Yes, the fiscal cliff -- the totally preventable budget crisis that we created for ourselves because we couldn't figure out how to work together. And, apparently, still can't. So now our fragile economic recovery is going to be thrown under a bus... because we can't play nice with each other. That's a great way to signal the start of a new year. What next, placing bombs under things with two keys, one given to a republican, the other to a democrat, and then a timer set and they have to figure out how to work together or it explodes?:(
It's stuff like this that make me wonder what the hell is wrong with my country.
âoeElectromagnetic energy doesnâ(TM)t add up like that,â said Kevin Bothmann, the EMT Labs testing manager.
This man has clearly never been to a football game. Let me assure you -- 10,000 screaming fans makes it a lot harder to hear the person next to you than one screaming fan.
Every major manufacturer takes advantage of mistreated labor forces somewhere in the world and that includes most of the food stuffs you buy.
Red light in the cockpit, mods. When someone uses the words "everyone, always, never, all," or other universally true (or false) statements, you really need to engage your bullshit detectors. By this poster's logic, anyone who works in manufacturing is being exploited. That is the position of an anti-industrialist, and it's not a tenable one. Yes, labor is exploited, but it's not as pervasive as the poster is claiming. Cars are a major manufacturing industry in this country, and they're union shops with health benefits, retirement plans, etc. They may not be the greatest jobs to work, but they pay a living wage and employees are treated with a measure of respect. So right there, the claim of every manufacturer is busted.
That said, the original poster is excercising his freedom of choice in the marketplace -- he is making purchasing decisions based on his personal ethics. This is to be commended. It is also making a difference because not everything in the world is produced in a Foxconn factory, or similar factory. I will stop short of saying this poster's behavior happens often enough in the marketplace to actually drive a noticable change in it, but simply underscore that his purchasing decision and the ethics underpinning it, are not an onerous burden. It's possible to live free of slave-labor products.
Perhaps Slashdot's users can help make sense of this mess and help explain it to me?"
You don't have to delve too deeply into this one, to be honest. The company took a risk. It lost at the gambling table. Badly. And now it's looking for someone, or something, to blame. And the only way to reduce their debt load without screwing someone over a barrel is if some vaguely-defined "fraud" is found in the accounting books, thus saving HP of a lot of tax money and reducing the liability. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
"An upper limit for incandescent lamp luminous efficacy (LER) is around 52 lumens per watt...
Do you have a problem with comparing the optimal case for incandescent lamps with the average case for this new technology -- and noting that it is multiples more efficient? Clearly, the point is adequately represented here... nobody would argue that I chose the worst case scenario to justify them... here we have the optimal and it still doesn't come close. I'm just not sure what you're trying to say by restating the obvious...
It is not an overlooked issue.
Then why, when the federal government mandated we kick incandescent bulbs out the door, that we also update the requirements for the replacements -- namely that they have a similar spectral profile, or that they are red-shifted so as to reduce this well-known and documented effect? Perhaps you haven't overlooked it, but a great many people have -- most people are unaware of these problems outside of the medical and peripheral fields and even then, often are not aware simply because it hasn't been part of their clinical experience.
Visibility (pardon the pun) is quite low on this problem.
its pretty common, if not standard issue now to put a patch of phosphorous over a UV led to generate the final visible light in these high powered LED's. so its very similar to what you can expect out of a CFL (course these things measure in cm)
And we can of course trust that the manufacturing quality is 100% on these -- that the UV light isn't leaking out. There are health problems with certain wavelengths. However, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about...
For comparative purposes, an incandescent bulb puts out about 52 lumens per watt. This LED is therefore about four times more efficient at converting electricity into light than the traditional lightbulb. That said, one of the big problems with LED lighting is that the light tends towards the blue end of the spectrum, whereas incandescents tend towards the red. Studies have shown that it is blue light that suppresses melatonin production, which in turn upsets the sleep/wake cycle. Similar problems have been found with LCD monitors compared to CRT monitors.
We may be improving energy efficiency, but we're actually creating health hazards in doing so -- because people assume all light is equal. It isn't.
Would I need a license to own a debugger or a soldering iron?
