TFA is not separating what the DoJ did before with what they are requiring of the merger. I made the same mistake, then read some of the references that the blogger cites that worded things far more clearly and provided more detail.
Still, I don't think attaching net neutrality concessions to a merger between a content provider and a content deliverer is a good thing. Network neutrality should be the rule, not the exception you sign up for in return for another fundamental violation of another important antitrust consideration.
Damnit, my tax dollars subsidized Comcast putting in those lines, and my government maintains a monopoly for them in my area. For good reason, but what's this with Senatorial balls receding into their body cavities and caving in to the businesses that the government ensures profit to by the shitload?
If Comcast wants to run unregulated, let 'em. Just have them cede all the wiring and rights-of-way on their way out, and let someone else who appreciates a government-sponsored monopoly and might show a little respect for their side of the bargain have a shot.
The attached article is pretty poor, but cites a few other articles that give a lot more information (I really hate stories that cite bloggers' regurgitation of stories rather than original writing with actual research and all that journalistic nonsense!)
Supposedly, and I'm going to take this with about 4 tons of grains of salt, the deal requires that Comcast not throttle other providers "to the point where the video quality is reduced", but I'm sure Comcast will find an easy loophole (caps dropped to from 250GB to 1GB a month, but access to Comcast "and partner" content doesn't count, for example)...
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
No. A beta release is (in general) bug fixes and improvements to existing code. They generally don't introduce swaths of new features, that's what the FIRST beta did, the rest are fixing problems with those features. The fact that they have had more than 11 betas of Firefox 4 is proof that what they are trying to do is necessary. They made 4.0 too big.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
They are going for more releases BECAUSE the betas exhausted them, and that's a good decision. What they are trying to do is go to a smaller, more focused release on a smaller number of changes at a given time, and get that version out as the regular version more regularly. It allows them to keep their release and development codebases closer together, meaning less effort for security backfixes into the release version. It allows them to manage the complexity of their changes so a new version of Firefox doesn't feel like a new version of Windows - something that comes out maybe twice in a decade and is so different from what you had before that it's basically unrecognizable.
They've been trying to bite off too much at each new major release, and as a result they've fallen victim to BPS (Perpetual Beta Syndrome) because the scope of changes they are trying to do simultaneously exceeds their development capacity. It's a nasty, unrewarding cycle to get into, and it makes support hard and expensive, and it makes the project stagnate and stagger under its own weight.
In order to dig yourself out of that cycle you need to pick smaller targets and set out to accomplish them, rather than taking on the world with insufficient resources and ending up with a version so buggy and unwieldy that you need a dozen or more betas to get to something you're comfortable won't actually find a way to kill your users, much less work correctly every time. So you'll see a pattern of smaller releases focused on smaller sets of new functionality.
Having said that, I've been using 4.0beta(latest) for a few months, and I find it pretty solid. But the point remains - if they had focused on one task at a time and released that feature, we'd probably be about where we are today, without the vast chasm between "production" and "beta" releases being so huge that a lot of people are going to resist moving to 4.0 for a long time (and keeping the development teams working on two very different codebases for bug fixes).
The bigger you make your changes, and the less often you release, the harder it is for your users to upgrade. And the harder it is for you to maintain two stable and increasingly-different codebases (one development, one stable).
Firefox should have taken 1/3 of the changes they wanted for 4.0, called them 3.7 or 4.0, and released them for beta quickly. Then taken the next 1/3 and made them 3.8 or 5.0. Then the final third and 3.9 or 6.0 (which numbering depends on whether you're in development or marketing, pretty much, but it really doesn't matter).
Instead, we're stuck with two Firefoxes - one that's a year old and is showing its age, and one that's so vastly utterly different in terms of UI and underlying infrastructure that you'll have people resisting the upgrade for at least six months.
Apologies to you and others, I got the GGGP's sarcastic discussion of extracting "dangerous" water confused with another adjacent discussion on extracting oil.
What do you mean? In what way is Netflix something that should stop me considering Amazon Prime to the point you think I've never heard of it? They are competitors now, but that doesn't make Netflix the automagical winner just because they've been offering movies longer.
Netflix costs $7.99 a month, or $96 a year. It does not provide me with anything but movies. Plus $2 a month if I want new releases and stuff shipped to me on a DVD. That's near-as-makes-no-difference $120 a year, if my math is correct, or about $10 a month.
Amazon Prime costs $79 a year, and primarily offers free 2-day shipping on Amazon orders. Now, as a free bonus, you get free unlimited streaming video.
