Tenure is one of the most destructive things to ever happen to higher education. The entire concept is much akin to the widely reviled stacked ranking that many corporations have started to use in their ranks. The entire concept is that whoever wins the political / popularity contest at the educational institute is rewarded with tenure.
The result of the tenure system is political backstabbing, a good old boy (girl) club, group think that literally requires the death of the elders to change. Because the existing staff with tenure are often the ones to choose the new they do everything they can to ensure that even upon their death that things still will change as little as possible. Since the leadership of departments can't be fired the result is an elitist entitlement attitude where because doesn't have to answer to the real world and a feeling that should be isolated from it, no matter how callous their actions.
An academic institution that is isolated from the real world with tenure will become so separated from reality that term 'Ivory Tower' was coined to describe the phenomenon. The net result is that they do not serve society or their students, instead serving only themselves. Without checks and balances a department can become more and more self feeding on their own dogma each year. Because they do not ever have to interact or answer to the real world their coursework and degrees become more and more disconnected from the real world and students continue to be granted degrees irrespective of whether or not they will ever be able to use them.
The results are hardly academic when society suffers from a large influx of college graduates that receive degrees that have absolutely no value outside of academia. The results have been overwhelming with recent college graduates finding that their college degrees are often worthless, even when granted by well known Universities. Millions of college graduates have discovered themselves working jobs at places like retail or fast food when they had a harsh reality check that their degree was worthless. These graduates are now being tasked with repaying a four year degree with a McJob, a task that cannot be done. With crushing debt and chronic underemployment the student loan crisis in America is arguably the next mortgage collapse.
In Europe unemployment rates among college graduates are at record levels with many graduates lucky to find jobs doing things in supermarkets or factories. Finding a job in your field often requires getting a job literally without pay for a couple years just to get experience so that you might have something that will apply to the real world for the employer./Formerly worked at a University for a few years and saw this madness from the inside.
I never disregarded altruism, in fact I explicitly covered it in my grandparent post:
You can have sponsors that donate time and materials, you have generic ads, volunteers to a certain point
I have nothing against altruism, at a personal level I have volunteered for charity work for many years. In fact I have even taken a pay cut to serve in a professional capacity in an environment that needed people. However there is nothing about this that changes the fact that you still have expenses such as those that I have listed. Let me make my point with the National Blood Marrow Donor program which is pretty non-political and receives a lot of volunteer efforts, donations and services that are donated by altruistic people, companies and government agencies.
Read through their IT department career website and you'll notice that they have IT needs as sophisticated as any company. They have expenses that include things like professionals with security, HIPAA and other practices. I can assure you that even for a program as necessary and heart warmingly approved by just about everybody as the NMDB that they still have substantial expenses.
In fact when your benefiting from Altruism your often on a very short leash by your benefactor to justify your expenses. I've done things like work with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I've worked with IT in education where grants were a form (if not the only form) of income for a program and we have to carefully track that programs expenses. I can promise you that grants require an operational model of income and expenses, saying we're going to get by on Altruism is a really good way to never get a grant.
I can also guarantee you that after spending a fair amount of time working with non-profits and educational institutions in a professional capacity that they have the very expenses that I listed above. Any website of any size will require those expenses, those that benefit from altruism do nothing but shift where the expense is being paid from.
I stand by my point, you cannot have a functioning website that operates without expenses and those expenses must be paid for in some manner.
Linux has easily had billions of dollars in development costs over it's life and easily costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Linux gets by on donated servers, hardware, millions of donated hours of labor, countless patents that are donated and on and on. Open source companies are just as expensive as closed source companies, only they wrap their costs into maintenance instead of licenses.
Open source companies aren't alive through good will, they are live because they charge money, they simply do it in different ways. Take Firefox, they get over 80% of their money through advertising revenue from Google.
Linux is as far from free as possible, and exists as a community effort because people, companies and government agencies actively contribute to it's costs. These companies do so because it is in their mutual best interest to do so (the overwhelming majority of Linux code is written by large corps). My point about the costs stand, the costs are overwhelmingly donated.
Tell you what, why don't you have a conversation with one of the developers or Linus sometime and suggest that Linux is without cost. However when you really get down to brass tacks, Linux isn't a product, it's a philosophy.
I never said a god damn thing about politics. I never said I was a Republican. I'm not, I'm an Independent. I'm not a right winger, I'm not a left winger. I'm a moderate in the middle.
I talked about the laws of economics. You can't operate an expense without a source of income. The laws of economics require that you have income to cover expenses. If you have a website that website is going to have certain costs that are required to keep it up and running.