Why not? Law enforcement considers having bottled water in your car evidence of drug use and can tag you with possession of drug paraphenilia or use it as an excuse to strip your car down to the axles looking for drugs, then leave you with a disassembled car on the side of the road. A teenager was recently arrested and charged with possession of an explosive device because he doodled a comic book character who could shoot beams of energy out of his fists -- unfortunately, he also had an interest in engineering and electronics and his house contained many things that had been disassembled. No explosive material was found. He's still looking at life in prison.
All it'll take is the right lobbyist whispering "Terrorism" in the right ear, and you can bet your ass a soldering gun and the other stuff required to assemble your own computer will land you on some government watchlist. Cyberterrorists Build Own Computers To Thwart Security Measures, headlines will read. Yes, it's a bit of a stretch. But only a bit.
What's wrong with supporting UEFI secureboot by default, but still providing users a BIOS option of disabling it for legacy/alternate OSes?
Because the definition of 'UEFI secureboot' is that you can't disable it. Disabling it would defeat the entire point of the Trusted Computing Module... which is to fuck you, the customer, over a barrel--er, I mean, provide the customer with the security and reliability they've come to expect in a modern operating system...
Richard, it's a nice sentiment, but what are the alternatives? Signing something saying I won't buy a UEFI-enabled system is basically saying I've doomed myself to the stone age. Every company is switching over. Nobody's going to go for that in the long term, anyone signing that is doing it just to make a statement. Eventually, their decrepit pre-UEFI system is going to fry, and they're going to go looking for a new one.
Rather than do something useless like a petition, which have a very low success rate on the internet, why not give us something useful: Like a list of motherboards and builds that do not have UEFI and sport otherwise modern hardware and features?
Software development companies just mean their products are primarily electronic. Thomson Reuters for example, has the Lexus/Nexus legal database. It's practically required for anyone in law; They employ well over that number, but most of them are data entry, editing, support, accounting, HR, etc. There's less than a hundred actual developers in the company... but they're a software development company because that's the product they sell: Software.
Well, arguably what Linus is doing is a kind of tough love. He did something dumb and he's getting flogged for it. If his ego survives, he'll be a better programmer for it. That said, Linus is too much of a net celebrity to be laying someone out like that. It makes the news, like it did here, and then it makes Linux as an operating system -- and everything that runs on it and depends on it, look bad. It's like if Balmer dragged a programmer up on stage and proceeded to flog the crap out of him for ruining something in the windows kernel -- people would be all over what a horrible platform Windows is to develop for and what a horrible company Microsoft is. And Balmer could have been totally correct in everything he said about said hypothetical programmer.
There's some things you just don't do on the public stage; And an e-mail list is public, yes.
â"the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websitesâ"as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself.
Anonymity is not optional in a free society. If we all had to put our names on our ballots, if cash were outlawed and everyone had to pay by credit card with their name on it, if we truly became the transparent surveillance society tech pundits keep pointing to as the future, then democracy is dead. Anonymity is the one thing that can change the status quo -- it allows expression of ideas, themes, and alternatives to it without retribution or revenge being brought down on the speaker. Without anonymity, the government can simply disappear anyone who disagrees. Corporations can lock out political and social undesireables from key markets. When you make speaking out against the establishment impossible without painting a big target on your ass, you've killed democracy. It simply cannot survive without it.
The internet's free-wheeling and democratic nature, complete with our Anonymous cyber-terrorist groups and our Anonymous Cowards (mostly harmless, sometimes annoying), to cyber-bullies and cyber-other-things-left-unmentioned, is probably a shock to a dreamer like this guy. As a self-described pioneer, he's clearly an idealist. He doesn't see the practical long-term problems, only the ones keeping him from taking whatever his next step is on his ideological journey. For him, he's decided anonymity is the next problem to be kicked out on the way to utopia.
Sir, with respect to your accomplishments, there are no digital utopias anymore than there are real ones. The analogues between our world, here, and the world out there, and your desire to bridge the two, is noble. But you cannot pick and choose ideological values for your new world. All you can be is a humble medium through which social change occurs. All the great inventors of the world know this. When Maxwell was approached by a politician on the usefulness of electricity, he remarked, "One day sir, you will tax it." I'm sure he envisioned homes lit by power 'from the ethers', and buggies that no longer needed horses as he slaved away in his lab, but he kept enough perspective to realize that what he was discovering would one day integrate into the fabric of society in ways even he couldn't imagine... and the idea of free power for humanity, while noble, was less practical in light of the fact (no pun intended) that it would be regulated and taxed. He knew that, before it even existed.
