Posting as AC as I didn't get an account ten years ago and missed out on those lovely low number IDs.
What, exactly, does that have to do with the price of fish? I don't exactly have a low ID either but I rarely see this mentioned unless you are talking absolute rubbish, which you are not... Or maybe you are? Posting as AC is somehow less suspicious than having a high ID? Is this some Swedish thing I'm missing?
But it's not a good payment network if the value of the payment are not stable.
The network exists to 'mine' coins and process transactions. It's cheap because there is a payout for participating in the network split two ways, you get to mine coins, which are worth something and you can charge transaction fees. If there is little worth in the coins, the network will either be tiny and easier to take over and control (if you control the majority of the processing power, you control the entire network) or the transaction fees will increase.
I think there are two related problems with Bitcoin. The first is that it is not stable enough. This should slowly reduce as more volume gets into the market and it gets used more widely but it might take several years. It is currently far too easy for bubble behaviour to appear. The currency is inherently international and inherently lacking in government-led stabilisation mechanisms. A currency, and money in general, is there for people to be able to exchange goods and services and needs stability or the only thing it's useful for is speculation. The second thing is that there is not enough volume. For the first problem to go away we need volume/value compared to existing currencies. It could go up to say $100,000 per coin, and we would have a max value of $2,100,000,000,000, but that's still not enough for a widely used international currency. How much in total market value is there for Dollars? Euros? Yuan? Yen? Much more than this, and even they have governments actively stabilising... I may not understand things properly but my understanding is that bitcoin can't easily add fractional parts after the 8 places. For me this is a problem as it provides resistance against it increasing to the 1M+ per coin I think we'll need because you wouldn't be able to use it for everyday transactions.
You are right though, New Zealand is the place to be.
Depends on what you like. I like being able to travel to lots of places cheaply (for the weekend and the like). I like old cities with historic buildings. I like being able to go to conferences whenever I want. I like big, concentrated cities with great public transport (I haven't used my car in over 5 months). So I live in Paris. Wellington would be one of the coolest places on earth if only it were on the Mediterranean coast... The bush is nice but it's not like there are any birds left there. There are too many stupid people for the country to do anything cool, like take conservation seriously (remember the dead possums hunters left on Kapiti?), or take other stances on things like GMO (like was done with nuclear). If your not north of Hamilton then the sea water is always cold. And it's not the only place with nice nature - ever been to Norway's fjords? It's about 5 hours for me to get from sitting in front of my computer to sitting beside a fjord. You'd be hard pressed to do that even living in Christchurch or Dunedin. The cost of living is far too high for the salaries people get - I was absolutely shocked when I was there 3 years ago. I can get the most basic foodstuffs here in France much cheaper than in NZ. Only Auckland University is even remotely prestigious and there isn't enough capital to create a really audacious tech environment. And it rains to much in Auckland. And to top it all off - the damn currency is too small and too volatile!!!
That was true in the past but an increasing number of researchers are suggesting it won't be in the future - . I actually welcome the day when machines can take care of all of the necessities (and a lot of the rest). The way we organise the economy will have to change though, and we can expect complete carnage while people get used to that...
You obviously haven't been reading much of the philosophy coming out of universities over the past couple of decades! If we were to believe them then it's not people that are selfish, it's our very genes. By the way, it's not really a brain or mind that you think with, it's a computer. Admittedly, cells are very large collections of genes, which is why we don't get much more out of them than we get out of our governments. That's it! I have discovered the cause of cancer, it's democracy!!!
This is a complete and utter non-issue. Start getting worried when the US isn't in a position to build or convert existing plants to make whatever they want. "Yeah but it's not economical! It will take far too long!". Not when we start 3D printing most of the necessary parts, and not if there is a real need. Don't forget - if there is ever a *real* need to do something and do it quickly, the government doesn't ask and it doesn't issue tenders. It rings up and says "you're coming to work for us today, further instructions when you arrive at 9am". The guys arrive at 9. By midday they have made a list of what they need and by the end of the day suppliers have a list of things they need to provide by the following day. "The nation's security is in jeopardy, we must save the children...". No one kicks up a fuss, it's "to protect our way of life from the barbarians". The US still has a good proportion of the world's top grey matter and until that changes then there is nothing for you to worry about.
