> The current (well-supported) suspicion of banks and stock traders gives the whole article a sinister patina, e.g. "the banks were keeping upgrades and downgrades secret, but theflyonthewall was exposing the information before the brandy-and-cigars set could fully exploit it!"
So we want the public to be well-informed, but not too well informed? This will let the investment bankers keep their dirty little secrets secret for just a bit longer while they offload stock. The public won't know until the stock price dives. Preventing these *facts* from being published flies in the face of an open society. It shows what a dirty rigged game the stock market plays, and how the judiciary and congress plays along with it.
Another example is High Frequency Trading aka Zero Latency trading lets investment banks (not you) set up their computers right next to the NYSE's computers so they get advance notice of a few milliseconds of buy orders. They then buy big and when the other orders come in, the investment banks have already bought all the stock and onsell with a fat mark up. Amazing what these guys get away with, and that congress and the public let them get away with it. Despite the bawling about the bailout, the banks got everything they wanted and are still paying themselves obscene bonuses. Politicians profess outrage but never force their hand. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
The whole market is so rigged the only way the public can make a profit is when *everything* is going up. A good quote by boom roadkill: "We used to we were geniuses the stocks we bought always went up. Then when the bubble burst we looked back and realized it didn't matter what we bought, because everything went up anyway."
Sadly I know quite a few that have never coded. They don't see it as important. Anyone can look at a UML diagram and add arrows. Coding, well, that's grunt work when all the design work has been done.
> It seems everyone wants to be a "software engineer", but nobody wants to focus on the "hard stuff", and instead chant "let java/X do it for you".
Programming titles are getting very wanky: Software Developer, Software Engineer, Software Architect, Senior Software Enterprise Architect, etc. The frightening thing is you'll need some of these who have never coded in their life, but feel qualified to design software for others to write.
At heart, we're all programmers and those designers that know bugger all about software should really choose another career.
Don't expect it fixed... ever! In 2005 bought a "top end" Nvidia card that worked fine most of the time, but occasionally it would go through fits where it threw up a BSOD announcing an infinite loop was detected in the display driver nv4_disp.dll.
Many reported it to nVidia - me included - but they ignored everyone through every avenue. The bug stayed there through releases of new generation nVidia cards, and Google shows people still finding the bug and trying to "fix" it to this day.
I can only presume nVidia knew about it, but the problem would have required a card recall. So they just ignored it and kept selling the buggy cards. Many solutions were suggested by users, posted and tried, but none worked. No solutions ever came from nVidia, who wouldn't say a word on the issue. Their FAQ fobbed you off to the OEM who of course had no clue. Last time I checked you couldn't even submit a bug report through their site. They may be successful, but they have the worst tech support ever. Don't expect a fix. In the end I tossed the card.
This is proving to be an ongoing public relations disaster for Toyota. If they don't take meaningful action, vastly exceeding the expectations of the public, a well-respected brand name's reputation for safety/reliability is going to end up in the trash. Releasing the interface to read the black boxes contents (in read only mode) would be a good start. I don't say this as a geek who has a fetish for tabulating acceleration data, but as a nervous driver.
Yes, Toyota could be sued, but it's going to be sued anyway. Evasion won't change the outcome of the law suits, but it will go a long way to restoring their brand's reputation.
Instead of getting off my lawn, sit down and I'll tell you kids a story: In the Good ole days Adobe and it's founder John Warnock (or Warnock's Algorithm fame) were heroes. At the time most of us had ugly dot matrix printers and fixed fonts, they came up with the PostScript printer description language and many beautiful fonts. Buy a Postscript printer and you could print beautiful documents previously only typesetters could. When Apple licensed it for their laser printer desktop publishing took off. Warnock cared about beautiful fonts. Postscript was a full-blown programming language, yet a very efficient one. PDF itself *is* Postscript, just encapsulated in a file.