Show some humility, sir. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to become frustrated that the world you created did not develop at all like you imagined.
Keyless entry systems might be handy (although yet another security risk), but having a keyless system with no key backup is insane. Do these people also get their car towed when the keyless entry battery dies? Or if the car battery dies? I would never accept a system that didn't have some form of alternate entry and starting.
You have no idea just how insecure keyless entry systems are. Let's just say you're about an hour, a soldering gun, and some arduino project parts away from being able to steal luxury cars en masse. Anyway, the kind of people who plop down $80 grand for a car are not the kind of people who want to fuck around with jumper cables and risk having to ask... one of the unwashed masses... for help. They'll call for a tow, every single time. Which, in a twisted kind of social justice, makes me happy. These people spent a small fortune on a brand new top of the line car... and they can't drive it because it lacks a standard feature found in that beater car with black smoke pouring out the back of it: A metal key.
The author suggests an umbrella foundation to provide consistent direction across many projects. Quoting;
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Open source does not need consistency. It was created as a reaction against people who think they do need it.
enough complaints with evidence would result in powerful diplomatic pressure to pursue criminal investigation and prosecution.
Diplomatic pressure? Uhh, no. My aunt recently had her car totally destroyed by a vandal; over $10,000 worth of damages. The police didn't even want to come out and wouldn't take a report unless it was over the phone. And this was with some pretty compelling evidence of who'd done it as well. What exactly makes you think it's somehow different when you spam the same information to a large number of people? Law enforcement is not available to people like you; you haven't paid your dues.
Appropriately here means neither going bat shit insane with sting operations and massive stupid publicity campaigns when targeting particular selective groups or doing nothing at all ie the typical balance, using the motoring analogy of, traffic control.
Pirating Britney Spears can net you a larger fine and longer jail term than hacking a bank. Please tell me more about this "typical balance" you speak of.
Of course if individuals were doing more than DDOS protesting playing games et al and involved for example in credit card fraud then real prosecution and criminal penalties should apply.
"real prosecution and criminal penalties" are levied against the politically active far more often and severely than those levied against people who were just trying to make a profit. You may recall the entire Occupy protest movement over the failure of the government to prosecute such individuals, who perpetuated a lot more than just "credit card fraud" against the American public. You might also recall now who's on all the government terror watch lists, in jail, or otherwise convicted of various crimes. I'll give you a hint: Not the multi-billion dollar thieves, but the victims.
, how do you plan on handling e-gift giving and getting?"
I pirate. Most of what's "e-gifted" is just supporting the entertainment industry; and I'm loathe to support them until they clean up their act with all the DRM crap, manipulating the market prices, and throwing people in jail for trivial crap, as well as co-opting our entire legal system and feeling entitled to profits. So... I just give people cash or socks. Because holy shit, adults love socks. And cash. Everyone does, actually.
I'm curious about people moderating this as 'troll'. Do you think a locked ecosystem is a good thing? Do you think rewarding manufacturers who do it is going to result in you having more control over your hardware?
You had me right up until the third word: Think. No, the moderators do not think. They agree or disagree. Thinking is so Malda-era, and our new Web 3.0 monetization of the synergy of infolectual peer based interaction systems function better without it.
... assuming Microsoft 'approves' it. Buying into a locked ecosystem is a mistake. It's rewarding a company for taking the ownership of your hardware away.
Well, there's now $65,000 out there willing to test the waters. And the developers don't lose anything if it fails -- only the investors do. I'd guess a lot of that will be spent on the lawyer screwing about over patents... it might be the case that the only thing required is a few edits here and there to surgically transplant the UI. Porting an app usually costs a fraction of the original development cost. If portability was considered from the initial design, it might only require a few hours work to prep it for compiling on a different architecture. And it's open source; Projects that survive as long as VLC has do so because the programmers made it a goal to keep maintenance down. Release one bad app and you'll be supporting it for the rest of your life.:)
You don't need your own proxies. Just tell people to use Tor. It'll access TPB and other torrent sites just fine. Just remind them that downloading the torrent files (or magnet links) might be anonymized, but trying to tor-ify your bittorrent client is an excercise in futility, as well as seriously degrading the limited resources of the network; Nobody routes bittorrent traffic on Tor.
