As a side-note, a bit offtopic, here in Holland we've just got mandatory health insurance.
That's right, tax on being alive, payed directly to insurance companies. (did i mention that health insurance prices went up as soon as it became mandatory to have one?)
I reckon this would be a beter model for the "tax on being able to hear", payed directly to RIAA.
<rant> As a foreign, EU born, freelance IT professional, paying income taxes of 55% (due to the stupid way freelancers have to work around here we get to pay more that the maximum straight income tax) i would like to announce i'm leaving this crappy place. I'm sure the illiterate person that will probably take my place will really contribute a lot to increase this country's prosperity... </rant>
Very much like like politicians do, businesses make an enormous show of letting it be know how much they listen to "the community" all the while screwing thier customers/the-community anytime they can get away with it if they think they can make more money doing it.
<rant> It's all part of the growing awareness by businesses that the world is full of blind-following, short-memory, fanboy, brand-fanatic idiots which, as long as they are being fed plenty of PR, will keep buying (not to mention singing praises to) crummy products even when they feel THAT sharp pain in their backsides.
["Sony rootkit, Sony bad, Sony bad!.... PS3.... uhhhh shinnyyy!!!"] </rant>
... until somebody starts a flamewar by saying that Macs are not immune to viruses after all and they've only managed to stay relativelly safe because there are so few of them, to which a horde of Mac religious fanatics angrily reply that Windows is much worse at which point the flames start flying back and forth all the while drowning the only 2 posts that make sense, one saying that the only mainstream OS purposelly made with security in mind was OpenBSD and the other that says that stupid users running with admin rights that open executable attachments in mails from unknown sources are, independently of the OS, the biguest cause of virus infections.
I would rather that the IT department of wherever i'm working at the moment doesn't touch my personal machine thank you very much!
Also, it sounds suspiciously like the first steps from management to get employers to use their own machines for work - a big no-no.
Furthermore, if your management wants to retain those employers that are both highly qualified and highly mobile i suggest flexible working hours, little or no overwork (or maybe pay-per-hour), a location that's easy to access via both car and public transportation and a proper work environment (3-6 persons rooms, no cublicles, plenty of elbow room). If you're hiring contractors and then sending them to work at the customer's site there is little you can do to retain them - it doesn't take long for a contractor to figure out that they're best served by removing the middleman.
Beyond that, i know for a fact that one of the most important ways of streamlining the systems administration/support group work is to standardize the work machines (both HW and SW) so that for example, fixing a HW problem is just a question of backup/change-machines/restore. Doing that is simply not possible when it comes to maintaining the employer's personal machines.
If they're really keen on wasting money in this half-baked idea, they should outsource repairs/support of personnal machines to a company that's speciallized in selling those services to the general public.
I mean, think of it, red has a long wavelength, blue shorter. So it must be higher definition.
You Joe Sixpack is a geek and/or somebody with a higher education in sciences/technology.
In my experience many people don't know that light has a wavelength, most people don't know that the wavelength of blue is shorter than the one of red and the vast majority of people has no idea whatsovever of how the wavelength of the reading laser affects the amount of data that can be stored in CD-like media.
Actually i suspect most people have no idea whatsoever of how information is stored in and retrieved from CDs and DVDs.
Why would you want to stick with something as old as DVDs when Blu-Ray is all-new, all-improved?
The all-new, all-improved line of argumentation typically only convinces one type of person to separate from their hard-earned dollars: Early adopters.
Then again early adopters are known to buy anything as long as it's new and almost nobody else has one.
I expect that Joe Common will need some stronger arguments that "it's new" or "it's an improvement on DVD", just look at how DVD-Audio (both "new" and "an improvement on CDs") has NOT taken off outside early adopter circles...
Aceticon's formula to come up with a patent that gets accepted by the USPTO: 1) Choose one or more data transport related verb: "sending", "receiving", "delivering", "reading", "transmiting" 2) Add a generic data format name (eg, "video", "audio", "text") or if all are taken a more specific one (eg "stock quotes", "tv clips") 3) Add a data transport type name (eg "wireless", "internet") 4) Optionally add a transport timing name (eg "asynchronous", "on request", "real-time") 5) Mix it all up with some patentish wording to come up with a patent ( eg "a method for real-time wireless sending and recieving of audio" ) 6) Patent it (eg in our example we just patented mobile telephony) 7) Sit on the patent for a couple of years 8) Squeeze anybody that actually implements a working version of your algorithmic generated patent 9) Profit!!!
So the votes of those that live in Nevada should count for more than those that life in New York state?
Exactly why - are they more important or such?
If every person has one vote and all votes count the same then the distribution of elected representatives actually accuratly represents the wishes of ALL the voters.
If you're going to boost the voting power of a minority defined by the geographical location where they live, you might as well do it for any arbitrary minority - i heard that owners of red Porsches are awfully underepresented in Congress...
Not a quality function. Yes of course users are doing Beta testing, the whole purpose of Beta testing isn't to find bugs in the product, but to find out if you're hitting the market and providing the features that people want!
Not exactly. For products, Beta testing is testing the software in a wide range of target production environments and real life conditions. The idea is to have many people in many different machines exercising the software without developer bias (ie doing to the software the kind of things that users do and which developers never though anybody would ever do;)).