With what few new movies I want to see on DVD, the local video rental place (Bart and Greg's) gets $3.50 a rental for a few days and I get to pick the actual movie I want and have it home the same day I want it. $2 a movie if I buy a 20-movie pass for $40.
Both work in Linux, and I have a Windows XP virtual machine if I need support for something in it.
So for what Netflix costs, I can get streaming video from Amazon, and about one movie a month from Bart and Greg's. Oh, and free 2-day shipping on most of what I buy from Amazon as a "free bonus".
The movies can be considered "free" if you were already a Prime member when they started offering them. If Prime was worth it to you already and they added more features that did not enter into your original consideration, then, yes, you can call it "free".
Having access to a decent library of streaming media I can watch, including a number of things I'd actually WANT to? I'm thinking under $100 a year might be a fair price for that. I was paying about that for Intelliflix before they folded, and was getting far fewer movies I really wanted out of it.
To me, the 2-day shipping would be the "free" bonus.;)
Agreed. Though licensing the movies they used was probably getting harder and harder (in addition to running out of really good-grade "B" material, of course).
I think that's why Nelson and company went off and did the RiffTrax thing instead. They can provide the commentary, but they don't have to get into messy licensing issues because they don't have to buy any rights whatsoever to the movie. They aren't offering the movie, you have to buy that yourself, then you buy their RiffTrax separately to play along with it.
It also saved them the hassle of filming the pretty much unwatchable (and still expensive to film) interstitial stuff, and just sit down in front of a bad movie with a tape recorder and record the appropriate sarcasm and humor in the appropriate places.
My town has no summer folk, or almost none. We get all the traffic from people driving through to get to where they really want to go, but few of them stop. We survived the recent loss of a major source of jobs in the closing of a military base a couple of towns over, I think we'll manage without 20,000 cars a day coming through town without stopping and spending any money pretty well.:)
Plus, if the sea levels really do rise, I think I'll be more grateful for my acreage and my wetland-based water filtration system and less worried about the financial viability of any businesses or industry our town council has successfully prevented from coming in in any sustainable quantity anyway.
toxic, dangerous carbon was already in the environment, which doesn't magically stop at the surface of the Earth.
So by that argument, you shouldn't be locking up your bleach and rat poison to keep your young kids from getting at it, because it's already in the environment in your house, which doesn't magically stop at the door to the cabinet.
No, seriously, debate on the theorized effects of carbon aside, there is a huge difference in terms of impact between any material that's inert (stored somewhere) and the same material once it's been released into the air, water, etc. I'd hope such a point would be pretty blindingly obvious.
I don't breathe 500 feet underground, nor does my water come from there. Pulling up hydrocarbons and burning them puts shit in the water and air that was not in the water and air beforehand - it was underground, where it's been sitting inert for millions of years. I won't argue whether it's currently necessary to do so, obviously it is, but it's also important to recognize that we're shitting where we eat, and we need to find ways to stop doing that at some point before we run out of potable water and arable land.
Screw global warming, just the mere fact of pollution is scary enough. In fact, scarier than losing a little land to the ocean and having to move farming further from the equator. We can mitigate a rise in temperatures by finding new arable zones, etc. It's a lot harder to clean hydrocarbons out of the soil and water we need.
Hell, I live in Maine, a few miles from the ocean at a couple of hundred feet of elevation, on a few acres of well-forested land with a wetland on the property. If the temps went up, I'd have a longer growing season, the ocean would be closer to me, and it'd wash the houses of all the rich summer folk away. Where's the problem again? Bring it.
Saving water has nothing to do with climate change. Nothing at all. It has everything to do with conserving reserves of potable drinking water when reserves are running low and not using it to water your lawn or wash your car or other things that use large amounts of drinkable water for things other than drinking.
Actually, watering your lawn is GOOD for the environment. It keeps your grass healthy and vibrant and the photosynthesis increases the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen by a very tiny amount (probably not coming close to making up for the trees that got cut down to build the houses, but every little bit helps), and if you're into the whole carbon credits thing it sequesters carbon in the form of plant material, albeit temporarily and in small quantities.
The problem occurs during droughts and other periods of low water reserves. Drinkable water reserves run low, and urbanites are asked to stop wasting drinkable water because the city managers don't want to run out. So they ask people to conserve water. Not because of the environment, but because you'll run out of drinkable water if you keep wasting it and reserves run low, and one day you'll turn the tap on and hear a chuffing noise and no water will come out, and y'all'll go screaming to the grocers to buy Evian, only they'll be out, and you'll start dropping like flies or drinking from the local park pond that's got fish shit in it and you'll end up with dysentery or something.
