more than 100miles/180km from a major body of water [...] flyover country
There will be a few experienced developers who just happen to come from the place and love it so much they are willing to stay there. If, however you are in a hellhole like that and you want to recruit people with the right skills you will likely have to pay double and you will have to pay extra for the recruiting. Companies in Silicon valley are having to open offices in SFO. Do you think they do this because they are unable to compare real estate prices?
Class man. Vote parent up. One of the first on topic Microsoft astroturfers.
And to answer your serious point; It's absolutely fine for someone to post on here on behalf of Microsoft. There certainly used to be quite a few people who would put "I work for Microsoft" in their posts when giving serious answers. The key thing is that if you are benefiting financially from posting you should declare that and just speak directly on behalf of Microsoft. Because the astroturfers don't do that they are deceptive and illegal in quite a number of jurisdictions where Microsoft markets to Slashdot readers.
The fact that Microsoft is willing to use deceptive, illegal practices quite rightly discredits other people who attempt to support Microsoft in forums. Even if someone isn't benefiting directly, it's quite likely they got their viewpoint from someone who did. This is a general poison to the public debate which makes serious discussion more difficult. There is no possible justification for it.
There is already a tendency on Slashdot that any minor technical error in a criticism of Microsoft gets picked on. If the astroturfers left this alone, this would provide more than sufficieint balance. As it is, I think that the underlying motivation is mostly to misdirect discussion making the astroturfers equivalent to forum trolls.
They are full of uranium hexafluoride, a gas. No possibility of it going critical.
I have a small hobby. I occasionally fact check interesting things nuclear advocates say on Slashdot. The problem with this hobby is it scares me. For example; uranium hexafluoride, it turns out, crystallises as a solid at room temperature (so could easily form a critical mass) an there have even been experiments with using it directly in nuclear reactors which means it must be able to go critical.
Please explain how my understanding is wrong. I would really appreciate being wrong.
Well; the projects mentioned in the post are actually more like Netscape; they've thrown the software over the wall and will be abandoned, but a different project will take on where they left off. Mer is the Mozilla project equivalent and Nemo or one of the other Mer based products will be the Firefox equivalent.
What's key here is that they have fully open software running on real hardware. From here there's actually a chance of moving forward. Also they aren't tied to any particular manufacturer so they won't be killed by some management whim.
I really didn't make this up. I actually did the calculation:
He said that Apple will continue growing at 60% yearly. I looked at the numbers. The world GDP is about 60-65 Trillion dollars. Apple has revenue of 108 billion. If you do 108 billion * ( 1.6 ^ 14 ) you get 77 trillion dollars. So by his prediction of ongoing 60% growth, 14 years from now Apple's revenue will exceed the entire size of the world economy today. I would say they will need to discover some new export markets to achieve this.
Apple could easily continue 60% growth rates year after year just from the growth the phone ALONE
Lovely; This is exactly the logic which used to predict that the dot coms would soon be larger than the entire world economy. With your prediction Apple's revenue will be larger than the entire world GDP today in less than a decade and a half. I'm assuming that by then the aliens will have made themselves known and put in some extremely large inter-galactic orders?
You've been taken in by the GMO lobby to at least some extent. The farmer completely openly admitted to knowing there were round up resistant plants. He said that he had discovered this by spraying the edge around his filed and finding that some of his own corn survived. After that he admitted to spraying part of his own field with round up to see what happened.
Now, the question is, what should he do at that stage? What is he allowed to do? if Monsanto negligently allows it's genes to escape into his field and contaminate his crop does he have any responsibility to care for Monsanto's genes. Morally the answer is clearly no. Unless Monsanto is offering him full access to free cleanup facilities to remove the contamination he should have no duty to them. If Monsanto had a history as a friendly helpful company then he might have a moral duty to contact them to ask to be made right. As it is they are a lawsuit happy company with a history of crushing small farmers, he has only a duty to do his best to survive.
Okay; so let's look at how he could proceed now. I can see three choices
Try to filter for non-roundup resistant canola
Try to filter for roundup resistant canola
Ignore the problem.
