I work as a freelancer in IT and have worked with tens of companies by now, from small (20 people) to big (20000+ people) in several different sectors and a have noticed that in the private sector, wastage and inefficiency is proportional to: - The size of the company: the bigger the worse. - The amount of easy money. Companies that are in monopolist/duopolist/protected-market positions (i.e. Yellow Pages before the Internet) or make most of their money by rent seeking (i.e. Finance) are much less efficient. - How long have they been in that position. The longer a company has been in a stable easy money position the more wastage and inneficency is tolerated. - In a division within a company, is it a profit center (i.e. the ones that make the money directly) or a cost center (i.e. a support division). Cost centers tend to be less efficient.
To summon it up, big companies that have been making easy money for quite a while in a monopolist/duopolist/protected-market are the least efficient and most wastefull of them all. Non-profit center divisions within it are the least efficient of all.
Considering that the State is in a monopolist position (nobody else can charge for taxes or provide law&order services in a country), very big (even in countries with the smallest governments, the number of people the State employs is larger than most companies in the world), makes easy money (taxes flow in every year and are relativelly independent of the quality of State services) and is mostly composed of non-profit divisions (pretty much only tax collection makes money) it's not surprising that it suffers from high inneficiency and wastage.
The same can be said, however, of many private companies out there.
I was under the impression that the consensus here is that video games programming was, at least in the mainstream industry, an extreme sweatshop, slave-like, gaming-enjoyment destroying kind of IT job...
Sure, do it for fun (who doesn't) but joining the industry is a bad idea.
Maybe u should first do your due diligence and warn them about it!?
This government given opportunity for blackmail cannot be wasted. Grandmothers are already being accused of sharing porn and made to pay under the mere threat of a lawsuit - just imagine when their ability to connect to the Internet, where all sorts of services, public and otherwise, have been moved to, is on the line.
I suspect that within less than a month of the law comming to be, whole ranges of IP addresses will be receiving spurious accusations of copyright infregement and blackmailed to pay "or else". (After all, there are no courts involved in deciding who is guilty and who is innocent - the connection is just cut on the 3rd strike).
Give it 6 months of countless newsarticles about grandmothers, single mothers and members of the church loosing their connections for "sharing Brittney", everybody knowing somebody whose connection has been cut and people suing the government right and left because essential services have been moved exclusivelly to the Net and they cannot access them any more and the backslash will be huge.
Defending Cheryl Cole's right to make millions is all kinda *yawn* until your Internet connection is taken down by a slimy lawyer blackmailing you for £1000 - then it becomes personal.
We couldn't have asked for a better way to make the common people aware of the evils of Copyright Laws and the influence of the Media cartels in politics.
In fact, seeing more and more of the mainstream media in the UK dedicating full pages to stories about old-ladies accused by ACS:Law of sharing Porn is way beyond entertaining.
This is creating a really bad perception in people's mind's about copyright enforcement so much so that "media figures" have spoken agains the way ACS:Law does business - talk about damage control.
I can't wait for the first grandmothers getting disconnected from the Net thanks to the Digital Economy Act or even better, threatned by the countless shady characters that will be coming out of the woodwork once this government-given legal opportunity for blackmail gets in full swing.
Given the way the media has spinned this story, the Digital Economy Act might very well turn out to be the thing that puts IP law in the minds of ordinary people as a bad thing that needs fixing.
If you can't make an image of the CD/DVD, store it in you Hard-disk and play from there then the game has some sort of CD/DVD check DRM which is way beyond a simple serial check.
While Steam is great compared to more recent types of DRM (ever more intrusive CD/DVD checks or even constant online validation) it's evil when compared with the simple serial key validations for games from several year ago.
Everytime I hear pro-Steam arguments, they come from somebody that didn't game in the 90's. Back then there were lots of independent Software Houses and Producers out there (lots of competition) and DRM was non-existent or nowhere nearly as intrusive
It's amazing how angry people can get over the idea of paying for new content. In my opinion this is a much better model than releasing expansions that prevent others playing with the majority population without purchasing it. I recently reinstalled the game and to be sure, everyone has weird hats etc but I cannot say I found any noticeable disadvantage in having none of these gimmicks, my scores are middling same as they were a year or more ago when I last played it and I'm grateful to be able to still play with everyone without having to fork out 10 or 20 for the new maps and gear etc.