Definning the set of features of a software product (or any software program) is something that happens at the beginning. At the most, if you're doing cyclical development you can postpone the details of some types of requirements until the beginning of the cycle in which they are to be developed - at this point you might get some user feedback, but this is rarer for products since it's done with the help ofan in house representative user and you rarelly have one for a product. This is as far as it goes.
Beta testing on the other hand is something that only happens at the very end of the product development cycle. At that point you absolutely don't want any new features or big changes to features. At most small changes to critical usability issues. Getting customer feedback on major features at the end of the development cycle is a great way of starting all over again.
Usually developers do beta testing with a limited group of voluntary, non-paying users. After the issues discovered in beta testing are solved, the game to sale in stores (note that if beta testing brought up critical issues that required structural changes to the code, there might be a beta testing of the new version).
Unfortunately some games publishers still put out games that were never beta tested.
Actually the problem runs much more deeply than voter apathy. The main reasons why the same old hands keep getting re-elected even when they are clearly selling custom-made laws to their corporate pals are: - Gerrymandering - Politicians get to draw the lines of their own electoral districts. It's no surprise then that using information about registered voters they draw the lines in such a way as to maximizing their chances to get re-elected. Latelly they even use computer programs to do that. - Incumbents have a lote more money to defends their seats than other candidates running for that seat. In the US, the candidate with the biggest advertising campaing is often the winner. This actually creates a perverse incentive for politicians to proposed/approve laws that benefict some companies: the more favours they do when holding office, the bigger the pot they will have when the time comes to defend their seat.
The result was that, in 2004, 95% of incumbents managed to keep their seats. It's hard to believe that only 1 in 20 politicians turned out to not be the best choice to represent their constituency...
Honestly, seen from the point of view of someone who lives in a country where politicians get elected via proportional voting (Holland), the political system in the US looks far from being a real democracy. Not only do different votes have different weights (a person voting Democrat in an electoral district with 70% registered Republicans - or vice-versa - has precisely ZERO chance of changing the outcome of the vote) but the whole registered voters thing provides countless oportunities for social manipulation.
I've also lived in a country that not so long ago (32 year ago, tomorrow) went from dictatorship to democracy (Portugal) and were members of parliment are elected via electoral districts. This resulted in the same 2 parties alternating with each other as winner of the elections. After some decades of this the end result was: a) Both parties have pretty much the same policies. In front of the cameras politicians criticise the other party, but in practice both parties do the same things. b) There was an increase in career politicians. The kind that go to politics for money and power, not because they want to improve the country. c) A "political class" was born (politicians actually use this expression). They stopped being representatives of their constituents and instead were pretty much just representing themselfs. This can clearly be seen in a number of laws designed to protect/benefict politicians (and lawyers). d) An environment of unaccountability has installed itself. Those politicians currently in power do their best to cover the backs of those that were in power before them (as in, for example, burying legal investigations into corruption) because they know that when they change places the other ones will do the same for them. (thanks to the free press, at the moment there's a bit of a backslash against corruption) e) A lot less people vote nowadays. Unless you're voting for one of the two parties that are always in government, you know that your vote counts for little. Voter turnout is now often below 50%, while in the years after the revolution it was more than 70%.
Still, at least there's no gerrymandering or voter registration: parliement seats actual change, even if mostly it's between the same two persons and latelly some young and inovative parties have been slowly growing, even if, thanks to electoral districts, their representation in the parliement is actually only HALF of what they would get in a proportional representation system...
"The wealthiest 5% of households hold nearly 60% of all the wealth."
They also pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue.
So the top 5% of households have 60% of all the wealth but only pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue!??
The overall standard of living has increased. The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago
You know all those cheap made-in-China products you can get from Walmart in the US, the ones that brought down the average price of consumer goods so that "The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago"?
You can get them in France too.
"The bottom 60% of households hold 4.2% of the wealth despite earning 26.8% of the income."
Because they spend too much of their disposable income rather than saving what they can and taking advantage of opportunities to purchase assets instead of taking on more debt to finance depreciating liabilities like that Disney vacation or that new flat panel television.
Having recently gone from working is a permanent position and making X per-month to a freelancer position making 3*X per-month (i live and work in Holland) i noticed that my montly expenses increased only slightly and most of that extra money went for savings. In other words, i make 3 times as much and i save 5 times as much than before.
In my experience there is a base amount for monthly expenses which you spend no mater how much you earn (assuming a middle class lifestyle, one can slice basic expenses down by bunking with 11 other people in a small apartment or such, but most people won't do it unless they really have to). On top of it there's an amount for stuff you would like to have but you don't really need (eg luxuries), which you will spend if you can but not if you don't have the money for it. Beyond that, mostly it goes for saving (although most people will notice that when their income increases their base and luxuries amount will also slowly increase).
In other words, if your income both covers essencials and most luxuries, any extra beyond it will be saved (and invested if you're a wise person).
Most people out there have enough for base expenses but not for the luxuries, hence their pattern of consumption. (there's more than just this, but this is a big part of it)
I realize that because this is about websites, the dynamic changes slightly, but at some point you have to accept that technology has moved forward
I disagree that AJAX is "technology moving forward". CSS (especially 2.0) is technology moving forward. Javascript is technology moving forward. HTML 4 is technology moving forward.