Domain name Hosting Servers Load Balancers Networking Gear Firewalls Bandwidth Staff Time Licensing (you can try and run strictly GPL to an certain extent but you will discover that GPL based companies make their money on the next one) Maintenance Administrators (if you want staff good enough to not pay for maintenance your going to pay a lot for admins) Disaster Recovery Insurance Electricity Security
Now you'll notice the one expense I haven't covered is content, because you can generate that on your own. But in the real world the other expenses require cold hard cash and you had better believe that Rackspace and Cisco wont take unicorn farts for payment.
When I was on the web 20 years ago most web pages were hosted on University servers with donated bandwidth and concepts like dedicated firewalls, electrical budgets and the like just weren't issues. The web was a very different place then with many pages being static, the malice of today was largely absent and if a page was hacked typically the most someone would do was replace the front page with a picture of their choosing and throw the results up on 2600. That isn't the world we live in and you can't operate a page that way today, and you certainly can't operate a commercial web site that way.
If you aren't being charged for the product, you are the product.
This axiom has been true for a very long time and it's true for this site as well as any other such thing. How are they making money? I'm not objecting to their making money, after all they have to pay for their servers, bandwidth and admins and so on.
It's a fundamental question that you simply can't ignore and economics requires that you have to deal with it whether you want to or not. You can have sponsors that donate time and materials, you have generic ads, volunteers to a certain point, you can charge people for your service and so on.
The point is somehow or another you have to get money, and this site is claiming that they get money in ways that don't exploit your privacy. Since exploiting your privacy is how these sites normally pay your bills, this leaves serious questions on how they are monetizing their site.
I love the idea that a site can raise money without exploiting privacy in an evil manner, but before I can give them any credibility to their model I have to know their model works. I hate to rain on people's feel good parade, but you can' run a website on community goodwill, hugs and unicorn farts.
Does exactly what you need and is designed explicitly for integration with third party tools. Spins up everything from disks to automating webforms and jobs and imports and exports of jobs. There really isn't anything else out there that comes close to what Workflow will do. Used to be called Altiris Workflow. Works with everything from CMDB, change management, service desk to multiple languages.
Really! Hundreds of studies showing that GMO is harmful? Stop the presses, gather the pitchforks and round up the boys quick! How on earth did HUNDREDS of studies showing GMO is harmful get overlooked by the entire scientific community? You have to be right that Monsanto has orchestrated suppressed this with a worldwide conspiracy across two hundred plus countries with different religions and political views. The world is secretly ruled by Monsanto, they are the world's puppeteers!
Better yet how did a worldwide conspiracy theory to buy off the entire scientific community ever make it? Where is wikileaks? Thousands, tens of thousands of people, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people must be involved in a worldwide conspiracy to suppress HUNDREDS of scientific studies. Why hasn't anyone blown the lid off this and put Snowden on page 2?
Amazing story you have there, let me sit back and place this one somewhere between JFK assassinations conspiracies and the Illuminati. You could make a movie out of this and everything, think of the fortune to be made. You could even afford to feed your whole family at Whole Foods for a week - wow!!!!
Science wins and political extremists lose today, and for that progress for humanity is made. Any time a political extremist tries to hijack science to push a political agenda they should be subject to the greatest of scrutiny. Science can and must rise above politics for the greater good of humanity and in this case it did. Here's hoping science can do so in other realms as well.
It's still slander because the intent is to damage someone's reputation enough to cause harm through dishonest means. That being said, in today's society with some people if you accused them of something like an orgy they didn't participate in they would probably go ahead and claim credit anyways...
Follow the porn industry, they have an unblemished track record going back decades of getting at the bleeding edge of technology. From VHS to DVD to any number of other technologies porn was there first at any notable level. The rule of thumb for buying new technology without paying an arm and a leg is porn adoption + 4 years. That gets past the bleeding edge costs, the differing standards and the price typically settles down.
People have been gathering the sexual habits of people that they may need to discredit for thousands of years. In the Roman times the Christians accused the Pagan Roman's in charge of having orgy's and myth sticks around to this day. Mind you having relations with slaves that were children was considered perfectly acceptable by that society so nobody bothered to use it to slander anyone and the result was that people talked freely about it. What they didn't talk freely about was having orgies as they were simply a myth. In other words this story is as old as prostitutes, politicians and spies, only the names have changed.
The problem with well intended programs is that most of them have a lack of follow through in their chain of events.