It would be great if buyers of the game would know about this change to the nature of the game up-front, before buying the base game and it was priced appropriatelly.
That way, those that don't like the idea of an online FPS with must have items bought with real money could avoid the game and those that don't care about it could still get it.
The problem here is that Valve wants to have as many people as possible pay full price for an incomplete game and then again for the extra bits that are essential to play it competitivelly online.
Consider an MMORPG like WoW - you pay for the base game and then additionally you pay extra (in the case of WoW, for time but, for example, for D&D Online you can pay for gear instead if you want). Everybody knows what the deal is, up front and in big letters, and yet millions of people take that deal. Since there is an after buy pay-toplay component the base game is priced appropriatelly.
The difference for Team Fortress 2 is that the game you were sold was a fast paced, competitive, online FPS and then after a while Valve turned it into a pay-to-play game (at least if you want to remain competitive instead of just being cannon fodder for the guys with the paid-for-gear). They unilaterally changed the product after the sale and you have no choice but to take it or stop using it.
<rant> After all, Valve are the guys that invented an online DRM system and digital download store that screws you but at least lubes you up first (not like the competition's online-DRM which uses no lube). I mean, just look at all posts from defenders of it saying how you can be offline for a while and still play the games or re-download them when you loose them - sure it's not as good as a simple serial number, but at least it's not as bad as living in North Korea...
I'm sure that they haven't added must-have-pay-with-cash items to a highly competitive, fast-paced kind of game like an online FPS after releasing the game and after loads of people had bought it: that would be sneaky and deceitful, not to mention a lub-less screwing of customers.
This kind of thing is the purvey of Machiaveli-inspired companies like Sony Entertainment, not good guys like Valve.
- How many times have you seen the kind of guy/gal that proactivelly checks the systems/processes/code for problems, solves them and thus prevents problems in the future, get celebrated as a Hero/Heroine and promoted?
- How many times have you seen the kind of guy/gal that does not proactivelly seek and fixe potential issues but instead fixes things when they brake, somehow managing to "Save the day" when everybody is in "oh shit!" mode, get celebrated as a Hero/Heroine and promoted?
I bet that the vast majority of places celebrate and promote the ones that solve problems that put the team in the spotlight when they occur, not the ones that prevent the problems from ever appearing.
Do this for 10 or 20 years and the result is a company which is filled with short-term, reactive management from top to bottom.
Do UK ISP's not have a set of balls to stand up for their customers? They were so against the Digital Economy Act, but when it comes to giving up their customer details to a shady law outfit that wants to extort them, thats apparently just fine.
This is Sky we're talking about here: they're a media-company/broadcaster with an ISP-to-make-the-packages-more-attractive on the side. Their main business is pay-TV. What do you expect from them?
In fact, given their main business line, they're glad that bottom-dweller-scum-feeding companies like ACS:Law exist and do what they do and probably even sent over a complimentary bottle of Champagne with their first list of customer names and addresses.
Same thing with other media businesses with ISPs on the side such as Virgin (a conglomerate that specializes in looking cool and self-benifiting billing mistakes).
Beyond that you have the big, mass-market, cheap-but-its-a-tenth-of-the-advertised-speed ISPs who don't really see the point in fighting for a couple (of thousands) of customers.
In the UK, if you want ISPs with a spine you need to go for the small ones, preferably those with fewer customers than the threshold of the Digital Economy Act (400,000). They're also the same that don't do fishy things like filtering your Internet, blocking ports, gathering and selling information on customer habits or throtling down connections. The big ones are either a joke or have interests in media and are thus likelly to make more money from their share of copyright infringement "fines" than from the actual customer fees.
This not being the US, laws where long ago passed to force the incumbent Telcos to open up their networks to any ISP, so there are a lot of smaller ISPs around.
Interestingly enough, the reason why China is responsible for such a high proportion of the world's production of such Rare Earths is not because they cannot be found anywhere else, but because mining them is messy with poisonous and nature destroying side-effects, so it has been stopped in other places (which are pretty much all over the world).