If he ignores the problem then he ends up with a crop which is nor roundup resistant but cannot be sold as GMO free. This makes it much less valuable since he gets neither the financial benefit of being able to call it "organic" nor the industrial agriculture benefits of being able to get rid of weeds with herbicides.
Trying to filter for non-resistant crops is almost impossible. He can't be sure that he hasn't got some regressive genes which are hiding resistance which will come out in a future generation. He also can't use Roundup to do the filtering since that will kill his target crop, not the one he wants rid of. Actually, in principle he can; but he has to grow multiple generations and get rid of the siblings of roundup resistant crops. This will take him years and so is completely impractical.
So what's he left with? Make the best of a bad lot and go for the resistant crop. Does he know that's illegal? No he doesn't; there's no pre-existing case law, and natural justice is clearly on his side. Why should he pay for the mistakes of Monsanto? Now we know the truth of course. The law is clear. What big companies do to little people is legal. What little people try to do against the wishes of big companies is mostly illegal.
Small but important note to your comment. It wasn't actually Wikileaks that released all of the cables. That was done by the Guardian newspaper which had been enlisted by Wikileaks precisely because they promised to filter the leaks.
farmers intentionally planted seed which they knew contained unlicensed genetic material
Lets parse that a little shall we.
The farmer had a field next to a GMO field. The plants in the farmers own field got contaminated. Yes the farmer "knew about it" but it wasn't his fault and there was nothing he could do to stop it. There certainly weren't Monsanto reps running around offering to filter his seeds for free to identify which ones were GMO contaminated and which ones weren't.
Now when you say "intentionally planted"; what you mean is that the farmer took his only seeds; the ones which were contaminated; and then planted them. So in the end, if the farmer wanted to use his own seeds from his own field he had no choice apart from "intentionally" planting seeds which had been knowingly contaminated by Monsatnto.
Blaming the farmer is deeply disingenuous here. If Monsanto wants control of it's own genes then it should be responsible for ensuring that they don't contaminate other people's crops.
Generally you are right and the OP is pretty silly. However, the thing you are missing is that in our feeds we see the posts. In the Government feeds they see the post, browser information and originating IP address.
No event in any nuclear reactor that has ever happened can happen in one.
WTF. Where did you get this from? Twenty seconds of research shows the Monju Nuclear Power incident which was a fire caused by a liquid sodium leak. That can obviously repeat in any sodium cooled reactor.
This is not Wikipedia and you can Google before you ask for it. Whilst you or I wouldn't cry if Apple's app store profit was all we made next year, it's not exactly a major deal for Apple.
I think that's a Whoosh. His source is the same as almost everybody else's here (nuclear industry propaganda). He's just being up front about it and making a joke at the same time. Have a look at the numbers that keep being quoted for nuclear safety (less than two deaths in the last decade against the fully integrated numbers for coal including mining and so on) and compare them with the size of the nuclear construction projects. You can see that more people must have been killed in limestone quarrying alone just to make the containment domes.
Ramming whaling boats in international waters ("Non-violence"? "Civil disobedience"?) like common pirates?
Greenpeace does not ram. I think the organisation that you are looking for is Sea Shepard and even they, whilst they do try to stop "legal"/"scientific" whaling with dangerous direct action only tend to actually ram long term illegal whaling vessels.
But don't let facts get in the way of our big Greenpeace hate fest / Nuclear love in.
No they didn't. They paid up fully and automatically. First they blocked his account:
The team tried – unsuccessfully – to call Craig on his mobile. After several attempts to contact him, Craig’s bank account was frozen. The fraud unit eventually reached him on a landline.
Then they sorted everything out and paid for everything automatically.
Craig is satisfied that CommBank has done everything it can to resolve his specific matter, and he applauded the work of the bank's fraud squad.
They had even been part of a group which had investigated the MNP security fixes available but decided not to implement them because of security problems.
“We explored the Mobile Number Portability Database and decided not to progress the solution at the time due to limitations which we believed may have exposed our customers to undue risk," the spokesman said.
