No I have simplified the question "does this hardware have software support for this platform?" to "Does this hardware work on this platform". I'm well aware of what drivers are, and how they provide binary interaction between the operating system and the hardware, however I don't particularly care. If I have a Linux box, and a piece of hardware that lacks Linux drivers, then for all practical purposes the hardware doesn't work with my OS. I can't make it *do* anything. And yes, if I get a piece of hardware that lacks either a) a functional Windows 7 driver or b) an XP driver that works in compatibility mode, I say that the hardware doesn't work with Windows 7. Because for any useful definition of "works", it doesn't. That (b) above is somewhat important by the way. The amount of hardware that has no working compatibility mode drivers is even smaller than the fairly small set of hardware that can't be made to work in Linux. Just as I'm willing to give wireless cards that require nswrapper to work in Linux credit, I give compatibility mode drivers credit in Windows.
I personally have no problem with either option, but you typically have a "government regulation always bad" slant to your posts. What you're talking about in your second option isn't much different from what your parent originally suggested. Indeed, why have fifty cables, why not one government owned cable with a government owned or regulated switching room that hooks it up to the upstream provider of your choice. You pay a small maintenance fee to the government for your physical "last mile" connection, but mostly pay a provider of your choice for all the logical layer stuff. That's a discussion I could definitely get behind.
With modern technologies like fiber optics, there's no reason why every home cannot be wired with 50 incoming optical lines (1 cm thick bundle), each one carrying a TV lineup.
No reason except the insane and wasteful expense of doing so (You don't think they're all going to let each other use their existing infrastructure do you? Each and every one of those 50 cables will have to have its own hole dug. That or the government will have to force the companies to share the resources, which seems contrary to your point.) When I lived in Lafayette, LA the local government decided to say "fuck you" to Cox and had the local power company lay FIOS (which, by the way, is working out great by all reports, government run and all). Even using the infrastructure they had laid in already it was a multi-year, billion dollar operation. These were people that already had tunnels, right of ways, everything they needed to run power straight to every house in the city and most of the parish, and it still cost them a fortune and took a good long while. How long, and how much would be required for Google or Apple to do it from scratch?
You're splitting hairs. If it has no driver support, or the driver support is flaky, incomplete, or fiddly, then from a user's point of view it doesn't work, or works incompletely or flaky. From the point of view my statement was made from (user/system administrator/high level programmer), it was completely accurate. As it relates to the subject at hand, Coreboot not working, or working poorly with some hardware, my statement was completely relevant. If, as has happened over time, Linux drivers can be provided (either through vendors stepping up to the plate and writing them, or hackers reverse engineering them) for most major hardware, it's not unreasonable to think that a similar combination of motherboard manufactures and hackers could eventually provided similar levels of support for Coreboot.
It's gotten much, much better, but I can remember the days when "compatible" Linux hardware often meant that if you didn't mind missing half the functionality and everything being slow, it was completely compatible. Gods forbid something had "partial" or "experimental" support. I remember installing a scanner once that supposedly had "partial" support. It installed OK, and GIMP was able to use to it, so I was getting pretty excited. Then I tried to scan something. It would only scan approximately a 1 inch square around the very center of the glass. So assuming all you ever wanted to scan was the really small Post-It Notes you were fine.
Luckily the whole thing had been merely an exercise for me; the scanner worked fine on my Windows box, and I'd only tried to get it working on Linux for the experience. It was pretty shocking to see what constituted "partial support" though. Now, of course, nearly everything works with little or no effort. It's not *quite* as plug and play easy as Windows in some cases (though in many cases it is), but rarely do you find a piece of hardware that doesn't work at all or is severely degraded in Linux. Hopefully as time and development proceeds, this will improve as well (but I'm not using it till it does).