Those of us on wells have a self-enforcing water ban. During a drought, if we haven't planned our wells properly and/or waste a lot of water, we run out and the pump burns itself out trying to suck water out of a dry hole. Have that happen once and you tend to be more conservative with your water if it hasn't rained in a while.
I don't mean to be rude, but Google Docs is free. Sign up for it and take it for a test drive. I mean, really. It's got some serious balls.
Does google docs audit and track all changes by users in documents or is it food for corporate political wars as users attempt to bugger up parts of a document that are other people's responsibilities and how readily accessible is it.
It tracks all changes to all Google documents. Not, obviously, to Office documents you upload to it since Office doesn't natively track such things. In any Google document, just click on "File" / "View Revision History" and you get a Wikipedia-like list of revisions. Click on one and you see "before" and "after" highlighted neatly, along with the user who made the change. Seriously detailed history that's two clicks away.
Also does google warrant the security of documents in the cloud with realistic values implicit with regard to, say tender documents were leaked information could be readily worth millions of dollars.
No. Not in my opinion. If the document is security-critical and contains such things as your customer's credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc, don't put it on a server you don't own, and don't put it on a server you DO own that everyone inside the company has access to.
Of course, my company has the same policy for email and word documents on our own servers. Anyone caught putting a credit card number in a Word document or spreadsheet or anything but the "red zone" financial database would probably be drawn and quartered. And that's as it should be.
But for memos about progress on the latest project, I mean, yeah, competitors would probably lap that up. But it wouldn't compromise the business. Not that it matters, we're on an old version of Office that lacks collaboration anyway, so instead of worrying about security breaches we spend our time waiting in line to edit the project status spreadsheet that Bob just locked before he headed off on vacation for a week.
I fail to see what this collaboration has to do with people walking in and interrupting you.
I've used real-time collaboration in Google Docs before, and it's brilliant. I've used it on spreadsheets, not word processing documents, but I assume the word processing interface is similar.
In spreadsheets, you're working along and suddenly a box appears on the right saying "Frank is also editing this document". It shows the cell I'm currently editing highlighted in one color, and the cell Frank is editing highlighted in another. Whenever Frank saves his cell, I see the new value, and vice versa. There's a chat window that I can talk to Frank and we can work on something together, so you don't have to print out what you are talking about and meet somewhere in a conference room where neither of you have access to a computer. You can also just ignore each other if you're working on different parts of the spreadsheet, and when you're done your work is automatically and continually saved so you just exit.
Sadly, we lack this capability at work (Office 2000 and 2003), but we're really hoping to get 2010 soon so there's some possibility of doing some document collaboration. It'll save me a lot of trips across town to work out the details of a document if a few coworkers from other buildings and I can all have the original open at the same time and work together on it. That'll free up time I can spend actually working rather than driving back and forth.
True, but even so, the fact that IE6 was updated 6 years more recently indicates that more people are using it, and even the old unpatched version is more likely to be compatible with current stuff (because a lot of current stuff gets retrofitted to support it, and IE6 has not undergone a major structural change,so writing support for the 2008 version means you're most likely also writing support for the 2001 version).
A lot of web developers still write code to support IE6's peculiarities. That's because a lot of people still use it. There's a correlation between that and the fact the Microsoft kept updating IE6 until 2008.
Netscape was abandoned. There's a correlation between the fact that the company writing it died out and people stopped using it and the fact that no web developers write back-support code for it.
IE6 has remained useful because of hordes of web developers who, to this day, write "if useragent = IE6 do something different" code all across their web pages. And those web developers do that because, surprise surprise, it's still in common use.
As far as I can see, there's not much chance of false alarms unless someone drops something heavy right next to one of the seismometers or something. This is detecting actual earthquakes. The chances of actual false alarms are pretty low. The earth is shaking somewhere. In fact, this is data seismologists already gather as a routine.
The difference here is that it's propagating out an automated warning that can be responded to automatically to nearby locations. The key is "automatically". As in, people don't need to react. You'll only get a minute or two of warning at best - you want this to be automated.
Signal hits the fire station, and the fire station opens the doors immediately (so the quake can't jam them shut if power is lost or the doors get shaken out of track, for example). Alarm tells the firefighters to go get in the truck and pull it into the parking lot in case the building collapses. That's a bunch of fire engines and ambulances you've kept in service when they're likely to be needed very, very soon.