But Adobe then isn't Adobe now. Their Adobe Reader is an appalling, fat, unresponsive hard to drive piece of software. Ever configured options? There are twenty off preference pages with no coherent grouping. They still haven't grasped things like reopening the document where you last were reading it, or letting you add bookmarks. Instead they've loaded Adobe with a tonne of "features" to the point it's now a trojan horse vector. The company itself is no longer a source of innovation: Instead they just buy out other companies (like Macromedia Flash) and then run them into the ground. Their software uniformly suffers from appalling GUIs (or if it doesn't when they buy it, they shortly will) e.g. Photoshop, but when you're that big you can afford to be that arrogant. People will buy your software anyway, because they don't have a choice.
Yes, there are some PDF Reader imitators like Foxit Software. While they're much faster, they have copied the Adobe interface instead of themselves innovating.
The Adobe Updater is an intrusive pain in the ass. In a previous version, you had to connect to the net and then connect to Adobe to turn off the Updater. This was "free" software, so this wasn't for licensing: It was just lame in-your-face programming by lame programmers. If you try and deleted the Updater yourself, it reinstalled itself. In the end I found out if you deleted it (in your Program Files directory) and then replace plain files with directories and directories with plain files so when it goes try and reinstall itself Windows tells it to get lost.
It's that they just don't get Privacy. Yes, we love Google search, GMail and that Beta stuff they do. But they just don't get privacy. To quote Google Executive Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
The trouble is, as the very first post described, we all do things in everyday life we don't want the world to know. Things we're perfectly entitled to do. But Google don't get it. I haven't used Google Docs because I'm scared there's some setting somewhere I won't know to turn off which will expose my documents to the world. Same concerns with GMail. Yahoo might hand your details over to the Chinese Government, but at least you don't need to worry about them telling *everyone* you've ever e-mailed! If a company ever did that, of course it would be Google.
Google is the sort of company that would break into your house and stick a webcam in your toilet "So you can socialize with your friends when you're sitting on the can." And they would be shocked when the people who find out about it object to it. The public is still largely ignorant about privacy, but with incidents like this slowly they will wake up. Google really needs to hire some serious Privacy experts to counterbalance people like Schmidt who can only see the dollars and not the bigger picture. Right now the best way for an upstart to beat Google is to offer everything they do but with the Privacy settings on max.
You would think Quantum Mechanics would be one subject so mind-bogglingly difficult you definitely would not want any errors in your text, but McGraw Hill's "Quantum Mechanics Demystified" (a cram guide) is so riddled with errors it's ridiculous. Worse, in years they haven't bothered fixing these and are continuing to sell the same error plagued edition:
This puts to sleep the myth that publishers are guardians of quality control. For many books I would encourage you to check out reader reviews before you purchase because you won't believe the number of textbooks being published today that are riddled with errors.
There was one I heard... a pregnant woman thought she could fix a washing machine, but she got electrocuted. Her and her fetus died. HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH!!! WHAT AN IDIOT!!!! HAHAHAHHAHAH!!!
That's a real story, and like the Darwin Awards, I don't think it's funny at all.
The vast majority of bacteria are either harmless or beneficial to their human host. Only a very small number of bacteria are pathogenic, and most of the time your body does a great job keeping those out. Here's a great book for bacteria spotters, amateur and pro, which tells you how to find bacteria without a microscope.
Though the story is newsworthy, this has the misleading title of the century. They didn't unlock it. They sequenced it. There's a big, big difference. It's the difference between having a map of South America and doing Sharon Stone on the throne of the Lost City of Gold.
Refer your boss to the programming classic "Peopleware." Music does hurt your ability to solve certain coding problems, but for others it doesn't make any difference (mundane coding or data entry). So listen and turn it off when you need to think. Trouble is the other noise in cubicle land: phone calls, chit chat, socialites, loud meetings and other people with music turned up. When you need silence there is no escape. I listen to music to try to drown this crap out.
> As for dumbass decisions, I can only say I've heard of a number of decisions at the national level, even at the supreme court, I strongly disagree with, but only because either the law wasn't clear and the case was incredibly difficult, or the case was politically motivated.