That may all be true, but reality remains reality. You can't say "well, we're on a shoestring budget here guys, we need to make the most of every resource, so we need to get someone with at least a little bit of experience so he can get up and running quickly, but we can't afford to pay a senior person so we'll advertise for an "Entry level person with 3 years of experience"." You either pay for a more senior person, or you accept that you're hiring an entry level person. The whole "entry level with three years of experience" results in one of three things:
1) You get an actual entry level person, get away with paying them shit and sacrifice on their effectiveness. 2) You wind up hiring a decent senior person, but they refuse to work for your entry level salary and you have to pay them more. 3) You get some poor mouth breather who has no idea what his experience is worth, and probably wasn't that great to begin with. He's willing to work cheap, but unlike the new guy isn't even going to learn fast. He gets up to speed quicker, but tops out at 45 on the Interstate.
So your under-budgeted, under-resourced, and not following good design or documentation practices, but can't figured out why hiring new people isn't a magic bullet to fix the problem? Doesn't really sound like you have a hiring problem per se. Doing everything wrong and the blaming new hires for being new hires seems like a pretty broken system to begin with.
So because you met a Rails programmer who sucked, you naturally leaped to the conclusion that all Rails programmers suck? That is really an amazing story? Who do you work for so I can make sure never, ever to apply there? I mean obviously since you're really bad at selecting candidates, everyone at your company mush be awful. It only makes sense, right?
It's nice that you tear apart his grammar, while at the same time screwing up your quote tags so as to make your post far less readable than his. Gosh you'd almost think no one is perfect. Also you have have several dangling participles. (Before anyone comments, yes, there probably will be grammatical errors in this post. That just reinforces my point. This is an Internet forum post, not a cover letter or engineering document).
Going on to the main topic: You know what? I'm good at what I do. I can say that as objectively as possible in a career field that lacks any real objective criteria for "good". I have a fairly senior level position, with a good company. They like me and my work well enough to offer a substantial raise to keep me when I got another offer. I get fairly regular contact from recruiters, and when I follow up I get interviews and even offers more often than I don't. I also really love my job. I love being able to play round on computers the likes of which would stagger most people to think about, and make them do things that people don't realize they can do.
You know what else? I do that eight or nine hours a day. Sometimes ten or twelve on a bad day. I do it everyday, even the days that I'm not really feeling it. That's way more time than I spend on any hobby, any other area of interest, my wife.. hell that's more time than I spend sleeping. I'm not doing it when I get home. Period. Not unless I get a wild hair up my ass and decide that something really needs to be done. If that makes me a bad engineer, a bad employee, well you better talk to my boss. He seems quite happy with my terrible work habits.
Indeed, I was not trying to say that "Doctors are always right" either. Like anything else, you have to evaluate the facts and make a decision. Those facts include the expert opinion of your doctors; but like everyone else they are human and they err. In my mind the treatment on your arm is a bad example. There are a number of factors that could have led to a very similar seeming injury requiring very different treatment, or for a specialist to recommend a more elaborate treatment than a generalist (that is, after all, part of the reason we go to specialists). I actually missed the plural on "sons" in your post on my first read through, the Urologist's opinion seems even more suspect now than it did. Of course one fairly nice option that our system does allow for is second opinions... in this case I'd certainly seek one.
The second broken arm was $10,000 more than the first, but the first "treatment" resulted in your arm breaking in exactly the same way a second time. Don't get me wrong, there are a ton of factors involved in the location and severity of a bone break, and it may well have been inevitable that your arm would break the same way when you injured yourself in a similar manner; *but* it's also arguable that the less elaborate and complete first treatment resulted in the bone healing weaker and more likely to rebreak.
Regardless of whether the first break contributed to the second, it's also not inconsiderable that getting such a similar injury in nearly the same place caused the doctors to have to take much more care in the second treatment. Having two healed breaks, practically on top of each other, is almost certain to weaken the bone; the addition of some titanium plated for support of such a weakened bone might have been prudent caution.
You also mention therapy, which is certainly a not inconsiderable expense but can significantly increase the pace of recovery. It may not make you any stronger or healthier in the end, but the "end" might be 8 weeks instead of 12.