I've done AJAX - its just a buzzword for a way of using the advances in technology stated above together. The only thing that differenciates a website done with AJAX from any non-AJAX website out there using JavaScript, CSS2 and HMTL4 is that AJAX uses the XMLHttpRequester to dynamically retrieve data while an non-AJAX site might do it via a hidden IFRAME.
The only reason AJAX is receiving the attention it has is that some self-proclaimed "technology investment gurus" left over from the boom are trying to go back to the old times when they could create a (new-technology) company that did exactly the same as plenty of already existing (old-technology) companies but via the Net, IPO it on the stockmarket, watch it's stock price rise to incredible heights on the backs of the greedy and ignorant masses, and then cash out. Two years later the company would long be bankrupt.
I work as a freelancer and i've recently had an assignment on a company that does websites. From what i've seen there and since they still have plenty of customers, i now firmly believe that the Internet related part of the industry is still the most wastefull, less professional and more fashion driven part of the whole IT sector.
When you guys stop being driven by buzzwords, stop making software design choices on the basis of "cool new thing to try" and get some managers that actually manage projects instead of being "creeping requirements pipelines", call me.
It's the half-assed attempt to look like someone that sacrifices himself for the good of company (and to by projecting such image getting his stock to go up in value) that gets on my nerves.
In other words, my problem is with dishonest people trying to scam everybody else.
From the realm of "just about to become real": People going around with micro-video camera(s) always on, registering their whole life 24h per-day on video.
From the realm of "science-fiction today but not as far as you think": Full 3D environment mapping down to details smaller than 1mm including not only visual information but also all the information necessary to reproduce the correct aureal behaviour of the included objects (at the very least temperature and density information on all parts of all the objects).
These should provide enough data to fill whatever storage technology they come up with for the next couple of decades.
And if this isn't enough, consider how much storage space would be needed to store a digitized copy of a human being down to the micro-celular level.
There's a not that uncommon tax scam for company owners which works as the following: - Company owner is also company CEO - Company CEO is payed minimum/symbolic wages - Company pays for just about any expense of the owner/CEO and his family
I reckon that for a listed company, the positive advertising (and share price boosting) effects of divulging a CEO's low salary would make such a scam even sweeter...
I personally follow the policy of only starting to block ads on a site when i'm confronted with obnoxious ads.
Until i see moving (flash or gif, makes no difference), sound making or content hidding ads i'll keep the ads from a site visible. As soon as i see one of those obnoxious ads on my browser they (and all ads from the same provider) get blocked.
Popups that manage to go around Firefox's pop-up protection are reason for me to block the whole site of the ad provider plus the one of the company whose advert is on that pop-up.
It's a ballance between helping the sites i like to keep going on (and even make a profit) and enforcing the limits i've set for what are acceptable ads.
To all web-site managers out there i say: Don't use ad providers that (try to) abuse the viewer's good will and you won't have any problems with having a steady revenue stream from advertising.
Hasn't In-Game Advertising been "Poised for Explosive Growth" for the last couple of years?
For sure there was an article here on/. a couple of months ago about how in-game advertising was going to grow (sorry, i'm too lazy to look up the reference). I'm still waiting to hear the bang.
Been seing in-game avertising for years now (just about any F1 game of the last 5 years has it) and yet it in-game advertising revenue remains a very (very, very) small part of the total advertising revenue.
With the notable exception of games whose setting is in the present, real world, most other games do not have any visible advertising on them. The few that have tried (example, Planetside) saw a backslash from consumers as a result.
In fact, it's very hard to work real adverts into any games set in a fantasy/futuristic environment without them being "in your face" to the level of insult ("Sword of the Mighty *-Cola").
Maybe the predicted 5x growth is just going from miniscule to punny.
In other news, in a few minutes there is going to be an explosive growth (100x times) on the amount of cofee in my used cofee cup - all the way from the 2 drops left over from the last time to a full cup.
Actually Belgium sits between Holland and France (it's basically an west-east strip between those countries).
And yes, Belgium is short enough that when riding from somewhere in France to somewhere in Holland one mostly notices Belgium because roads are worse and there are less traffic signs indicating which roads leads to where.
The country of belgium chocolate and Claude Van Dame though.
I'm very, very much in favor of consumer choice. So very much indeed that i'm in favour of legalizing drugs - it's no business of the state to tell anyone what they can or not do with their own bodies.
Stil, consumer choice is only really a choice if the consumer has the necessary information to make an informed choice. Otherwise it's just a form of random selection disguised as choice.
In o practice, consumers do not have the time to, by themselfs, gather and interprete all the information necessary to make informed choices for every single buying decision. In practice only with expensive products will most consumers invest the time into getting informed before making a buying decision. This is as valid for toothpaste as it is for choosing which television shows your 12 y.o. can see.
Without any mandatory, minimum level of information to consumers, all you have, unless you go through the trouble of investigating it yourself, is advertising. Advertising is not impartial information. Advertising is more like a beauty contest where there are no judges, everybody gets to make their own rules and everybody gets unlimited access to very good plastic surgeons before the big night. Thus it doesn't really inform you about the bad stuff, just about the good stuff and even that might be untruthfull (though in Europe there are also rules that prevent outright lies in adverts).