Like the Bush Florida thing? Hardly the court's proudest moment, but I was speaking from the Australian perspective.
If you would like an example of how far above everyone else these pompous asses consider themselves, check this out. Barristers got immunity from negligence, and this was gifted by the High Court itself. Their reasoning for granting their own profession (but no one else's, like say, Doctors) was that the public deserved "finality of decision." No nasty, unsightly having a barristers conduct challenged. The public just has to suck on it. No other profession gets away with that. One justice dissented, but the others were all for it. Politicians didn't make that law up. That was a finding of the High Court. If you want an example of pompous superiority, look no further:
As for bad decisions, yeah, I would hope most decisions are reasonable, but they make some incredibly reckless decisions and here once you're appointed a judge it's extremely rare to be removed. Read the papers here and pretty much every day you'll hear some howler decision. No in theory a bad judge can be removed, but in all my life I've only ever heard of 2 cases where that happened. Anyone else doing a bad job would be fired. Judges are 'above the law'. In theory this protects them from political interference, and they're trusted to look after themselves. Fox Henhouse.
> Every time I hear a judge screech "*My* court" or make a dumb ass decision Are you a lawyer, court reporter, or bailiff? Here at least, when challenged, yes, they really say that and it speaks volumes about their attitude. It's not their court. It's the taxpayers' court. They're nothing more than any other public servant. And really I get tired of this guff that they "work hard and are underpaid." You can say that of nearly any profession: even the poor bastard stacking groceries at 2am. Truth is you could probably cut judges salary by 1/10th and the civil courts which are useless would still be clogged up, but since the general public seldom gets to use them so what?
> You couldn't possible be American since American judges don't wear wigs. No, but they do have the black power capes. This, like the wigs, is supposed inspire respect and awe in you.
> I agree but that's not the judge's fault, at least not in the US anyway, and I'm not sure how that would be the Judge's fault in any system that was borrowed from the British either. This is a topic for a completely different conversation.
But highly relevant because judges and lawyers block changes that would interrupt in their gravy train. I've heard justice delayed is justice denied, but so is justice you can't afford. Here the civil courts spend a lot of time entertaining big companies in pissing contents, while Q.C.'s charge rates that are beyond ludicrous. Richard Ackland who writes for Fairfax is a lawyer and has had a lot of really bad stuff to say about the profession, amongst them the gentlemans club which hands out Q.C.'s for mates. It's just a license to print money, and it's hard to even get a lawyer to sit down with you to discuss a case. If they can see you can't pay their $300 an hour, they'll show you the door. The judicial system has become a money making enterprise which is has precious little to do with "justice".
I've been through the courts, and occasionally I have to engage lawyers for commercial disputes. This is where my contempt comes. The legal system is all about serving judges and lawyers. It's not about justice. Do you really think the legal system lives up to that idea? It really needs a major o
If you get a microscope, don't buy one at the toystore. These are so gimped that kids can't see anything and will quickly lose interest. Look on eBay where in e.g. India you can buy solid professional grade microscopes for $100. Remember most microbes are transparent, so you either need darkfield cover (just a piece of plastic) and/or a small bottle of Methylene Blue solution otherwise they won't see the bacteria. Further suggestions: Hard to see single bacteria so also get a jar (a petri dish is better but anything with a lid is fine) and some agar (to grow bacteria in). Google is your friend.
Good luck, and kudos to you for getting some toys that will help your kids learn as opposed to the usual crap toy stores are full of these days.
Whether or not they declare it in Facebook, judges and lawyers do "friend" in real life. You have to wonder how often a judge gives a lawyer a break because of this. What the Facebooking of friends does is lift the veil off this and make bias easier to spot. I would say it's a good thing, and what I'd really like to see is computers used for a deeper statistical analysis of courtroom decisions by judges with certain lawyers.
I'm sure the legal profession would hate the very idea of this, but these days judges seemed vastly disconnected from society. Every time I hear a judge screech "*My* court" or make a dumb ass decision it's apparent they've forgotten they're nothing more than pubic servants, albeit overpaid and wearing silly black capes and/or pompous wigs. This is theater only the very rich can afford to participate in. The whole legal system needs to be tossed out on it's ass and reinvented from scratch.