I recall when early in my career I worked in a fair size office building that had a cafeteria on the premises. In the cafeteria you were presented with an assortments of recycling options where you could recycle everything from organic waste to making sure that green glass was separated from brown.
When I worked the first shift I would watch as everyone dutifully separated everything just so to make sure they were being good for the environment. I was then transferred to second shift after a while at which point I noticed that every single evening the janitor took every single bin and dumped them all into the same garbage dolly.
The same thing happens with many recycling programs where the materials are simply shipped to Africa or China. They are then disassembled by hand as they value the money more than the computer, often by small kids and certainly without any kind of environmental controls. In order to put an end to e-waste you really have to start forcing in country recycling programs where the materials are completely broken down.
This is utter nonsense and doesn't pass Occam's razor. Take a look at this with a rational mind and not a politically tainted mind. Assange, self declared enemy of the United States, responsible for Wikileaks and Bradley Manning's trove being publicized. He gets a kick out of embarrassing the US at every opportunity he has and has made clear he doesn't intend to stop and considers himself a martyr. Until he ran out on his rape matters he was walking around a free man in Britain which has fairly strong extradition treaties with the US. The Washington Post recently talked about how even if he came to the US he probably wouldn't be charged with a crime.
Bradley Manning. Responsible for the biggest leak of international diplomatic cables in history. Betrayed his oath of service, traitor to his country and even this his wholesale and indiscriminate release of hundreds of thousands of records resulted in 35 years in prison, not the death penalty. All of this when he was within the military without all of the potential political complications that could have gotten in the way.
Thomas Drake, Raymond McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, Colleen Rowley and Sarah Harrisom, another set of traitors that all betrayed the US. You might think they were locked up for life and the key thrown away? No, in the real world they went and visited fellow traitor Snowden in Russia a little while ago. Take a guess how many traitors Russia lets go on vacation to the United States.
So when they heck has a traitor ever actually been killed by the US? 1865 and that required the assassination of a sitting US president to do it. The Rosenburgs were killed in 1953 but that was for Espionage for the atomic bomb.
In the real world the US Federal Government is a paper tiger that plays catch and release with those that betray the country. When you put down the tin foil hats, Snowden doesn't need to worry about the US government, it's inept about these things. Snowden needs to worry about those people that would benefit from tripping his deadman's switch by killing him.
I could go on with example after example, but the fact is that people are routinely sued, put into jail and and have judgments put against them without their being in court every single day throughout the country.
I'm extremely familiar with how the back end of these systems work and what passes for 'evidence' in court from the creditors standpoint. The overwhelming majority of cases go to court with no more effort than a claim from the creditor that the money is owed and no debtor to dispute the claim.
I have also worked in credit (large balance) at one of the largest banks in the country. I am/very/ familiar with the laws on these things. Speaking without the anonymous coward tag...
Thinking of myself I've spent Thanksgiving at work twice because I was traveling overseas and it wasn't practical to fly back for the holiday. It does wonders for perspective through when you encounter people who insist it is a Christian holiday. You then get to explain that there's only two countries on the planet that celebrate it and they don't even celebrate it on the same day. Out of the US the holiday is known for overeating of food and buying too many presents. sigh
It's a tempest in a teapot because/every/ nation spies on every other nation to the greatest extent that their technology, budget and legal system allows. It has been this way since pre-biblical times (hell even the old Testament in the Bible records nations spying on nations amongst other ancient stories). I don't know if you noticed or not but while a lot of people became upset, and certainly a number of companies became upset about the Snowden revelations almost no governments became upset.
Think about it, why did almost no government become upset? Why did almost no government condemn the spying unless it was a small government that simply lacked the resources to do any level of spying at all? Use Occam's razor and give me an answer, any answer that doesn't come down to this:
Every nation spies on every other nation to the greatest extent that their technology, budget and legal system allows.
There are no innocent parties, and to be frank if there were they would be incompetent and in need of replacement for endangering their citizens. Unfortunately history has a habit of supplying example upon example of this occurring through less than peaceful means. You might recall a time and a quote "gentlemen do not read each others mail". It was spoken by a Mr Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State in 1929 right before Japan started their half of WW2 and used to justify cutting off funding of US Cryptographic efforts for breaking other countries communications. Similar examples from other nations that were caught and surprised with an invasion abound through history.
Tempest in a teapot? This tempest in a teapot has been brewing for thousands of years, only the names have changed. Those nations that have taken this teapot off the stove have paid the price time and again...
This is making me feel old as I recall how happy I was to have once maxed a board with 32 MB of RAM, a previous one with 8 MB, another with 4 MB and so on. I love that about technology, it pretty much always gets better until DRM and politics get into the mix...