Worse still, even if a consumer does try to investigate further, since compared with individuals companies have almost unlimited resources to spread misinformation and/or hide otherwise negative reviews under a sea of irrelevant information, it is hardly a simple task to dig out the real information (for a good example notice how many people have died in the US from smoke induced illnesses all the while the tobacco companies were spreading disinformation. The companies were finally made to pay for it, but that didn't made any difference whatsoever to those which were already dead by then)
Thus without any rules the odds are always stacked against individual consumers.
Hence any laws mandating a minimum standard of product information are always welcome.
With this kind of laws consumers allways have available a basic ammount of information to make their choices. If they want to see/eat shit it's their choice.
Without them companies get to choose if they feed shit to consumers. As long as it is properly disguised (plenty of sauce) consumers will eat shit and not even notice it. They might feel sick later but they won't know why and will hapilly eat the same shit again the next day.
Now to answer the post i'm replying to: - Why should products be excluded from this rules just because they are new, done in a new way, distriubuted in a new way (eg new media) or in the name of removing barriers to entry?
In other words, why should companies be allowed to covertely feed shit to consumers because they are new or their shit is new or they make or distribute shit in a new way???
Europe has a much more deeper level of product regulations than the US. This is done for consumer protection.
Typically the extra rules you see in place in Europe are intended to either: - Minimize or eliminate the possible damage to consumers caused by long term exposure to something which is contained in a product. - Make sure that the consumer is informed of the possible negative long term effects of something contained in a product so that the consumer can do an informed choice.
Although things that harm you immediatly are forbidden in products in both Europe and the US, the difference of regulations in both places makes it so that for things that (might) harm you in the longer run, in Europe one or more of the following will happen: - Its outright forbidden to sell products that contain it. - Its outright forbidden to sell products that contain it to certain age groups (typically children). - Manufacturers are mandated by law to inform the consumers of the possible negative side-effects of their products.
The law in the US is much more lax when it comes to both controlling access to products with possible negative long term effects and making sure that consumers know of those risks before actually buying a product.
Thus for example, there is a very well defined set of which chemical additives which are allowed on processed food products.
Another example is that (non-encrypted) public televisions broadcasters cannot broadcast "young adult" content before a specific hour and/or have to rate their content according to a standard "appropriated for age" table and provide those ratings when advertising that content and immediately before broadcasting it. (Rules for subscription and/or cable broadcasters are usually less strict)
Which brings us to the OP: - European legislators want to apply to all kinds of public broadcasters the same consumer protection rules already in place for those broadcasters that openly broadcast television by means of radio waves.
Thus things like providing timelly and appropriated information about the adequacy of their content to be viewed by kids.
What's the problem with that?
They're still perfectly free to setup direct-to-consumer online shops that show porn or whatever - consenting adults still have access to whatever they want to see while those parents that don't want their kids to see porn shows can more easilly know what to let or not their kids see.
PS: Note that for all the "regulations" in Europe versus "self-policing" in the US, there was still no problem whatsover with seing Janet Jackson's tittie on the tele around here (compared with some shows one can see after a certain hour of the day, seing JJ's breast in the open was positivelly mild) while in the US most broadcasters self-censured themselfs. No treats for anyone which guesses which place is in practice more open...
There seems to be a correlation between the sea temperature and the strength of hurricanes. (sorry, source of this was the TV)
Increased global average temperature will increase the average sea temperature, though localized sea temperatures might be lower.
Global warming = increased global average temperature.
Thus the possibility exists that global warming has, by means of increasing the sea temperature in the path of hurricane Katrina also increased the strength of the hurricane and thus the damage done by it.
Hardly proven but still a plausible theory.
How your reaction of calling somebody ignoramus got modded +5 Insightfull instead of -1 Troll is beyond me.
It might be just me, but it really seems like/. is becoming less a site for tech news for geeks, and more a site for geek politics. It seems like every day there are fewer and fewer stories about any actual tech, and they are all being replaced with stories about the politics of "geek" culture. I'm not really saying it is a bad thing, but just in my opinion a little boring.
What do you mean nowadays?
Been following/. almost from the beginning (i waited about 1 year before signing-up and doing my first non-anonymous coward post, hence not having a below 10000 id) and after the first couple of years "geek politics" has constantlty been gaining more article space.
This all started with discussions around "open source", which is as much a way of making software as it is a part of a set of beliefs (ie geek politics) and extended onwards to things that affected "geek" workers (outsourcing, patents) and then onwards to politics (both public politics and company politics).
If this is really a "geek" comunity, then most people around here should have the mental brainpower to at least recognize that a complex web of social-interrelations affects our lifes and influnces technology (for example how regulations and social adoption influence technology).
I'm sure there's plenty of sites out there that cater for the "100% monkey coder that doesn't wanna think beyond that" or the "scientist that wants to live in the vacuum" or any such kinds of technical/scientifical inclined persons that would rather ignore those things that shape the doing of science or technology.
The rest of us (if i may speak for the rest of us) are just really pissed when politics gets in the way of being able to go on a turist trip to the Moon without actually being a milionair.
Slashdot Mirror
As a side-note, a bit offtopic, here in Holland we've just got mandatory health insurance.
...
That's right, tax on being alive, payed directly to insurance companies.
(did i mention that health insurance prices went up as soon as it became mandatory to have one?)
I reckon this would be a beter model for the "tax on being able to hear", payed directly to RIAA.