The biggest market for audio transcription I'm aware of is in medical transcription, followed by legal. Many of the terms used are not normal english; In fact without a basic understanding of medicine, you could easily confuse one thing for another, with potentially tragic results. This is fine for everyday english, but not in industries where terminology is used that isn't. And that's a lot of it. This would be more useful for something like Siri -- no doubt Apple has humans to process some of the unknowns in the background, and would find a service like this useful, if they don't have something similar already.
I'm totally serious. If you truly feel that whatever project you're working on can benefit the company and there's people and politics in the way, do it but don't tell anyone. Work on your own until you have something usable. Because the thing is, it's easy to shoot something down when it's on the drawing board. They'll say it isn't possible. They'll add all kinds of requirements that aren't necessary and put everyone over your shoulder. It'll implode on the launch pad and make no mistake: That is the goal of many of the people you're talking to.
If you want to win, don't tell them. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and while you won't win any friends from the fillibuster crowd, I've found that good managers will find ways to reward you without becoming enmeshed in the politics. That said... don't get caught until it's ready, and don't let it leak out to anyone what you're doing. You have to get a workable solution on the table to have a chance with these people, even if it's just a shell. And don't go crazy -- minimal implimentation only. The rest you can develop later. Right now, you need to give your supporters some ammo, and nothing says "Let's do this" like a working solution on the table compared to their steaming piles of nothingness to reply with.
In the world of business, I've found you never ask for permission -- you do it, then build a case for continuing to do it once you've proven the benefits of doing what you weren't doing until they found out you'd been doing it all along. It's ass backwards, but then... so is the world of business.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the fiscal cliff -- the totally preventable budget crisis that we created for ourselves because we couldn't figure out how to work together. And, apparently, still can't. So now our fragile economic recovery is going to be thrown under a bus... because we can't play nice with each other. That's a great way to signal the start of a new year. What next, placing bombs under things with two keys, one given to a republican, the other to a democrat, and then a timer set and they have to figure out how to work together or it explodes? :(
It's stuff like this that make me wonder what the hell is wrong with my country.
âoeElectromagnetic energy doesnâ(TM)t add up like that,â said Kevin Bothmann, the EMT Labs testing manager.
This man has clearly never been to a football game. Let me assure you -- 10,000 screaming fans makes it a lot harder to hear the person next to you than one screaming fan.
Every major manufacturer takes advantage of mistreated labor forces somewhere in the world and that includes most of the food stuffs you buy.
Red light in the cockpit, mods. When someone uses the words "everyone, always, never, all," or other universally true (or false) statements, you really need to engage your bullshit detectors. By this poster's logic, anyone who works in manufacturing is being exploited. That is the position of an anti-industrialist, and it's not a tenable one. Yes, labor is exploited, but it's not as pervasive as the poster is claiming. Cars are a major manufacturing industry in this country, and they're union shops with health benefits, retirement plans, etc. They may not be the greatest jobs to work, but they pay a living wage and employees are treated with a measure of respect. So right there, the claim of every manufacturer is busted.
That said, the original poster is excercising his freedom of choice in the marketplace -- he is making purchasing decisions based on his personal ethics. This is to be commended. It is also making a difference because not everything in the world is produced in a Foxconn factory, or similar factory. I will stop short of saying this poster's behavior happens often enough in the marketplace to actually drive a noticable change in it, but simply underscore that his purchasing decision and the ethics underpinning it, are not an onerous burden. It's possible to live free of slave-labor products.
It is not easy, however.
Perhaps Slashdot's users can help make sense of this mess and help explain it to me?"
You don't have to delve too deeply into this one, to be honest. The company took a risk. It lost at the gambling table. Badly. And now it's looking for someone, or something, to blame. And the only way to reduce their debt load without screwing someone over a barrel is if some vaguely-defined "fraud" is found in the accounting books, thus saving HP of a lot of tax money and reducing the liability. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
"An upper limit for incandescent lamp luminous efficacy (LER) is around 52 lumens per watt...