I hate banks in general as much as the next man in the times of this crisis induced by some of them but lets at least blame them for the evil things that they really have done. This is not one of them.
no form of security is absolutely 100% perfect in every way..
Right; but that's not something new. No bank vault has ever been 100% safe either. The difference is that the bank takes responsibility for that so they ensure that it's "good enough", whatever that means. If money gets stolen from the bank vault they don't say "oh that was money from your account; sorry". With electronic security, there's often a level where they blame the failure of their own security measures on "identity theft" and make it the customer's responsibility. Two factor authentication of this kind is fine for a transaction of a few thousand dollars; It's not enough for transactions of hundreds of thousands of dollars. For 45k AUD that's a judgement call. `
This case is not like most American and some European banks though; Commonwealth Bank discovered the problem its self, is paying off the cost of the transaction and, even so, warned their customer. When they take the responsibility for the losses then what systems to use or not use become their commercial judgement. They looked at an MNP security system and decided there was something wrong with it. Maybe they now change their mind, maybe not. That's exactly the right thing. Hopefully they can persuade Vodafone to at least send a text message warning customers that their number is being ported before they actually do it in future.
I take "controlled by" to have little to do with who's internally running the parties. Look at corporate donors; most of these donate to both Republicans and Democrats and often do so quite equally. They tend to get the things that they want. Go out into the street and ask random Americans what issues they find pressing. I doubt you will find "music piracy" or "film piracy" mentioned even by one percent. The US politicians, both Democrat and Republican, however, see this as such an important issue that it has come up repeatedly in the past few years. These are the people who are really "controlling" the parties.
"AMERICAN POST OFFICE - The American Letter Mail company has established post offices in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston, and will transmit letters daily from each city to the others - twice a day between New York and Philadelphia. Postage 6 1/4 cents per each half-ounce, payable in advance always. Stamps 20 for a dollar." [my emphasis]
Looking at the material it seems the American Letter Mail company never provided universal mail. You have an exception which proves the rule (in the original sense of the phrase).
Here's me in the very first response to your first post.
We used to have "networked hard disks" or "file servers". Then we started having cloud servers which did the same but you lost the personal control. Now the marketing people started selling a "personal cloud" which is in fact exactly what you were selling originally
Here's you.
Not the same at all.
So it seems, from your rather unclear last post, that the stuff said in the very beginning of this post finally got through to you.
Now let's see what you say now:
You didn't even look at the link you're talking about, did you. Western Digital's personal cloud storage is,a local hard drive.
Well; that depends what you mean by local storage. It's actually Gigabit Ethernet attached; it may or may not be local. So it's quite probable that you didn't even read the product description of the system you are talking about at the moment that you are accusing someone else of not having read it.
But, let's be charitable and assume that, as an educationally subnormal person, by "local storage" you meant "can be connected to locally". In which case you have just tried to argue the point I made in my original post against me. We now agree that the new WD could storage is the same as having a personal file server or NAS.
To be frank, I'm all up for a flamefest, but you aren't even funny. Could you at least try a bit harder. You act like the only insult you know is "moron" and you probably don't even know what it means. You might want to start with an insult dictionary so that, even if your shining wit doesn't exactly come through, you can at least vary your postings a little bit.
What you say is of course correct; but these "rights" are not fundamental rights in the sense of freedom of speech. They are constructed limited rights given out by society in return for the benefit derived from them. Since the copyright holders as a class are failing to deliver that benefit, for example due to the fact that they use DRM, and since these rights are being maintained largely through lobbying and effective bribery of the political classes, these rights are often being obtained fraudulently and should be revoked.
The Swiss, in this case, have not been convinced that the recording industry is giving the benefit that it needs to give in order to earn it's "rights". This is a very interesting example of actual democracy in action.
Ah; you are being obtuse. We are comparing cloud storage as a product with "personal cloud storage" as an advertised product of Western digital and with a standard old fashioned networked file server. If you buy "cloud storage" as in Amazon S3 or sugarsync then obviously that storage isn't local. You would need an intelligence level where the local slugs would start laughing at to think that we were discussing about local hard disks.
a) This doesn't have anything to do with the end user agreement. The court will look at what you could reasonably expect in the way of rights. When you change to access another person's information there will be no question you don't have authorization b) people actually have been prosecuted for this type of thing; this isn't a question it's settled case law.