Signal hits a hospital, and they spin up their generator (so it's already running if the Big One hits and they lose power) and sound a tone in operating rooms telling doctors the floors might shake so starting a delicate cut around the brainstem is a bad idea for a few minutes.
Signal hits a large commercial building, and the elevators all go to the nearest floor, open their doors, engage all friction locking mechanisms, and tell everyone to get out of the elevator right now.
Bridges might drop gates to keep people who are not on them yet off them. Water and gas mains might close some containment valves. Traffic lights might all turn red so cars stop. Bell goes off at the school telling the kids to get near a reinforced wall.
Nothing that people need to take conscious effort to react to, just automated stuff that makes the incoming quake a little easier to deal with. Also nothing that would cause all life to come to a complete stop. There'll still be enough gas and water pressure in the systems that most people wouldn't even notice the outage. Traffic would be stopped for a few minutes. The elevator alarm will shut off and people will get back in. And so on...
This is pretty useless if you're at the epicenter, but gives you increasing amounts of warning as you get further away. It also lets emergency personnel outside the quake zone know that they'd better start getting ready to head toward the epicenter, because they'll be needed very soon.
If The Big One ever hits, this might save a lot of lives and damage to a lot of useful rescue equipment miles from the epicenter.
Really? Then why is there still a line at Hannaford when I go to buy my food? Shouldn't the bad publicity have driven everyone to Wally World and Shaw's? Oh, wait, my options are terrible produce or paying more for my food? Well, Hannaford it is, then.
Good thing you never see anyone at the BP fuel stations any more! Man, the publicity of screwing up oil extraction really... ummm... oh, wait.
Some people remember stuff like this for a long time and use it as their primary criteria and avoid the company forever (several friends of mine still boycott Nestle over the third world formula fiasco, and Nestle caved and that boycott fizzled out before the average Slashdot reader was born).
Some people forget stuff like this immediately, or engage some sort of strange Stolkholm-syndrome type thing. I have a friend who now goes to Hannaford because he feels sorry for them. No, I can't figure it out either.
The rest of us have equally rational (to us) and irrational (to others) reasons for preferring or avoiding certain businesses. A hack or a huge screwup is rarely fatal to a business. Being behind the competition because you spent all your time dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s of every little security detail is a far larger nightmare to your average C?O.
Fear of being hacked makes a C{E,I,O,F}O nervous.
Fear of being irrelevant is what keeps them up at night.
So the people who understand security will refuse to fill out the application and leave in disgust at their perception that you are a clueless idiot who knows nothing about security, and the people who fill out the applications and apply are all proving to you that they are clueless idiots who know nothing about security (or they fill out false credentials proving that they are liars).
You'll never get any applicants you want to hire, unless someone writes PISS OFF in both the username and password fields, and then they'll be an attitude problem for you.
A very useful tool if, for example, you actually have to publish a job opening publicly but you really want to hire your nephew. "There were no qualified external applicants, so Jimmy gets the job! Yay for inbreeding!"
Assuming, of course, that you were issued a SSN at birth. For the purposes of this discussion, yes, that's most likely true - most kids get an SSN before they leave the hospital (I know my daughter was issued one and it was not offered to us as an option, it was one of the things we had to do in order to have her released from the hospital). I assume it's been going on for more than ten years now.
But when I was a kid, I didn't get my SSN until I tried to get a work permit at 13 to get my first paper route. Knowing when and where I was born would do you very little good in reconstructing the first 5 of my SSN, because my first 5 is based on neither of those things. We were living in a different state in a different part of the country, and my brother (who was born in a different state than I was) was issued the next consecutive number for his SSN since my parents decided to apply for both of our numbers at the same time since they had to sit in line anyway.
So if you used SSN to identify birth city and date, you'd assume we were twins, born in a completely different part of the country than where we actually were born, and we'd both appear to be ten years younger than we actually are.
Damnit, I confused my story about the landline phone with one about the electric company. You can pretty much either replace "landline telephone" with "electrical service", or "make sure you will pay your electric bill" with "make sure you will pay your telephone bill". Your choice.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm thinking more "self love", but I also want my money, so even that's not safe...
TFA is not separating what the DoJ did before with what they are requiring of the merger. I made the same mistake, then read some of the references that the blogger cites that worded things far more clearly and provided more detail.
Still, I don't think attaching net neutrality concessions to a merger between a content provider and a content deliverer is a good thing. Network neutrality should be the rule, not the exception you sign up for in return for another fundamental violation of another important antitrust consideration.
