It's not a troll, I seriously don't really get the idea of a single country being run by so many independant states as the US seems to be.
Umm... Aren't you guys a member of the EU? You're just now seeing the beginning of how Federal and state powers and responsibilities manifested in US history. Shortly after the unpleasantness with the your Crown, the thirteen states banded together in something very like the EU under the Articles of Confederation. It became clear after a time that the Articles were insufficient to bound the states together, much as it is becoming clear that something more substantial may be needed in Europe (at the least many member states are concerned about how much everyone's economic policy diverges). So we upgraded the capabilities of the Federal government in the Constitution. Over the next two hundred years the States and the Fed (and the locals and the states) have maneuvered, pushed, and pulled (and in part fought a war) into the current system. The Federal Government's power have increased substantially over that time, but the states rather jealously guard what they have left.
The answer to your more immediate question of why local governments are building national infrastructure, the answer is they don't. States do. States are not local governments. Even ignoring the history above, remember that the US is relatively huge vs. the UK. England (indeed, the entire island including Scotland and Wales) would fit into some of our larger states. A certain level of mid tier government between "national" and "local" makes sense. Typically states maintain the larger roads (sometimes with mostly their own funding, called "state roads"; sometime with additional federal money called "federal roads" or "Interstates"), and local governments maintain the smaller local roads. State and local governments get a lot of their funding from sales tax (like your VAT, but collected at the local and state level). So the issues here are:
1) It's hard for states and localities to collect sales on interstate mail order purchases (as throughout the Internet). They are pushing to legally require this on any business which operates inside their borders. This is becoming a larger and larger issue as online ordering becomes a larger part of the retail profile of many people.
2) Sales tax rates vary extremely from state to state and locality to locality. I live in Massachusetts, we have like a 7% sales tax. It's higher in Boston which collects a local tax on top of the state tax. An hour north of me is New Hampshire which has no sales tax at all. Amazon and some other online retailers claim that this makes sales tax collection unduly complicated for them, so they want a national sales tax.
3) The difficulty presented by the OP is a real one. If the Feds start to collect a national sales tax on online orders as a proxy for states and localities how can you fairly divide up the proceeds. Should every state just get a percentage based on population? How's that work when many more people in say California or Massachusetts are much more likely to shop online than people in Mississippi? How do you handle getting local governments their share? Should people in states like New Hampshire, that have no state sales tax, have to pay? Should those states get any of the proceeds?
Except that to all appearances this requires the user to go to a specific web site (or somehow generate a control code) and explicitly allow the connection. It's still not without some security concerns I suppose, but it would require a fair amount of fooling both Google and the user to abuse it. Mostly I can see it as being a great way to help friends/relatives with their computers. As a double plus good you can help your mom with her Mac from your Windows box, or your dad with his Windows box from your Linux box. As I use all three OSes at different times, and help people who use all three OSes, this has some serious pluses for me.
Like anything else there are security implications here, but there are security implications to any sort of remote control applications out there. This is no worse than most, and has significant apparent advantages in simplicity for the supported users. One of the biggest hurdles in remote support for non-corporate environments is getting the user to enable the right services in a secure way to allow the support person control, but not anyone else. This seems to go a way towards that goal without requiring a lot of technical skill from the user. Time will tell if it's actually as secure as it seems of course (this isn't exactly a white paper), but on the surface I don't see huge issues.
Except when Barnes and Noble or Amazon know that I like, say Jim Butcher, then they tell me when he releases a new book. Or when someone publishes a book that bears superficial similarities to his that I might enjoy. Granted they aren't always right, but it's still a win-win situation when they hit something else that I enjoy. Format shifting isn't much of an issue for me. There are Kindle and Nook clients for nearly every format on the market. The only devices I'm aware of without a native Nook client is the Kindle. I can hardly even say the reverse is true, because the Nook is so trivially easy to boot into stock Android that it for all intents and purposes it does have a Kindle client.