Slashdot Mirror
more than 100miles/180km from a major body of water [...] flyover country
There will be a few experienced developers who just happen to come from the place and love it so much they are willing to stay there. If, however you are in a hellhole like that and you want to recruit people with the right skills you will likely have to pay double and you will have to pay extra for the recruiting. Companies in Silicon valley are having to open offices in SFO. Do you think they do this because they are unable to compare real estate prices?
Gosh; wow; a real human being using his own moral judgement. The horror; the evil. Execute him immediately.
Class man. Vote parent up. One of the first on topic Microsoft astroturfers.
And to answer your serious point; It's absolutely fine for someone to post on here on behalf of Microsoft. There certainly used to be quite a few people who would put "I work for Microsoft" in their posts when giving serious answers. The key thing is that if you are benefiting financially from posting you should declare that and just speak directly on behalf of Microsoft. Because the astroturfers don't do that they are deceptive and illegal in quite a number of jurisdictions where Microsoft markets to Slashdot readers.
The fact that Microsoft is willing to use deceptive, illegal practices quite rightly discredits other people who attempt to support Microsoft in forums. Even if someone isn't benefiting directly, it's quite likely they got their viewpoint from someone who did. This is a general poison to the public debate which makes serious discussion more difficult. There is no possible justification for it.
There is already a tendency on Slashdot that any minor technical error in a criticism of Microsoft gets picked on. If the astroturfers left this alone, this would provide more than sufficieint balance. As it is, I think that the underlying motivation is mostly to misdirect discussion making the astroturfers equivalent to forum trolls.
They are full of uranium hexafluoride, a gas. No possibility of it going critical.
I have a small hobby. I occasionally fact check interesting things nuclear advocates say on Slashdot. The problem with this hobby is it scares me. For example; uranium hexafluoride, it turns out, crystallises as a solid at room temperature (so could easily form a critical mass) an there have even been experiments with using it directly in nuclear reactors which means it must be able to go critical.
Please explain how my understanding is wrong. I would really appreciate being wrong.
What's key here is that they have fully open software running on real hardware. From here there's actually a chance of moving forward. Also they aren't tied to any particular manufacturer so they won't be killed by some management whim.
I really didn't make this up. I actually did the calculation:
He said that Apple will continue growing at 60% yearly. I looked at the numbers. The world GDP is about 60-65 Trillion dollars. Apple has revenue of 108 billion. If you do 108 billion * ( 1.6 ^ 14 ) you get 77 trillion dollars. So by his prediction of ongoing 60% growth, 14 years from now Apple's revenue will exceed the entire size of the world economy today. I would say they will need to discover some new export markets to achieve this.
Apple could easily continue 60% growth rates year after year just from the growth the phone ALONE
Lovely; This is exactly the logic which used to predict that the dot coms would soon be larger than the entire world economy. With your prediction Apple's revenue will be larger than the entire world GDP today in less than a decade and a half. I'm assuming that by then the aliens will have made themselves known and put in some extremely large inter-galactic orders?
You've been taken in by the GMO lobby to at least some extent. The farmer completely openly admitted to knowing there were round up resistant plants. He said that he had discovered this by spraying the edge around his filed and finding that some of his own corn survived. After that he admitted to spraying part of his own field with round up to see what happened.
Now, the question is, what should he do at that stage? What is he allowed to do? if Monsanto negligently allows it's genes to escape into his field and contaminate his crop does he have any responsibility to care for Monsanto's genes. Morally the answer is clearly no. Unless Monsanto is offering him full access to free cleanup facilities to remove the contamination he should have no duty to them. If Monsanto had a history as a friendly helpful company then he might have a moral duty to contact them to ask to be made right. As it is they are a lawsuit happy company with a history of crushing small farmers, he has only a duty to do his best to survive.