<rant>
As a foreign, EU born, freelance IT professional, paying income taxes of 55% (due to the stupid way freelancers have to work around here we get to pay more that the maximum straight income tax) i would like to announce i'm leaving this crappy place. I'm sure the illiterate person that will probably take my place will really contribute a lot to increase this country's prosperity
</rant>
Very much like like politicians do, businesses make an enormous show of letting it be know how much they listen to "the community" all the while screwing thier customers/the-community anytime they can get away with it if they think they can make more money doing it.
.... PS3 .... uhhhh shinnyyy!!!"]
<rant>
It's all part of the growing awareness by businesses that the world is full of blind-following, short-memory, fanboy, brand-fanatic idiots which, as long as they are being fed plenty of PR, will keep buying (not to mention singing praises to) crummy products even when they feel THAT sharp pain in their backsides.
["Sony rootkit, Sony bad, Sony bad!
</rant>
... until somebody starts a flamewar by saying that Macs are not immune to viruses after all and they've only managed to stay relativelly safe because there are so few of them, to which a horde of Mac religious fanatics angrily reply that Windows is much worse at which point the flames start flying back and forth all the while drowning the only 2 posts that make sense, one saying that the only mainstream OS purposelly made with security in mind was OpenBSD and the other that says that stupid users running with admin rights that open executable attachments in mails from unknown sources are, independently of the OS, the biguest cause of virus infections.
.... nevermind, already started.
3, 2,
I would rather that the IT department of wherever i'm working at the moment doesn't touch my personal machine thank you very much!
Also, it sounds suspiciously like the first steps from management to get employers to use their own machines for work - a big no-no.
Furthermore, if your management wants to retain those employers that are both highly qualified and highly mobile i suggest flexible working hours, little or no overwork (or maybe pay-per-hour), a location that's easy to access via both car and public transportation and a proper work environment (3-6 persons rooms, no cublicles, plenty of elbow room).
If you're hiring contractors and then sending them to work at the customer's site there is little you can do to retain them - it doesn't take long for a contractor to figure out that they're best served by removing the middleman.
Beyond that, i know for a fact that one of the most important ways of streamlining the systems administration/support group work is to standardize the work machines (both HW and SW) so that for example, fixing a HW problem is just a question of backup/change-machines/restore. Doing that is simply not possible when it comes to maintaining the employer's personal machines.
If they're really keen on wasting money in this half-baked idea, they should outsource repairs/support of personnal machines to a company that's speciallized in selling those services to the general public.
In this day and age of cars as penis extensions, SUVs will always beat small vehicles.
I mean, think of it, red has a long wavelength, blue shorter. So it must be higher definition.
;)
You Joe Sixpack is a geek and/or somebody with a higher education in sciences/technology.
In my experience many people don't know that light has a wavelength, most people don't know that the wavelength of blue is shorter than the one of red and the vast majority of people has no idea whatsovever of how the wavelength of the reading laser affects the amount of data that can be stored in CD-like media.
Actually i suspect most people have no idea whatsoever of how information is stored in and retrieved from CDs and DVDs.
Methinks you lack exposure to end-users
Why would you want to stick with something as old as DVDs when Blu-Ray is all-new, all-improved?
The all-new, all-improved line of argumentation typically only convinces one type of person to separate from their hard-earned dollars: Early adopters.
Then again early adopters are known to buy anything as long as it's new and almost nobody else has one.
I expect that Joe Common will need some stronger arguments that "it's new" or "it's an improvement on DVD", just look at how DVD-Audio (both "new" and "an improvement on CDs") has NOT taken off outside early adopter circles...
Goatse pics definitely are "pornographic content that can be harmful to society"
Aceticon's formula to come up with a patent that gets accepted by the USPTO:
1) Choose one or more data transport related verb: "sending", "receiving", "delivering", "reading", "transmiting"
2) Add a generic data format name (eg, "video", "audio", "text") or if all are taken a more specific one (eg "stock quotes", "tv clips")
3) Add a data transport type name (eg "wireless", "internet")
4) Optionally add a transport timing name (eg "asynchronous", "on request", "real-time")
5) Mix it all up with some patentish wording to come up with a patent ( eg "a method for real-time wireless sending and recieving of audio" )
6) Patent it (eg in our example we just patented mobile telephony)
7) Sit on the patent for a couple of years
8) Squeeze anybody that actually implements a working version of your algorithmic generated patent
9) Profit!!!
So the votes of those that live in Nevada should count for more than those that life in New York state?
...
Exactly why - are they more important or such?
If every person has one vote and all votes count the same then the distribution of elected representatives actually accuratly represents the wishes of ALL the voters.
If you're going to boost the voting power of a minority defined by the geographical location where they live, you might as well do it for any arbitrary minority - i heard that owners of red Porsches are awfully underepresented in Congress
Not a quality function. Yes of course users are doing Beta testing, the whole purpose of Beta testing isn't to find bugs in the product, but to find out if you're hitting the market and providing the features that people want!
;)).
Not exactly. For products, Beta testing is testing the software in a wide range of target production environments and real life conditions. The idea is to have many people in many different machines exercising the software without developer bias (ie doing to the software the kind of things that users do and which developers never though anybody would ever do
Definning the set of features of a software product (or any software program) is something that happens at the beginning. At the most, if you're doing cyclical development you can postpone the details of some types of requirements until the beginning of the cycle in which they are to be developed - at this point you might get some user feedback, but this is rarer for products since it's done with the help ofan in house representative user and you rarelly have one for a product. This is as far as it goes.