Yes, look at Stallman. He's confined to the use of a 10 year old, 10 inch net book; and can't use 90% of the software available to the rest of the world, all because he's incapable of bending his principles enough to live in the real world. He's so "free" that he can't use most of the software and hardware on the planet. Sign me up for some of that action!
It's a not a one for one comparison, mostly based on the distribution model. A programmer (typically) has a job. They get a regular and predictable paycheck, health insurance, 401K, etc. Authors work for themselves. They make whatever their book sells, have to provide themselves with any insurance they need, etc. I'm not saying every author needs to make a million dollar a year to survive (that's patently ridiculous, and I doubt any but the best known do), but comparing it to a programming gig with a company is not reasonable either.
Isn't he going to double my order if I order now? And maybe give me some completely unrelated product of little actual value for a bonus gift?
"That's right folks, order now and get two square feet of graphene for 39.99 million dollars. And this free ferret. It can all be yours for this low, low, price. order now!"
Long story short... no. First, that isn't how science works. If I'm an expert in photovoltaic reactions, my help isn't very helpful while you're trying to get a windmill working. Scientist are, in general, specialists, there is no degree in "cool alternative energy technology". Second, that's not how markets work. If I'm really close to figuring out how to, say, increase solar cell efficiency by 50%, thus making me rich; I'm unlikely to give up that work because we're working on wind power this month. Finally, it would be foolish to put all of our eggs in one basket. It's unlikely that any currently feasible alternative energy systems will be able to supply all the power people need everywhere.
Deserts are great for solar, coastline are get for wind and hydro, volcanically active areas are great for geothermal... None of them is a perfect tech that will work everywhere. Seattle would find solar farms all but useless, and there's not much easily available geothermal in Detroit. There are a few "magic bullet" technologies being researched, but they are very theoretical and a risky "bet the farm" idea. Sure, controllable and safe fusion power would solve all our problems, but no one is entirely sure it's possible.
This doesn't sound like a real "search and seizure" situation. This is a cop getting curious during a traffic stop. I doubt every car is equipped with a reader capable of downloading the contents of your phone. If you've left it vulnerable (no passcode) he can look through it just like any other container in the car, otherwise he'd have to seize it and take it back to the station. That's a whole different thing.
Police can get away with looking at things much more easily than they can taking them. Also, IIRC the iPhone and Blackberries can be encrypted. I don't know if the same is true for Androids but I assume at least some can be. That would make data retrieval without a warrant damn near impossible. The iPhone's encryption can be compromised with physical access, but again that's a far more significant breach of privacy and would seem to me to require a warrant. Then, of course, if the cops doesn't think to turn the device off, there's auto-wipe.
IANAL of course and all of this is just guess work, but I think that a passcode would be enough to prevent this kind of casual snooping in practice. Obviously if they have a warrant, all bets are off and much more can be done.
It's like anything else. The better your initial plan or design the less likely you are to get surprised and the more likely that the surprises will be small. There's an old saying about plans in the military "The best plans only last until the first bullet flies" and it's true... but that doesn't mean I didn't spend hours and hour planning operations. Sure nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, but a good plan considers as many variants and contingencies as possible in order to anticipate reactions and minimize disruptions to operations.
Software design is the same. The more time you spend planning and designing, the more likely the final product is to look like the design. It's never going to free the process entirely of surprises and gotchas, but it can minimize them and help to predict how to fit them in. Of course if you keep working toward the "perfect" plan you'll never get anywhere, but spending at least part of your development life cycle on a realistic design rarely hurts and often helps.
But if you happen to look like Abul bin Awfulguy it means that you will be inconvenienced every time you go to the airport. Everytime. While that might be fine for you (or might not, did you know you look just like Sean McIRAnut?), it's not exactly great for Robert Hussien. Who's a fourth generation American, and has a security clearance, but convince the automated systems of that why don't you?