Okay; so let's look at how he could proceed now. I can see three choices
If he ignores the problem then he ends up with a crop which is nor roundup resistant but cannot be sold as GMO free. This makes it much less valuable since he gets neither the financial benefit of being able to call it "organic" nor the industrial agriculture benefits of being able to get rid of weeds with herbicides.
Trying to filter for non-resistant crops is almost impossible. He can't be sure that he hasn't got some regressive genes which are hiding resistance which will come out in a future generation. He also can't use Roundup to do the filtering since that will kill his target crop, not the one he wants rid of. Actually, in principle he can; but he has to grow multiple generations and get rid of the siblings of roundup resistant crops. This will take him years and so is completely impractical.
So what's he left with? Make the best of a bad lot and go for the resistant crop. Does he know that's illegal? No he doesn't; there's no pre-existing case law, and natural justice is clearly on his side. Why should he pay for the mistakes of Monsanto? Now we know the truth of course. The law is clear. What big companies do to little people is legal. What little people try to do against the wishes of big companies is mostly illegal.
Small but important note to your comment. It wasn't actually Wikileaks that released all of the cables. That was done by the Guardian newspaper which had been enlisted by Wikileaks precisely because they promised to filter the leaks.
farmers intentionally planted seed which they knew contained unlicensed genetic material
Lets parse that a little shall we.
The farmer had a field next to a GMO field. The plants in the farmers own field got contaminated. Yes the farmer "knew about it" but it wasn't his fault and there was nothing he could do to stop it. There certainly weren't Monsanto reps running around offering to filter his seeds for free to identify which ones were GMO contaminated and which ones weren't.
Now when you say "intentionally planted"; what you mean is that the farmer took his only seeds; the ones which were contaminated; and then planted them. So in the end, if the farmer wanted to use his own seeds from his own field he had no choice apart from "intentionally" planting seeds which had been knowingly contaminated by Monsatnto.
Blaming the farmer is deeply disingenuous here. If Monsanto wants control of it's own genes then it should be responsible for ensuring that they don't contaminate other people's crops.
Generally you are right and the OP is pretty silly. However, the thing you are missing is that in our feeds we see the posts. In the Government feeds they see the post, browser information and originating IP address.
No event in any nuclear reactor that has ever happened can happen in one.
WTF. Where did you get this from? Twenty seconds of research shows the Monju Nuclear Power incident which was a fire caused by a liquid sodium leak. That can obviously repeat in any sodium cooled reactor.
"Professionals" means that, unlike us slashdot posters, they get paid for being insane.
This is not Wikipedia and you can Google before you ask for it. Whilst you or I wouldn't cry if Apple's app store profit was all we made next year, it's not exactly a major deal for Apple.
I think that's a Whoosh. His source is the same as almost everybody else's here (nuclear industry propaganda). He's just being up front about it and making a joke at the same time. Have a look at the numbers that keep being quoted for nuclear safety (less than two deaths in the last decade against the fully integrated numbers for coal including mining and so on) and compare them with the size of the nuclear construction projects. You can see that more people must have been killed in limestone quarrying alone just to make the containment domes.
'cos the only pages I can find about are pretty pro concentrated solar power and the rest of the pages against the Mojave desert development seem to be from oil lobby groups.
Ramming whaling boats in international waters ("Non-violence"? "Civil disobedience"?) like common pirates?
Greenpeace does not ram. I think the organisation that you are looking for is Sea Shepard and even they, whilst they do try to stop "legal"/"scientific" whaling with dangerous direct action only tend to actually ram long term illegal whaling vessels.
But don't let facts get in the way of our big Greenpeace hate fest / Nuclear love in.
So the banks say it's not their problem,
No they didn't. They paid up fully and automatically. First they blocked his account:
The team tried – unsuccessfully – to call Craig on his mobile. After several attempts to contact him, Craig’s bank account was frozen. The fraud unit eventually reached him on a landline.
Then they sorted everything out and paid for everything automatically.
Craig is satisfied that CommBank has done everything it can to resolve his specific matter, and he applauded the work of the bank's fraud squad.