Since arriving in France 10 years ago, I've had a chip-based debit card that runs on Visa's network. Probably most French have their debit cards running through Visa or Mastercard, though it's possible to run it through the France-only system, Carte Bleue. Electron and the others might be possible too, I haven't checked recently. Sure, we pay handsomely for it but it does come with comprehensive insurance. Changing it when it gets lost (happened once in 10 yrs) or stolen (never) is a pretty major hassle (possible moreso than changing banks if the truth be told) but you get used to administrative nightmares as a part of life here, so one's pain tolerance is already pretty high.
Ah the good ol' "it can't be wrong because mathematics says so". This is one of the most misunderstood things about the universe and our attempts at understanding it, and unfortunately something many scientists don't even properly grasp. Without getting into an historical account of the development of Western semiotics and the ways in which our culture (and now many others) construe notions such as "truth" and "logic", we need look no further than "what is science". Science, in the Western tradition, is about attempting to describe the world around us with patterns we observe. Mathematics is a tool that helps us do this, and not some magical "truth-maker" - we are not discovering the mind of God, one differential equation at a time, we are looking at the world around us and describing it. Science over the last few centuries has been very good at giving us great predictive power, and is getting better at it every day. Some might say that is, indeed, the point of it. Over the centuries scholars have invented new tools to aid us in describing and predicting, and it is folly to think that this will not continue. Mathematics, as a tool, cannot be "wrong". It can be fit for purpose or not.
Most or all of the people on/. would have to agree with this, at least on some level. I may not, myself, be an A-player but I know that working with them is an absolute pleasure. Worth far more than free lunches or pinball machines. I'm talking about the kind of people that you are constantly learning from - new ideas, new approaches, excitement and passion for what they are doing. I firmly believe that a good (A-player) techie is worth at least 3 average ones, and possibly worth an infinity of them.
What is an A-player though? How do you know one without working with them for a decent period? Do they have to have people skills or are they just a bonus? Do they have to have interests outside tech or are they just a bonus? I also think that the notion of an A-player is actually pretty nebulous, and overall company culture has a lot to do with whether someone will be an A-player or not in any given environment. I was offered the CTO position in a small company I worked in for several years but ended up not taking it for a variety of reasons, one of the main ones being that it would have been impossible to get rid of the D, E and even F players, due to both corporate culture and local employment laws. I am fairly certain the company will eventually die because of the lack of innovation coming out of it, and I think that is because most of the dead wood is taking salaries without contributing anything really valuable back. Then everyone will lose their job...
Who knows, maybe that's the whole point? They didn't have enough hate to justify the trillions so they are manufacturing it. Might be taking it a bit far... Certainly Gitmo hasn't earned the US much respect as responsible caretakers of the "free world".
Solved. If it bothers you so much, don't read it on your 2560x1440 display, read it on a tablet or cellphone. Sheesh, how 'bout some lateral thinkin' there!
I might have missed something but how is this different from, say, someone taking a limited-run bank note/bill or coin and asking someone to put a nice frame around it? Would you say that this person is involved in money transfer? They receive the bill/coin and put it in a pretty container for a fee. Sounds pretty similar to me. This may be considered aiding and abetting money laundering also though... And what about the makers of *ugly* devices, like USB sticks? Are they also aiding-and-abetting?
Ye gads, read the article? Are you serious? I might actually start saying sensible things as opposed to talking out of my nether regions... Seriously though, mea culpa on this one, you are quite right, he was being an arse and deserved to be arrested. My understanding of the article was not that he had been asked not to charge his car there but rather that he should not have been there at all. I do think he should have been charged with something else though... like trespassing.
By the time this sort of theft would even merit a mention on someone's energy bill there will have been many more billions put into battery research and the distribution network. This is such a non-issue only/.ers could possibly argue about it. Ever taken a pen from an office after signing something? I can assure you that it wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back if the business is no longer. Many places won't accept theft charges under a certain value for a good reason, for there to be a crime it needs to cause some harm, and this guy was probably (hopefully?) saving someone a minute of their working time by being there (taking a kid off their hands a minute earlier for example), making it probably a net saving to the school...
And having another medical professional (also under medical secrecy), particularly one that has fairly intimate knowledge of the patient's consumption of medicines, is a bad thing? And of course it makes a massive difference whether it says "depression" or "Prozac" on the script... Because no one knows what any medicines are used for treating. No where is perfect but Canada's medical system is far from the worst if I understand anything about it.
