so Google developed Android to give the market a choice
Please think about what you are saying here. Google are in business to give people choice? I don't think so.
Not as their primary business function, no, obviously not.
Google are in business to make money from advertising. However, this has a couple of interesting side-effects: - Google don't care about technology, except that more of it is better. They're completely platform-neutral, as long as the platform is 'open' to allow them to display (and make money from) their adverts. - Preventing other companies from closing their platforms (in order to take all that lovely advertising revenue for themselves) becomes a major strategic issue.
This makes Google's actions entirely sensible, which otherwise look a bit strange... develop a leading mobile platform and give it away. Develop a leading browser and give it away. Develop possibly the most extensive mapping solution on the net at vast cost and, yup, give it away. This is clearly ludicrous behaviour for a technology company. Unless it's not.
So yes, the strategy that they seem to be pursuing at the moment, quite successfully, is to give people choice. I think so.
We, like every other living organism on this planet, are responsible for creating the atmosphere.
Our atmosphere isn't 'natural'...it shouldn't 'naturally' contain this much free oxygen (or most of the other gases except nitrogen). It's entirely produced by the biosphere, and all living organisms have adapted to this unnatural mix of gases. Well, except some of the bacterial mats that use other bacteria to protect themselves from this new-fangled Oxygen stuff and want us kids to get off their f*ing lawn.
Humans are part of the biosphere, our responsibility as part of this incredibly complex living terraforming machine is to absorb O2 and produce CO2. We do this alongside a whole bunch of other organisms that do this, and our outputs balance with the other half of the machine (primarily plants) which absorbs CO2 and produces O2. This balance has survived huge, vast, dramatic changes to the planet and is still working perfectly. We're doing our job very well, possibly too efficiently recently, but as we don't really understand the machine any attempts to correct our output may well do more harm than good. But since we haven't even doubled our pre-industrial output yet, and our CO2 output is dwarfed by the rest of the biosphere, I don't think we need to panic just yet.
Musicians have happily survived for vast swathes of time where reproduction was impossible. Hearing music meant listening to a musician play it for the vast majority of time that humans have been creating and listening to music.
Luckily humans still enjoy doing this: people like actually listening to live musicians and musicians still enjoy performing music for people.
The business model that made a lot of middlemen very rich by taking a recording of the live music and selling it to people who wanted to listen to the music outside of a live performance is dead, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other business models that work just as well for musicians and music fans. Note that this business model did not actually make the musicians any more money, on average (yes, a few musicians got very rich, but many many more got broken).
Unfortunately for the middlemen (but fortunately for everyone else involved) none of those other business models work nearly as well for the middlemen. Hence their struggles to remain relevant and destroy any other business models while the musicians and music fans slowly work out that the other business models do work and that there is more than one way to make a living from being a musician.
Can you provide even a SINGLE example where Google has stifled competition through the abuse of technology?
Sorry, I obviously didn't make myself clear.
I didn't say that Google was abusing technology to stifle competition. I said that Google was using technology to prevent threats to its business from other people's control of technology. That's a different thing.
Google won't stop anyone visiting Apple's website, but Apple would love to stop people visiting Google's search engine (or at least, that was Mr Jobs' clear intention while he was in charge). They control their platforms sufficiently to do that if they choose to (see the Death of Flash as an example), so Google developed Android to give the market a choice and prevent Apple's controlled platform from being the only mobile platform, which would have lost them the entire mobile advertising market. Every Android device purchased doesn't give Google any revenue, but prevents Apple from potentially blocking a Google customer. As long as that remains true, they're happy to continue building Android.
Which is why their nightmare is that a single major Android manufacturer emerges and does a deal with Google's real competition. Which I suspect is the reasoning behind their purchase of Motorola... it gives them a 'nuclear' option of their own.
Google isn't in this to 'win' and control a handset platform. They're in it to not 'lose' to Apple: they spent all that money and effort creating Android so that the mobile platform wasn't completely controlled by Apple (who could then dictate terms on advertising on that platform).
Remember, Google isn't about making money from technology. It's about making money from advertising, and it uses technology to keep anyone else from threatening its advertising revenue.
Google has made Chrome for the same reasons... to prevent Microsoft from controlling the browser platform and defaulting everyone to Bing. The fact that they also use this to drive standards adoption and technological advancement in browsers is a secondary bonus strategy.