I'm not a doctor of course, and I don't know the details of your case, but in my mind your having had two such similar breaks is an excellent argument for the second being more expensive. Now the urologist thing does seem a bit suspect, but again, it's hard to say. Is your son experiencing some sort of symptoms that such an operation might alleviate?
Not to mention that the compound was in the middle of a rich suburban neighborhood. Pakistan was understandably miffed that we violated their airspace and conducted a military raid in the middle of their country, but we get a certain amount of pass on that becasue of the nature of the target and the egg they have on their collective faces for not taking care of this themselves. Dropping aircraft bombs on the equivalent of Bel Air would be a little tougher to paper over (and contrary to our "minimal civilian casualties" policy for sure).
On the one hand you're saying that TOR is going to awesome becasue you played it for 20 minutes at a con, on the other you're saying that loads of your friends liked Rift initially and got bored when they hit endgame. Do you see the contradiction here? Lots of games have stories, WoW's story is reasonably compelling (not great literature by any means, but reasonably compelling) if you read the quests and pay attention to what you're doing. One of Blizzard's main fiction producers is Christie Golden, who is also one of the main Star Wars novel producers. She's a moderately talented writer (I won't call her an author exactly, she doesn't write her own stories, just fleshes out the stories her editors give her) who produces reasonably entertaining stories for both universes. That's really the best you can hope to get for any mass market entertainment series like SW or Warcraft.
The problem with "story" based games as MMOs (and this is a problem that WoW is facing more and more now that they've streamlined the questing system) is that once the "story" is played out.. then what? Why am I paying you next month? How fast will the story be progressing? Faster than I can play through? Doubtful. Faster than some no-lifer who plays 16 hours a day can play through? Almost impossible.
I'll give TOR a shot, don't get me wrong. I'd love to be proven wrong here. We'll see what happens.
Realistically this is a complete non-issue. This is like some guy in a cubicle in the White House said "Hey, you guys think we should look at this?" and it never went anywhere. We might as well get excited becasue some Congressmen mentioned a wanting to make fish illegal in a restaurant with a buddy.
OK, I realize you're a tremendous troll, but for a lark I did the math. A million dollars for each citizen of just the US is 300 trillion dollars. That's about four times the GDP of the entire world. That's worlds away from the cost of every war, and bank bailout in US history combined. Possibly world history.
I apologize if you thought I was flaming you, it really wasn't intended that way. I'm just getting really annoyed with this whole line of discussion. I'm not even really a Mac "fanboi". I like Macs, and I have an old Macbook that my wife uses; but I mostly work and play on either Windows (for games) or Linux (becasue it's what I do professionally) systems. This whole discussion is based on the rather suspect logic:
1) The iPhone is locked down and has an app store 2) MacOS now has an App Store. 3) Therefore any day now they will lock down MacOS.
Ignoring the fact that (3) does not even follow from (1) and (2), the whole idea just doesn't make a lot of sense. Macs are sold as *computers*, iDevices are sold as *devices*. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a different strategy. I'm just getting really annoyed by the continued presentation as a fact something that really barely stands up as a theory. As things stand right now, a locked down MacOS doesn't even seem very likely, yet a large number of people continue to talk about it as a forgone conclusion. As things play out, they could turn out to be right and I could turn out to be wrong, but there's really no reason to think so right now. Yet the first or second post on every app store story is always something like this.
It's *available* via the app store, not *exclusively* available via the app store. Go to Best Buy and get a disk. No one is stopping you. I'd rather get it online and have the ability to redownload it if I lose my physical copy. Bloody Hell you people are pointlessly paranoid.
MacOS is *not* getting more closed everyday. It's not one iota more closed than it was a year ago or two years ago. You're jumping at shadows. Explain to me, in a way that doesn't involve a conspiracy theory, how being able to buy the OS online and download it, as an *option*, makes MacOS more closed? It's one of the great advantages of Linux, but it somehow makes Macs more closed? Same with the App Store, it's an entirely optional additional way to get software onto the system, explain to me (again, without conspiracy theories) how an additional, entirely optional, method of acquiring applications closes down the OS?
