phone account. However, I do have a vague memory of something like this being set up in the UK, by Vodafone I think. A quick google didn't turn up anything about it, though I'm sure someone else will be more successful in hunting for a reference.
Google may be prepared to "exit" as in get kicked out, but they are not leaving China on their own. They are however stopping censorship - the real question here is how will China respond?
It seems pretty clear to me: if Google serves uncensored search results to Chinese users, China will block Google - using its Great Firewall or similar means. The Chinese government really values its ability to control what its people can know, and it will maintain the status quo any way it can.
From a marketing standpoint, they can take the high-road here and look brilliant and doing no evil. They are also the only ones who can claim they don't censor
This is where Google really is going to score a "win". Falling into line with the other search sites and agreeing to censor its results didn't do Google any favours at all. The whole "Don't be evil" thing was revealed to be a lie: we were all horrified to learn that actually Google is a corporation like any other and will be as evil as it needs to be to make a buck. Now Google can claim it's pulling out of China because of the censorship issue, and sappy public opinion will believe it. Google isn't evil after all; whereas Bing drowns kittens for fun. Heck, I think I'm falling in love with Google all over again. I just hope the bitch doesn't cheat on me like last time...
I promise not to do business with China. Can I have some money too?
South Africa had some diamonds, krugerrands and a nice line in citrus fruit. Fairly painless to boycott. China is a major industrial player. Boycotting that would be unthinkable.
Google is saying "hey, we have a motto and doing business with such a government is not in keeping with it".
That might be what Google is saying, but it's pretty clear that Google's pulling out because they believe the Chinese government was involved in the "hacking" incident. For some years Google operated the way they were told to. If you think they just decided, all of a sudden, that China's rules are too repugnant to play by, I've got a bridge you might like to buy.
The mere existence of the Chinese government and who they will be supportive of creates a safe environment for more of the same to blossom in different places.
Can you explain what you mean by that? Who/what is China prepared to support? How does China's support of the Mysterons encourage other regimes to ally themselves with the Mysterons? What on earth are you talking about?
It's not like the red scare or anything
Really? That's precisely what it sounds like to me...
And the word you're looking for is "pedantic git".
Ooops, sorry. That's the words I was looking for.
But is a potential loss really an actual loss? If I chose different lottery numbers last week I would now be a millionaire. So have I actually lost all those millions?
We all know what "woulda, coulda" achieved.
I really don't understand the situation wrt Hong Kong. When Britain handed back the island, China made certain promises about freedom and stuff. Okay, I get that. What I don't get is why China needs to keep their promises. Hong Kong belongs to China. If the Chinese government decide to harmonize Hong Kong law with that of the mainland, what is anyone going to do about it? Is Britain going to take the island back by force? Uh, no. Is the UN Security Council going to impose sanctions? Of course not - China is a permanent member of the Security Council and can veto anything it wants to prevent. Is the "free world" going to take unilateral economic measures? Hell no, we've all got far too much invested in China to walk away from. China keeps its promises because it is in China's interests to look good. But if they decide that looking good isn't important after all, they'll do what they like. And there is nothing that anyone can do about it.
Of course everything I just wrote may be wrong. If so, please correct me.
Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.
The Google management are either extremely stupid or extremely heartless. Regardless of whether or not their Chinese employees should be held responsible for the US executives' decisions, the fact is that the Chinese government certainly can hold them responsible. If China decides that Google is an "enemy of the people", the Chinese employees will also be "enemies of the people", "capitalist lackeys" and so on.
It is a sad fact that many Communist justice systems didn't/don't really care about objective truth. Appearance is everything. To forgive Google's Chinese employees would be a sign of weakness. And I doubt that the Chinese government has all of a sudden decided that looking weak is good.
Yeah right, nuke all the population centres. That'll free the people.
Outside interference wouldn't be much use. If the Chinese people want to be "freed", they're going to have to "free" themselves. It will be awfully difficult, awfully messy, and it will probably take a few tries before it works. But history shows us that no regime can survive when its people decide they've had enough.