The other nice side-effect of this strategy is that we get (more or less) open platforms and improving technology. But that's a side-effect not the main purpose, and should the mindset at Google change, or the market change, expect their attitudes to 'open and improving' to change.
Google's nightmare would be that Microsoft pays Samsung a lot of money to default all their devices to Bing. As long as they don't do that, I'm not sure Google gives a monkey's what Samsung do with their market dominance.
Small companies and start-ups care less about immaculate CV's and care more about actual ability and really value being able to fill more than one role, so look for a small company that will love a sales-experienced coder.
Your sales experience will be an advantage for some roles (for example pre-sales support building demos) and it's very rare for someone to have both sales and coding experience, so you just need to find the organisation who needs that.
Of course, as it's so rare you won't find many organisations advertising for the role, and smaller organisations tend not to advertise or go through formal recruiting processes anyway, it tends to be more word-of-mouth and friend-of-friend, so get networking!
That's just how people are; not all of them, but a lot of them.
I mean, stories of people getting hacked or their identities stolen are in the news all the time, and the most common user-created passwords are still ridiculous shit like "1234" and "ABCDEFG". Clearly people would rather accept the risk of a weak password for the sake of convenience. Either that or they really are retarded.
Since clearly most people are not retarded, but are using the system as if they are retarded, then the system is the problem. Blaming the users is pointless, you're not going to get better human beings to use your system, so you've got to change the system.
As XKCD and many others have pointed out, we have a pointlessly hard method of specifying passwords...if it's 'strong' it can't be easily remembered, and will be written down or re-used on multiple occasions. If it's easy to remember then it's easy to guess. In other words, we have a system that is easy for computers to implement, but hard for humans to use.
There must, surely, be better ways of doing this that work with the way the human brain works to encourage stronger security. After all, it's a lot easier to change the security implementation than it is to change the human brain. We need to find a better system and not just stick with the current broken one and blame the users for being retards.
I'm glad someone is trying something different that might make security better.
You mean there are still people naive enough to think that "secrecy" will protect their idea?
Yes. There's a perfectly valid form of IP protection called 'Trade Secrets' that relies on the thing being protected being kept secret. Companies relying on this protection, and there are a lot of them, must take very careful steps to ensure that the secret being protected is actually protected, and document that protection. The archetypal example of this protection is the Coca-cola recipe, which is unpatented, still secret and still protected.
The protection that Trade Secrets gives is that if someone in your company betrays you and gives your secret to a competitor, you have the right to compensation from the competitor and the betrayer, if you can prove your case in court.
Bad IT implementation could potentially ruin your chances of claiming your secret was protected, and invalidate your Trade Secrets protection.
Not all IP protection is about Patents, and while Patents are broken in the software world, they do work well in medicine and genetic research.
Men and women are not biologically the same, obviously. There is far more too it than what is between your legs though. Men produce more hormones that encourage competitiveness, women produce more that encourage nurturing. This is not unsurprising since natural selection favours men who have as many partners as possible and can protect them from harm, and women who are able to form strong relationships with strong men and their offspring.
Haven't we discredited this kind of social darwinistic thinking now? I thought we'd decided that human group behaviour was too complex to decode into these simplistic metaphors?
And clearly you've never worked in an all-female office where the bitchiness is way beyond merely 'competitive', or worked as part of an all-male team where they would literally (and I mean literally) die for each other.
I'm a long-term developer studying an MBA at the moment. I'd recommend it to everyone working in commercial IT, it really helps you to understand why some of the decisions are made so badly from a technical point of view (because they're taken from a business point of view where they make more sense). More usefully, it also gives you the tools to explain why those decisions are technically bad in language your decision-makers will understand.
You don't need to know how to manage a server, or configure Active Directory, or run an Exchange mail server. All that you know is to write business requirements for vendors to come in and set everything up.
Yes, an IT manager doesn't need to know how to set up an Exchange server, but they do need to know how to write up their business requirements. This is good surely?
Exactly. This. This is part of the problem. There's a disjunct between how academia sees Computer Science as nothing to do with IT and how business sees a CS degree as the basic starting point for a career in IT.
Can we please either have a Computers in Business degree that teaches useful skills, or a business culture that doesn't expect academic degrees to be vocational qualifications? I don't mind which, either is good.
Also, the reason your company doesn't have any gurus is that no-one is prepared to spend any time or money training their staff, or even giving them self-development time to train themselves. Companies that do decent training have gurus. It's pretty simple.