It was created by a knave of a Federal Government who thought they could introduce competition into the Australian Telecommunications market (then controlled by Telstra aka Telecom) by regulating to introduce just *one* competitor: Optus. The idea was that Telstra and Optus would fight each other with lower prices and better service. Instead both just sat on their hands and a monopoly became a cozy duopoly. Even though the market was opened up, these two fat, lazy and arrogant companies still dominate the market.
Optus has been a terrible teleco ever since inception. Its broadband packages are amongst the worst in the country. It's offerings are overpriced and plagued with poor service. They're arrogant to boot: Whenever they do screw up their PR is terrible. They're unethical too (which is to say they're criminal, but being a big company with good lawyers mean you can break the law with a slap on the wrist at worst case).
Like this one: Incredible, but Optus conspired to have phone sex calls made by aussies to International Numbers *diverted to their own phone sex partner!* That's right, when you saw Hot Monica advertizing at 2AM on Channel 10 and called, your call was diverted from the advertizer and ended up fattening Optus's profits. Sounds as illegal as hell. Yes: This is Australia's #2 Teleco:
"In an earlier case, Justice Robert McDougall was much harsher with Bragg, saying he had no regard for the truth, except for when it suited him. In this case Optus was forced to pay millions to Gilsan after it was found to have skimmed money from Gilsan by under-reporting the number of minutes porn clients were on the phone so Optus could take home a larger share of the profits."
Ha ha. Ok. Let me correct that. They're used to be a successful imitator. Now that's an unsuccessful imitator: Whatever Google is doing with 'Live' in front of it. O/S's that have been on a downwards trend since XP. Office has been getting worse since 2000 and help is still so bad I have to use Google to get my Word Help! And now they're trying to bribe people to use their crap products.
Google on one side. Microsoft and Murdoch on the other. Gee... I wonder who the public will side with?
Sure, Microsoft once beat Mozilla who was burning up cash, but that memory will loom large with Google who has bucketloads of cash and more importantly: smarter people that those old dinosaurs. Microsoft these days is a poor imitator. News Corp is irrelevant unless you like spoonfed opinionated news. My money is on Google.
"Solyent Green is Foreskins! Solyent Green is discarded Foreskins! No. Really. They collect them for the keratinocyte stem cells. It's all quite safe."
Doesn't have quite the same punch, but at least it's corrected for accuracy.
> but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."
Are you sure? You may find Microsoft do the same thing here and just strip the Linux functionality out. When Microsoft took over Connectix and their excellent Virtual PC Software and proceeded to strip Linux functionality (that was already there) out of the product. On the Connectix version there was a Linux utility that handled control back to Windows when the CPU was idle. On the Microsoft version they took that out, so the CPU always ran at 100%. It made Virtual PC useless for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
> The current (well-supported) suspicion of banks and stock traders gives the whole article a sinister patina, e.g. "the banks were keeping upgrades and downgrades secret, but theflyonthewall was exposing the information before the brandy-and-cigars set could fully exploit it!"
So we want the public to be well-informed, but not too well informed? This will let the investment bankers keep their dirty little secrets secret for just a bit longer while they offload stock. The public won't know until the stock price dives. Preventing these *facts* from being published flies in the face of an open society. It shows what a dirty rigged game the stock market plays, and how the judiciary and congress plays along with it.
Another example is High Frequency Trading aka Zero Latency trading lets investment banks (not you) set up their computers right next to the NYSE's computers so they get advance notice of a few milliseconds of buy orders. They then buy big and when the other orders come in, the investment banks have already bought all the stock and onsell with a fat mark up. Amazing what these guys get away with, and that congress and the public let them get away with it. Despite the bawling about the bailout, the banks got everything they wanted and are still paying themselves obscene bonuses. Politicians profess outrage but never force their hand. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
The whole market is so rigged the only way the public can make a profit is when *everything* is going up. A good quote by boom roadkill: "We used to we were geniuses the stocks we bought always went up. Then when the bubble burst we looked back and realized it didn't matter what we bought, because everything went up anyway."