All they (the Chinese) will achieve with this is a renaissance of mining operations for Rare Earths all over the world, with the Japanese government investing the money and the Japanese companies the engineering know-how. If the Japanese do put their mind into developing new methods for mining Rare Earths which are more nature friendly, expect that eventually there will be a lot of sources for Rare Earths all over the world.
Intellectual Property law created what in effect is a tax paid directly to other persons/companies: - Against the natural laws, it gives people and companies ownership of ideas and lets them charge you every time you share an idea.
It's very simple really: with Intellectual Property you have to have authorization to give/share things with others and pay for iy, without it you're free to do as you which with what you have and what you know.
I'm surprised this point is not raised more often by the "Pirate" political parties: instead they tend to get drawn into abstract discussions on (for most people) obscure points...
I, another iOS user, did make that decision. I decided to buy an iOS device (multiple in fact,) knowing full well that it didn't support flash, because I decided I didn't need or want it. Steve Jobs didn't choose it for me, he just made a device (both hardware and software) that suited my needs, just as HTC made a device that suits yours.
And that's how it should be: people should be doing informed buying decisions.
Just like those developing software and websites should be doing informed decisions with regards to the technologies they use.
In that sense, this article and other Apple iWidget articles serve the purpose of informing us a potential buyers and/or developers of the potential downsides of Apple technology (while Apple's adverts take care of showing us the benefits of their technology).
If after knowing this somebody chooses to go with Apple products, that's perfectly good: they've had the chance of doing an informed decision and will not be disapointed.
Personally I welcome any kind of reality-check, myth-busting articles about technology - there's way too much blind fashion-following and fanboyism around in the technology community. I just wish mainstream media was also more prone to taking a skeptic point of view in their technology news.
And ACTA will stop doctor/hospital worker from sending your personal health files to a data mining company how?
ACTA is targetted at distribution of copyrighted information (which by it's own nature is public) not protection of confidential information. In fact, I suspect that if your doctor put your personal health files up for all to see in a public website, under ACTA you would probably not even be able to get the site to remove it since it's the doctor that owns the copyright on those files (he wrote them) not you.
The whole logic in the current lawmaking is COMPANY ACTIONS = ALLOW; PERSON ACTIONS = DENY. Companies selling your personal data to each other is ok, but you copying a music track from a CD to your MP3 player is not ok.
This might be related with creating Delta-wing passengers aircrafts (where the whole aircraft is a flat and delta-shapped wing). When looking into this, one of the problems that Airbus and Boeing found for those versus the traditional cigarrete-tube-with-wings ones is that in a delta wing, most passengers do not sit anywhere near windows, and that is ennerving to people.
A (semi-)transparent fuselage would be able to solve this.
That still leaves the second problem, which is that no airports in the world have docking bays appropriate for delta-wing aircraft.
I recently gave in to the nagging "Update" prompts and had my Zone Alarm update itself.
After that my machine (XP) started totally freezing periodically, requiring a restart. Being a device driver and having been updated recently, Zone Alarm was the natural suspect.
So I looked around for a new free firewall and found Comodo Internet Firewall. I replaced Zone Alarm with it and, lo-and-behold, no more freezes.
The Comodo firewall can be quite bit more nagging than ZA, and unless you have it set in the lower paranoia mode it will prompt for stuff which is real obscure for non-technical users but at the end of the day it still works better and is more powerfull and configurable (for example, ZA free has nothing to show which applications have which connections open, but Comodo does).
5 years ago, Zone Alarm free was great and most other personal firewalls were either enormous turds (McAfee, Norton) or obscure and hard to configure. Nowadays there are plenty of good personal firewalls out there and Zone Alarm has been going downhill.
Turn it all around and see it from a different perspective: - While in the Past, we looked to the Future as a direction of improvement but it that didn't came to be.
It's not as much that the Past was better than the Present, it's more that back then we had lower expectations and we hed hopes for the Future that in the end didn't quite materialized all that well.
Specifically for Gaming, the Past had the added advantage that everything was new and fresh and wonderful purelly because computer gaming at home was so much better than what we had before. It helped that as computer gaming technology was introduced, it went through a series of frequent game changing technological improvements (pun intended): from 10 minutes loading of a game from tape we went to 1 minute from floppy; just when we were getting bored of flat sprites, out comes 3D; when single players wasn't cutting it anymore, out comes online multiplayer - every couple of years, just when the old stuff was starting to get boring, out comes a technological improvement that open up a whole new range of fun.