Yes, it's new, but there have been a few technologies over the history of mankind that have created fundamental changes in the way we think, behave and structure society. We not only survived with these technologies, we flourished with them. And yes, these paradigm changes mean that there is often a period of adjustment where people don't know how to act "responsibly" and lots of nasty things happen. When humankind originally started mastering fire, I'm sure there were lots of "mistakes" (there still are)! That doesn't mean we can or should reject new tech though.
My point is that our way of interacting with each other and our perception of groups in society and society as a whole, have changed many times in the past and WILL change again. Where yesterday the grumpy puritan was able to publicly pour scorn on the young girl next door who was found out for having sex with some dashing young soldier, they now just sound ridiculous - there are photos of their own kids doin' it group-stylez plastered all over facebook. Being ridiculous is no fun, so they move on. Values change, and are tightly coupled to our ability to quickly access wide-ranging, personal information on others. There is always some lag but what is unacceptable today will be tomorrow's norm, that's just how societies evolve.
Humans are almost infinitely adaptable and when a technology becomes ubiquitous enough, it becomes banal. When you have to start firing all the good people too because you realise that EVERYONE has a least a few skeletons in their closet (read "embarassing photos on facebook") then you start looking at your employment practices. Courts start to say that yesterday's sufficient reasons for dismissal are that no longer. And so on ad infinitum.
I have been looking at these for a while now but I just can't understand why they are so expensive. I know prices on RAM and HDs vary but something is wrong here.
I currently have a 14" HP with a i5-2410M, 6GB of RAM and a 750GB/5400 HD. This all comes in at under 2kg. I bought it with the Windows tax and it STILL only cost me 700€, over 2 years ago. I use Ubuntu 12.04 and battery life is crap. I completely disabled the separate graphics card and I still get far lower life than on windows (which I use once every two months or so for the odd word document I can't be bothered risking the format of). I spent ages trying to get it performing better but nothing worked. I want to continue using Ubuntu 12.04 until at least 14.04 comes out - I much, much prefer running the same system as my servers and I'm too old to be permanently testing a new distro....
In theory, this system is almost perfect - I lose on disk space but I only really need 256GB - the rest can go on an external disk and better disk speed would be really nice. A touch screen decidedly turns me off (a developer laptop? seriously? know any developers that like you putting your greasy mitts on their lovely screen?) but it's thin, light and has decent battery life, *with drivers for linux so I don't have to piss around like in the ol' days*. But 1300-1450€ - WTF?!? (in France). I might get a discount because of my Linux Foundation membership but I got to the point where I had to put my credit card in on the site and I still didn't see whether there would be a discount, and if so, how much.
They may eventually get my business, because I'm willing to pay a couple of hundred extra for decent Linux support but I'm definitely going to be left feeling like I was done in the back of a Volkswagon...
They could have stuffed it up, but I can't help thinking Nokia would be in the position Samsung are now had they gone with Android. They may have had to tow the line a bit with Google but with their expertise (and kick-arse hardware), I'm convinced they would have made it very hard for others to thrive, even Samsung. And this is not just hindsight talking, LOTS of people knew Nokia would struggle if they went with anything apart from Android. It would have also meant there was a European company in the game too...
Well, we're not quite Europeans but all of the other intelligent New Zealanders I know that saw the movie at the time thought is was excellent. How could you possibly not see the satire and political commentary? That said, I've been living in France for the last 10 years... While most sequels are bad, I only got about 20 minutes into ST2 - the people that made that obviously didn't understand what Verhoeven did either.
Maybe. You have money and population, that's true. There are basically no countries that really care about rugby except South Africa and New Zealand, and in SA it's only really the whites. If you watched the recent final of the NZ national championship (highest level with NZ-only teams) you would be forgiven for thinking they don't give a shit about it either. The 35k capacity stadium wasn't even half full!
NZ also has very few registered players compared with other countries (Oz, UK, SA, FR) but has managed to dominate the sport for the last hundred years and is currently in a class above all other countries. NZ also loses many, many players who were born there because salaries are minuscule compared to what they can get elsewhere, and if you don't play in NZ you can't play for the national team. It is true though that almost all of the true athletes in NZ play rugby rather than any other sport.