All of the FUD regarding MacOS being "more closed everyday" is entirely bases on an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory wherein Apple somehow rewrites all the guts of OSX so that somehow root can't install software which has not been sold through the app store. It would be difficult to do, serve little purpose (there's virtually no evidence that the App store is a huge profit center for Apple on any of its platforms), and piss of a wide chunk of the user base. It's *highly* unlikely to happen.
If (and this is a big if) it did happen, it would require a OS upgrade to implement. They can't force you to upgrade the OS. If (and again, a big if) they did do this, at that point you can simply chose to not upgrade your Macs, and not buy any new ones. At that point you can say "well, Apple really has jumped the shark, they get no more of my money." You can then either just keep using the old version of OSX on your hardware till it dies, or use boot camp to install Windows or Linux. It's not like they can remotely disable a part of the firmware on your computer becasue it no longer fits their business model this whole thing is a manufactured problem dreamed up by anti-Apple trolls without the least basis in fact.
The DoD's reasoning is pretty straightforward. There are few to no "in the wild" viruses or trojans for Linux/Mac (several worms though), but data rarely stays in one platform in an interconnected world. We put virus protection on every platform so that whenever a document or program is introduced on the network it gets scanned. That way if it has malware in it, even Windows malware on a Linux/Mac system, it's caught early. Just because I first put the document on a Linux system doesn't mean it's going to stay on a Linux system.
Except if you read the article, only one "fake" DCMA notice was sent out, and it appears to have been a legitimate accident. While the author of the article is not exactly happy with Dropbox's response to this matter he is not nearly as down on it as the summary suggests, and Dropbox's behavior was no near as flagrant as the summary suggests. This is not "nothing", but it's not anywhere near the level of "awful" suggested in the summary. Whole situation is somewhere between "tempest in teapot" and "very mildly concerning".
Why not put the "fuel station" in orbit around Mars. Send up an unmanned ship loaded with roughly half the amount of fuel, food, oxygen, water, etc. needed for the mission and put it in orbit around Mars. Later, once everything is verified as arrived and safe, launch a manned ship with roughly half the amount of food, fuel, etc needed for the mission and let it dock with the unmanned station when it gets to Mars to restock. This will allow you to carry roughly half as much consumables on the (by necessity) much larger and more complex manned vehicle. It'll also give you a bit more fudge factor for relatively cheap. If you stock one manned vessel with rough 20% more consumable than you expect to need (just in case), you're adding quite a bit to a single ship's mass. If you add 10% more to each of two vessels, probably less of a big deal.
I think it shows a reasonable standard deviation, given that the tests are all slightly different and almost certainly have different blind spots. Luck is also a factor. The tests all showed you to be above average, merely in variations thereof. If two had shown you to be a moron, three average, and one a genius there would be more cause for concern.
Also your post lacks a lot of details that could help explain the discrepancy. How many tests did you take? What was the spread? If you took three tests, two of which rated you "quite smart" and one of which rated you a genius, it's possible you got lucky on that one or the test happened to overstate the importance of something you're particularly good at. Conversely if one of them was notably lower than the others it might have a particular hole for subset of "intelligence" that you happen to be particularly good at, or you just got unlucky.
Relevant to the article we're discussing, how did your scored do as a function of time? Perhaps your early success caused to get bored and perform less well later. Perhaps your earlier mediocre performance caused you to try harder on later tests. Maybe you were just having a shitty day when you did poorly on the one test.
While interesting, and perhaps somewhat true, your point is complete ancillary to the topic at hand. Both financiers and scientists have almost certainly followed a "college track" in high school and graduated with at least a bachelors, probably (almost certainly in the case of scientists) more. If anything management and finance are (slightly) easier to get into with less education than science or engineering. While it's certainly true that to a guy making 25K a year fixing cars both science/engineering and management/finance seem like laudable careers making fantastic money; this article focuses on the discrepancies between those STEM guys and the finance guys, not on how either of them compare to someone who never went to college.