Sadly I know quite a few that have never coded. They don't see it as important. Anyone can look at a UML diagram and add arrows. Coding, well, that's grunt work when all the design work has been done.
> It seems everyone wants to be a "software engineer", but nobody wants to focus on the "hard stuff", and instead chant "let java/X do it for you".
Programming titles are getting very wanky: Software Developer, Software Engineer, Software Architect, Senior Software Enterprise Architect, etc. The frightening thing is you'll need some of these who have never coded in their life, but feel qualified to design software for others to write.
At heart, we're all programmers and those designers that know bugger all about software should really choose another career.
nVidia don't accept bug reports for Windows.
Don't expect it fixed... ever! In 2005 bought a "top end" Nvidia card that worked fine most of the time, but occasionally it would go through fits where it threw up a BSOD announcing an infinite loop was detected in the display driver nv4_disp.dll.
Many reported it to nVidia - me included - but they ignored everyone through every avenue. The bug stayed there through releases of new generation nVidia cards, and Google shows people still finding the bug and trying to "fix" it to this day.
I can only presume nVidia knew about it, but the problem would have required a card recall. So they just ignored it and kept selling the buggy cards. Many solutions were suggested by users, posted and tried, but none worked. No solutions ever came from nVidia, who wouldn't say a word on the issue. Their FAQ fobbed you off to the OEM who of course had no clue. Last time I checked you couldn't even submit a bug report through their site. They may be successful, but they have the worst tech support ever. Don't expect a fix. In the end I tossed the card.
http://www.google.com/search?q=nvdisp+4+nvidia+bsod
This is proving to be an ongoing public relations disaster for Toyota. If they don't take meaningful action, vastly exceeding the expectations of the public, a well-respected brand name's reputation for safety/reliability is going to end up in the trash. Releasing the interface to read the black boxes contents (in read only mode) would be a good start. I don't say this as a geek who has a fetish for tabulating acceleration data, but as a nervous driver.
Yes, Toyota could be sued, but it's going to be sued anyway. Evasion won't change the outcome of the law suits, but it will go a long way to restoring their brand's reputation.
So in the 1920s the Government poisoned people for moral reasons.
Today they still poison methylated spirits (aka denatured spirits) to maximize their tax revenue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denatured_alcohol
Instead of getting off my lawn, sit down and I'll tell you kids a story: In the Good ole days Adobe and it's founder John Warnock (or Warnock's Algorithm fame) were heroes. At the time most of us had ugly dot matrix printers and fixed fonts, they came up with the PostScript printer description language and many beautiful fonts. Buy a Postscript printer and you could print beautiful documents previously only typesetters could. When Apple licensed it for their laser printer desktop publishing took off. Warnock cared about beautiful fonts. Postscript was a full-blown programming language, yet a very efficient one. PDF itself *is* Postscript, just encapsulated in a file.
But Adobe then isn't Adobe now. Their Adobe Reader is an appalling, fat, unresponsive hard to drive piece of software. Ever configured options? There are twenty off preference pages with no coherent grouping. They still haven't grasped things like reopening the document where you last were reading it, or letting you add bookmarks. Instead they've loaded Adobe with a tonne of "features" to the point it's now a trojan horse vector. The company itself is no longer a source of innovation: Instead they just buy out other companies (like Macromedia Flash) and then run them into the ground. Their software uniformly suffers from appalling GUIs (or if it doesn't when they buy it, they shortly will) e.g. Photoshop, but when you're that big you can afford to be that arrogant. People will buy your software anyway, because they don't have a choice.
Yes, there are some PDF Reader imitators like Foxit Software. While they're much faster, they have copied the Adobe interface instead of themselves innovating.