Do you have a problem with comparing the optimal case for incandescent lamps with the average case for this new technology -- and noting that it is multiples more efficient? Clearly, the point is adequately represented here... nobody would argue that I chose the worst case scenario to justify them... here we have the optimal and it still doesn't come close. I'm just not sure what you're trying to say by restating the obvious...
It is not an overlooked issue.
Then why, when the federal government mandated we kick incandescent bulbs out the door, that we also update the requirements for the replacements -- namely that they have a similar spectral profile, or that they are red-shifted so as to reduce this well-known and documented effect? Perhaps you haven't overlooked it, but a great many people have -- most people are unaware of these problems outside of the medical and peripheral fields and even then, often are not aware simply because it hasn't been part of their clinical experience.
Visibility (pardon the pun) is quite low on this problem.
its pretty common, if not standard issue now to put a patch of phosphorous over a UV led to generate the final visible light in these high powered LED's. so its very similar to what you can expect out of a CFL (course these things measure in cm)
And we can of course trust that the manufacturing quality is 100% on these -- that the UV light isn't leaking out. There are health problems with certain wavelengths. However, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about...
For comparative purposes, an incandescent bulb puts out about 52 lumens per watt. This LED is therefore about four times more efficient at converting electricity into light than the traditional lightbulb. That said, one of the big problems with LED lighting is that the light tends towards the blue end of the spectrum, whereas incandescents tend towards the red. Studies have shown that it is blue light that suppresses melatonin production, which in turn upsets the sleep/wake cycle. Similar problems have been found with LCD monitors compared to CRT monitors.
We may be improving energy efficiency, but we're actually creating health hazards in doing so -- because people assume all light is equal. It isn't.
Would I need a license to own a debugger or a soldering iron?
Why not? Law enforcement considers having bottled water in your car evidence of drug use and can tag you with possession of drug paraphenilia or use it as an excuse to strip your car down to the axles looking for drugs, then leave you with a disassembled car on the side of the road. A teenager was recently arrested and charged with possession of an explosive device because he doodled a comic book character who could shoot beams of energy out of his fists -- unfortunately, he also had an interest in engineering and electronics and his house contained many things that had been disassembled. No explosive material was found. He's still looking at life in prison.
All it'll take is the right lobbyist whispering "Terrorism" in the right ear, and you can bet your ass a soldering gun and the other stuff required to assemble your own computer will land you on some government watchlist. Cyberterrorists Build Own Computers To Thwart Security Measures, headlines will read. Yes, it's a bit of a stretch. But only a bit.
What's wrong with supporting UEFI secureboot by default, but still providing users a BIOS option of disabling it for legacy/alternate OSes?
Because the definition of 'UEFI secureboot' is that you can't disable it. Disabling it would defeat the entire point of the Trusted Computing Module... which is to fuck you, the customer, over a barrel--er, I mean, provide the customer with the security and reliability they've come to expect in a modern operating system...
Richard, it's a nice sentiment, but what are the alternatives? Signing something saying I won't buy a UEFI-enabled system is basically saying I've doomed myself to the stone age. Every company is switching over. Nobody's going to go for that in the long term, anyone signing that is doing it just to make a statement. Eventually, their decrepit pre-UEFI system is going to fry, and they're going to go looking for a new one.
Rather than do something useless like a petition, which have a very low success rate on the internet, why not give us something useful: Like a list of motherboards and builds that do not have UEFI and sport otherwise modern hardware and features?
Software development company with 50K employees?
Software development companies just mean their products are primarily electronic. Thomson Reuters for example, has the Lexus/Nexus legal database. It's practically required for anyone in law; They employ well over that number, but most of them are data entry, editing, support, accounting, HR, etc. There's less than a hundred actual developers in the company... but they're a software development company because that's the product they sell: Software.
...a better love story than Twilight.
Well, arguably what Linus is doing is a kind of tough love. He did something dumb and he's getting flogged for it. If his ego survives, he'll be a better programmer for it. That said, Linus is too much of a net celebrity to be laying someone out like that. It makes the news, like it did here, and then it makes Linux as an operating system -- and everything that runs on it and depends on it, look bad. It's like if Balmer dragged a programmer up on stage and proceeded to flog the crap out of him for ruining something in the windows kernel -- people would be all over what a horrible platform Windows is to develop for and what a horrible company Microsoft is. And Balmer could have been totally correct in everything he said about said hypothetical programmer.