Fast forward 15 years and while improvements did happened, they were almost exclusivelly incremental improvements in graphics: as it turned out, just prettier pictures are not enough.
Gameplay is not any better (in fact, the industry kept relaunching the same games with new graphics), stability has improved somewhat but beta-state games are still release. In some ways, things went back, like game content being removed before release and sold as DLC and (in the PC space) intrusive and irritating DRM.
So while the Past wasn't better in absolute terms, things kept improving fast back then and based on that we hoped for a Future which would've been much better than what we ended up getting.
It's just a shame that for the ignorant emotion-driven masses that trully believe in the exagerated alarmist pap fed to them by the media, this exercise in humour is just going to be one enormous "whoosh!".
Would forbidding the press to report on murders stop people being murdered?
'Cause that's equivalent to what Conroy is suggesting: hide the problem not solve the problem.
It seems to me that if he is so concerned about the problem of sexual abuse of children he should support going after those that do the abuse, not hiding it.
This angle could be used to pry open his argument.
The biggest problem with Business and Software Patents is not that it's not possible to "dance around" most of them, it's that you need to know that the Patent is there and understand it in order to "dance around" it.
Given the large number of industry standard practices which were patented in one way or another, this means that, especially as a software engineer, to make sure you are not stepping in any patent when developing a system, you need to spend more time and money investigating patents and finding workarounds for them than you do in actually designing and developing the system.
In the current society where there are huge numbers of creators of IP and the infrastructure is in place to make information flow freely unconstrained by distance and geography, the hidden bureaucratic costs of IP compliance, which impact all creators, have balooned to such a level as to more than deny any incentives to creativity that IP laws might provide.
Certainly in the purelly non-physical areas where the costs of creation would otherwise be negligible, IP is a huge break on invention and progress, not a boost.
You must, by law, have at least a Company Secretary as well - and they can't be the same person
Not anymore: the law was changed and since the beginning of this year a company secretary is not needed for small companies (revenue below £250,000 per-annum if I remember correctly).
Even before that, it was possible (and common) to just pay a small amount to the guys that handled company formation or to some accountants and they would then do the company Secretary bit.
I should know since I've had a one man company in the UK for at least 4 years now.
The title should say "Why Broadband Prices Haven't Decreased in the US"
For which the answer is: - Most of the US has a de facto oligopoly in the provision of broadband services so the suppiers feel no market pressure to improve services and/or lower prices
The reasons for the oligopoly are: - High barriers to entry due the cost of laying new cables/fibre, especially for the last mile. The difficulty in getting rights of way raises these even further. - Entrenched suppliers with fully paid-up infrastrutures. To add insult to injury, most of that infrastruture has been paid for with taxpayer's money. - Bought up and paid for politician which not only do not take any measures to open the market up for competition (like those that were taken in Europe) but activelly stop new competition from coming to the market (by blocking municipal projects, not assigning rights-of-way for laying new cables/fiber and in general maintain a climate of regulatory uncertainty).
The rest of the world has been hapilly getting better speeds for less money thank you very much.
At least for me "DLC" reads as "Stuff we took out from the main release or would give out in a free update but now sell as extra to squeeze more money out of the customers", 'cause that's exactly what has been done by most publishers.
Call it "expansion pack" or "small expansion pack".
Next give some sort of no-monetary-value reward for people who pay the larger amount. Maybe easier access to the developer and the ability to suggest improvements for the next version.
That said, is the "expansion pack" even worth the small amount? For all we know the two amounts listed are "more money than it's worth" and "way much more money than it's worth" and this is all a poor-man's advertising gimmick. Certainly getting the game to Slashdot will bring more sales. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if it's so or not. Maybe the use of the word "DLC" has put me in a overly-negative mind-set with regards to this and even the large amount is great value. Take my opinion with a pinch of salt).
In Russia the purpose of the State is to protected the State it's leaders and it's agents, not the People. In Russia, if you endanger the stability of the State (read: are against it's current rulers) then you are a criminal.
Thus, unless the botnet operators start making political statements against the leaders/agents of the State or start attacking the State's interests they're perfectly safe (as long as they make sure they pay the appropriate bribes).