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No I have simplified the question "does this hardware have software support for this platform?" to "Does this hardware work on this platform". I'm well aware of what drivers are, and how they provide binary interaction between the operating system and the hardware, however I don't particularly care. If I have a Linux box, and a piece of hardware that lacks Linux drivers, then for all practical purposes the hardware doesn't work with my OS. I can't make it *do* anything. And yes, if I get a piece of hardware that lacks either a) a functional Windows 7 driver or b) an XP driver that works in compatibility mode, I say that the hardware doesn't work with Windows 7. Because for any useful definition of "works", it doesn't. That (b) above is somewhat important by the way. The amount of hardware that has no working compatibility mode drivers is even smaller than the fairly small set of hardware that can't be made to work in Linux. Just as I'm willing to give wireless cards that require nswrapper to work in Linux credit, I give compatibility mode drivers credit in Windows.
I personally have no problem with either option, but you typically have a "government regulation always bad" slant to your posts. What you're talking about in your second option isn't much different from what your parent originally suggested. Indeed, why have fifty cables, why not one government owned cable with a government owned or regulated switching room that hooks it up to the upstream provider of your choice. You pay a small maintenance fee to the government for your physical "last mile" connection, but mostly pay a provider of your choice for all the logical layer stuff. That's a discussion I could definitely get behind.
With modern technologies like fiber optics, there's no reason why every home cannot be wired with 50 incoming optical lines (1 cm thick bundle), each one carrying a TV lineup.
No reason except the insane and wasteful expense of doing so (You don't think they're all going to let each other use their existing infrastructure do you? Each and every one of those 50 cables will have to have its own hole dug. That or the government will have to force the companies to share the resources, which seems contrary to your point.) When I lived in Lafayette, LA the local government decided to say "fuck you" to Cox and had the local power company lay FIOS (which, by the way, is working out great by all reports, government run and all). Even using the infrastructure they had laid in already it was a multi-year, billion dollar operation. These were people that already had tunnels, right of ways, everything they needed to run power straight to every house in the city and most of the parish, and it still cost them a fortune and took a good long while. How long, and how much would be required for Google or Apple to do it from scratch?
You're splitting hairs. If it has no driver support, or the driver support is flaky, incomplete, or fiddly, then from a user's point of view it doesn't work, or works incompletely or flaky. From the point of view my statement was made from (user/system administrator/high level programmer), it was completely accurate. As it relates to the subject at hand, Coreboot not working, or working poorly with some hardware, my statement was completely relevant. If, as has happened over time, Linux drivers can be provided (either through vendors stepping up to the plate and writing them, or hackers reverse engineering them) for most major hardware, it's not unreasonable to think that a similar combination of motherboard manufactures and hackers could eventually provided similar levels of support for Coreboot.
It's gotten much, much better, but I can remember the days when "compatible" Linux hardware often meant that if you didn't mind missing half the functionality and everything being slow, it was completely compatible. Gods forbid something had "partial" or "experimental" support. I remember installing a scanner once that supposedly had "partial" support. It installed OK, and GIMP was able to use to it, so I was getting pretty excited. Then I tried to scan something. It would only scan approximately a 1 inch square around the very center of the glass. So assuming all you ever wanted to scan was the really small Post-It Notes you were fine.
Luckily the whole thing had been merely an exercise for me; the scanner worked fine on my Windows box, and I'd only tried to get it working on Linux for the experience. It was pretty shocking to see what constituted "partial support" though. Now, of course, nearly everything works with little or no effort. It's not *quite* as plug and play easy as Windows in some cases (though in many cases it is), but rarely do you find a piece of hardware that doesn't work at all or is severely degraded in Linux. Hopefully as time and development proceeds, this will improve as well (but I'm not using it till it does).
That may all be true, but reality remains reality. You can't say "well, we're on a shoestring budget here guys, we need to make the most of every resource, so we need to get someone with at least a little bit of experience so he can get up and running quickly, but we can't afford to pay a senior person so we'll advertise for an "Entry level person with 3 years of experience"." You either pay for a more senior person, or you accept that you're hiring an entry level person. The whole "entry level with three years of experience" results in one of three things:
1) You get an actual entry level person, get away with paying them shit and sacrifice on their effectiveness.