Damnit, my tax dollars subsidized Comcast putting in those lines, and my government maintains a monopoly for them in my area. For good reason, but what's this with Senatorial balls receding into their body cavities and caving in to the businesses that the government ensures profit to by the shitload?
If Comcast wants to run unregulated, let 'em. Just have them cede all the wiring and rights-of-way on their way out, and let someone else who appreciates a government-sponsored monopoly and might show a little respect for their side of the bargain have a shot.
The attached article is pretty poor, but cites a few other articles that give a lot more information (I really hate stories that cite bloggers' regurgitation of stories rather than original writing with actual research and all that journalistic nonsense!)
Supposedly, and I'm going to take this with about 4 tons of grains of salt, the deal requires that Comcast not throttle other providers "to the point where the video quality is reduced", but I'm sure Comcast will find an easy loophole (caps dropped to from 250GB to 1GB a month, but access to Comcast "and partner" content doesn't count, for example)...
I know for a fact that mine has metal and glass, too.
All they would have to do is call some of their betas number releases.
No. A beta release is (in general) bug fixes and improvements to existing code. They generally don't introduce swaths of new features, that's what the FIRST beta did, the rest are fixing problems with those features. The fact that they have had more than 11 betas of Firefox 4 is proof that what they are trying to do is necessary. They made 4.0 too big.
This is a trench op on the marketing side, to make pointy heads happy that Firefox can be in version 7 this year and version 10 next year. Apparently something pending about betas exhausted them.
They are going for more releases BECAUSE the betas exhausted them, and that's a good decision. What they are trying to do is go to a smaller, more focused release on a smaller number of changes at a given time, and get that version out as the regular version more regularly. It allows them to keep their release and development codebases closer together, meaning less effort for security backfixes into the release version. It allows them to manage the complexity of their changes so a new version of Firefox doesn't feel like a new version of Windows - something that comes out maybe twice in a decade and is so different from what you had before that it's basically unrecognizable.
They've been trying to bite off too much at each new major release, and as a result they've fallen victim to BPS (Perpetual Beta Syndrome) because the scope of changes they are trying to do simultaneously exceeds their development capacity. It's a nasty, unrewarding cycle to get into, and it makes support hard and expensive, and it makes the project stagnate and stagger under its own weight.
In order to dig yourself out of that cycle you need to pick smaller targets and set out to accomplish them, rather than taking on the world with insufficient resources and ending up with a version so buggy and unwieldy that you need a dozen or more betas to get to something you're comfortable won't actually find a way to kill your users, much less work correctly every time. So you'll see a pattern of smaller releases focused on smaller sets of new functionality.
Having said that, I've been using 4.0beta(latest) for a few months, and I find it pretty solid. But the point remains - if they had focused on one task at a time and released that feature, we'd probably be about where we are today, without the vast chasm between "production" and "beta" releases being so huge that a lot of people are going to resist moving to 4.0 for a long time (and keeping the development teams working on two very different codebases for bug fixes).
The bigger you make your changes, and the less often you release, the harder it is for your users to upgrade. And the harder it is for you to maintain two stable and increasingly-different codebases (one development, one stable).
Firefox should have taken 1/3 of the changes they wanted for 4.0, called them 3.7 or 4.0, and released them for beta quickly. Then taken the next 1/3 and made them 3.8 or 5.0. Then the final third and 3.9 or 6.0 (which numbering depends on whether you're in development or marketing, pretty much, but it really doesn't matter).
Instead, we're stuck with two Firefoxes - one that's a year old and is showing its age, and one that's so vastly utterly different in terms of UI and underlying infrastructure that you'll have people resisting the upgrade for at least six months.
Apologies to you and others, I got the GGGP's sarcastic discussion of extracting "dangerous" water confused with another adjacent discussion on extracting oil.
What do you mean? In what way is Netflix something that should stop me considering Amazon Prime to the point you think I've never heard of it? They are competitors now, but that doesn't make Netflix the automagical winner just because they've been offering movies longer.
Netflix costs $7.99 a month, or $96 a year. It does not provide me with anything but movies. Plus $2 a month if I want new releases and stuff shipped to me on a DVD. That's near-as-makes-no-difference $120 a year, if my math is correct, or about $10 a month.
Amazon Prime costs $79 a year, and primarily offers free 2-day shipping on Amazon orders. Now, as a free bonus, you get free unlimited streaming video.