When I was a kid reading Judge Dredd stories in 2000AD, this was one of the features of life in MegaCity1 that seemed so unbelievable back then: that everyone was guilty of something ('everyone's a perp") and if JD wanted to arrest someone, he could, all he had to do was find out what they were guilty of.
A while back I realised that I'm a law-abiding person with no criminal intentions, and yet I routinely break laws that could potentially see me arrested, fined, even imprisoned if the authorities decided to enforce the laws. All it would take is some bureaucrat or police officer to take an interest in me and my life would be ruined, which is a pretty scary thing.
For companies (at least here in Australia), it's the environmental laws and agencies that are having a similar effect. All it takes is a complaint from an anonymous member of the public and the business can be shut down, or restricted to the point where it is no longer economical. Recent examples: - Long-standing pubs having their licences revoked because of complaints of noise from nearby residents who only recently moved in. - Rural agricultural businesses being refused licences to operate because of 'smell' and the mother of all examples recently: the shutting down of the entire live cattle export industry because of a TV report showing cruelty to the exported animals further down the processing chain.
It seems the same 'environmental' laws are being used in this case too, which is also a pretty scary thing.
So a release of genuine, authentic emails and files from a known, authentic, highly-respected member of the climatology community was 'manufactured'. How? Phil Jones has confirmed that the Climategate material is genuine. What exactly was manufactured?
The timing may have been driven by a desire to derail Copenhagen, but then if anyone with an ounce of morals had been able to read the content of those emails they would have been duty-bound to attempt to derail Copenhagen.
And if there is no evidence that 'the usual suspects' financed it, maybe that's because it wasn't financed by the usual suspects, but was a genuine act by a genuine whistleblower?
I was nearly shot by UK police. For wearing a long black coat in an off-licence, and then removing it a little hastily when challenged by two armed policemen. The copper who nearly snuffed me let me sit in the back of the car while I got over the shock and told me he nearly pulled the trigger.
Trust me, you can be shot by the UK police without even having a gun on you.
Not that I'm criticising, I couldn't do their job. But they need to do it properly.
So you posted your question, a lot of experienced people came back with sensible, reasoned arguments from their personal experiences running their own mail servers, and you label them 'assholes' because their experiences don't mesh with your dreams?
Why the hell did you even ask the question?
Good luck with your mailserver, please let us know 5 years down the track when you finally realise that your freedom to run a mailserver of your choice is also a spammer's freedom to splurt adverts all over your server and you get fed up of wiping their freedom off your inbox every morning.
We wouldn't want Australians playing violent video games, would we? It might turn them into criminals!
Wow, that's pathetic. You haven't posted for over 3 years, and thought that was *the* thing you needed to say now?
And nice manipulation of the Streisand Effect by the publishers. "Kids there's a really gory violent game here!" plus bonus: "If it's not violent enough for you, don't blame us! It's the gubmint!"
Depends on your customer base. My customers all run Windows and have.Net framework already installed. Any conversation with their IT departments go along the lines of:
'what's the deployment impact?'
'it's a.Net application, framework v3.5'
'Cool, no impact then'. I love Python as a language, and I'd love to develop in it, but that conversation would go along the lines of:
'what's the deployment impact?'
'it's a Python app'
'hmmm, OK, we'll be adding 3 months to your deployment phase while we approve Python apps for deployment on the SOE and get that rolled out. Have you considered using.Net?'
If you're doing retail coding and you really care about the 10% market share that don't use Windows, then platform neutrality is important. For pretty much all commercial coding it's just not important. 99% of your customers will be on Windows and the other 1% will be used to handling Windows apps even if they don't like it. Of course, if you're doing mobile development then your picture is vastly different, and there are no platform-independent solutions anyway.
I've read a great deal on climate change aka global warming and not once have I ever seen humidity and cirrus clouds mentioned as part of it until this guy claimed it was the foundation of it.
Radiation absorbed by new CO2 released into the atmosphere from fossil fuels is the cause, anything else is a red herring distraction, which is what this Tea Party type guy is all about.
You really haven't read enough then, or understood what you've read.
CO2 by itself cannot produce anything more than a small forcing (and we should really be talking about GHG not CO2 here too, because CO2 is only a part of the overall man-made greenhouse gas forcing). If it was just down to GHG we'd see a ~1 degree rise at most. The models predict, however, that this small forcing is being applied in the mid-level atmosphere where it will cause increased humidity, and water vapour is a vastly more effective GHG, which will cause more warming, and therefore more humidity. This is the 'feedback' and the 'tipping point' that we need to avoid.