So if you could get all of the best athletes in the US to play rugby then you would almost certainly win. You are one of the most highly populated countries though, and by FAR the richest over 150M. Nothing really to see here.
The other way round might have worked actually - there are large parts of at least the south east of China (like Fujian) that pronounce both "r" and "l" the same as "l"(meaning there is no phonetic difference).
I think a lot of people who consume content are a little more discerning. Have you ever tried to watch a screener? No thanks... Watching a dvd/br rip is a different story. Which means you get people who go to theatres for some things and get it via streaming or DVD for the rest, or download illegally when they become available as rips (ie., when streamed or DVD is released). And did I mention DRM? Letting people "own" media is a separate question - in any case you don't own squat anyway. If I can have an account at some service that lets me watch whatever I want, when I want (after DVD release), and has a reasonable number of apps for different platforms, then what is the problem? I didn't talk about remuneration model either - I personally would have a preference for a monthly fee but pay-per-view could also work. The problem is that for lots of people around the world, there is simply no option to legally consume content directly after it is first released to DVD (or shown on tv). You sometimes need to wait months, and many formats oblige you to watch something dubbed.
There is nothing wrong with making a profit, and I never said there was. I just think if they really cared about piracy they would look at their business model and try and adapt it rather than act as if technology hadn't advanced.
Back in the 90s I was horrified to learn from a professor who was on an editorial board that he got no money from the publisher. He only recompense for his work was a copy of the journal - our university didn't even get a free copy, even though he obviously spent university time on it. Our university, like so many others, had serious budget problems getting all the various required journals and that frustrated me - after all, what value is being brought by the publishers? Some journals even make you pay to have articles published!!! As a former managing editor, you have confirmed all my suspicions and confirmed that this continues.
Fast-forward to 2013. There is absolutely no reason for this to continue, yet it does. With a relatively simple organisational structure, the current amount spent from one or two universities could provide all the funding necessary for a highly professional meta-organisation that publishes everything for free online, with a cost+ small% button to have journals actually delivered. The small/on-demand print run problem has been solved for a while now, and anything at scale (i.e., lots of journals being done at the same place) would make costs very reasonable.
So what are the elements that need to be reproduced in order to serve the current filtering function that journals currently perform? The key element seems to be reputation. To be worth reading and worth publishing in, a journal needs the right people reviewing articles and the right people writing them. These services are currently being provided FREE by academics, so there is clearly room to move here. Everything else is an implementation detail. While there is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, a few good motivators with reasonable connections could get the ball rolling and then the problem is effectively solved.
So what might this look like? An organisational structure with proposed, incubating and top-level journals, depending on a number of criteria, like the number of subscribers, number of reviewers, "quality" of the editorial board, etc. These sorts of "points" systems exist in some countries today for deciding how much research funding a university gets so what works (and what doesn't), while controversial, is pretty well understood (or at least debated). Don't like how top-level journal X is run by the editorial board? Gather 10 (or 5 or 20) like-minded university researchers, form and editorial board and create a project. There is no reason for there not to be 2, or even 50 top-level journals dealing with subject X. There is choice now. You just need to fulfil a certain number of (changeable) criteria and you become a top-level journal. There will obviously be differences in prestige between top-level journals but there is now too - no problem here.
But how do we stop the riff-raff from submitting and wasting highly valuable reviewer time? There are internationally recognised lists of tertiary institutions, and one of these could easily be used to *start* with. Any full-time academic with one of these could sign their university up, and act as a reputation guarantor. As things evolve, university departments would almost certainly get involved and that is probably a good thing but the key is to have some reasonable filtering to start with. After that, any new contributing member to a journal needs to have at least N sponsors before being able to submit an article for review. You might like to require all new submitters to be sponsored by someone on the editorial board, and that could even be one of the criteria for a journal to become a top-level journal. Complaints could be submitted to the editorial board (or a rep), and people or institutions could be banned (temporarily) or sponsorship rights revoked (temporarily) by editorial board vote. While some over-arching criteria would be useful for distinguising top-level from other journals, after things got moving individual journals could set a lot of their own. There could even be privileged "categories" formed - get a group of 10 (o
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Posting as AC as I didn't get an account ten years ago and missed out on those lovely low number IDs.