There's some things you just don't do on the public stage; And an e-mail list is public, yes.
Or as the Romans put it: In vino veritas.
Given the comments one sees on the internet, I suppose the only conclusion is most of the participants are drunk.
â"the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websitesâ"as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself.
Anonymity is not optional in a free society. If we all had to put our names on our ballots, if cash were outlawed and everyone had to pay by credit card with their name on it, if we truly became the transparent surveillance society tech pundits keep pointing to as the future, then democracy is dead. Anonymity is the one thing that can change the status quo -- it allows expression of ideas, themes, and alternatives to it without retribution or revenge being brought down on the speaker. Without anonymity, the government can simply disappear anyone who disagrees. Corporations can lock out political and social undesireables from key markets. When you make speaking out against the establishment impossible without painting a big target on your ass, you've killed democracy. It simply cannot survive without it.
The internet's free-wheeling and democratic nature, complete with our Anonymous cyber-terrorist groups and our Anonymous Cowards (mostly harmless, sometimes annoying), to cyber-bullies and cyber-other-things-left-unmentioned, is probably a shock to a dreamer like this guy. As a self-described pioneer, he's clearly an idealist. He doesn't see the practical long-term problems, only the ones keeping him from taking whatever his next step is on his ideological journey. For him, he's decided anonymity is the next problem to be kicked out on the way to utopia.
Sir, with respect to your accomplishments, there are no digital utopias anymore than there are real ones. The analogues between our world, here, and the world out there, and your desire to bridge the two, is noble. But you cannot pick and choose ideological values for your new world. All you can be is a humble medium through which social change occurs. All the great inventors of the world know this. When Maxwell was approached by a politician on the usefulness of electricity, he remarked, "One day sir, you will tax it." I'm sure he envisioned homes lit by power 'from the ethers', and buggies that no longer needed horses as he slaved away in his lab, but he kept enough perspective to realize that what he was discovering would one day integrate into the fabric of society in ways even he couldn't imagine... and the idea of free power for humanity, while noble, was less practical in light of the fact (no pun intended) that it would be regulated and taxed. He knew that, before it even existed.
Show some humility, sir. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to become frustrated that the world you created did not develop at all like you imagined.
Keyless entry systems might be handy (although yet another security risk), but having a keyless system with no key backup is insane. Do these people also get their car towed when the keyless entry battery dies? Or if the car battery dies? I would never accept a system that didn't have some form of alternate entry and starting.
You have no idea just how insecure keyless entry systems are. Let's just say you're about an hour, a soldering gun, and some arduino project parts away from being able to steal luxury cars en masse. Anyway, the kind of people who plop down $80 grand for a car are not the kind of people who want to fuck around with jumper cables and risk having to ask... one of the unwashed masses... for help. They'll call for a tow, every single time. Which, in a twisted kind of social justice, makes me happy. These people spent a small fortune on a brand new top of the line car... and they can't drive it because it lacks a standard feature found in that beater car with black smoke pouring out the back of it: A metal key.
The author suggests an umbrella foundation to provide consistent direction across many projects. Quoting;
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Open source does not need consistency. It was created as a reaction against people who think they do need it.
enough complaints with evidence would result in powerful diplomatic pressure to pursue criminal investigation and prosecution.
Diplomatic pressure? Uhh, no. My aunt recently had her car totally destroyed by a vandal; over $10,000 worth of damages. The police didn't even want to come out and wouldn't take a report unless it was over the phone. And this was with some pretty compelling evidence of who'd done it as well. What exactly makes you think it's somehow different when you spam the same information to a large number of people? Law enforcement is not available to people like you; you haven't paid your dues.
Appropriately here means neither going bat shit insane with sting operations and massive stupid publicity campaigns when targeting particular selective groups or doing nothing at all ie the typical balance, using the motoring analogy of, traffic control.
Pirating Britney Spears can net you a larger fine and longer jail term than hacking a bank. Please tell me more about this "typical balance" you speak of.