1) You don't have insurance or a "regular doctor". There are a remarkable (and growing) number of people in this country who might be able to afford $50 on a quick talk with a doc in kiosk, but can't afford regular and sustained health care. Many of those people might consider this options "better than nothing".
2) You have a quick easy to diagnose problem and you want a simple pharmaceutical fix. I know what a sinus infection looks and feels like. I know what the treatment is. I can't prescribe myself antibiotics. If there's a Rite-Aide on the corner and the Doc-in-the-box can give me a quick script for them; then for $45 I might do so in a pinch (especially if my insurance pays a part of that cost).
In general though you are correct. Assuming I have insurance and a regular doctor, I would not use this service for any but the most trivial cases.
In my, rather longer than most, experience it's the same in the US. I dunno if this is a new thing that they're trying to get CS graduates to do to make them feel special, or something that OP just kind of made up for himself.
Well, I know that if I go to the "IT" section of most job sites I see everything from "senior software engineer" to "windows support monkey", so he's mostly right. For that matter acting like all admins are dumb janitors and all programmer from genius engineers is pretty typical fresh from college arrogance. I make as much as a senior developer and have a masters in CS. I'd do dev work (I'm quite capable of it), but I would have to take huge pay cut to go from senior Unix administrator to junior or even mid-level developer.
This isn't entirely true. Being the Windows desktop weasel is definitely a lifetime of frustration kinda gig, but no one with any real knowledge or skill stays a Windows desktop weasel for long. I do user support for Linux desktops combined with system administration for Linux desktops and servers. I make as much as a developer with similar experience, and am considered a respected and important part of my team. Of course, for that money I don't point, click, and drool making someone's Office suite works. Kernel performance tuning, assistance with build problems, service provisioning, that sort of this is interesting, challenging, and valuable.
My life isn't all glamorous and exciting high end technical problems, occasionally I do have to replace a DVD-ROM or figure out why someone's mouse is misbehaving. Once in a great while I even solve people's Office problems... Overall though systems administration isn't a horrible gig, once past the "hur hur I fix your computor" stage. At that lower end, it's sucky and high stress, but I wouldn't say I spent more than a year or two in the trenches. It's not like developers don't have that career stage where no one trusts them to do more than write "hello world" modules.
Oh come on, really? Sure the UK and the US work hard to keep each other happy. We're almost certainly amongst each others most important allies (Canada is probably more important to us, France more important to you, for geographic reasons; but we're hugely important to each other). I won't deny that the UK has bent over backward to help the US before (and we've done the same), but in this case you're just being a tinfoil hatter. A law enforcement agency of a sovereign nation went to your courts and presented solid evidence that an international crime had been committed partially on your soil. They asked for a warrant to search for information from a company linked to said crime. It doesn't matter if the country in question was the US or Portugal, they'd have gotten the warrant. It's a simple process and it happens daily, probably hourly. International law enforcement cooperation is strong amongst all the western nations.
As long as the action in question is in fact a crime in the UK (it appears to be), and the evidence presented is sufficient (it appears to be), a warrant will be issued.
Alternately to (b), what do you expect them to do? Subpenas and warrants are not optional. You can, right up to the minute the court order comes in, tell government agencies that your policies forbid releasing customer data... after that, your choices are pretty limited (they involve "hand over information" or "go to jail and let them search for it themselves"). If you want true, court order proof, privacy, the onus is on you to find a company that can provide it, Ideally you want a company located in a place where either the there are no data retention requirements, or the court cannot compel discovery, conversely you'd like to be able to sue them if they do release your data. I'd venture that finding a country with the proper blend of anarchy and legal system will be challenging.
He's using awk to find the string 'bluefish' and eliminating the greps entirely (the capabilities of awk are a superset of the capabilities of grep), but I don't know how he's eliminating the "awk '/bluefish/ {print $2}'" entry in the process list. I suspect he didn't think about it in his attempts to look 1337. You could probably design an awk regex that would eliminate the awk process from the output, but in the end I think the GGP's is simpler.