Beta testing on the other hand is something that only happens at the very end of the product development cycle. At that point you absolutely don't want any new features or big changes to features. At most small changes to critical usability issues. Getting customer feedback on major features at the end of the development cycle is a great way of starting all over again.
Usually developers do beta testing with a limited group of voluntary, non-paying users. After the issues discovered in beta testing are solved, the game to sale in stores (note that if beta testing brought up critical issues that required structural changes to the code, there might be a beta testing of the new version).
Unfortunately some games publishers still put out games that were never beta tested.
In the US, power is currently in the hands of the moral descendants of the same religious groups that were burning witches in the 18th century.
It's hardly a surprise that criminalizing "morally deviant" (whose moral?) behaviours and "payback justice" are all the rage around there.
Actually the problem runs much more deeply than voter apathy. The main reasons why the same old hands keep getting re-elected even when they are clearly selling custom-made laws to their corporate pals are:
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- Gerrymandering - Politicians get to draw the lines of their own electoral districts. It's no surprise then that using information about registered voters they draw the lines in such a way as to maximizing their chances to get re-elected. Latelly they even use computer programs to do that.
- Incumbents have a lote more money to defends their seats than other candidates running for that seat. In the US, the candidate with the biggest advertising campaing is often the winner. This actually creates a perverse incentive for politicians to proposed/approve laws that benefict some companies: the more favours they do when holding office, the bigger the pot they will have when the time comes to defend their seat.
The result was that, in 2004, 95% of incumbents managed to keep their seats. It's hard to believe that only 1 in 20 politicians turned out to not be the best choice to represent their constituency
Honestly, seen from the point of view of someone who lives in a country where politicians get elected via proportional voting (Holland), the political system in the US looks far from being a real democracy. Not only do different votes have different weights (a person voting Democrat in an electoral district with 70% registered Republicans - or vice-versa - has precisely ZERO chance of changing the outcome of the vote) but the whole registered voters thing provides countless oportunities for social manipulation.
I've also lived in a country that not so long ago (32 year ago, tomorrow) went from dictatorship to democracy (Portugal) and were members of parliment are elected via electoral districts. This resulted in the same 2 parties alternating with each other as winner of the elections. After some decades of this the end result was:
a) Both parties have pretty much the same policies. In front of the cameras politicians criticise the other party, but in practice both parties do the same things.
b) There was an increase in career politicians. The kind that go to politics for money and power, not because they want to improve the country.
c) A "political class" was born (politicians actually use this expression). They stopped being representatives of their constituents and instead were pretty much just representing themselfs. This can clearly be seen in a number of laws designed to protect/benefict politicians (and lawyers).
d) An environment of unaccountability has installed itself. Those politicians currently in power do their best to cover the backs of those that were in power before them (as in, for example, burying legal investigations into corruption) because they know that when they change places the other ones will do the same for them. (thanks to the free press, at the moment there's a bit of a backslash against corruption)
e) A lot less people vote nowadays. Unless you're voting for one of the two parties that are always in government, you know that your vote counts for little. Voter turnout is now often below 50%, while in the years after the revolution it was more than 70%.
Still, at least there's no gerrymandering or voter registration: parliement seats actual change, even if mostly it's between the same two persons and latelly some young and inovative parties have been slowly growing, even if, thanks to electoral districts, their representation in the parliement is actually only HALF of what they would get in a proportional representation system
"The wealthiest 5% of households hold nearly 60% of all the wealth."
They also pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue.
So the top 5% of households have 60% of all the wealth but only pay 35% of the total federal tax revenue!??
The overall standard of living has increased. The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago
You know all those cheap made-in-China products you can get from Walmart in the US, the ones that brought down the average price of consumer goods so that "The average american can afford to buy more goods and services with the same income now than he could 20 years ago"?
You can get them in France too.
"The bottom 60% of households hold 4.2% of the wealth despite earning 26.8% of the income."
Because they spend too much of their disposable income rather than saving what they can and taking advantage of opportunities to purchase assets instead of taking on more debt to finance depreciating liabilities like that Disney vacation or that new flat panel television.
Having recently gone from working is a permanent position and making X per-month to a freelancer position making 3*X per-month (i live and work in Holland) i noticed that my montly expenses increased only slightly and most of that extra money went for savings. In other words, i make 3 times as much and i save 5 times as much than before.
In my experience there is a base amount for monthly expenses which you spend no mater how much you earn (assuming a middle class lifestyle, one can slice basic expenses down by bunking with 11 other people in a small apartment or such, but most people won't do it unless they really have to). On top of it there's an amount for stuff you would like to have but you don't really need (eg luxuries), which you will spend if you can but not if you don't have the money for it. Beyond that, mostly it goes for saving (although most people will notice that when their income increases their base and luxuries amount will also slowly increase).
In other words, if your income both covers essencials and most luxuries, any extra beyond it will be saved (and invested if you're a wise person).
Most people out there have enough for base expenses but not for the luxuries, hence their pattern of consumption. (there's more than just this, but this is a big part of it)
I realize that because this is about websites, the dynamic changes slightly, but at some point you have to accept that technology has moved forward
I disagree that AJAX is "technology moving forward". CSS (especially 2.0) is technology moving forward. Javascript is technology moving forward. HTML 4 is technology moving forward.