With what few new movies I want to see on DVD, the local video rental place (Bart and Greg's) gets $3.50 a rental for a few days and I get to pick the actual movie I want and have it home the same day I want it. $2 a movie if I buy a 20-movie pass for $40.
Both work in Linux, and I have a Windows XP virtual machine if I need support for something in it.
So for what Netflix costs, I can get streaming video from Amazon, and about one movie a month from Bart and Greg's. Oh, and free 2-day shipping on most of what I buy from Amazon as a "free bonus".
I hear it's going to happen next Sunday, A. D.
The movies can be considered "free" if you were already a Prime member when they started offering them. If Prime was worth it to you already and they added more features that did not enter into your original consideration, then, yes, you can call it "free".
Having access to a decent library of streaming media I can watch, including a number of things I'd actually WANT to? I'm thinking under $100 a year might be a fair price for that. I was paying about that for Intelliflix before they folded, and was getting far fewer movies I really wanted out of it.
To me, the 2-day shipping would be the "free" bonus. ;)
Agreed. Though licensing the movies they used was probably getting harder and harder (in addition to running out of really good-grade "B" material, of course).
I think that's why Nelson and company went off and did the RiffTrax thing instead. They can provide the commentary, but they don't have to get into messy licensing issues because they don't have to buy any rights whatsoever to the movie. They aren't offering the movie, you have to buy that yourself, then you buy their RiffTrax separately to play along with it.
It also saved them the hassle of filming the pretty much unwatchable (and still expensive to film) interstitial stuff, and just sit down in front of a bad movie with a tape recorder and record the appropriate sarcasm and humor in the appropriate places.
promiscuous sockpuppetry.
Wow, and here I was thinking that furries were a little creepy. Now this.
Not that there's anything wrong with what consenting adults choose to do in the privacy of their own space, but... :)
My town has no summer folk, or almost none. We get all the traffic from people driving through to get to where they really want to go, but few of them stop. We survived the recent loss of a major source of jobs in the closing of a military base a couple of towns over, I think we'll manage without 20,000 cars a day coming through town without stopping and spending any money pretty well. :)
Plus, if the sea levels really do rise, I think I'll be more grateful for my acreage and my wetland-based water filtration system and less worried about the financial viability of any businesses or industry our town council has successfully prevented from coming in in any sustainable quantity anyway.
toxic, dangerous carbon was already in the environment, which doesn't magically stop at the surface of the Earth.
So by that argument, you shouldn't be locking up your bleach and rat poison to keep your young kids from getting at it, because it's already in the environment in your house, which doesn't magically stop at the door to the cabinet.
No, seriously, debate on the theorized effects of carbon aside, there is a huge difference in terms of impact between any material that's inert (stored somewhere) and the same material once it's been released into the air, water, etc. I'd hope such a point would be pretty blindingly obvious.
I don't breathe 500 feet underground, nor does my water come from there. Pulling up hydrocarbons and burning them puts shit in the water and air that was not in the water and air beforehand - it was underground, where it's been sitting inert for millions of years. I won't argue whether it's currently necessary to do so, obviously it is, but it's also important to recognize that we're shitting where we eat, and we need to find ways to stop doing that at some point before we run out of potable water and arable land.
Screw global warming, just the mere fact of pollution is scary enough. In fact, scarier than losing a little land to the ocean and having to move farming further from the equator. We can mitigate a rise in temperatures by finding new arable zones, etc. It's a lot harder to clean hydrocarbons out of the soil and water we need.
Hell, I live in Maine, a few miles from the ocean at a couple of hundred feet of elevation, on a few acres of well-forested land with a wetland on the property. If the temps went up, I'd have a longer growing season, the ocean would be closer to me, and it'd wash the houses of all the rich summer folk away. Where's the problem again? Bring it.
Saving water has nothing to do with climate change. Nothing at all. It has everything to do with conserving reserves of potable drinking water when reserves are running low and not using it to water your lawn or wash your car or other things that use large amounts of drinkable water for things other than drinking.
Actually, watering your lawn is GOOD for the environment. It keeps your grass healthy and vibrant and the photosynthesis increases the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen by a very tiny amount (probably not coming close to making up for the trees that got cut down to build the houses, but every little bit helps), and if you're into the whole carbon credits thing it sequesters carbon in the form of plant material, albeit temporarily and in small quantities.