Of course if individuals were doing more than DDOS protesting playing games et al and involved for example in credit card fraud then real prosecution and criminal penalties should apply.
"real prosecution and criminal penalties" are levied against the politically active far more often and severely than those levied against people who were just trying to make a profit. You may recall the entire Occupy protest movement over the failure of the government to prosecute such individuals, who perpetuated a lot more than just "credit card fraud" against the American public. You might also recall now who's on all the government terror watch lists, in jail, or otherwise convicted of various crimes. I'll give you a hint: Not the multi-billion dollar thieves, but the victims.
Despite what you think, the mere fact that you created something does NOT mean that you are "entitled" to profits.
I hope this "You" does not refer to me. I'm a pirate; I'm the last person you'd expect to give a damn about profit.
, how do you plan on handling e-gift giving and getting?"
I pirate. Most of what's "e-gifted" is just supporting the entertainment industry; and I'm loathe to support them until they clean up their act with all the DRM crap, manipulating the market prices, and throwing people in jail for trivial crap, as well as co-opting our entire legal system and feeling entitled to profits. So... I just give people cash or socks. Because holy shit, adults love socks. And cash. Everyone does, actually.
I'm curious about people moderating this as 'troll'. Do you think a locked ecosystem is a good thing? Do you think rewarding manufacturers who do it is going to result in you having more control over your hardware?
You had me right up until the third word: Think. No, the moderators do not think. They agree or disagree. Thinking is so Malda-era, and our new Web 3.0 monetization of the synergy of infolectual peer based interaction systems function better without it.
... assuming Microsoft 'approves' it. Buying into a locked ecosystem is a mistake. It's rewarding a company for taking the ownership of your hardware away.
Well, there's now $65,000 out there willing to test the waters. And the developers don't lose anything if it fails -- only the investors do. I'd guess a lot of that will be spent on the lawyer screwing about over patents... it might be the case that the only thing required is a few edits here and there to surgically transplant the UI. Porting an app usually costs a fraction of the original development cost. If portability was considered from the initial design, it might only require a few hours work to prep it for compiling on a different architecture. And it's open source; Projects that survive as long as VLC has do so because the programmers made it a goal to keep maintenance down. Release one bad app and you'll be supporting it for the rest of your life. :)
'Perfect Citizen?' Who thinks up these names?"
People who are so deluded they think destroying our way of life is the same as saving it.
You don't need your own proxies. Just tell people to use Tor. It'll access TPB and other torrent sites just fine. Just remind them that downloading the torrent files (or magnet links) might be anonymized, but trying to tor-ify your bittorrent client is an excercise in futility, as well as seriously degrading the limited resources of the network; Nobody routes bittorrent traffic on Tor.
The biggest market for audio transcription I'm aware of is in medical transcription, followed by legal. Many of the terms used are not normal english; In fact without a basic understanding of medicine, you could easily confuse one thing for another, with potentially tragic results. This is fine for everyday english, but not in industries where terminology is used that isn't. And that's a lot of it. This would be more useful for something like Siri -- no doubt Apple has humans to process some of the unknowns in the background, and would find a service like this useful, if they don't have something similar already.
I'm totally serious. If you truly feel that whatever project you're working on can benefit the company and there's people and politics in the way, do it but don't tell anyone. Work on your own until you have something usable. Because the thing is, it's easy to shoot something down when it's on the drawing board. They'll say it isn't possible. They'll add all kinds of requirements that aren't necessary and put everyone over your shoulder. It'll implode on the launch pad and make no mistake: That is the goal of many of the people you're talking to.
If you want to win, don't tell them. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and while you won't win any friends from the fillibuster crowd, I've found that good managers will find ways to reward you without becoming enmeshed in the politics. That said... don't get caught until it's ready, and don't let it leak out to anyone what you're doing. You have to get a workable solution on the table to have a chance with these people, even if it's just a shell. And don't go crazy -- minimal implimentation only. The rest you can develop later. Right now, you need to give your supporters some ammo, and nothing says "Let's do this" like a working solution on the table compared to their steaming piles of nothingness to reply with.
In the world of business, I've found you never ask for permission -- you do it, then build a case for continuing to do it once you've proven the benefits of doing what you weren't doing until they found out you'd been doing it all along. It's ass backwards, but then... so is the world of business.