But if the Chinese people want rulers who treat them like mushrooms and run them down with tanks... well, we all end up with the government we deserve.
Even though hospitals and emergency ambulance/paramedic services both fall under the umbrella term "healthcare" they are very different beasts. You can have 2 (or more) hospitals in an area all competing for the same customers (patients) - "Come to Hospital X, it's better than Hospital Y!" - but how exactly would you have competing ambulance services? You dial 999 (emergency calls in UK, same as US 911) and the operator says "Which service do you require?".... "Ambulance"... "Which ambulance service do you want: Paramedix-R-Us with its 2-for-1 deal,Rapido Ambulance who guarantee a 10-minute response time or you pay nothing, or Luxury Ambu-Limousine?"... "Uh I dunno, which will get here faster?"... "Well Rapido claims..." - by which time the casualty is dead and you can start shopping round for a hearse instead.
The fact is, you're going to have a monopoly on ambulance services - either a government-owned service, or a private company that has got the contract through some sort of competitive tender. In both cases, cost is going to be an important factor in their decision-making. Whether this happens as part of an overall socialized healthcare regime or something else is irrelevant. Tax-payers and shareholders will want those costs kept down.
I fail to understand how a committee which includes (competent) physicians would expect a telephone operator following a script no more sophisticated than one used in an Indian call center to be able to take correct medical decisions when the same physicians would be hesitant to take the same decision on the phone - out of concern for a fellow human being or perhaps out of concern of being held professionally liable and literally having their "asses sued off".
I don't know how it works where you live, but here in the UK doctors don't get their asses sued off. They may lose their money, job, home, even liberty, but they generally get to keep their butts.
"The victim is probably horribly wounded, so let's not bother hurrying. With any luck he'll die before we get there."
He modded it informative then posted a comment disagreeing with another aspect. Seems pretty "neutral" to me - he gives nice points to dickheads.
I like the way you play up the ability of "the US and Western Europe" to protect itself and downplay the fact that a seriously-threatened North Korea or potential future Iran will fling nukes at targets in the middle east, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, etc etc. Also you ignore the fact that a strike on North Korea might provoke China, who has a military arsenal quite capable of reaching the USA and Europe. And how about the probability that Iran in its death throes would launch a nuclear strike on Israel - and if Israel responds with it's nukes, that would drag in all its hostile-minded neighbours, which would result in a regional Armageddon?
Your vision of precision strikes and low levels of collateral damage is all very nice. But IRL, war ain't like that. As you will find, as Chinese or Russian ICBMs rain down on your hometown.
Earth will have great historic, nostalgic, spiritual and commercial value. It is the homeworld - the place where the human race began - the trade in trashy souvenirs alone will be huge. We can't let all that get knocked out by some no-name comet.
3. Send it on a collision course with a neutron star. When they collide, the combined mass increases the gravity so much, that they explode in an even bigger supernova and result in a black hole. .
But if we can reroute the star in question, why destroy it? Why not just reroute it..?
...Never mind. I like fireworks as much as the next kid. Carry on.
More seriously, look what happened to Alan Turing (father of the computer); if the Brits had had this policy in place and denied him any serious work in the war effort, computer technology would have set way back (and perhaps the decoding of Enigma and the winning of the war). As it is, they only managed to get him to commit suicide AFTER he had done some incredibly important work.
Turing lost his security clearance because he got a criminal conviction. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain back then. If the authorities had known of Turing's homosexuality during the war, they would have refused him clearance because of the blackmail risk. But that was at a time of war, and when homosexuality was a crime. I think the JPL case is a little different.
That was the case a while back. And I guess there still are places where some folk would fear being outed so much that they might be susceptible to blackmail. But I wouldn't have tagged Pasadena CA as one of those places.
Being gay isn't illegal or immoral. Therefore the blackmail theory doesn't hold much water. I know people who would fear being outed as a Tottenham Hotspur supporter, but I doubt a background check would redflag that.
The same people who currently defend the innocent. Spider-Man. Or the Batman, depending on your religion.