What, exactly, does that have to do with the price of fish? I don't exactly have a low ID either but I rarely see this mentioned unless you are talking absolute rubbish, which you are not... Or maybe you are? Posting as AC is somehow less suspicious than having a high ID? Is this some Swedish thing I'm missing?
But it's not a good payment network if the value of the payment are not stable.
The network exists to 'mine' coins and process transactions. It's cheap because there is a payout for participating in the network split two ways, you get to mine coins, which are worth something and you can charge transaction fees. If there is little worth in the coins, the network will either be tiny and easier to take over and control (if you control the majority of the processing power, you control the entire network) or the transaction fees will increase.
I think there are two related problems with Bitcoin. The first is that it is not stable enough. This should slowly reduce as more volume gets into the market and it gets used more widely but it might take several years. It is currently far too easy for bubble behaviour to appear. The currency is inherently international and inherently lacking in government-led stabilisation mechanisms. A currency, and money in general, is there for people to be able to exchange goods and services and needs stability or the only thing it's useful for is speculation. The second thing is that there is not enough volume. For the first problem to go away we need volume/value compared to existing currencies. It could go up to say $100,000 per coin, and we would have a max value of $2,100,000,000,000, but that's still not enough for a widely used international currency. How much in total market value is there for Dollars? Euros? Yuan? Yen? Much more than this, and even they have governments actively stabilising... I may not understand things properly but my understanding is that bitcoin can't easily add fractional parts after the 8 places. For me this is a problem as it provides resistance against it increasing to the 1M+ per coin I think we'll need because you wouldn't be able to use it for everyday transactions.
You are right though, New Zealand is the place to be.
Depends on what you like. I like being able to travel to lots of places cheaply (for the weekend and the like). I like old cities with historic buildings. I like being able to go to conferences whenever I want. I like big, concentrated cities with great public transport (I haven't used my car in over 5 months). So I live in Paris. Wellington would be one of the coolest places on earth if only it were on the Mediterranean coast... The bush is nice but it's not like there are any birds left there. There are too many stupid people for the country to do anything cool, like take conservation seriously (remember the dead possums hunters left on Kapiti?), or take other stances on things like GMO (like was done with nuclear). If your not north of Hamilton then the sea water is always cold. And it's not the only place with nice nature - ever been to Norway's fjords? It's about 5 hours for me to get from sitting in front of my computer to sitting beside a fjord. You'd be hard pressed to do that even living in Christchurch or Dunedin. The cost of living is far too high for the salaries people get - I was absolutely shocked when I was there 3 years ago. I can get the most basic foodstuffs here in France much cheaper than in NZ. Only Auckland University is even remotely prestigious and there isn't enough capital to create a really audacious tech environment. And it rains to much in Auckland. And to top it all off - the damn currency is too small and too volatile!!!
That was true in the past but an increasing number of researchers are suggesting it won't be in the future - . I actually welcome the day when machines can take care of all of the necessities (and a lot of the rest). The way we organise the economy will have to change though, and we can expect complete carnage while people get used to that...
You obviously haven't been reading much of the philosophy coming out of universities over the past couple of decades! If we were to believe them then it's not people that are selfish, it's our very genes. By the way, it's not really a brain or mind that you think with, it's a computer. Admittedly, cells are very large collections of genes, which is why we don't get much more out of them than we get out of our governments. That's it! I have discovered the cause of cancer, it's democracy!!!
This is a complete and utter non-issue. Start getting worried when the US isn't in a position to build or convert existing plants to make whatever they want. "Yeah but it's not economical! It will take far too long!". Not when we start 3D printing most of the necessary parts, and not if there is a real need. Don't forget - if there is ever a *real* need to do something and do it quickly, the government doesn't ask and it doesn't issue tenders. It rings up and says "you're coming to work for us today, further instructions when you arrive at 9am". The guys arrive at 9. By midday they have made a list of what they need and by the end of the day suppliers have a list of things they need to provide by the following day. "The nation's security is in jeopardy, we must save the children...". No one kicks up a fuss, it's "to protect our way of life from the barbarians". The US still has a good proportion of the world's top grey matter and until that changes then there is nothing for you to worry about.