2) You wind up hiring a decent senior person, but they refuse to work for your entry level salary and you have to pay them more.
3) You get some poor mouth breather who has no idea what his experience is worth, and probably wasn't that great to begin with. He's willing to work cheap, but unlike the new guy isn't even going to learn fast. He gets up to speed quicker, but tops out at 45 on the Interstate.
In the end you get what you pay for.
So your under-budgeted, under-resourced, and not following good design or documentation practices, but can't figured out why hiring new people isn't a magic bullet to fix the problem? Doesn't really sound like you have a hiring problem per se. Doing everything wrong and the blaming new hires for being new hires seems like a pretty broken system to begin with.
So because you met a Rails programmer who sucked, you naturally leaped to the conclusion that all Rails programmers suck? That is really an amazing story? Who do you work for so I can make sure never, ever to apply there? I mean obviously since you're really bad at selecting candidates, everyone at your company mush be awful. It only makes sense, right?
It's nice that you tear apart his grammar, while at the same time screwing up your quote tags so as to make your post far less readable than his. Gosh you'd almost think no one is perfect. Also you have have several dangling participles. (Before anyone comments, yes, there probably will be grammatical errors in this post. That just reinforces my point. This is an Internet forum post, not a cover letter or engineering document).
Going on to the main topic: You know what? I'm good at what I do. I can say that as objectively as possible in a career field that lacks any real objective criteria for "good". I have a fairly senior level position, with a good company. They like me and my work well enough to offer a substantial raise to keep me when I got another offer. I get fairly regular contact from recruiters, and when I follow up I get interviews and even offers more often than I don't. I also really love my job. I love being able to play round on computers the likes of which would stagger most people to think about, and make them do things that people don't realize they can do.
You know what else? I do that eight or nine hours a day. Sometimes ten or twelve on a bad day. I do it everyday, even the days that I'm not really feeling it. That's way more time than I spend on any hobby, any other area of interest, my wife.. hell that's more time than I spend sleeping. I'm not doing it when I get home. Period. Not unless I get a wild hair up my ass and decide that something really needs to be done. If that makes me a bad engineer, a bad employee, well you better talk to my boss. He seems quite happy with my terrible work habits.
Indeed, I was not trying to say that "Doctors are always right" either. Like anything else, you have to evaluate the facts and make a decision. Those facts include the expert opinion of your doctors; but like everyone else they are human and they err. In my mind the treatment on your arm is a bad example. There are a number of factors that could have led to a very similar seeming injury requiring very different treatment, or for a specialist to recommend a more elaborate treatment than a generalist (that is, after all, part of the reason we go to specialists). I actually missed the plural on "sons" in your post on my first read through, the Urologist's opinion seems even more suspect now than it did. Of course one fairly nice option that our system does allow for is second opinions... in this case I'd certainly seek one.
The second broken arm was $10,000 more than the first, but the first "treatment" resulted in your arm breaking in exactly the same way a second time. Don't get me wrong, there are a ton of factors involved in the location and severity of a bone break, and it may well have been inevitable that your arm would break the same way when you injured yourself in a similar manner; *but* it's also arguable that the less elaborate and complete first treatment resulted in the bone healing weaker and more likely to rebreak.
Regardless of whether the first break contributed to the second, it's also not inconsiderable that getting such a similar injury in nearly the same place caused the doctors to have to take much more care in the second treatment. Having two healed breaks, practically on top of each other, is almost certain to weaken the bone; the addition of some titanium plated for support of such a weakened bone might have been prudent caution.
You also mention therapy, which is certainly a not inconsiderable expense but can significantly increase the pace of recovery. It may not make you any stronger or healthier in the end, but the "end" might be 8 weeks instead of 12.
I'm not a doctor of course, and I don't know the details of your case, but in my mind your having had two such similar breaks is an excellent argument for the second being more expensive. Now the urologist thing does seem a bit suspect, but again, it's hard to say. Is your son experiencing some sort of symptoms that such an operation might alleviate?