I've done AJAX - its just a buzzword for a way of using the advances in technology stated above together. The only thing that differenciates a website done with AJAX from any non-AJAX website out there using JavaScript, CSS2 and HMTL4 is that AJAX uses the XMLHttpRequester to dynamically retrieve data while an non-AJAX site might do it via a hidden IFRAME.
The only reason AJAX is receiving the attention it has is that some self-proclaimed "technology investment gurus" left over from the boom are trying to go back to the old times when they could create a (new-technology) company that did exactly the same as plenty of already existing (old-technology) companies but via the Net, IPO it on the stockmarket, watch it's stock price rise to incredible heights on the backs of the greedy and ignorant masses, and then cash out. Two years later the company would long be bankrupt.
I work as a freelancer and i've recently had an assignment on a company that does websites. From what i've seen there and since they still have plenty of customers, i now firmly believe that the Internet related part of the industry is still the most wastefull, less professional and more fashion driven part of the whole IT sector.
When you guys stop being driven by buzzwords, stop making software design choices on the basis of "cool new thing to try" and get some managers that actually manage projects instead of being "creeping requirements pipelines", call me.
I have no problem with the guy's success.
It's the half-assed attempt to look like someone that sacrifices himself for the good of company (and to by projecting such image getting his stock to go up in value) that gets on my nerves.
In other words, my problem is with dishonest people trying to scam everybody else.
What will you PUT on it?
From the realm of "just about to become real":
People going around with micro-video camera(s) always on, registering their whole life 24h per-day on video.
From the realm of "science-fiction today but not as far as you think":
Full 3D environment mapping down to details smaller than 1mm including not only visual information but also all the information necessary to reproduce the correct aureal behaviour of the included objects (at the very least temperature and density information on all parts of all the objects).
These should provide enough data to fill whatever storage technology they come up with for the next couple of decades.
And if this isn't enough, consider how much storage space would be needed to store a digitized copy of a human being down to the micro-celular level.
There's a not that uncommon tax scam for company owners which works as the following:
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- Company owner is also company CEO
- Company CEO is payed minimum/symbolic wages
- Company pays for just about any expense of the owner/CEO and his family
Thus "safe"-house, bulletproof limo, bodyguard-driver, security-certified cleaning company, bulletproof yacht
I reckon that for a listed company, the positive advertising (and share price boosting) effects of divulging a CEO's low salary would make such a scam even sweeter
I personally follow the policy of only starting to block ads on a site when i'm confronted with obnoxious ads.
Until i see moving (flash or gif, makes no difference), sound making or content hidding ads i'll keep the ads from a site visible. As soon as i see one of those obnoxious ads on my browser they (and all ads from the same provider) get blocked.
Popups that manage to go around Firefox's pop-up protection are reason for me to block the whole site of the ad provider plus the one of the company whose advert is on that pop-up.
It's a ballance between helping the sites i like to keep going on (and even make a profit) and enforcing the limits i've set for what are acceptable ads.
To all web-site managers out there i say: Don't use ad providers that (try to) abuse the viewer's good will and you won't have any problems with having a steady revenue stream from advertising.
Hasn't In-Game Advertising been "Poised for Explosive Growth" for the last couple of years?
/. a couple of months ago about how in-game advertising was going to grow (sorry, i'm too lazy to look up the reference). I'm still waiting to hear the bang.
For sure there was an article here on
Been seing in-game avertising for years now (just about any F1 game of the last 5 years has it) and yet it in-game advertising revenue remains a very (very, very) small part of the total advertising revenue.
With the notable exception of games whose setting is in the present, real world, most other games do not have any visible advertising on them. The few that have tried (example, Planetside) saw a backslash from consumers as a result.
In fact, it's very hard to work real adverts into any games set in a fantasy/futuristic environment without them being "in your face" to the level of insult ("Sword of the Mighty *-Cola").
Maybe the predicted 5x growth is just going from miniscule to punny.
In other news, in a few minutes there is going to be an explosive growth (100x times) on the amount of cofee in my used cofee cup - all the way from the 2 drops left over from the last time to a full cup.
[ time to go make it so ]
Actually Belgium sits between Holland and France (it's basically an west-east strip between those countries).
And yes, Belgium is short enough that when riding from somewhere in France to somewhere in Holland one mostly notices Belgium because roads are worse and there are less traffic signs indicating which roads leads to where.
The country of belgium chocolate and Claude Van Dame though.
I'm very, very much in favor of consumer choice. So very much indeed that i'm in favour of legalizing drugs - it's no business of the state to tell anyone what they can or not do with their own bodies.
Stil, consumer choice is only really a choice if the consumer has the necessary information to make an informed choice. Otherwise it's just a form of random selection disguised as choice.
In o practice, consumers do not have the time to, by themselfs, gather and interprete all the information necessary to make informed choices for every single buying decision. In practice only with expensive products will most consumers invest the time into getting informed before making a buying decision.
This is as valid for toothpaste as it is for choosing which television shows your 12 y.o. can see.
Without any mandatory, minimum level of information to consumers, all you have, unless you go through the trouble of investigating it yourself, is advertising. Advertising is not impartial information. Advertising is more like a beauty contest where there are no judges, everybody gets to make their own rules and everybody gets unlimited access to very good plastic surgeons before the big night. Thus it doesn't really inform you about the bad stuff, just about the good stuff and even that might be untruthfull (though in Europe there are also rules that prevent outright lies in adverts).