Drat and bother, I was writing on a smartphone in a minute break at work...
You forgot the first rule of being a grammar nazi which is that you will always make a mistake of your own. At any rate you didn't even catch my biggest grammar error which was "You giant paragraph" which should have been "Your giant paragraph".
My point was that the giant wall of text was simply unreadable - not about whether or not they were using proper grammar. For a site where we at least have a pretense that we want people to read the article or story before commenting I'd say it's hardly a moot point.
Paragraphs make text readable. You giant paragraph is completely unreadable. Please write in such a way that people can even have an opportunity to read you.
One of the best designed devices I have ever used. It is simple to use, ergonomic, doesn't waste tape (like the new ones) and just plain works.
It grants this wonderful ability to be organized and to know what is what and that is what keeps the rest of my lab working. Without a good label maker your lab is chaos abd unusable, something I have seen time and again for years.
Claims like these are typically only made by 'bulletproof' spam companies and similar service providers. I couldn't begin to tell you how many bulletproof hosts have been taken down from all parts of the world. Frankly you sound like a professional spammer.
Everything you do has an online score that has a given value to someone. Your slashdot account (and similar accounts) has an online score from any number of companies that monitor such websites for third parties. They look for for your influential posters, political views, shills accounts, who you look for and so on. You would then be valued according to your usefulness to the organization. These companies range from managing online reputations for companies to countries (ever notice certain stories get a lot of hits from Venezuela etc). Certainly facebook, twitter and similar accounts have companies that watch your reputation and score it as well.
If it's Amazon and you are a reviewer of products and nobody finds your reviews useful than your value is low. If your reviews are well thought of and highly considered you will start to get packages from companies hoping to a review. After a while you could become a professional reviewer without ever paying for packages.
Even things like credit scores aren't standardized anymore and haven't been for years. You could be a perfectly acceptable risk to buy a house, and get turned down for a credit card. You will have a different credit score from each agency based on what type of vendor is requesting your score and for what purpose. You will have one number for employment, another for renting, another for getting a car loan and so on.
The last I checked there are about 1500 different types of credit scores alone (do you know your behavior score?) and they change all the time. Your scores change all the time based on what you buy, where you buy it and when you buy it. Welcome to the world of big data. Don't fear big government, it's big business that you need to worry about.
This has got to be the most full of crap post I have ever read on slashdot. Even in Australia, where they have a history of being big on Carbon (enough to spark a backlash of late) they won't claim half of that. Australia has ideal solar capacity and even they are projecting that they theoretically could reach 50% of baseline with renewables by 2040 and that is the most aggressive credible study I have ever heard of.
Keep in mind that Australia is largely ideally suited for renewables with ample sunshine, and a low population that is largely either in large cities or small towns and very little in-between. That makes it about one of the best places you could possibly have short of a small island for having a renewables based energy source. The resources to scale up windmills, solar panels and other forms of renewables are not infinite and have to come from somewhere.
Windmills and solar panels require rare earth minerals and those come from mines that are almost exclusively in China. A new mine has recently opened in the US so at least one mine will be run with environmental standards. However your notion that we have enough supplies to build enough windmills to power the world is absurd. Don't forget about present shortages in silicon for creating solar panels with the today's production capacity. The idea that we have the materials to supply the world is absurd as cold fusion.
Even when you get the power which often comes at less than ideal times (when it's sunny, windy etc) you have to store somewhere. That means creating batteries and batteries are either going to use materials that are bad for the environment or going to be hyrdopower based or air based and difficult to scale. They can be built, however you simply cannot scale these on a world wide basis at any kind of realistic rate, no matter how well they work at a small scale because the capacity simply isn't there.
I firmly support renewables and have followed the technology for decades. However I have to call out pie in the sky posts like yours as being environmentally irresponsible. The result of always claiming baseline renewables were right around the corner has been decades of keeping society firmly in the hands of the coal industry. Meanwhile we could have had real environmental change by building nuclear power plants instead of more coal power plants because people forget the power has to come from somewhere.
Real world point "Don't be an idiot and make a gun out of plastic". Fear mongering point., "someone might make a single shot pistol that could be smuggled past a metal detector".
Slashdot Mirror
Tenure is one of the most destructive things to ever happen to higher education. The entire concept is much akin to the widely reviled stacked ranking that many corporations have started to use in their ranks. The entire concept is that whoever wins the political / popularity contest at the educational institute is rewarded with tenure.