The problem occurs during droughts and other periods of low water reserves. Drinkable water reserves run low, and urbanites are asked to stop wasting drinkable water because the city managers don't want to run out. So they ask people to conserve water. Not because of the environment, but because you'll run out of drinkable water if you keep wasting it and reserves run low, and one day you'll turn the tap on and hear a chuffing noise and no water will come out, and y'all'll go screaming to the grocers to buy Evian, only they'll be out, and you'll start dropping like flies or drinking from the local park pond that's got fish shit in it and you'll end up with dysentery or something.
Those of us on wells have a self-enforcing water ban. During a drought, if we haven't planned our wells properly and/or waste a lot of water, we run out and the pump burns itself out trying to suck water out of a dry hole. Have that happen once and you tend to be more conservative with your water if it hasn't rained in a while.
I don't understand, how does that not combat global warming?
Seems to me that a large amount of ice would be an effective way to combat global increases in temperature, yes?
I don't mean to be rude, but Google Docs is free. Sign up for it and take it for a test drive. I mean, really. It's got some serious balls.
Does google docs audit and track all changes by users in documents or is it food for corporate political wars as users attempt to bugger up parts of a document that are other people's responsibilities and how readily accessible is it.
It tracks all changes to all Google documents. Not, obviously, to Office documents you upload to it since Office doesn't natively track such things. In any Google document, just click on "File" / "View Revision History" and you get a Wikipedia-like list of revisions. Click on one and you see "before" and "after" highlighted neatly, along with the user who made the change. Seriously detailed history that's two clicks away.
Also does google warrant the security of documents in the cloud with realistic values implicit with regard to, say tender documents were leaked information could be readily worth millions of dollars.
No. Not in my opinion. If the document is security-critical and contains such things as your customer's credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc, don't put it on a server you don't own, and don't put it on a server you DO own that everyone inside the company has access to.
Of course, my company has the same policy for email and word documents on our own servers. Anyone caught putting a credit card number in a Word document or spreadsheet or anything but the "red zone" financial database would probably be drawn and quartered. And that's as it should be.
But for memos about progress on the latest project, I mean, yeah, competitors would probably lap that up. But it wouldn't compromise the business. Not that it matters, we're on an old version of Office that lacks collaboration anyway, so instead of worrying about security breaches we spend our time waiting in line to edit the project status spreadsheet that Bob just locked before he headed off on vacation for a week.
I fail to see what this collaboration has to do with people walking in and interrupting you.
I've used real-time collaboration in Google Docs before, and it's brilliant. I've used it on spreadsheets, not word processing documents, but I assume the word processing interface is similar.
In spreadsheets, you're working along and suddenly a box appears on the right saying "Frank is also editing this document". It shows the cell I'm currently editing highlighted in one color, and the cell Frank is editing highlighted in another. Whenever Frank saves his cell, I see the new value, and vice versa. There's a chat window that I can talk to Frank and we can work on something together, so you don't have to print out what you are talking about and meet somewhere in a conference room where neither of you have access to a computer. You can also just ignore each other if you're working on different parts of the spreadsheet, and when you're done your work is automatically and continually saved so you just exit.
Sadly, we lack this capability at work (Office 2000 and 2003), but we're really hoping to get 2010 soon so there's some possibility of doing some document collaboration. It'll save me a lot of trips across town to work out the details of a document if a few coworkers from other buildings and I can all have the original open at the same time and work together on it. That'll free up time I can spend actually working rather than driving back and forth.
True, but even so, the fact that IE6 was updated 6 years more recently indicates that more people are using it, and even the old unpatched version is more likely to be compatible with current stuff (because a lot of current stuff gets retrofitted to support it, and IE6 has not undergone a major structural change,so writing support for the 2008 version means you're most likely also writing support for the 2001 version).
A lot of web developers still write code to support IE6's peculiarities. That's because a lot of people still use it. There's a correlation between that and the fact the Microsoft kept updating IE6 until 2008.
Netscape was abandoned. There's a correlation between the fact that the company writing it died out and people stopped using it and the fact that no web developers write back-support code for it.
IE6 has remained useful because of hordes of web developers who, to this day, write "if useragent = IE6 do something different" code all across their web pages. And those web developers do that because, surprise surprise, it's still in common use.
As far as I can see, there's not much chance of false alarms unless someone drops something heavy right next to one of the seismometers or something. This is detecting actual earthquakes. The chances of actual false alarms are pretty low. The earth is shaking somewhere. In fact, this is data seismologists already gather as a routine.
The difference here is that it's propagating out an automated warning that can be responded to automatically to nearby locations. The key is "automatically". As in, people don't need to react. You'll only get a minute or two of warning at best - you want this to be automated.