There are a few uncertainties with this model, however, that haven't been fully ironed out: - The exact forcing from cloud cover is not known at this point (and I believe TFP referenced in TFA is attempting to address this), and there's even valid questions about whether the net forcing from increased humidity is positive or negative. - The characteristic mid-atmosphere warming from the GHG can't be confirmed by measurement (the famous 'missing hotspot')
If the feedback from water vapour turns out to be less strong (for example because white clouds reflect more heat back into space than the water absorbs), or if the hotspot never appears (meaning that the models were inaccurate about where the warming would occur), then the catastrophic feedback loops won't occur and we can all stop panicking about it.
Of course, if we all stop panicking about it then a lot of climatologists and envirocrats lose their funding/jobs, and a lot of NGO's (hello Greenpeace) lose their lobbying influence and 'awareness-raising' funding, so I'd imagine there's some significant pressure within those organisations and governments to not let anyone know should the models turn out to be wrong.
I think he's talking about the simulation/game/therapy/learning tool from Ender's Game more than any beefed-up version of WoW. And I bought that as a concept, it worked well and I could see how it could be used to teach difficult concepts as well as explore the child's psyche in a therapeutic manner.
So if a species dies out and disappears from an ecosystem, that's bad for biodiversity and can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Now we find out that if a species that used to be part of an ecosystem re-enters it that's also bad and can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
I have a dyslexic sister who can't read books, she just doesn't relate to the information in the written word. She watches films instead
For her, the world is exactly opposite to yours. The wonders you see in the written word are completely obscured for her, and her ability to be absorbed in a movie is significantly greater than mine (I read a lot).
there's nothing inherently wonderful about the written word. There is something wonderful (and I get as much from books as you do) in our ability to create magical worlds in our heads based on nothing but a description.
Slashdot Mirror
so Google developed Android to give the market a choice
Please think about what you are saying here. Google are in business to give people choice? I don't think so.
Not as their primary business function, no, obviously not.
Google are in business to make money from advertising. However, this has a couple of interesting side-effects:
- Google don't care about technology, except that more of it is better. They're completely platform-neutral, as long as the platform is 'open' to allow them to display (and make money from) their adverts.
- Preventing other companies from closing their platforms (in order to take all that lovely advertising revenue for themselves) becomes a major strategic issue.
This makes Google's actions entirely sensible, which otherwise look a bit strange... develop a leading mobile platform and give it away. Develop a leading browser and give it away. Develop possibly the most extensive mapping solution on the net at vast cost and, yup, give it away. This is clearly ludicrous behaviour for a technology company. Unless it's not.
So yes, the strategy that they seem to be pursuing at the moment, quite successfully, is to give people choice. I think so.
We, like every other living organism on this planet, are responsible for creating the atmosphere.
Our atmosphere isn't 'natural'...it shouldn't 'naturally' contain this much free oxygen (or most of the other gases except nitrogen). It's entirely produced by the biosphere, and all living organisms have adapted to this unnatural mix of gases. Well, except some of the bacterial mats that use other bacteria to protect themselves from this new-fangled Oxygen stuff and want us kids to get off their f*ing lawn.
Humans are part of the biosphere, our responsibility as part of this incredibly complex living terraforming machine is to absorb O2 and produce CO2. We do this alongside a whole bunch of other organisms that do this, and our outputs balance with the other half of the machine (primarily plants) which absorbs CO2 and produces O2. This balance has survived huge, vast, dramatic changes to the planet and is still working perfectly.
We're doing our job very well, possibly too efficiently recently, but as we don't really understand the machine any attempts to correct our output may well do more harm than good.
But since we haven't even doubled our pre-industrial output yet, and our CO2 output is dwarfed by the rest of the biosphere, I don't think we need to panic just yet.
Musicians have happily survived for vast swathes of time where reproduction was impossible. Hearing music meant listening to a musician play it for the vast majority of time that humans have been creating and listening to music.
Luckily humans still enjoy doing this: people like actually listening to live musicians and musicians still enjoy performing music for people.
The business model that made a lot of middlemen very rich by taking a recording of the live music and selling it to people who wanted to listen to the music outside of a live performance is dead, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other business models that work just as well for musicians and music fans. Note that this business model did not actually make the musicians any more money, on average (yes, a few musicians got very rich, but many many more got broken).