The result of the tenure system is political backstabbing, a good old boy (girl) club, group think that literally requires the death of the elders to change. Because the existing staff with tenure are often the ones to choose the new they do everything they can to ensure that even upon their death that things still will change as little as possible. Since the leadership of departments can't be fired the result is an elitist entitlement attitude where because doesn't have to answer to the real world and a feeling that should be isolated from it, no matter how callous their actions.
An academic institution that is isolated from the real world with tenure will become so separated from reality that term 'Ivory Tower' was coined to describe the phenomenon. The net result is that they do not serve society or their students, instead serving only themselves. Without checks and balances a department can become more and more self feeding on their own dogma each year. Because they do not ever have to interact or answer to the real world their coursework and degrees become more and more disconnected from the real world and students continue to be granted degrees irrespective of whether or not they will ever be able to use them.
The results are hardly academic when society suffers from a large influx of college graduates that receive degrees that have absolutely no value outside of academia. The results have been overwhelming with recent college graduates finding that their college degrees are often worthless, even when granted by well known Universities. Millions of college graduates have discovered themselves working jobs at places like retail or fast food when they had a harsh reality check that their degree was worthless. These graduates are now being tasked with repaying a four year degree with a McJob, a task that cannot be done. With crushing debt and chronic underemployment the student loan crisis in America is arguably the next mortgage collapse.
In Europe unemployment rates among college graduates are at record levels with many graduates lucky to find jobs doing things in supermarkets or factories. Finding a job in your field often requires getting a job literally without pay for a couple years just to get experience so that you might have something that will apply to the real world for the employer. /Formerly worked at a University for a few years and saw this madness from the inside.
I never disregarded altruism, in fact I explicitly covered it in my grandparent post:
I have nothing against altruism, at a personal level I have volunteered for charity work for many years. In fact I have even taken a pay cut to serve in a professional capacity in an environment that needed people. However there is nothing about this that changes the fact that you still have expenses such as those that I have listed. Let me make my point with the National Blood Marrow Donor program which is pretty non-political and receives a lot of volunteer efforts, donations and services that are donated by altruistic people, companies and government agencies.
http://bethematch.org/About-Us/Careers/Career-opportunities/Information-technology/
Read through their IT department career website and you'll notice that they have IT needs as sophisticated as any company. They have expenses that include things like professionals with security, HIPAA and other practices. I can assure you that even for a program as necessary and heart warmingly approved by just about everybody as the NMDB that they still have substantial expenses.
In fact when your benefiting from Altruism your often on a very short leash by your benefactor to justify your expenses. I've done things like work with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I've worked with IT in education where grants were a form (if not the only form) of income for a program and we have to carefully track that programs expenses. I can promise you that grants require an operational model of income and expenses, saying we're going to get by on Altruism is a really good way to never get a grant.
I can also guarantee you that after spending a fair amount of time working with non-profits and educational institutions in a professional capacity that they have the very expenses that I listed above. Any website of any size will require those expenses, those that benefit from altruism do nothing but shift where the expense is being paid from.
I stand by my point, you cannot have a functioning website that operates without expenses and those expenses must be paid for in some manner.
Are you trying to make my point for me?
Linux has easily had billions of dollars in development costs over it's life and easily costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Linux gets by on donated servers, hardware, millions of donated hours of labor, countless patents that are donated and on and on. Open source companies are just as expensive as closed source companies, only they wrap their costs into maintenance instead of licenses.
Open source companies aren't alive through good will, they are live because they charge money, they simply do it in different ways. Take Firefox, they get over 80% of their money through advertising revenue from Google.
Linux is as far from free as possible, and exists as a community effort because people, companies and government agencies actively contribute to it's costs. These companies do so because it is in their mutual best interest to do so (the overwhelming majority of Linux code is written by large corps). My point about the costs stand, the costs are overwhelmingly donated.
Tell you what, why don't you have a conversation with one of the developers or Linus sometime and suggest that Linux is without cost. However when you really get down to brass tacks, Linux isn't a product, it's a philosophy.
I never said a god damn thing about politics. I never said I was a Republican. I'm not, I'm an Independent. I'm not a right winger, I'm not a left winger. I'm a moderate in the middle.
I talked about the laws of economics. You can't operate an expense without a source of income. The laws of economics require that you have income to cover expenses. If you have a website that website is going to have certain costs that are required to keep it up and running.