For a country that had the potential to be the biguest and most important country in Europe, Russia does seem to have a knack to slip back to Czarist habits at every turn: as somebody once said, "The biggest enemy of Russia are the Russians".
Slashdot Mirror
I work as a freelancer in IT and have worked with tens of companies by now, from small (20 people) to big (20000+ people) in several different sectors and a have noticed that in the private sector, wastage and inefficiency is proportional to:
- The size of the company: the bigger the worse.
- The amount of easy money. Companies that are in monopolist/duopolist/protected-market positions (i.e. Yellow Pages before the Internet) or make most of their money by rent seeking (i.e. Finance) are much less efficient.
- How long have they been in that position. The longer a company has been in a stable easy money position the more wastage and inneficency is tolerated.
- In a division within a company, is it a profit center (i.e. the ones that make the money directly) or a cost center (i.e. a support division). Cost centers tend to be less efficient.
To summon it up, big companies that have been making easy money for quite a while in a monopolist/duopolist/protected-market are the least efficient and most wastefull of them all. Non-profit center divisions within it are the least efficient of all.
Considering that the State is in a monopolist position (nobody else can charge for taxes or provide law&order services in a country), very big (even in countries with the smallest governments, the number of people the State employs is larger than most companies in the world), makes easy money (taxes flow in every year and are relativelly independent of the quality of State services) and is mostly composed of non-profit divisions (pretty much only tax collection makes money) it's not surprising that it suffers from high inneficiency and wastage.
The same can be said, however, of many private companies out there.
I was under the impression that the consensus here is that video games programming was, at least in the mainstream industry, an extreme sweatshop, slave-like, gaming-enjoyment destroying kind of IT job...
Sure, do it for fun (who doesn't) but joining the industry is a bad idea.
Maybe u should first do your due diligence and warn them about it!?
This government given opportunity for blackmail cannot be wasted. Grandmothers are already being accused of sharing porn and made to pay under the mere threat of a lawsuit - just imagine when their ability to connect to the Internet, where all sorts of services, public and otherwise, have been moved to, is on the line.
I suspect that within less than a month of the law comming to be, whole ranges of IP addresses will be receiving spurious accusations of copyright infregement and blackmailed to pay "or else". (After all, there are no courts involved in deciding who is guilty and who is innocent - the connection is just cut on the 3rd strike).
Give it 6 months of countless newsarticles about grandmothers, single mothers and members of the church loosing their connections for "sharing Brittney", everybody knowing somebody whose connection has been cut and people suing the government right and left because essential services have been moved exclusivelly to the Net and they cannot access them any more and the backslash will be huge.
Defending Cheryl Cole's right to make millions is all kinda *yawn* until your Internet connection is taken down by a slimy lawyer blackmailing you for £1000 - then it becomes personal.
We couldn't have asked for a better way to make the common people aware of the evils of Copyright Laws and the influence of the Media cartels in politics.
In fact, seeing more and more of the mainstream media in the UK dedicating full pages to stories about old-ladies accused by ACS:Law of sharing Porn is way beyond entertaining.
This is creating a really bad perception in people's mind's about copyright enforcement so much so that "media figures" have spoken agains the way ACS:Law does business - talk about damage control.
I can't wait for the first grandmothers getting disconnected from the Net thanks to the Digital Economy Act or even better, threatned by the countless shady characters that will be coming out of the woodwork once this government-given legal opportunity for blackmail gets in full swing.
Given the way the media has spinned this story, the Digital Economy Act might very well turn out to be the thing that puts IP law in the minds of ordinary people as a bad thing that needs fixing.
If you can't make an image of the CD/DVD, store it in you Hard-disk and play from there then the game has some sort of CD/DVD check DRM which is way beyond a simple serial check.
While Steam is great compared to more recent types of DRM (ever more intrusive CD/DVD checks or even constant online validation) it's evil when compared with the simple serial key validations for games from several year ago.
Everytime I hear pro-Steam arguments, they come from somebody that didn't game in the 90's. Back then there were lots of independent Software Houses and Producers out there (lots of competition) and DRM was non-existent or nowhere nearly as intrusive
It would be great if buyers of the game would know about this change to the nature of the game up-front, before buying the base game and it was priced appropriatelly.