Not to mention that the compound was in the middle of a rich suburban neighborhood. Pakistan was understandably miffed that we violated their airspace and conducted a military raid in the middle of their country, but we get a certain amount of pass on that becasue of the nature of the target and the egg they have on their collective faces for not taking care of this themselves. Dropping aircraft bombs on the equivalent of Bel Air would be a little tougher to paper over (and contrary to our "minimal civilian casualties" policy for sure).
On the one hand you're saying that TOR is going to awesome becasue you played it for 20 minutes at a con, on the other you're saying that loads of your friends liked Rift initially and got bored when they hit endgame. Do you see the contradiction here? Lots of games have stories, WoW's story is reasonably compelling (not great literature by any means, but reasonably compelling) if you read the quests and pay attention to what you're doing. One of Blizzard's main fiction producers is Christie Golden, who is also one of the main Star Wars novel producers. She's a moderately talented writer (I won't call her an author exactly, she doesn't write her own stories, just fleshes out the stories her editors give her) who produces reasonably entertaining stories for both universes. That's really the best you can hope to get for any mass market entertainment series like SW or Warcraft.
The problem with "story" based games as MMOs (and this is a problem that WoW is facing more and more now that they've streamlined the questing system) is that once the "story" is played out.. then what? Why am I paying you next month? How fast will the story be progressing? Faster than I can play through? Doubtful. Faster than some no-lifer who plays 16 hours a day can play through? Almost impossible.
I'll give TOR a shot, don't get me wrong. I'd love to be proven wrong here. We'll see what happens.
Realistically this is a complete non-issue. This is like some guy in a cubicle in the White House said "Hey, you guys think we should look at this?" and it never went anywhere. We might as well get excited becasue some Congressmen mentioned a wanting to make fish illegal in a restaurant with a buddy.
OK, I realize you're a tremendous troll, but for a lark I did the math. A million dollars for each citizen of just the US is 300 trillion dollars. That's about four times the GDP of the entire world. That's worlds away from the cost of every war, and bank bailout in US history combined. Possibly world history.
I apologize if you thought I was flaming you, it really wasn't intended that way. I'm just getting really annoyed with this whole line of discussion. I'm not even really a Mac "fanboi". I like Macs, and I have an old Macbook that my wife uses; but I mostly work and play on either Windows (for games) or Linux (becasue it's what I do professionally) systems. This whole discussion is based on the rather suspect logic:
1) The iPhone is locked down and has an app store
2) MacOS now has an App Store.
3) Therefore any day now they will lock down MacOS.
Ignoring the fact that (3) does not even follow from (1) and (2), the whole idea just doesn't make a lot of sense. Macs are sold as *computers*, iDevices are sold as *devices*. It's perfectly reasonable to expect a different strategy. I'm just getting really annoyed by the continued presentation as a fact something that really barely stands up as a theory. As things stand right now, a locked down MacOS doesn't even seem very likely, yet a large number of people continue to talk about it as a forgone conclusion. As things play out, they could turn out to be right and I could turn out to be wrong, but there's really no reason to think so right now. Yet the first or second post on every app store story is always something like this.
It's *available* via the app store, not *exclusively* available via the app store. Go to Best Buy and get a disk. No one is stopping you. I'd rather get it online and have the ability to redownload it if I lose my physical copy. Bloody Hell you people are pointlessly paranoid.
MacOS is *not* getting more closed everyday. It's not one iota more closed than it was a year ago or two years ago. You're jumping at shadows. Explain to me, in a way that doesn't involve a conspiracy theory, how being able to buy the OS online and download it, as an *option*, makes MacOS more closed? It's one of the great advantages of Linux, but it somehow makes Macs more closed? Same with the App Store, it's an entirely optional additional way to get software onto the system, explain to me (again, without conspiracy theories) how an additional, entirely optional, method of acquiring applications closes down the OS?