Research faculty are preferred to non-research factuality because they bring in grant money. It's never as simple as "do this and everything will be fine" if they paid research faculty less, those faculty will leave and go into industry, government, or universities that will pay them. Grant money disappears. Grant money, even when it has no immediate or obvious benefit to the university, is a huge part of university funding. Maybe a grant bought a big computer cluster for researching a specific problem. Once the paper is printed, often that computer reverts to the university to use as they see fit. Grants pay part or all of the faculty members salary, pay undergraduate and graduate research assistants who then turn around and reinvest their pay in tuition, and books, they provide equipment and facilities
The problem being that less and less of the state funding is coming in. Hence the need to recruit higher (monetary) value students. Pulling random numbers out of my butt, lets pretend that it costs a given uni 40 million dollars a year to operate. Ten years ago, that university got 20 million a year from the state. With half it's funding coming from the state, only 20 million had to come from tuition, grants, or endowments. Now the state is only giving them 5 million. That means to maintain they must raise 35 million from outside sources now instead of twenty. They can't increase tuition on in-state students, and they can only increase enrollment so much (not to mention that enrollment increases costs too). The only real solution is to find students that they *can* charge more.
In reality no states have cut funding *that* dramatically of course; but still the loss of say 35 or 40% of your state funding, as a state school, hurts. You have to make up the money somewhere. This is a "somewhere".
This sounds not unreasonable. B&N already has a huge amount of information on my book buying habits from my accounts with them (I have a loyalty card, and buy stuff from them online), and they've never used that to spam me excessively. I don't see why they would abuse the more limited info Borders may have on me. At best it would serve to piss me off and be less likely to use them.
To fair, the support is pricey, but it's good. For the SOHO shop that is using a Linux box or two as a back end for their Windows and/or Mac workstations, they'll answer the straight easy "how do I do $thing in Linux" all day. For the big boys the basic support people will escalate to engineers for helping you optimize kernels, fix complex issues. I've used their support for some very tricky issues in clustering and HPC, they've always been willing to help and usually pointed me int eh right direction even if they didn't flat solve the problem. Unlike Microsoft, their "scope of support" is very broad, and they have at least a few real experts on any given topic.
On the face it your idea has merit, but I don't think RIM will do it, more to the point I'm sure they can do it and remain viable. RIM has always been Blackberry. They made their fortune off of being *the* real smartphone vendor that enterprise took seriously. They designed everything from the ground up and built a system that businesses were willing to pay big bucks for. Then the iPhone came out, and they sat there, sure that nothing could challenge their business dominance (who cares about consumer phones anyway?). Then Android came out and they still did nothing. Then iPhone got enterprise integration and they started to look a little worried and came out with a few new phones... Now two thirds of the people in my office (of a major multinational mind) have turned in their company issued Blackberries and use their personal iPhone or Android device.
What can they do by switching to Windows 7? Become another player fighting for the tiny little pieces of the pie? That won't support a company like RIM. This isn't HTC, they aren't used to surviving on razor thin hardware margins. They're used to naming their price and having big businesses beg them to sell more. In the unlikely event that they could even make the switch, it would be a much smaller and less important company on the other end. Until something major changes, their are exactly two winner in cell phones right now. Google and Apple. Google's partners are in a race to the bottom, and Microsoft hasn't had any significant success. At best MS will become a third "winner" with their partners fighting the same losing battle as Google's are fighting now.
Until a serious game changing event rolls along, the only real question in the phone market right now is whether Microsoft can carve out a niche of its own.
He did (well, they did). This law replaces the old law, and they have changed the definition of the crime to include a caveat about TOS and employment contracts. Assuming this law passes, it will not longer be any sort of crime to violate a TOS or employment contract (at least in so far as this law is concerned, if you violate your employment contract by stealing a few hundred grand, I suspect they still arrest you)
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It's not a troll, I seriously don't really get the idea of a single country being run by so many independant states as the US seems to be.