Domain name
Hosting
Servers
Load Balancers
Networking Gear
Firewalls
Bandwidth
Staff Time
Licensing (you can try and run strictly GPL to an certain extent but you will discover that GPL based companies make their money on the next one)
Maintenance
Administrators (if you want staff good enough to not pay for maintenance your going to pay a lot for admins)
Disaster Recovery
Insurance
Electricity
Security
Now you'll notice the one expense I haven't covered is content, because you can generate that on your own. But in the real world the other expenses require cold hard cash and you had better believe that Rackspace and Cisco wont take unicorn farts for payment.
When I was on the web 20 years ago most web pages were hosted on University servers with donated bandwidth and concepts like dedicated firewalls, electrical budgets and the like just weren't issues. The web was a very different place then with many pages being static, the malice of today was largely absent and if a page was hacked typically the most someone would do was replace the front page with a picture of their choosing and throw the results up on 2600. That isn't the world we live in and you can't operate a page that way today, and you certainly can't operate a commercial web site that way.
If you aren't being charged for the product, you are the product.
This axiom has been true for a very long time and it's true for this site as well as any other such thing. How are they making money? I'm not objecting to their making money, after all they have to pay for their servers, bandwidth and admins and so on.
It's a fundamental question that you simply can't ignore and economics requires that you have to deal with it whether you want to or not. You can have sponsors that donate time and materials, you have generic ads, volunteers to a certain point, you can charge people for your service and so on.
The point is somehow or another you have to get money, and this site is claiming that they get money in ways that don't exploit your privacy. Since exploiting your privacy is how these sites normally pay your bills, this leaves serious questions on how they are monetizing their site.
I love the idea that a site can raise money without exploiting privacy in an evil manner, but before I can give them any credibility to their model I have to know their model works. I hate to rain on people's feel good parade, but you can' run a website on community goodwill, hugs and unicorn farts.
Does exactly what you need and is designed explicitly for integration with third party tools. Spins up everything from disks to automating webforms and jobs and imports and exports of jobs. There really isn't anything else out there that comes close to what Workflow will do. Used to be called Altiris Workflow. Works with everything from CMDB, change management, service desk to multiple languages.
http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/learn-about-symantec-workflow
Really! Hundreds of studies showing that GMO is harmful? Stop the presses, gather the pitchforks and round up the boys quick! How on earth did HUNDREDS of studies showing GMO is harmful get overlooked by the entire scientific community? You have to be right that Monsanto has orchestrated suppressed this with a worldwide conspiracy across two hundred plus countries with different religions and political views. The world is secretly ruled by Monsanto, they are the world's puppeteers!
Better yet how did a worldwide conspiracy theory to buy off the entire scientific community ever make it? Where is wikileaks? Thousands, tens of thousands of people, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people must be involved in a worldwide conspiracy to suppress HUNDREDS of scientific studies. Why hasn't anyone blown the lid off this and put Snowden on page 2?
Amazing story you have there, let me sit back and place this one somewhere between JFK assassinations conspiracies and the Illuminati. You could make a movie out of this and everything, think of the fortune to be made. You could even afford to feed your whole family at Whole Foods for a week - wow!!!!
Science wins and political extremists lose today, and for that progress for humanity is made. Any time a political extremist tries to hijack science to push a political agenda they should be subject to the greatest of scrutiny. Science can and must rise above politics for the greater good of humanity and in this case it did. Here's hoping science can do so in other realms as well.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/26/microsoft-kill-windows-rt-larson-green
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/10477811/Microsoft-appears-set-to-abandon-Windows-RT.html
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-is-hammering-the-final-nails-into-windows-rts-coffin-7000023641/
http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2013/11/28/microsoft-windows-rt-faces-the-chop
http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows/23194/microsoft-confirms-windows-rt-will-die
It's still slander because the intent is to damage someone's reputation enough to cause harm through dishonest means. That being said, in today's society with some people if you accused them of something like an orgy they didn't participate in they would probably go ahead and claim credit anyways...
Follow the porn industry, they have an unblemished track record going back decades of getting at the bleeding edge of technology. From VHS to DVD to any number of other technologies porn was there first at any notable level. The rule of thumb for buying new technology without paying an arm and a leg is porn adoption + 4 years. That gets past the bleeding edge costs, the differing standards and the price typically settles down.
People have been gathering the sexual habits of people that they may need to discredit for thousands of years. In the Roman times the Christians accused the Pagan Roman's in charge of having orgy's and myth sticks around to this day. Mind you having relations with slaves that were children was considered perfectly acceptable by that society so nobody bothered to use it to slander anyone and the result was that people talked freely about it. What they didn't talk freely about was having orgies as they were simply a myth. In other words this story is as old as prostitutes, politicians and spies, only the names have changed.