That way, those that don't like the idea of an online FPS with must have items bought with real money could avoid the game and those that don't care about it could still get it.
The problem here is that Valve wants to have as many people as possible pay full price for an incomplete game and then again for the extra bits that are essential to play it competitivelly online.
Consider an MMORPG like WoW - you pay for the base game and then additionally you pay extra (in the case of WoW, for time but, for example, for D&D Online you can pay for gear instead if you want). Everybody knows what the deal is, up front and in big letters, and yet millions of people take that deal. Since there is an after buy pay-toplay component the base game is priced appropriatelly.
The difference for Team Fortress 2 is that the game you were sold was a fast paced, competitive, online FPS and then after a while Valve turned it into a pay-to-play game (at least if you want to remain competitive instead of just being cannon fodder for the guys with the paid-for-gear). They unilaterally changed the product after the sale and you have no choice but to take it or stop using it.
This can't be true!
<rant> ...
After all, Valve are the guys that invented an online DRM system and digital download store that screws you but at least lubes you up first (not like the competition's online-DRM which uses no lube). I mean, just look at all posts from defenders of it saying how you can be offline for a while and still play the games or re-download them when you loose them - sure it's not as good as a simple serial number, but at least it's not as bad as living in North Korea
I'm sure that they haven't added must-have-pay-with-cash items to a highly competitive, fast-paced kind of game like an online FPS after releasing the game and after loads of people had bought it: that would be sneaky and deceitful, not to mention a lub-less screwing of customers.
This kind of thing is the purvey of Machiaveli-inspired companies like Sony Entertainment, not good guys like Valve.
Right!?
Right!???
Right????
</rant>
Think back to any large company you worked for:
- How many times have you seen the kind of guy/gal that proactivelly checks the systems/processes/code for problems, solves them and thus prevents problems in the future, get celebrated as a Hero/Heroine and promoted?
- How many times have you seen the kind of guy/gal that does not proactivelly seek and fixe potential issues but instead fixes things when they brake, somehow managing to "Save the day" when everybody is in "oh shit!" mode, get celebrated as a Hero/Heroine and promoted?
I bet that the vast majority of places celebrate and promote the ones that solve problems that put the team in the spotlight when they occur, not the ones that prevent the problems from ever appearing.
Do this for 10 or 20 years and the result is a company which is filled with short-term, reactive management from top to bottom.
To quote from Isaac Newton:
Patents on ideas go against the most basic principles that brought the modern age to be.
That doesn't sound right: I'm self-employed and I make at least twice as much as the cubicle drones.
I do however have to rent my soul to the highest bidder (usually in the form of 6 months contracts) ...
This is Sky we're talking about here: they're a media-company/broadcaster with an ISP-to-make-the-packages-more-attractive on the side. Their main business is pay-TV. What do you expect from them?
In fact, given their main business line, they're glad that bottom-dweller-scum-feeding companies like ACS:Law exist and do what they do and probably even sent over a complimentary bottle of Champagne with their first list of customer names and addresses.
Same thing with other media businesses with ISPs on the side such as Virgin (a conglomerate that specializes in looking cool and self-benifiting billing mistakes).
Beyond that you have the big, mass-market, cheap-but-its-a-tenth-of-the-advertised-speed ISPs who don't really see the point in fighting for a couple (of thousands) of customers.
In the UK, if you want ISPs with a spine you need to go for the small ones, preferably those with fewer customers than the threshold of the Digital Economy Act (400,000). They're also the same that don't do fishy things like filtering your Internet, blocking ports, gathering and selling information on customer habits or throtling down connections. The big ones are either a joke or have interests in media and are thus likelly to make more money from their share of copyright infringement "fines" than from the actual customer fees.
This not being the US, laws where long ago passed to force the incumbent Telcos to open up their networks to any ISP, so there are a lot of smaller ISPs around.
Interestingly enough, the reason why China is responsible for such a high proportion of the world's production of such Rare Earths is not because they cannot be found anywhere else, but because mining them is messy with poisonous and nature destroying side-effects, so it has been stopped in other places (which are pretty much all over the world).