The Adobe Updater is an intrusive pain in the ass. In a previous version, you had to connect to the net and then connect to Adobe to turn off the Updater. This was "free" software, so this wasn't for licensing: It was just lame in-your-face programming by lame programmers. If you try and deleted the Updater yourself, it reinstalled itself. In the end I found out if you deleted it (in your Program Files directory) and then replace plain files with directories and directories with plain files so when it goes try and reinstall itself Windows tells it to get lost.
"And this affects me how?"
It's that they just don't get Privacy. Yes, we love Google search, GMail and that Beta stuff they do. But they just don't get privacy. To quote Google Executive Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
The trouble is, as the very first post described, we all do things in everyday life we don't want the world to know. Things we're perfectly entitled to do. But Google don't get it. I haven't used Google Docs because I'm scared there's some setting somewhere I won't know to turn off which will expose my documents to the world. Same concerns with GMail. Yahoo might hand your details over to the Chinese Government, but at least you don't need to worry about them telling *everyone* you've ever e-mailed! If a company ever did that, of course it would be Google.
Google is the sort of company that would break into your house and stick a webcam in your toilet "So you can socialize with your friends when you're sitting on the can." And they would be shocked when the people who find out about it object to it. The public is still largely ignorant about privacy, but with incidents like this slowly they will wake up. Google really needs to hire some serious Privacy experts to counterbalance people like Schmidt who can only see the dollars and not the bigger picture. Right now the best way for an upstart to beat Google is to offer everything they do but with the Privacy settings on max.
This is crazy. How is this guy supposed to come up with $1.5M? That's more money than he's likely to earn in his lifetime.
Here's a picture of "Rose Lappin" of Nintendo Australia who sued him and rubbed his nose in it: http://blogs.theage.com.au/screenplay/RoseLappin1.jpg
I suggest he offer to do the deed with her for $1.5M. He's got nothing to lose, and it's better than declaring bankruptcy.
Well. Maybe...
You would think Quantum Mechanics would be one subject so mind-bogglingly difficult you definitely would not want any errors in your text, but McGraw Hill's "Quantum Mechanics Demystified" (a cram guide) is so riddled with errors it's ridiculous. Worse, in years they haven't bothered fixing these and are continuing to sell the same error plagued edition:
http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Demystified-David-McMahon/dp/0071455469
This puts to sleep the myth that publishers are guardians of quality control. For many books I would encourage you to check out reader reviews before you purchase because you won't believe the number of textbooks being published today that are riddled with errors.
There was one I heard... a pregnant woman thought she could fix a washing machine, but she got electrocuted. Her and her fetus died. HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAH!!! WHAT AN IDIOT!!!! HAHAHAHHAHAH!!!
That's a real story, and like the Darwin Awards, I don't think it's funny at all.
The vast majority of bacteria are either harmless or beneficial to their human host. Only a very small number of bacteria are pathogenic, and most of the time your body does a great job keeping those out. Here's a great book for bacteria spotters, amateur and pro, which tells you how to find bacteria without a microscope.
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3864
http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Bacteria-Comstock-Book/dp/0801488540
Though the story is newsworthy, this has the misleading title of the century. They didn't unlock it. They sequenced it. There's a big, big difference. It's the difference between having a map of South America and doing Sharon Stone on the throne of the Lost City of Gold.
http://seqcore.brcf.med.umich.edu/doc/educ/dnapr/sequencing.html
Refer your boss to the programming classic "Peopleware." Music does hurt your ability to solve certain coding problems, but for others it doesn't make any difference (mundane coding or data entry). So listen and turn it off when you need to think. Trouble is the other noise in cubicle land: phone calls, chit chat, socialites, loud meetings and other people with music turned up. When you need silence there is no escape. I listen to music to try to drown this crap out.
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Projects-Teams-Second/dp/0932633439
Thanks for a reasoned response. Now, back at ya:
> As for dumbass decisions, I can only say I've heard of a number of decisions at the national level, even at the supreme court, I strongly disagree with, but only because either the law wasn't clear and the case was incredibly difficult, or the case was politically motivated.