The problem with well intended programs is that most of them have a lack of follow through in their chain of events.
I recall when early in my career I worked in a fair size office building that had a cafeteria on the premises. In the cafeteria you were presented with an assortments of recycling options where you could recycle everything from organic waste to making sure that green glass was separated from brown.
When I worked the first shift I would watch as everyone dutifully separated everything just so to make sure they were being good for the environment. I was then transferred to second shift after a while at which point I noticed that every single evening the janitor took every single bin and dumped them all into the same garbage dolly.
The same thing happens with many recycling programs where the materials are simply shipped to Africa or China. They are then disassembled by hand as they value the money more than the computer, often by small kids and certainly without any kind of environmental controls. In order to put an end to e-waste you really have to start forcing in country recycling programs where the materials are completely broken down.
This is utter nonsense and doesn't pass Occam's razor. Take a look at this with a rational mind and not a politically tainted mind. Assange, self declared enemy of the United States, responsible for Wikileaks and Bradley Manning's trove being publicized. He gets a kick out of embarrassing the US at every opportunity he has and has made clear he doesn't intend to stop and considers himself a martyr. Until he ran out on his rape matters he was walking around a free man in Britain which has fairly strong extradition treaties with the US. The Washington Post recently talked about how even if he came to the US he probably wouldn't be charged with a crime.
Bradley Manning. Responsible for the biggest leak of international diplomatic cables in history. Betrayed his oath of service, traitor to his country and even this his wholesale and indiscriminate release of hundreds of thousands of records resulted in 35 years in prison, not the death penalty. All of this when he was within the military without all of the potential political complications that could have gotten in the way.
Thomas Drake, Raymond McGovern, Jesselyn Radack, Colleen Rowley and Sarah Harrisom, another set of traitors that all betrayed the US. You might think they were locked up for life and the key thrown away? No, in the real world they went and visited fellow traitor Snowden in Russia a little while ago. Take a guess how many traitors Russia lets go on vacation to the United States.
So when they heck has a traitor ever actually been killed by the US? 1865 and that required the assassination of a sitting US president to do it. The Rosenburgs were killed in 1953 but that was for Espionage for the atomic bomb.
In the real world the US Federal Government is a paper tiger that plays catch and release with those that betray the country. When you put down the tin foil hats, Snowden doesn't need to worry about the US government, it's inept about these things. Snowden needs to worry about those people that would benefit from tripping his deadman's switch by killing him.
You also happen to be factually accurate as the MPAA and their latest set of statistics.
http://www.startribune.com/investigators/95692619.html
I could go on with example after example, but the fact is that people are routinely sued, put into jail and and have judgments put against them without their being in court every single day throughout the country.
I'm extremely familiar with how the back end of these systems work and what passes for 'evidence' in court from the creditors standpoint. The overwhelming majority of cases go to court with no more effort than a claim from the creditor that the money is owed and no debtor to dispute the claim.
I have also worked in credit (large balance) at one of the largest banks in the country. I am /very/ familiar with the laws on these things. Speaking without the anonymous coward tag...
Thinking of myself I've spent Thanksgiving at work twice because I was traveling overseas and it wasn't practical to fly back for the holiday. It does wonders for perspective through when you encounter people who insist it is a Christian holiday. You then get to explain that there's only two countries on the planet that celebrate it and they don't even celebrate it on the same day. Out of the US the holiday is known for overeating of food and buying too many presents. sigh
It's a tempest in a teapot because /every/ nation spies on every other nation to the greatest extent that their technology, budget and legal system allows. It has been this way since pre-biblical times (hell even the old Testament in the Bible records nations spying on nations amongst other ancient stories). I don't know if you noticed or not but while a lot of people became upset, and certainly a number of companies became upset about the Snowden revelations almost no governments became upset.
Think about it, why did almost no government become upset? Why did almost no government condemn the spying unless it was a small government that simply lacked the resources to do any level of spying at all? Use Occam's razor and give me an answer, any answer that doesn't come down to this:
Every nation spies on every other nation to the greatest extent that their technology, budget and legal system allows.
There are no innocent parties, and to be frank if there were they would be incompetent and in need of replacement for endangering their citizens. Unfortunately history has a habit of supplying example upon example of this occurring through less than peaceful means. You might recall a time and a quote "gentlemen do not read each others mail". It was spoken by a Mr Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State in 1929 right before Japan started their half of WW2 and used to justify cutting off funding of US Cryptographic efforts for breaking other countries communications. Similar examples from other nations that were caught and surprised with an invasion abound through history.