Unfortunately for the middlemen (but fortunately for everyone else involved) none of those other business models work nearly as well for the middlemen. Hence their struggles to remain relevant and destroy any other business models while the musicians and music fans slowly work out that the other business models do work and that there is more than one way to make a living from being a musician.
Can you provide even a SINGLE example where Google has stifled competition through the abuse of technology?
Sorry, I obviously didn't make myself clear.
I didn't say that Google was abusing technology to stifle competition. I said that Google was using technology to prevent threats to its business from other people's control of technology. That's a different thing.
Google won't stop anyone visiting Apple's website, but Apple would love to stop people visiting Google's search engine (or at least, that was Mr Jobs' clear intention while he was in charge). They control their platforms sufficiently to do that if they choose to (see the Death of Flash as an example), so Google developed Android to give the market a choice and prevent Apple's controlled platform from being the only mobile platform, which would have lost them the entire mobile advertising market. Every Android device purchased doesn't give Google any revenue, but prevents Apple from potentially blocking a Google customer. As long as that remains true, they're happy to continue building Android.
Which is why their nightmare is that a single major Android manufacturer emerges and does a deal with Google's real competition. Which I suspect is the reasoning behind their purchase of Motorola... it gives them a 'nuclear' option of their own.
Google isn't in this to 'win' and control a handset platform. They're in it to not 'lose' to Apple: they spent all that money and effort creating Android so that the mobile platform wasn't completely controlled by Apple (who could then dictate terms on advertising on that platform).
Remember, Google isn't about making money from technology. It's about making money from advertising, and it uses technology to keep anyone else from threatening its advertising revenue.
Google has made Chrome for the same reasons... to prevent Microsoft from controlling the browser platform and defaulting everyone to Bing. The fact that they also use this to drive standards adoption and technological advancement in browsers is a secondary bonus strategy.
The other nice side-effect of this strategy is that we get (more or less) open platforms and improving technology. But that's a side-effect not the main purpose, and should the mindset at Google change, or the market change, expect their attitudes to 'open and improving' to change.
Google's nightmare would be that Microsoft pays Samsung a lot of money to default all their devices to Bing. As long as they don't do that, I'm not sure Google gives a monkey's what Samsung do with their market dominance.
The best solution to a problem isn't always the popular one.
Small companies and start-ups care less about immaculate CV's and care more about actual ability and really value being able to fill more than one role, so look for a small company that will love a sales-experienced coder.
Your sales experience will be an advantage for some roles (for example pre-sales support building demos) and it's very rare for someone to have both sales and coding experience, so you just need to find the organisation who needs that.
Of course, as it's so rare you won't find many organisations advertising for the role, and smaller organisations tend not to advertise or go through formal recruiting processes anyway, it tends to be more word-of-mouth and friend-of-friend, so get networking!
That's just how people are; not all of them, but a lot of them.
I mean, stories of people getting hacked or their identities stolen are in the news all the time, and the most common user-created passwords are still ridiculous shit like "1234" and "ABCDEFG". Clearly people would rather accept the risk of a weak password for the sake of convenience. Either that or they really are retarded.
Since clearly most people are not retarded, but are using the system as if they are retarded, then the system is the problem. Blaming the users is pointless, you're not going to get better human beings to use your system, so you've got to change the system.
As XKCD and many others have pointed out, we have a pointlessly hard method of specifying passwords...if it's 'strong' it can't be easily remembered, and will be written down or re-used on multiple occasions. If it's easy to remember then it's easy to guess. In other words, we have a system that is easy for computers to implement, but hard for humans to use.
There must, surely, be better ways of doing this that work with the way the human brain works to encourage stronger security. After all, it's a lot easier to change the security implementation than it is to change the human brain. We need to find a better system and not just stick with the current broken one and blame the users for being retards.
I'm glad someone is trying something different that might make security better.
You mean there are still people naive enough to think that "secrecy" will protect their idea?
Yes. There's a perfectly valid form of IP protection called 'Trade Secrets' that relies on the thing being protected being kept secret. Companies relying on this protection, and there are a lot of them, must take very careful steps to ensure that the secret being protected is actually protected, and document that protection.
The archetypal example of this protection is the Coca-cola recipe, which is unpatented, still secret and still protected.
The protection that Trade Secrets gives is that if someone in your company betrays you and gives your secret to a competitor, you have the right to compensation from the competitor and the betrayer, if you can prove your case in court.