Since arriving in France 10 years ago, I've had a chip-based debit card that runs on Visa's network. Probably most French have their debit cards running through Visa or Mastercard, though it's possible to run it through the France-only system, Carte Bleue. Electron and the others might be possible too, I haven't checked recently. Sure, we pay handsomely for it but it does come with comprehensive insurance. Changing it when it gets lost (happened once in 10 yrs) or stolen (never) is a pretty major hassle (possible moreso than changing banks if the truth be told) but you get used to administrative nightmares as a part of life here, so one's pain tolerance is already pretty high.
Ah the good ol' "it can't be wrong because mathematics says so". This is one of the most misunderstood things about the universe and our attempts at understanding it, and unfortunately something many scientists don't even properly grasp. Without getting into an historical account of the development of Western semiotics and the ways in which our culture (and now many others) construe notions such as "truth" and "logic", we need look no further than "what is science". Science, in the Western tradition, is about attempting to describe the world around us with patterns we observe. Mathematics is a tool that helps us do this, and not some magical "truth-maker" - we are not discovering the mind of God, one differential equation at a time, we are looking at the world around us and describing it. Science over the last few centuries has been very good at giving us great predictive power, and is getting better at it every day. Some might say that is, indeed, the point of it. Over the centuries scholars have invented new tools to aid us in describing and predicting, and it is folly to think that this will not continue. Mathematics, as a tool, cannot be "wrong". It can be fit for purpose or not.
Most or all of the people on /. would have to agree with this, at least on some level. I may not, myself, be an A-player but I know that working with them is an absolute pleasure. Worth far more than free lunches or pinball machines. I'm talking about the kind of people that you are constantly learning from - new ideas, new approaches, excitement and passion for what they are doing. I firmly believe that a good (A-player) techie is worth at least 3 average ones, and possibly worth an infinity of them.
What is an A-player though? How do you know one without working with them for a decent period? Do they have to have people skills or are they just a bonus? Do they have to have interests outside tech or are they just a bonus? I also think that the notion of an A-player is actually pretty nebulous, and overall company culture has a lot to do with whether someone will be an A-player or not in any given environment. I was offered the CTO position in a small company I worked in for several years but ended up not taking it for a variety of reasons, one of the main ones being that it would have been impossible to get rid of the D, E and even F players, due to both corporate culture and local employment laws. I am fairly certain the company will eventually die because of the lack of innovation coming out of it, and I think that is because most of the dead wood is taking salaries without contributing anything really valuable back. Then everyone will lose their job...
Who knows, maybe that's the whole point? They didn't have enough hate to justify the trillions so they are manufacturing it. Might be taking it a bit far... Certainly Gitmo hasn't earned the US much respect as responsible caretakers of the "free world".
Solved. If it bothers you so much, don't read it on your 2560x1440 display, read it on a tablet or cellphone. Sheesh, how 'bout some lateral thinkin' there!
I might have missed something but how is this different from, say, someone taking a limited-run bank note/bill or coin and asking someone to put a nice frame around it? Would you say that this person is involved in money transfer? They receive the bill/coin and put it in a pretty container for a fee. Sounds pretty similar to me. This may be considered aiding and abetting money laundering also though... And what about the makers of *ugly* devices, like USB sticks? Are they also aiding-and-abetting?
Ye gads, read the article? Are you serious? I might actually start saying sensible things as opposed to talking out of my nether regions... Seriously though, mea culpa on this one, you are quite right, he was being an arse and deserved to be arrested. My understanding of the article was not that he had been asked not to charge his car there but rather that he should not have been there at all. I do think he should have been charged with something else though... like trespassing.
By the time this sort of theft would even merit a mention on someone's energy bill there will have been many more billions put into battery research and the distribution network. This is such a non-issue only /.ers could possibly argue about it. Ever taken a pen from an office after signing something? I can assure you that it wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back if the business is no longer. Many places won't accept theft charges under a certain value for a good reason, for there to be a crime it needs to cause some harm, and this guy was probably (hopefully?) saving someone a minute of their working time by being there (taking a kid off their hands a minute earlier for example), making it probably a net saving to the school...
Fuck this is way off topic from hard drives, sorry. Just needed to fill in some missing info.
Dude, there's no such thing as off-topic on /. Remotely interesting is perfectly sufficient.
And having another medical professional (also under medical secrecy), particularly one that has fairly intimate knowledge of the patient's consumption of medicines, is a bad thing? And of course it makes a massive difference whether it says "depression" or "Prozac" on the script... Because no one knows what any medicines are used for treating. No where is perfect but Canada's medical system is far from the worst if I understand anything about it.