Signal hits the fire station, and the fire station opens the doors immediately (so the quake can't jam them shut if power is lost or the doors get shaken out of track, for example). Alarm tells the firefighters to go get in the truck and pull it into the parking lot in case the building collapses. That's a bunch of fire engines and ambulances you've kept in service when they're likely to be needed very, very soon.
Signal hits a hospital, and they spin up their generator (so it's already running if the Big One hits and they lose power) and sound a tone in operating rooms telling doctors the floors might shake so starting a delicate cut around the brainstem is a bad idea for a few minutes.
Signal hits a large commercial building, and the elevators all go to the nearest floor, open their doors, engage all friction locking mechanisms, and tell everyone to get out of the elevator right now.
Bridges might drop gates to keep people who are not on them yet off them. Water and gas mains might close some containment valves. Traffic lights might all turn red so cars stop. Bell goes off at the school telling the kids to get near a reinforced wall.
Nothing that people need to take conscious effort to react to, just automated stuff that makes the incoming quake a little easier to deal with. Also nothing that would cause all life to come to a complete stop. There'll still be enough gas and water pressure in the systems that most people wouldn't even notice the outage. Traffic would be stopped for a few minutes. The elevator alarm will shut off and people will get back in. And so on...
This is pretty useless if you're at the epicenter, but gives you increasing amounts of warning as you get further away. It also lets emergency personnel outside the quake zone know that they'd better start getting ready to head toward the epicenter, because they'll be needed very soon.
If The Big One ever hits, this might save a lot of lives and damage to a lot of useful rescue equipment miles from the epicenter.
You should try Linux, then. I hear it has Super Cow powers.
Really? Then why is there still a line at Hannaford when I go to buy my food? Shouldn't the bad publicity have driven everyone to Wally World and Shaw's? Oh, wait, my options are terrible produce or paying more for my food? Well, Hannaford it is, then.
Good thing you never see anyone at the BP fuel stations any more! Man, the publicity of screwing up oil extraction really... ummm... oh, wait.
Some people remember stuff like this for a long time and use it as their primary criteria and avoid the company forever (several friends of mine still boycott Nestle over the third world formula fiasco, and Nestle caved and that boycott fizzled out before the average Slashdot reader was born).
Some people forget stuff like this immediately, or engage some sort of strange Stolkholm-syndrome type thing. I have a friend who now goes to Hannaford because he feels sorry for them. No, I can't figure it out either.
The rest of us have equally rational (to us) and irrational (to others) reasons for preferring or avoiding certain businesses. A hack or a huge screwup is rarely fatal to a business. Being behind the competition because you spent all your time dotting the "i"s and crossing the "t"s of every little security detail is a far larger nightmare to your average C?O.
Fear of being hacked makes a C{E,I,O,F}O nervous.
Fear of being irrelevant is what keeps them up at night.
So the people who understand security will refuse to fill out the application and leave in disgust at their perception that you are a clueless idiot who knows nothing about security, and the people who fill out the applications and apply are all proving to you that they are clueless idiots who know nothing about security (or they fill out false credentials proving that they are liars).
You'll never get any applicants you want to hire, unless someone writes PISS OFF in both the username and password fields, and then they'll be an attitude problem for you.
A very useful tool if, for example, you actually have to publish a job opening publicly but you really want to hire your nephew. "There were no qualified external applicants, so Jimmy gets the job! Yay for inbreeding!"
Thanks! It's good to be loved. Hugs and kisses.
Assuming, of course, that you were issued a SSN at birth. For the purposes of this discussion, yes, that's most likely true - most kids get an SSN before they leave the hospital (I know my daughter was issued one and it was not offered to us as an option, it was one of the things we had to do in order to have her released from the hospital). I assume it's been going on for more than ten years now.
But when I was a kid, I didn't get my SSN until I tried to get a work permit at 13 to get my first paper route. Knowing when and where I was born would do you very little good in reconstructing the first 5 of my SSN, because my first 5 is based on neither of those things. We were living in a different state in a different part of the country, and my brother (who was born in a different state than I was) was issued the next consecutive number for his SSN since my parents decided to apply for both of our numbers at the same time since they had to sit in line anyway.
So if you used SSN to identify birth city and date, you'd assume we were twins, born in a completely different part of the country than where we actually were born, and we'd both appear to be ten years younger than we actually are.
Damnit, I confused my story about the landline phone with one about the electric company. You can pretty much either replace "landline telephone" with "electrical service", or "make sure you will pay your electric bill" with "make sure you will pay your telephone bill". Your choice. :)