Bad IT implementation could potentially ruin your chances of claiming your secret was protected, and invalidate your Trade Secrets protection.
Not all IP protection is about Patents, and while Patents are broken in the software world, they do work well in medicine and genetic research.
Men and women are not biologically the same, obviously. There is far more too it than what is between your legs though. Men produce more hormones that encourage competitiveness, women produce more that encourage nurturing. This is not unsurprising since natural selection favours men who have as many partners as possible and can protect them from harm, and women who are able to form strong relationships with strong men and their offspring.
Haven't we discredited this kind of social darwinistic thinking now? I thought we'd decided that human group behaviour was too complex to decode into these simplistic metaphors?
And clearly you've never worked in an all-female office where the bitchiness is way beyond merely 'competitive', or worked as part of an all-male team where they would literally (and I mean literally) die for each other.
I'm a long-term developer studying an MBA at the moment. I'd recommend it to everyone working in commercial IT, it really helps you to understand why some of the decisions are made so badly from a technical point of view (because they're taken from a business point of view where they make more sense). More usefully, it also gives you the tools to explain why those decisions are technically bad in language your decision-makers will understand.
You don't need to know how to manage a server, or configure Active Directory, or run an Exchange mail server. All that you know is to write business requirements for vendors to come in and set everything up.
Yes, an IT manager doesn't need to know how to set up an Exchange server, but they do need to know how to write up their business requirements. This is good surely?
And what does CS have to do with IT?
Exactly. This. This is part of the problem.
There's a disjunct between how academia sees Computer Science as nothing to do with IT and how business sees a CS degree as the basic starting point for a career in IT.
Can we please either have a Computers in Business degree that teaches useful skills, or a business culture that doesn't expect academic degrees to be vocational qualifications? I don't mind which, either is good.
Also, the reason your company doesn't have any gurus is that no-one is prepared to spend any time or money training their staff, or even giving them self-development time to train themselves. Companies that do decent training have gurus. It's pretty simple.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
~Edsger W. Dijkstra
yeah but Astronomy isn't called Telescope Science so it's a bit less confusing
When I was a kid reading Judge Dredd stories in 2000AD, this was one of the features of life in MegaCity1 that seemed so unbelievable back then: that everyone was guilty of something ('everyone's a perp") and if JD wanted to arrest someone, he could, all he had to do was find out what they were guilty of.
A while back I realised that I'm a law-abiding person with no criminal intentions, and yet I routinely break laws that could potentially see me arrested, fined, even imprisoned if the authorities decided to enforce the laws. All it would take is some bureaucrat or police officer to take an interest in me and my life would be ruined, which is a pretty scary thing.
For companies (at least here in Australia), it's the environmental laws and agencies that are having a similar effect. All it takes is a complaint from an anonymous member of the public and the business can be shut down, or restricted to the point where it is no longer economical. Recent examples:
- Long-standing pubs having their licences revoked because of complaints of noise from nearby residents who only recently moved in.
- Rural agricultural businesses being refused licences to operate because of 'smell'
and the mother of all examples recently: the shutting down of the entire live cattle export industry because of a TV report showing cruelty to the exported animals further down the processing chain.
It seems the same 'environmental' laws are being used in this case too, which is also a pretty scary thing.
So a release of genuine, authentic emails and files from a known, authentic, highly-respected member of the climatology community was 'manufactured'. How?
Phil Jones has confirmed that the Climategate material is genuine. What exactly was manufactured?
The timing may have been driven by a desire to derail Copenhagen, but then if anyone with an ounce of morals had been able to read the content of those emails they would have been duty-bound to attempt to derail Copenhagen.
And if there is no evidence that 'the usual suspects' financed it, maybe that's because it wasn't financed by the usual suspects, but was a genuine act by a genuine whistleblower?
Yeah, we can't stop laughing over here at what you lot are doing with our Ugg hats...
I was nearly shot by UK police. For wearing a long black coat in an off-licence, and then removing it a little hastily when challenged by two armed policemen. The copper who nearly snuffed me let me sit in the back of the car while I got over the shock and told me he nearly pulled the trigger.
Trust me, you can be shot by the UK police without even having a gun on you.
Not that I'm criticising, I couldn't do their job. But they need to do it properly.