Yes, it's new, but there have been a few technologies over the history of mankind that have created fundamental changes in the way we think, behave and structure society. We not only survived with these technologies, we flourished with them. And yes, these paradigm changes mean that there is often a period of adjustment where people don't know how to act "responsibly" and lots of nasty things happen. When humankind originally started mastering fire, I'm sure there were lots of "mistakes" (there still are)! That doesn't mean we can or should reject new tech though.
My point is that our way of interacting with each other and our perception of groups in society and society as a whole, have changed many times in the past and WILL change again. Where yesterday the grumpy puritan was able to publicly pour scorn on the young girl next door who was found out for having sex with some dashing young soldier, they now just sound ridiculous - there are photos of their own kids doin' it group-stylez plastered all over facebook. Being ridiculous is no fun, so they move on. Values change, and are tightly coupled to our ability to quickly access wide-ranging, personal information on others. There is always some lag but what is unacceptable today will be tomorrow's norm, that's just how societies evolve.
Humans are almost infinitely adaptable and when a technology becomes ubiquitous enough, it becomes banal. When you have to start firing all the good people too because you realise that EVERYONE has a least a few skeletons in their closet (read "embarassing photos on facebook") then you start looking at your employment practices. Courts start to say that yesterday's sufficient reasons for dismissal are that no longer. And so on ad infinitum.
Change is the only constant - get used to it!
I have been looking at these for a while now but I just can't understand why they are so expensive. I know prices on RAM and HDs vary but something is wrong here.
I currently have a 14" HP with a i5-2410M, 6GB of RAM and a 750GB/5400 HD. This all comes in at under 2kg. I bought it with the Windows tax and it STILL only cost me 700€, over 2 years ago. I use Ubuntu 12.04 and battery life is crap. I completely disabled the separate graphics card and I still get far lower life than on windows (which I use once every two months or so for the odd word document I can't be bothered risking the format of). I spent ages trying to get it performing better but nothing worked. I want to continue using Ubuntu 12.04 until at least 14.04 comes out - I much, much prefer running the same system as my servers and I'm too old to be permanently testing a new distro....
In theory, this system is almost perfect - I lose on disk space but I only really need 256GB - the rest can go on an external disk and better disk speed would be really nice. A touch screen decidedly turns me off (a developer laptop? seriously? know any developers that like you putting your greasy mitts on their lovely screen?) but it's thin, light and has decent battery life, *with drivers for linux so I don't have to piss around like in the ol' days*. But 1300-1450€ - WTF?!? (in France). I might get a discount because of my Linux Foundation membership but I got to the point where I had to put my credit card in on the site and I still didn't see whether there would be a discount, and if so, how much.
They may eventually get my business, because I'm willing to pay a couple of hundred extra for decent Linux support but I'm definitely going to be left feeling like I was done in the back of a Volkswagon...
After using an Xperia S for the last year and a half, I tend to agree but waterproof with a much better camera...
I mean making huge profits and selling more high-end devices than pretty much all other manufacturers combined.
They could have stuffed it up, but I can't help thinking Nokia would be in the position Samsung are now had they gone with Android. They may have had to tow the line a bit with Google but with their expertise (and kick-arse hardware), I'm convinced they would have made it very hard for others to thrive, even Samsung. And this is not just hindsight talking, LOTS of people knew Nokia would struggle if they went with anything apart from Android. It would have also meant there was a European company in the game too...
Well, we're not quite Europeans but all of the other intelligent New Zealanders I know that saw the movie at the time thought is was excellent. How could you possibly not see the satire and political commentary? That said, I've been living in France for the last 10 years... While most sequels are bad, I only got about 20 minutes into ST2 - the people that made that obviously didn't understand what Verhoeven did either.
Maybe. You have money and population, that's true. There are basically no countries that really care about rugby except South Africa and New Zealand, and in SA it's only really the whites. If you watched the recent final of the NZ national championship (highest level with NZ-only teams) you would be forgiven for thinking they don't give a shit about it either. The 35k capacity stadium wasn't even half full!
NZ also has very few registered players compared with other countries (Oz, UK, SA, FR) but has managed to dominate the sport for the last hundred years and is currently in a class above all other countries. NZ also loses many, many players who were born there because salaries are minuscule compared to what they can get elsewhere, and if you don't play in NZ you can't play for the national team. It is true though that almost all of the true athletes in NZ play rugby rather than any other sport.