All of the FUD regarding MacOS being "more closed everyday" is entirely bases on an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory wherein Apple somehow rewrites all the guts of OSX so that somehow root can't install software which has not been sold through the app store. It would be difficult to do, serve little purpose (there's virtually no evidence that the App store is a huge profit center for Apple on any of its platforms), and piss of a wide chunk of the user base. It's *highly* unlikely to happen.
If (and this is a big if) it did happen, it would require a OS upgrade to implement. They can't force you to upgrade the OS. If (and again, a big if) they did do this, at that point you can simply chose to not upgrade your Macs, and not buy any new ones. At that point you can say "well, Apple really has jumped the shark, they get no more of my money." You can then either just keep using the old version of OSX on your hardware till it dies, or use boot camp to install Windows or Linux. It's not like they can remotely disable a part of the firmware on your computer becasue it no longer fits their business model this whole thing is a manufactured problem dreamed up by anti-Apple trolls without the least basis in fact.
Wouldn't it make more sense to catch it early on a platform that can't be infected?
The DoD's reasoning is pretty straightforward. There are few to no "in the wild" viruses or trojans for Linux/Mac (several worms though), but data rarely stays in one platform in an interconnected world. We put virus protection on every platform so that whenever a document or program is introduced on the network it gets scanned. That way if it has malware in it, even Windows malware on a Linux/Mac system, it's caught early. Just because I first put the document on a Linux system doesn't mean it's going to stay on a Linux system.
It also appears that the take down notices are a mistake, and Dropbox is apologizing for them.
Except if you read the article, only one "fake" DCMA notice was sent out, and it appears to have been a legitimate accident. While the author of the article is not exactly happy with Dropbox's response to this matter he is not nearly as down on it as the summary suggests, and Dropbox's behavior was no near as flagrant as the summary suggests. This is not "nothing", but it's not anywhere near the level of "awful" suggested in the summary. Whole situation is somewhere between "tempest in teapot" and "very mildly concerning".
Why not put the "fuel station" in orbit around Mars. Send up an unmanned ship loaded with roughly half the amount of fuel, food, oxygen, water, etc. needed for the mission and put it in orbit around Mars. Later, once everything is verified as arrived and safe, launch a manned ship with roughly half the amount of food, fuel, etc needed for the mission and let it dock with the unmanned station when it gets to Mars to restock. This will allow you to carry roughly half as much consumables on the (by necessity) much larger and more complex manned vehicle. It'll also give you a bit more fudge factor for relatively cheap. If you stock one manned vessel with rough 20% more consumable than you expect to need (just in case), you're adding quite a bit to a single ship's mass. If you add 10% more to each of two vessels, probably less of a big deal.
I think it shows a reasonable standard deviation, given that the tests are all slightly different and almost certainly have different blind spots. Luck is also a factor. The tests all showed you to be above average, merely in variations thereof. If two had shown you to be a moron, three average, and one a genius there would be more cause for concern.
Also your post lacks a lot of details that could help explain the discrepancy. How many tests did you take? What was the spread? If you took three tests, two of which rated you "quite smart" and one of which rated you a genius, it's possible you got lucky on that one or the test happened to overstate the importance of something you're particularly good at. Conversely if one of them was notably lower than the others it might have a particular hole for subset of "intelligence" that you happen to be particularly good at, or you just got unlucky.
Relevant to the article we're discussing, how did your scored do as a function of time? Perhaps your early success caused to get bored and perform less well later. Perhaps your earlier mediocre performance caused you to try harder on later tests. Maybe you were just having a shitty day when you did poorly on the one test.
While interesting, and perhaps somewhat true, your point is complete ancillary to the topic at hand. Both financiers and scientists have almost certainly followed a "college track" in high school and graduated with at least a bachelors, probably (almost certainly in the case of scientists) more. If anything management and finance are (slightly) easier to get into with less education than science or engineering. While it's certainly true that to a guy making 25K a year fixing cars both science/engineering and management/finance seem like laudable careers making fantastic money; this article focuses on the discrepancies between those STEM guys and the finance guys, not on how either of them compare to someone who never went to college.