Umm... Aren't you guys a member of the EU? You're just now seeing the beginning of how Federal and state powers and responsibilities manifested in US history. Shortly after the unpleasantness with the your Crown, the thirteen states banded together in something very like the EU under the Articles of Confederation. It became clear after a time that the Articles were insufficient to bound the states together, much as it is becoming clear that something more substantial may be needed in Europe (at the least many member states are concerned about how much everyone's economic policy diverges). So we upgraded the capabilities of the Federal government in the Constitution. Over the next two hundred years the States and the Fed (and the locals and the states) have maneuvered, pushed, and pulled (and in part fought a war) into the current system. The Federal Government's power have increased substantially over that time, but the states rather jealously guard what they have left.
The answer to your more immediate question of why local governments are building national infrastructure, the answer is they don't. States do. States are not local governments. Even ignoring the history above, remember that the US is relatively huge vs. the UK. England (indeed, the entire island including Scotland and Wales) would fit into some of our larger states. A certain level of mid tier government between "national" and "local" makes sense. Typically states maintain the larger roads (sometimes with mostly their own funding, called "state roads"; sometime with additional federal money called "federal roads" or "Interstates"), and local governments maintain the smaller local roads. State and local governments get a lot of their funding from sales tax (like your VAT, but collected at the local and state level). So the issues here are:
1) It's hard for states and localities to collect sales on interstate mail order purchases (as throughout the Internet). They are pushing to legally require this on any business which operates inside their borders. This is becoming a larger and larger issue as online ordering becomes a larger part of the retail profile of many people.
2) Sales tax rates vary extremely from state to state and locality to locality. I live in Massachusetts, we have like a 7% sales tax. It's higher in Boston which collects a local tax on top of the state tax. An hour north of me is New Hampshire which has no sales tax at all. Amazon and some other online retailers claim that this makes sales tax collection unduly complicated for them, so they want a national sales tax.
3) The difficulty presented by the OP is a real one. If the Feds start to collect a national sales tax on online orders as a proxy for states and localities how can you fairly divide up the proceeds. Should every state just get a percentage based on population? How's that work when many more people in say California or Massachusetts are much more likely to shop online than people in Mississippi? How do you handle getting local governments their share? Should people in states like New Hampshire, that have no state sales tax, have to pay? Should those states get any of the proceeds?
Except that to all appearances this requires the user to go to a specific web site (or somehow generate a control code) and explicitly allow the connection. It's still not without some security concerns I suppose, but it would require a fair amount of fooling both Google and the user to abuse it. Mostly I can see it as being a great way to help friends/relatives with their computers. As a double plus good you can help your mom with her Mac from your Windows box, or your dad with his Windows box from your Linux box. As I use all three OSes at different times, and help people who use all three OSes, this has some serious pluses for me.
Like anything else there are security implications here, but there are security implications to any sort of remote control applications out there. This is no worse than most, and has significant apparent advantages in simplicity for the supported users. One of the biggest hurdles in remote support for non-corporate environments is getting the user to enable the right services in a secure way to allow the support person control, but not anyone else. This seems to go a way towards that goal without requiring a lot of technical skill from the user. Time will tell if it's actually as secure as it seems of course (this isn't exactly a white paper), but on the surface I don't see huge issues.
Except when Barnes and Noble or Amazon know that I like, say Jim Butcher, then they tell me when he releases a new book. Or when someone publishes a book that bears superficial similarities to his that I might enjoy. Granted they aren't always right, but it's still a win-win situation when they hit something else that I enjoy. Format shifting isn't much of an issue for me. There are Kindle and Nook clients for nearly every format on the market. The only devices I'm aware of without a native Nook client is the Kindle. I can hardly even say the reverse is true, because the Nook is so trivially easy to boot into stock Android that it for all intents and purposes it does have a Kindle client.