So if you could get all of the best athletes in the US to play rugby then you would almost certainly win. You are one of the most highly populated countries though, and by FAR the richest over 150M. Nothing really to see here.
The other way round might have worked actually - there are large parts of at least the south east of China (like Fujian) that pronounce both "r" and "l" the same as "l"(meaning there is no phonetic difference).
I think a lot of people who consume content are a little more discerning. Have you ever tried to watch a screener? No thanks... Watching a dvd/br rip is a different story. Which means you get people who go to theatres for some things and get it via streaming or DVD for the rest, or download illegally when they become available as rips (ie., when streamed or DVD is released). And did I mention DRM? Letting people "own" media is a separate question - in any case you don't own squat anyway. If I can have an account at some service that lets me watch whatever I want, when I want (after DVD release), and has a reasonable number of apps for different platforms, then what is the problem? I didn't talk about remuneration model either - I personally would have a preference for a monthly fee but pay-per-view could also work. The problem is that for lots of people around the world, there is simply no option to legally consume content directly after it is first released to DVD (or shown on tv). You sometimes need to wait months, and many formats oblige you to watch something dubbed.
There is nothing wrong with making a profit, and I never said there was. I just think if they really cared about piracy they would look at their business model and try and adapt it rather than act as if technology hadn't advanced.
Back in the 90s I was horrified to learn from a professor who was on an editorial board that he got no money from the publisher. He only recompense for his work was a copy of the journal - our university didn't even get a free copy, even though he obviously spent university time on it. Our university, like so many others, had serious budget problems getting all the various required journals and that frustrated me - after all, what value is being brought by the publishers? Some journals even make you pay to have articles published!!! As a former managing editor, you have confirmed all my suspicions and confirmed that this continues.
Fast-forward to 2013. There is absolutely no reason for this to continue, yet it does. With a relatively simple organisational structure, the current amount spent from one or two universities could provide all the funding necessary for a highly professional meta-organisation that publishes everything for free online, with a cost+ small% button to have journals actually delivered. The small/on-demand print run problem has been solved for a while now, and anything at scale (i.e., lots of journals being done at the same place) would make costs very reasonable.
So what are the elements that need to be reproduced in order to serve the current filtering function that journals currently perform? The key element seems to be reputation. To be worth reading and worth publishing in, a journal needs the right people reviewing articles and the right people writing them. These services are currently being provided FREE by academics, so there is clearly room to move here. Everything else is an implementation detail. While there is a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, a few good motivators with reasonable connections could get the ball rolling and then the problem is effectively solved.
So what might this look like? An organisational structure with proposed, incubating and top-level journals, depending on a number of criteria, like the number of subscribers, number of reviewers, "quality" of the editorial board, etc. These sorts of "points" systems exist in some countries today for deciding how much research funding a university gets so what works (and what doesn't), while controversial, is pretty well understood (or at least debated). Don't like how top-level journal X is run by the editorial board? Gather 10 (or 5 or 20) like-minded university researchers, form and editorial board and create a project. There is no reason for there not to be 2, or even 50 top-level journals dealing with subject X. There is choice now. You just need to fulfil a certain number of (changeable) criteria and you become a top-level journal. There will obviously be differences in prestige between top-level journals but there is now too - no problem here.
But how do we stop the riff-raff from submitting and wasting highly valuable reviewer time? There are internationally recognised lists of tertiary institutions, and one of these could easily be used to *start* with. Any full-time academic with one of these could sign their university up, and act as a reputation guarantor. As things evolve, university departments would almost certainly get involved and that is probably a good thing but the key is to have some reasonable filtering to start with. After that, any new contributing member to a journal needs to have at least N sponsors before being able to submit an article for review. You might like to require all new submitters to be sponsored by someone on the editorial board, and that could even be one of the criteria for a journal to become a top-level journal. Complaints could be submitted to the editorial board (or a rep), and people or institutions could be banned (temporarily) or sponsorship rights revoked (temporarily) by editorial board vote. While some over-arching criteria would be useful for distinguising top-level from other journals, after things got moving individual journals could set a lot of their own. There could even be privileged "categories" formed - get a group of 10 (o