Tempest in a teapot? This tempest in a teapot has been brewing for thousands of years, only the names have changed. Those nations that have taken this teapot off the stove have paid the price time and again...
This is making me feel old as I recall how happy I was to have once maxed a board with 32 MB of RAM, a previous one with 8 MB, another with 4 MB and so on. I love that about technology, it pretty much always gets better until DRM and politics get into the mix...
Drat and bother, I was writing on a smartphone in a minute break at work...
You forgot the first rule of being a grammar nazi which is that you will always make a mistake of your own. At any rate you didn't even catch my biggest grammar error which was "You giant paragraph" which should have been "Your giant paragraph".
My point was that the giant wall of text was simply unreadable - not about whether or not they were using proper grammar. For a site where we at least have a pretense that we want people to read the article or story before commenting I'd say it's hardly a moot point.
Paragraphs make text readable. You giant paragraph is completely unreadable. Please write in such a way that people can even have an opportunity to read you.
Thanks,
The Internet
One of the best designed devices I have ever used. It is simple to use, ergonomic, doesn't waste tape (like the new ones) and just plain works.
It grants this wonderful ability to be organized and to know what is what and that is what keeps the rest of my lab working. Without a good label maker your lab is chaos abd unusable, something I have seen time and again for years.
Claims like these are typically only made by 'bulletproof' spam companies and similar service providers. I couldn't begin to tell you how many bulletproof hosts have been taken down from all parts of the world. Frankly you sound like a professional spammer.
Everything you do has an online score that has a given value to someone. Your slashdot account (and similar accounts) has an online score from any number of companies that monitor such websites for third parties. They look for for your influential posters, political views, shills accounts, who you look for and so on. You would then be valued according to your usefulness to the organization. These companies range from managing online reputations for companies to countries (ever notice certain stories get a lot of hits from Venezuela etc). Certainly facebook, twitter and similar accounts have companies that watch your reputation and score it as well.
If it's Amazon and you are a reviewer of products and nobody finds your reviews useful than your value is low. If your reviews are well thought of and highly considered you will start to get packages from companies hoping to a review. After a while you could become a professional reviewer without ever paying for packages.
Even things like credit scores aren't standardized anymore and haven't been for years. You could be a perfectly acceptable risk to buy a house, and get turned down for a credit card. You will have a different credit score from each agency based on what type of vendor is requesting your score and for what purpose. You will have one number for employment, another for renting, another for getting a car loan and so on.
The last I checked there are about 1500 different types of credit scores alone (do you know your behavior score?) and they change all the time. Your scores change all the time based on what you buy, where you buy it and when you buy it. Welcome to the world of big data. Don't fear big government, it's big business that you need to worry about.
This has got to be the most full of crap post I have ever read on slashdot. Even in Australia, where they have a history of being big on Carbon (enough to spark a backlash of late) they won't claim half of that. Australia has ideal solar capacity and even they are projecting that they theoretically could reach 50% of baseline with renewables by 2040 and that is the most aggressive credible study I have ever heard of.
Keep in mind that Australia is largely ideally suited for renewables with ample sunshine, and a low population that is largely either in large cities or small towns and very little in-between. That makes it about one of the best places you could possibly have short of a small island for having a renewables based energy source. The resources to scale up windmills, solar panels and other forms of renewables are not infinite and have to come from somewhere.
Windmills and solar panels require rare earth minerals and those come from mines that are almost exclusively in China. A new mine has recently opened in the US so at least one mine will be run with environmental standards. However your notion that we have enough supplies to build enough windmills to power the world is absurd. Don't forget about present shortages in silicon for creating solar panels with the today's production capacity. The idea that we have the materials to supply the world is absurd as cold fusion.
Even when you get the power which often comes at less than ideal times (when it's sunny, windy etc) you have to store somewhere. That means creating batteries and batteries are either going to use materials that are bad for the environment or going to be hyrdopower based or air based and difficult to scale. They can be built, however you simply cannot scale these on a world wide basis at any kind of realistic rate, no matter how well they work at a small scale because the capacity simply isn't there.
I firmly support renewables and have followed the technology for decades. However I have to call out pie in the sky posts like yours as being environmentally irresponsible. The result of always claiming baseline renewables were right around the corner has been decades of keeping society firmly in the hands of the coal industry. Meanwhile we could have had real environmental change by building nuclear power plants instead of more coal power plants because people forget the power has to come from somewhere.
Real world point "Don't be an idiot and make a gun out of plastic". Fear mongering point., "someone might make a single shot pistol that could be smuggled past a metal detector".
Let the fear mongering begin!