Yes, look at Stallman. He's confined to the use of a 10 year old, 10 inch net book; and can't use 90% of the software available to the rest of the world, all because he's incapable of bending his principles enough to live in the real world. He's so "free" that he can't use most of the software and hardware on the planet. Sign me up for some of that action!
It's a not a one for one comparison, mostly based on the distribution model. A programmer (typically) has a job. They get a regular and predictable paycheck, health insurance, 401K, etc. Authors work for themselves. They make whatever their book sells, have to provide themselves with any insurance they need, etc. I'm not saying every author needs to make a million dollar a year to survive (that's patently ridiculous, and I doubt any but the best known do), but comparing it to a programming gig with a company is not reasonable either.
Isn't he going to double my order if I order now? And maybe give me some completely unrelated product of little actual value for a bonus gift?
"That's right folks, order now and get two square feet of graphene for 39.99 million dollars. And this free ferret. It can all be yours for this low, low, price. order now!"
Long story short... no. First, that isn't how science works. If I'm an expert in photovoltaic reactions, my help isn't very helpful while you're trying to get a windmill working. Scientist are, in general, specialists, there is no degree in "cool alternative energy technology". Second, that's not how markets work. If I'm really close to figuring out how to, say, increase solar cell efficiency by 50%, thus making me rich; I'm unlikely to give up that work because we're working on wind power this month. Finally, it would be foolish to put all of our eggs in one basket. It's unlikely that any currently feasible alternative energy systems will be able to supply all the power people need everywhere.
Deserts are great for solar, coastline are get for wind and hydro, volcanically active areas are great for geothermal... None of them is a perfect tech that will work everywhere. Seattle would find solar farms all but useless, and there's not much easily available geothermal in Detroit. There are a few "magic bullet" technologies being researched, but they are very theoretical and a risky "bet the farm" idea. Sure, controllable and safe fusion power would solve all our problems, but no one is entirely sure it's possible.
This doesn't sound like a real "search and seizure" situation. This is a cop getting curious during a traffic stop. I doubt every car is equipped with a reader capable of downloading the contents of your phone. If you've left it vulnerable (no passcode) he can look through it just like any other container in the car, otherwise he'd have to seize it and take it back to the station. That's a whole different thing.
Police can get away with looking at things much more easily than they can taking them. Also, IIRC the iPhone and Blackberries can be encrypted. I don't know if the same is true for Androids but I assume at least some can be. That would make data retrieval without a warrant damn near impossible. The iPhone's encryption can be compromised with physical access, but again that's a far more significant breach of privacy and would seem to me to require a warrant. Then, of course, if the cops doesn't think to turn the device off, there's auto-wipe.
IANAL of course and all of this is just guess work, but I think that a passcode would be enough to prevent this kind of casual snooping in practice. Obviously if they have a warrant, all bets are off and much more can be done.
It's not Java! Stop calling it that, you'll get me in trouble!
It's like anything else. The better your initial plan or design the less likely you are to get surprised and the more likely that the surprises will be small. There's an old saying about plans in the military "The best plans only last until the first bullet flies" and it's true... but that doesn't mean I didn't spend hours and hour planning operations. Sure nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, but a good plan considers as many variants and contingencies as possible in order to anticipate reactions and minimize disruptions to operations.
Software design is the same. The more time you spend planning and designing, the more likely the final product is to look like the design. It's never going to free the process entirely of surprises and gotchas, but it can minimize them and help to predict how to fit them in. Of course if you keep working toward the "perfect" plan you'll never get anywhere, but spending at least part of your development life cycle on a realistic design rarely hurts and often helps.
But if you happen to look like Abul bin Awfulguy it means that you will be inconvenienced every time you go to the airport. Everytime. While that might be fine for you (or might not, did you know you look just like Sean McIRAnut?), it's not exactly great for Robert Hussien. Who's a fourth generation American, and has a security clearance, but convince the automated systems of that why don't you?
I can think of two reasons:
1) You don't have insurance or a "regular doctor". There are a remarkable (and growing) number of people in this country who might be able to afford $50 on a quick talk with a doc in kiosk, but can't afford regular and sustained health care. Many of those people might consider this options "better than nothing".