Like the Bush Florida thing? Hardly the court's proudest moment, but I was speaking from the Australian perspective.
If you would like an example of how far above everyone else these pompous asses consider themselves, check this out. Barristers got immunity from negligence, and this was gifted by the High Court itself. Their reasoning for granting their own profession (but no one else's, like say, Doctors) was that the public deserved "finality of decision." No nasty, unsightly having a barristers conduct challenged. The public just has to suck on it. No other profession gets away with that. One justice dissented, but the others were all for it. Politicians didn't make that law up. That was a finding of the High Court. If you want an example of pompous superiority, look no further:
http://www.hg.org/articles/article_670.html
As for bad decisions, yeah, I would hope most decisions are reasonable, but they make some incredibly reckless decisions and here once you're appointed a judge it's extremely rare to be removed. Read the papers here and pretty much every day you'll hear some howler decision. No in theory a bad judge can be removed, but in all my life I've only ever heard of 2 cases where that happened. Anyone else doing a bad job would be fired. Judges are 'above the law'. In theory this protects them from political interference, and they're trusted to look after themselves. Fox Henhouse.
> Every time I hear a judge screech "*My* court" or make a dumb ass decision Are you a lawyer, court reporter, or bailiff?
Here at least, when challenged, yes, they really say that and it speaks volumes about their attitude. It's not their court. It's the taxpayers' court. They're nothing more than any other public servant. And really I get tired of this guff that they "work hard and are underpaid." You can say that of nearly any profession: even the poor bastard stacking groceries at 2am. Truth is you could probably cut judges salary by 1/10th and the civil courts which are useless would still be clogged up, but since the general public seldom gets to use them so what?
> You couldn't possible be American since American judges don't wear wigs.
No, but they do have the black power capes. This, like the wigs, is supposed inspire respect and awe in you.
> I agree but that's not the judge's fault, at least not in the US anyway, and I'm not sure how that would be the Judge's fault in any system that was borrowed from the British either. This is a topic for a completely different conversation.
But highly relevant because judges and lawyers block changes that would interrupt in their gravy train. I've heard justice delayed is justice denied, but so is justice you can't afford. Here the civil courts spend a lot of time entertaining big companies in pissing contents, while Q.C.'s charge rates that are beyond ludicrous. Richard Ackland who writes for Fairfax is a lawyer and has had a lot of really bad stuff to say about the profession, amongst them the gentlemans club which hands out Q.C.'s for mates. It's just a license to print money, and it's hard to even get a lawyer to sit down with you to discuss a case. If they can see you can't pay their $300 an hour, they'll show you the door. The judicial system has become a money making enterprise which is has precious little to do with "justice".
I've been through the courts, and occasionally I have to engage lawyers for commercial disputes. This is where my contempt comes. The legal system is all about serving judges and lawyers. It's not about justice. Do you really think the legal system lives up to that idea? It really needs a major o
You can't buy home chemistry sets in the toy store any more, but this book tells you how to make your own: http://www.amazon.com/Illustrated-Guide-Home-Chemistry-Experiments/dp/0596514921/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260568406&sr=8-1
If you get a microscope, don't buy one at the toystore. These are so gimped that kids can't see anything and will quickly lose interest. Look on eBay where in e.g. India you can buy solid professional grade microscopes for $100. Remember most microbes are transparent, so you either need darkfield cover (just a piece of plastic) and/or a small bottle of Methylene Blue solution otherwise they won't see the bacteria. Further suggestions: Hard to see single bacteria so also get a jar (a petri dish is better but anything with a lid is fine) and some agar (to grow bacteria in). Google is your friend.
Good luck, and kudos to you for getting some toys that will help your kids learn as opposed to the usual crap toy stores are full of these days.
Whether or not they declare it in Facebook, judges and lawyers do "friend" in real life. You have to wonder how often a judge gives a lawyer a break because of this. What the Facebooking of friends does is lift the veil off this and make bias easier to spot. I would say it's a good thing, and what I'd really like to see is computers used for a deeper statistical analysis of courtroom decisions by judges with certain lawyers.