They had even been part of a group which had investigated the MNP security fixes available but decided not to implement them because of security problems.
“We explored the Mobile Number Portability Database and decided not to progress the solution at the time due to limitations which we believed may have exposed our customers to undue risk," the spokesman said.
I hate banks in general as much as the next man in the times of this crisis induced by some of them but lets at least blame them for the evil things that they really have done. This is not one of them.
no form of security is absolutely 100% perfect in every way..
Right; but that's not something new. No bank vault has ever been 100% safe either. The difference is that the bank takes responsibility for that so they ensure that it's "good enough", whatever that means. If money gets stolen from the bank vault they don't say "oh that was money from your account; sorry". With electronic security, there's often a level where they blame the failure of their own security measures on "identity theft" and make it the customer's responsibility. Two factor authentication of this kind is fine for a transaction of a few thousand dollars; It's not enough for transactions of hundreds of thousands of dollars. For 45k AUD that's a judgement call. `
This case is not like most American and some European banks though; Commonwealth Bank discovered the problem its self, is paying off the cost of the transaction and, even so, warned their customer. When they take the responsibility for the losses then what systems to use or not use become their commercial judgement. They looked at an MNP security system and decided there was something wrong with it. Maybe they now change their mind, maybe not. That's exactly the right thing. Hopefully they can persuade Vodafone to at least send a text message warning customers that their number is being ported before they actually do it in future.
I take "controlled by" to have little to do with who's internally running the parties. Look at corporate donors; most of these donate to both Republicans and Democrats and often do so quite equally. They tend to get the things that they want. Go out into the street and ask random Americans what issues they find pressing. I doubt you will find "music piracy" or "film piracy" mentioned even by one percent. The US politicians, both Democrat and Republican, however, see this as such an important issue that it has come up repeatedly in the past few years. These are the people who are really "controlling" the parties.
Looking at the material it seems the American Letter Mail company never provided universal mail. You have an exception which proves the rule (in the original sense of the phrase).
God you are slow.
Here's me in the very first response to your first post.
Here's you.
So it seems, from your rather unclear last post, that the stuff said in the very beginning of this post finally got through to you.
Now let's see what you say now:
Well; that depends what you mean by local storage. It's actually Gigabit Ethernet attached; it may or may not be local. So it's quite probable that you didn't even read the product description of the system you are talking about at the moment that you are accusing someone else of not having read it.
But, let's be charitable and assume that, as an educationally subnormal person, by "local storage" you meant "can be connected to locally". In which case you have just tried to argue the point I made in my original post against me. We now agree that the new WD could storage is the same as having a personal file server or NAS.
To be frank, I'm all up for a flamefest, but you aren't even funny. Could you at least try a bit harder. You act like the only insult you know is "moron" and you probably don't even know what it means. You might want to start with an insult dictionary so that, even if your shining wit doesn't exactly come through, you can at least vary your postings a little bit.
What you say is of course correct; but these "rights" are not fundamental rights in the sense of freedom of speech. They are constructed limited rights given out by society in return for the benefit derived from them. Since the copyright holders as a class are failing to deliver that benefit, for example due to the fact that they use DRM, and since these rights are being maintained largely through lobbying and effective bribery of the political classes, these rights are often being obtained fraudulently and should be revoked.
The Swiss, in this case, have not been convinced that the recording industry is giving the benefit that it needs to give in order to earn it's "rights". This is a very interesting example of actual democracy in action.
Ah; you are being obtuse. We are comparing cloud storage as a product with "personal cloud storage" as an advertised product of Western digital and with a standard old fashioned networked file server. If you buy "cloud storage" as in Amazon S3 or sugarsync then obviously that storage isn't local. You would need an intelligence level where the local slugs would start laughing at to think that we were discussing about local hard disks.
a) This doesn't have anything to do with the end user agreement. The court will look at what you could reasonably expect in the way of rights. When you change to access another person's information there will be no question you don't have authorization b) people actually have been prosecuted for this type of thing; this isn't a question it's settled case law.