All they (the Chinese) will achieve with this is a renaissance of mining operations for Rare Earths all over the world, with the Japanese government investing the money and the Japanese companies the engineering know-how. If the Japanese do put their mind into developing new methods for mining Rare Earths which are more nature friendly, expect that eventually there will be a lot of sources for Rare Earths all over the world.
Intellectual Property law created what in effect is a tax paid directly to other persons/companies:
- Against the natural laws, it gives people and companies ownership of ideas and lets them charge you every time you share an idea.
It's very simple really: with Intellectual Property you have to have authorization to give/share things with others and pay for iy, without it you're free to do as you which with what you have and what you know.
I'm surprised this point is not raised more often by the "Pirate" political parties: instead they tend to get drawn into abstract discussions on (for most people) obscure points ...
And that's how it should be: people should be doing informed buying decisions.
Just like those developing software and websites should be doing informed decisions with regards to the technologies they use.
In that sense, this article and other Apple iWidget articles serve the purpose of informing us a potential buyers and/or developers of the potential downsides of Apple technology (while Apple's adverts take care of showing us the benefits of their technology).
If after knowing this somebody chooses to go with Apple products, that's perfectly good: they've had the chance of doing an informed decision and will not be disapointed.
Personally I welcome any kind of reality-check, myth-busting articles about technology - there's way too much blind fashion-following and fanboyism around in the technology community. I just wish mainstream media was also more prone to taking a skeptic point of view in their technology news.
And ACTA will stop doctor/hospital worker from sending your personal health files to a data mining company how?
ACTA is targetted at distribution of copyrighted information (which by it's own nature is public) not protection of confidential information.
In fact, I suspect that if your doctor put your personal health files up for all to see in a public website, under ACTA you would probably not even be able to get the site to remove it since it's the doctor that owns the copyright on those files (he wrote them) not you.
The whole logic in the current lawmaking is COMPANY ACTIONS = ALLOW; PERSON ACTIONS = DENY. Companies selling your personal data to each other is ok, but you copying a music track from a CD to your MP3 player is not ok.
This might be related with creating Delta-wing passengers aircrafts (where the whole aircraft is a flat and delta-shapped wing). When looking into this, one of the problems that Airbus and Boeing found for those versus the traditional cigarrete-tube-with-wings ones is that in a delta wing, most passengers do not sit anywhere near windows, and that is ennerving to people.
A (semi-)transparent fuselage would be able to solve this.
That still leaves the second problem, which is that no airports in the world have docking bays appropriate for delta-wing aircraft.
I recently gave in to the nagging "Update" prompts and had my Zone Alarm update itself.
After that my machine (XP) started totally freezing periodically, requiring a restart. Being a device driver and having been updated recently, Zone Alarm was the natural suspect.
So I looked around for a new free firewall and found Comodo Internet Firewall. I replaced Zone Alarm with it and, lo-and-behold, no more freezes.
The Comodo firewall can be quite bit more nagging than ZA, and unless you have it set in the lower paranoia mode it will prompt for stuff which is real obscure for non-technical users but at the end of the day it still works better and is more powerfull and configurable (for example, ZA free has nothing to show which applications have which connections open, but Comodo does).
5 years ago, Zone Alarm free was great and most other personal firewalls were either enormous turds (McAfee, Norton) or obscure and hard to configure. Nowadays there are plenty of good personal firewalls out there and Zone Alarm has been going downhill.
Turn it all around and see it from a different perspective:
- While in the Past, we looked to the Future as a direction of improvement but it that didn't came to be.
It's not as much that the Past was better than the Present, it's more that back then we had lower expectations and we hed hopes for the Future that in the end didn't quite materialized all that well.
Specifically for Gaming, the Past had the added advantage that everything was new and fresh and wonderful purelly because computer gaming at home was so much better than what we had before. It helped that as computer gaming technology was introduced, it went through a series of frequent game changing technological improvements (pun intended): from 10 minutes loading of a game from tape we went to 1 minute from floppy; just when we were getting bored of flat sprites, out comes 3D; when single players wasn't cutting it anymore, out comes online multiplayer - every couple of years, just when the old stuff was starting to get boring, out comes a technological improvement that open up a whole new range of fun.
Fast forward 15 years and while improvements did happened, they were almost exclusivelly incremental improvements in graphics: as it turned out, just prettier pictures are not enough.