Worse still, even if a consumer does try to investigate further, since compared with individuals companies have almost unlimited resources to spread misinformation and/or hide otherwise negative reviews under a sea of irrelevant information, it is hardly a simple task to dig out the real information (for a good example notice how many people have died in the US from smoke induced illnesses all the while the tobacco companies were spreading disinformation. The companies were finally made to pay for it, but that didn't made any difference whatsoever to those which were already dead by then)
Thus without any rules the odds are always stacked against individual consumers.
Hence any laws mandating a minimum standard of product information are always welcome.
With this kind of laws consumers allways have available a basic ammount of information to make their choices. If they want to see/eat shit it's their choice.
Without them companies get to choose if they feed shit to consumers. As long as it is properly disguised (plenty of sauce) consumers will eat shit and not even notice it. They might feel sick later but they won't know why and will hapilly eat the same shit again the next day.
Now to answer the post i'm replying to:
- Why should products be excluded from this rules just because they are new, done in a new way, distriubuted in a new way (eg new media) or in the name of removing barriers to entry?
In other words, why should companies be allowed to covertely feed shit to consumers because they are new or their shit is new or they make or distribute shit in a new way???
Europe has a much more deeper level of product regulations than the US. This is done for consumer protection.
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Typically the extra rules you see in place in Europe are intended to either:
- Minimize or eliminate the possible damage to consumers caused by long term exposure to something which is contained in a product.
- Make sure that the consumer is informed of the possible negative long term effects of something contained in a product so that the consumer can do an informed choice.
Although things that harm you immediatly are forbidden in products in both Europe and the US, the difference of regulations in both places makes it so that for things that (might) harm you in the longer run, in Europe one or more of the following will happen:
- Its outright forbidden to sell products that contain it.
- Its outright forbidden to sell products that contain it to certain age groups (typically children).
- Manufacturers are mandated by law to inform the consumers of the possible negative side-effects of their products.
The law in the US is much more lax when it comes to both controlling access to products with possible negative long term effects and making sure that consumers know of those risks before actually buying a product.
Thus for example, there is a very well defined set of which chemical additives which are allowed on processed food products.
Another example is that (non-encrypted) public televisions broadcasters cannot broadcast "young adult" content before a specific hour and/or have to rate their content according to a standard "appropriated for age" table and provide those ratings when advertising that content and immediately before broadcasting it.
(Rules for subscription and/or cable broadcasters are usually less strict)
Which brings us to the OP:
- European legislators want to apply to all kinds of public broadcasters the same consumer protection rules already in place for those broadcasters that openly broadcast television by means of radio waves.
Thus things like providing timelly and appropriated information about the adequacy of their content to be viewed by kids.
What's the problem with that?
They're still perfectly free to setup direct-to-consumer online shops that show porn or whatever - consenting adults still have access to whatever they want to see while those parents that don't want their kids to see porn shows can more easilly know what to let or not their kids see.
PS: Note that for all the "regulations" in Europe versus "self-policing" in the US, there was still no problem whatsover with seing Janet Jackson's tittie on the tele around here (compared with some shows one can see after a certain hour of the day, seing JJ's breast in the open was positivelly mild) while in the US most broadcasters self-censured themselfs. No treats for anyone which guesses which place is in practice more open
Stronger hurricanes cause more damage.
There seems to be a correlation between the sea temperature and the strength of hurricanes. (sorry, source of this was the TV)
Increased global average temperature will increase the average sea temperature, though localized sea temperatures might be lower.
Global warming = increased global average temperature.
Thus the possibility exists that global warming has, by means of increasing the sea temperature in the path of hurricane Katrina also increased the strength of the hurricane and thus the damage done by it.
Hardly proven but still a plausible theory.
How your reaction of calling somebody ignoramus got modded +5 Insightfull instead of -1 Troll is beyond me.
It might be just me, but it really seems like /. is becoming less a site for tech news for geeks, and more a site for geek politics. It seems like every day there are fewer and fewer stories about any actual tech, and they are all being replaced with stories about the politics of "geek" culture. I'm not really saying it is a bad thing, but just in my opinion a little boring.
/. almost from the beginning (i waited about 1 year before signing-up and doing my first non-anonymous coward post, hence not having a below 10000 id) and after the first couple of years "geek politics" has constantlty been gaining more article space.
What do you mean nowadays?
Been following
This all started with discussions around "open source", which is as much a way of making software as it is a part of a set of beliefs (ie geek politics) and extended onwards to things that affected "geek" workers (outsourcing, patents) and then onwards to politics (both public politics and company politics).
If this is really a "geek" comunity, then most people around here should have the mental brainpower to at least recognize that a complex web of social-interrelations affects our lifes and influnces technology (for example how regulations and social adoption influence technology).
I'm sure there's plenty of sites out there that cater for the "100% monkey coder that doesn't wanna think beyond that" or the "scientist that wants to live in the vacuum" or any such kinds of technical/scientifical inclined persons that would rather ignore those things that shape the doing of science or technology.
The rest of us (if i may speak for the rest of us) are just really pissed when politics gets in the way of being able to go on a turist trip to the Moon without actually being a milionair.