So you posted your question, a lot of experienced people came back with sensible, reasoned arguments from their personal experiences running their own mail servers, and you label them 'assholes' because their experiences don't mesh with your dreams?
Why the hell did you even ask the question?
Good luck with your mailserver, please let us know 5 years down the track when you finally realise that your freedom to run a mailserver of your choice is also a spammer's freedom to splurt adverts all over your server and you get fed up of wiping their freedom off your inbox every morning.
We wouldn't want Australians playing violent video games, would we? It might turn them into criminals!
Wow, that's pathetic. You haven't posted for over 3 years, and thought that was *the* thing you needed to say now?
And nice manipulation of the Streisand Effect by the publishers.
"Kids there's a really gory violent game here!"
plus bonus:
"If it's not violent enough for you, don't blame us! It's the gubmint!"
Serial facepalm. I give up.
Depends on your customer base. My customers all run Windows and have .Net framework already installed. .Net application, framework v3.5' .Net?'
Any conversation with their IT departments go along the lines of:
'what's the deployment impact?'
'it's a
'Cool, no impact then'.
I love Python as a language, and I'd love to develop in it, but that conversation would go along the lines of:
'what's the deployment impact?'
'it's a Python app'
'hmmm, OK, we'll be adding 3 months to your deployment phase while we approve Python apps for deployment on the SOE and get that rolled out. Have you considered using
If you're doing retail coding and you really care about the 10% market share that don't use Windows, then platform neutrality is important. For pretty much all commercial coding it's just not important. 99% of your customers will be on Windows and the other 1% will be used to handling Windows apps even if they don't like it.
Of course, if you're doing mobile development then your picture is vastly different, and there are no platform-independent solutions anyway.
I've read a great deal on climate change aka global warming and not once have I ever seen humidity and cirrus clouds mentioned as part of it until this guy claimed it was the foundation of it.
Radiation absorbed by new CO2 released into the atmosphere from fossil fuels is the cause, anything else is a red herring distraction, which is what this Tea Party type guy is all about.
You really haven't read enough then, or understood what you've read.
CO2 by itself cannot produce anything more than a small forcing (and we should really be talking about GHG not CO2 here too, because CO2 is only a part of the overall man-made greenhouse gas forcing). If it was just down to GHG we'd see a ~1 degree rise at most. The models predict, however, that this small forcing is being applied in the mid-level atmosphere where it will cause increased humidity, and water vapour is a vastly more effective GHG, which will cause more warming, and therefore more humidity. This is the 'feedback' and the 'tipping point' that we need to avoid.
There are a few uncertainties with this model, however, that haven't been fully ironed out:
- The exact forcing from cloud cover is not known at this point (and I believe TFP referenced in TFA is attempting to address this), and there's even valid questions about whether the net forcing from increased humidity is positive or negative.
- The characteristic mid-atmosphere warming from the GHG can't be confirmed by measurement (the famous 'missing hotspot')
If the feedback from water vapour turns out to be less strong (for example because white clouds reflect more heat back into space than the water absorbs), or if the hotspot never appears (meaning that the models were inaccurate about where the warming would occur), then the catastrophic feedback loops won't occur and we can all stop panicking about it.
Of course, if we all stop panicking about it then a lot of climatologists and envirocrats lose their funding/jobs, and a lot of NGO's (hello Greenpeace) lose their lobbying influence and 'awareness-raising' funding, so I'd imagine there's some significant pressure within those organisations and governments to not let anyone know should the models turn out to be wrong.
I think he's talking about the simulation/game/therapy/learning tool from Ender's Game more than any beefed-up version of WoW. And I bought that as a concept, it worked well and I could see how it could be used to teach difficult concepts as well as explore the child's psyche in a therapeutic manner.
Filled out my form, hopefully it'll make some small difference.
So if a species dies out and disappears from an ecosystem, that's bad for biodiversity and can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Now we find out that if a species that used to be part of an ecosystem re-enters it that's also bad and can potentially cause the collapse of the ecosystem.
Is there *anything* good that can happen to an ecosystem? Surely *some* changes are good?
I have a dyslexic sister who can't read books, she just doesn't relate to the information in the written word. She watches films instead
For her, the world is exactly opposite to yours. The wonders you see in the written word are completely obscured for her, and her ability to be absorbed in a movie is significantly greater than mine (I read a lot).
there's nothing inherently wonderful about the written word. There is something wonderful (and I get as much from books as you do) in our ability to create magical worlds in our heads based on nothing but a description.