2) You have a quick easy to diagnose problem and you want a simple pharmaceutical fix. I know what a sinus infection looks and feels like. I know what the treatment is. I can't prescribe myself antibiotics. If there's a Rite-Aide on the corner and the Doc-in-the-box can give me a quick script for them; then for $45 I might do so in a pinch (especially if my insurance pays a part of that cost).
In general though you are correct. Assuming I have insurance and a regular doctor, I would not use this service for any but the most trivial cases.
In my, rather longer than most, experience it's the same in the US. I dunno if this is a new thing that they're trying to get CS graduates to do to make them feel special, or something that OP just kind of made up for himself.
Well, I know that if I go to the "IT" section of most job sites I see everything from "senior software engineer" to "windows support monkey", so he's mostly right. For that matter acting like all admins are dumb janitors and all programmer from genius engineers is pretty typical fresh from college arrogance. I make as much as a senior developer and have a masters in CS. I'd do dev work (I'm quite capable of it), but I would have to take huge pay cut to go from senior Unix administrator to junior or even mid-level developer.
This isn't entirely true. Being the Windows desktop weasel is definitely a lifetime of frustration kinda gig, but no one with any real knowledge or skill stays a Windows desktop weasel for long. I do user support for Linux desktops combined with system administration for Linux desktops and servers. I make as much as a developer with similar experience, and am considered a respected and important part of my team. Of course, for that money I don't point, click, and drool making someone's Office suite works. Kernel performance tuning, assistance with build problems, service provisioning, that sort of this is interesting, challenging, and valuable.
My life isn't all glamorous and exciting high end technical problems, occasionally I do have to replace a DVD-ROM or figure out why someone's mouse is misbehaving. Once in a great while I even solve people's Office problems... Overall though systems administration isn't a horrible gig, once past the "hur hur I fix your computor" stage. At that lower end, it's sucky and high stress, but I wouldn't say I spent more than a year or two in the trenches. It's not like developers don't have that career stage where no one trusts them to do more than write "hello world" modules.
Oh come on, really? Sure the UK and the US work hard to keep each other happy. We're almost certainly amongst each others most important allies (Canada is probably more important to us, France more important to you, for geographic reasons; but we're hugely important to each other). I won't deny that the UK has bent over backward to help the US before (and we've done the same), but in this case you're just being a tinfoil hatter. A law enforcement agency of a sovereign nation went to your courts and presented solid evidence that an international crime had been committed partially on your soil. They asked for a warrant to search for information from a company linked to said crime. It doesn't matter if the country in question was the US or Portugal, they'd have gotten the warrant. It's a simple process and it happens daily, probably hourly. International law enforcement cooperation is strong amongst all the western nations.
As long as the action in question is in fact a crime in the UK (it appears to be), and the evidence presented is sufficient (it appears to be), a warrant will be issued.
Alternately to (b), what do you expect them to do? Subpenas and warrants are not optional. You can, right up to the minute the court order comes in, tell government agencies that your policies forbid releasing customer data... after that, your choices are pretty limited (they involve "hand over information" or "go to jail and let them search for it themselves"). If you want true, court order proof, privacy, the onus is on you to find a company that can provide it, Ideally you want a company located in a place where either the there are no data retention requirements, or the court cannot compel discovery, conversely you'd like to be able to sue them if they do release your data. I'd venture that finding a country with the proper blend of anarchy and legal system will be challenging.
He's using awk to find the string 'bluefish' and eliminating the greps entirely (the capabilities of awk are a superset of the capabilities of grep), but I don't know how he's eliminating the "awk '/bluefish/ {print $2}'" entry in the process list. I suspect he didn't think about it in his attempts to look 1337. You could probably design an awk regex that would eliminate the awk process from the output, but in the end I think the GGP's is simpler.