I'm sure the legal profession would hate the very idea of this, but these days judges seemed vastly disconnected from society. Every time I hear a judge screech "*My* court" or make a dumb ass decision it's apparent they've forgotten they're nothing more than pubic servants, albeit overpaid and wearing silly black capes and/or pompous wigs. This is theater only the very rich can afford to participate in. The whole legal system needs to be tossed out on it's ass and reinvented from scratch.
It was created by a knave of a Federal Government who thought they could introduce competition into the Australian Telecommunications market (then controlled by Telstra aka Telecom) by regulating to introduce just *one* competitor: Optus. The idea was that Telstra and Optus would fight each other with lower prices and better service. Instead both just sat on their hands and a monopoly became a cozy duopoly. Even though the market was opened up, these two fat, lazy and arrogant companies still dominate the market.
Optus has been a terrible teleco ever since inception. Its broadband packages are amongst the worst in the country. It's offerings are overpriced and plagued with poor service. They're arrogant to boot: Whenever they do screw up their PR is terrible. They're unethical too (which is to say they're criminal, but being a big company with good lawyers mean you can break the law with a slap on the wrist at worst case).
Like this one: Incredible, but Optus conspired to have phone sex calls made by aussies to International Numbers *diverted to their own phone sex partner!* That's right, when you saw Hot Monica advertizing at 2AM on Channel 10 and called, your call was diverted from the advertizer and ended up fattening Optus's profits. Sounds as illegal as hell. Yes: This is Australia's #2 Teleco:
"In an earlier case, Justice Robert McDougall was much harsher with Bragg, saying he had no regard for the truth, except for when it suited him. In this case Optus was forced to pay millions to Gilsan after it was found to have skimmed money from Gilsan by under-reporting the number of minutes porn clients were on the phone so Optus could take home a larger share of the profits."
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.telecom/browse_thread/thread/37a2629cd46244a0
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2009/01/05/1231003882552.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
http://www.the-scream.co.uk/forums/t28492.html
Google for "optus sucks" and equally "telsta sucks" and you will see many links.
> These days? How about the last 28+/- years?
Ha ha. Ok. Let me correct that. They're used to be a successful imitator. Now that's an unsuccessful imitator: Whatever Google is doing with 'Live' in front of it. O/S's that have been on a downwards trend since XP. Office has been getting worse since 2000 and help is still so bad I have to use Google to get my Word Help! And now they're trying to bribe people to use their crap products.
Google on one side.
Microsoft and Murdoch on the other.
Gee... I wonder who the public will side with?
Sure, Microsoft once beat Mozilla who was burning up cash, but that memory will loom large with Google who has bucketloads of cash and more importantly: smarter people that those old dinosaurs. Microsoft these days is a poor imitator. News Corp is irrelevant unless you like spoonfed opinionated news. My money is on Google.
"Solyent Green is Foreskins! Solyent Green is discarded Foreskins! No. Really. They collect them for the keratinocyte stem cells. It's all quite safe."
Doesn't have quite the same punch, but at least it's corrected for accuracy.
> not only to the domain name that exactly matches their trademark, but also ... nearly every possible misspelling or other variation of that trademark
Right now Larry Page and Sergey Brin are yelling at each other over their diamond-encrusted platinum iPhones. On the bright side this guy claims that Google earns $32M-50M on typosquatting. That's the sort of cash they could easily walk away:
http://www.itworld.com/internet/56426/professor-google-earns-32-50m-typosquatting-sites
> but the fact that Microsoft themselves will now be developing and shipping products based on those heterogeneous platforms, including 5 versions of Unix."
Are you sure? You may find Microsoft do the same thing here and just strip the Linux functionality out. When Microsoft took over Connectix and their excellent Virtual PC Software and proceeded to strip Linux functionality (that was already there) out of the product. On the Connectix version there was a Linux utility that handled control back to Windows when the CPU was idle. On the Microsoft version they took that out, so the CPU always ran at 100%. It made Virtual PC useless for Linux.