Gameplay is not any better (in fact, the industry kept relaunching the same games with new graphics), stability has improved somewhat but beta-state games are still release. In some ways, things went back, like game content being removed before release and sold as DLC and (in the PC space) intrusive and irritating DRM.
So while the Past wasn't better in absolute terms, things kept improving fast back then and based on that we hoped for a Future which would've been much better than what we ended up getting.
It's just a shame that for the ignorant emotion-driven masses that trully believe in the exagerated alarmist pap fed to them by the media, this exercise in humour is just going to be one enormous "whoosh!".
Would forbidding the press to report on murders stop people being murdered?
'Cause that's equivalent to what Conroy is suggesting: hide the problem not solve the problem.
It seems to me that if he is so concerned about the problem of sexual abuse of children he should support going after those that do the abuse, not hiding it.
This angle could be used to pry open his argument.
The biggest problem with Business and Software Patents is not that it's not possible to "dance around" most of them, it's that you need to know that the Patent is there and understand it in order to "dance around" it.
Given the large number of industry standard practices which were patented in one way or another, this means that, especially as a software engineer, to make sure you are not stepping in any patent when developing a system, you need to spend more time and money investigating patents and finding workarounds for them than you do in actually designing and developing the system.
In the current society where there are huge numbers of creators of IP and the infrastructure is in place to make information flow freely unconstrained by distance and geography, the hidden bureaucratic costs of IP compliance, which impact all creators, have balooned to such a level as to more than deny any incentives to creativity that IP laws might provide.
Certainly in the purelly non-physical areas where the costs of creation would otherwise be negligible, IP is a huge break on invention and progress, not a boost.
Not anymore: the law was changed and since the beginning of this year a company secretary is not needed for small companies (revenue below £250,000 per-annum if I remember correctly).
Even before that, it was possible (and common) to just pay a small amount to the guys that handled company formation or to some accountants and they would then do the company Secretary bit.
I should know since I've had a one man company in the UK for at least 4 years now.
The title should say "Why Broadband Prices Haven't Decreased in the US"
For which the answer is:
- Most of the US has a de facto oligopoly in the provision of broadband services so the suppiers feel no market pressure to improve services and/or lower prices
The reasons for the oligopoly are:
- High barriers to entry due the cost of laying new cables/fibre, especially for the last mile. The difficulty in getting rights of way raises these even further.
- Entrenched suppliers with fully paid-up infrastrutures. To add insult to injury, most of that infrastruture has been paid for with taxpayer's money.
- Bought up and paid for politician which not only do not take any measures to open the market up for competition (like those that were taken in Europe) but activelly stop new competition from coming to the market (by blocking municipal projects, not assigning rights-of-way for laying new cables/fiber and in general maintain a climate of regulatory uncertainty).
The rest of the world has been hapilly getting better speeds for less money thank you very much.
At least for me "DLC" reads as "Stuff we took out from the main release or would give out in a free update but now sell as extra to squeeze more money out of the customers", 'cause that's exactly what has been done by most publishers.
Call it "expansion pack" or "small expansion pack".
Next give some sort of no-monetary-value reward for people who pay the larger amount. Maybe easier access to the developer and the ability to suggest improvements for the next version.
That said, is the "expansion pack" even worth the small amount? For all we know the two amounts listed are "more money than it's worth" and "way much more money than it's worth" and this is all a poor-man's advertising gimmick. Certainly getting the game to Slashdot will bring more sales.
(Disclaimer: I have no idea if it's so or not. Maybe the use of the word "DLC" has put me in a overly-negative mind-set with regards to this and even the large amount is great value. Take my opinion with a pinch of salt).
In Russia the purpose of the State is to protected the State it's leaders and it's agents, not the People. In Russia, if you endanger the stability of the State (read: are against it's current rulers) then you are a criminal.
Thus, unless the botnet operators start making political statements against the leaders/agents of the State or start attacking the State's interests they're perfectly safe (as long as they make sure they pay the appropriate bribes).
For a country that had the potential to be the biguest and most important country in Europe, Russia does seem to have a knack to slip back to Czarist habits at every turn: as somebody once said, "The biggest enemy of Russia are the Russians".