Research faculty are preferred to non-research factuality because they bring in grant money. It's never as simple as "do this and everything will be fine" if they paid research faculty less, those faculty will leave and go into industry, government, or universities that will pay them. Grant money disappears. Grant money, even when it has no immediate or obvious benefit to the university, is a huge part of university funding. Maybe a grant bought a big computer cluster for researching a specific problem. Once the paper is printed, often that computer reverts to the university to use as they see fit. Grants pay part or all of the faculty members salary, pay undergraduate and graduate research assistants who then turn around and reinvest their pay in tuition, and books, they provide equipment and facilities
The problem being that less and less of the state funding is coming in. Hence the need to recruit higher (monetary) value students. Pulling random numbers out of my butt, lets pretend that it costs a given uni 40 million dollars a year to operate. Ten years ago, that university got 20 million a year from the state. With half it's funding coming from the state, only 20 million had to come from tuition, grants, or endowments. Now the state is only giving them 5 million. That means to maintain they must raise 35 million from outside sources now instead of twenty. They can't increase tuition on in-state students, and they can only increase enrollment so much (not to mention that enrollment increases costs too). The only real solution is to find students that they *can* charge more.
In reality no states have cut funding *that* dramatically of course; but still the loss of say 35 or 40% of your state funding, as a state school, hurts. You have to make up the money somewhere. This is a "somewhere".
This sounds not unreasonable. B&N already has a huge amount of information on my book buying habits from my accounts with them (I have a loyalty card, and buy stuff from them online), and they've never used that to spam me excessively. I don't see why they would abuse the more limited info Borders may have on me. At best it would serve to piss me off and be less likely to use them.
To fair, the support is pricey, but it's good. For the SOHO shop that is using a Linux box or two as a back end for their Windows and/or Mac workstations, they'll answer the straight easy "how do I do $thing in Linux" all day. For the big boys the basic support people will escalate to engineers for helping you optimize kernels, fix complex issues. I've used their support for some very tricky issues in clustering and HPC, they've always been willing to help and usually pointed me int eh right direction even if they didn't flat solve the problem. Unlike Microsoft, their "scope of support" is very broad, and they have at least a few real experts on any given topic.
Kimball's rocks, don't they?
Not Android developers. Google's hardware partners. Those guys are fighting increasingly bitter battles on increasingly thin margins.
On the face it your idea has merit, but I don't think RIM will do it, more to the point I'm sure they can do it and remain viable. RIM has always been Blackberry. They made their fortune off of being *the* real smartphone vendor that enterprise took seriously. They designed everything from the ground up and built a system that businesses were willing to pay big bucks for. Then the iPhone came out, and they sat there, sure that nothing could challenge their business dominance (who cares about consumer phones anyway?). Then Android came out and they still did nothing. Then iPhone got enterprise integration and they started to look a little worried and came out with a few new phones... Now two thirds of the people in my office (of a major multinational mind) have turned in their company issued Blackberries and use their personal iPhone or Android device.
What can they do by switching to Windows 7? Become another player fighting for the tiny little pieces of the pie? That won't support a company like RIM. This isn't HTC, they aren't used to surviving on razor thin hardware margins. They're used to naming their price and having big businesses beg them to sell more. In the unlikely event that they could even make the switch, it would be a much smaller and less important company on the other end. Until something major changes, their are exactly two winner in cell phones right now. Google and Apple. Google's partners are in a race to the bottom, and Microsoft hasn't had any significant success. At best MS will become a third "winner" with their partners fighting the same losing battle as Google's are fighting now.
Until a serious game changing event rolls along, the only real question in the phone market right now is whether Microsoft can carve out a niche of its own.
He did (well, they did). This law replaces the old law, and they have changed the definition of the crime to include a caveat about TOS and employment contracts. Assuming this law passes, it will not longer be any sort of crime to violate a TOS or employment contract (at least in so far as this law is concerned, if you violate your employment contract by stealing a few hundred grand, I suspect they still arrest you)