Not so obvious at all. Other estimates show very different lifetimes for coins and bills, and conclude that paper bills are actually a much better deal. Check out the great NPR Planet Money story on this very topic.
If you go into an unsupervised national park, you are only doing what we all used to do, up until a few decades ago.
What, you mean back when it was somebody's private property and you were trespassing?
Look, national parks don't have fences and even Obama and his darn gubmint haven't tried to build any. I'm pretty sure you can get yourself into any one of them as long as you don't use the road crossings - nobody's going to expend any effort trying to stop you. Just don't come crying if you accidentally start a fire, fall down a cliff or run out of water on "your" land and nobody is there to come help you.
I don't care personally what OS the computer (which some people call phone for no good reason)
Because it makes phone calls and that's what 90% of users use it for at least in part?
It's a computer and you as the user should be able to do what you want with it.
Agreed, absolutely! You did buy it for full price like you buy a computer, right? If you did, then you are 100% correct. Did you buy it for several hundred dollars less than the true cost because you agreed to use it under a carrier's terms and conditions for a fixed period of time? Then you are getting what you paid for.
Yes, we are no longer citizens, but subjects who may or may not go on our land at the whim of the those who rule by our consent.
Huh? OK, I'm not allowed to go into a national park while there are no federal employees to keep me safe or respond to problems. I'm also not allowed to build a burger stand or an oil well in the middle of a national park either. Neither of these things makes it any less "my" land. Part of the whole point of a national park is that not just any jackass can do anything they want with it even though it's "their" land - it is held in trust for us all by the government.
1. Create an enterprise hardened version of Android
Samsung did this already. It's called Knox. As most Android vendors have discovered, competing with Samsung is a losing proposition.
3. Provide a compatibility layer/VM for existing Blackberry apps on their devices
If that could easily be done, they would have done it for BB 10. And honestly, can you name one BlackBerry app worth having that doesn't exist on Android already? Ironically, BB did build Android compatibility into BB 10... but it apparently hasn't made the platform any more popular.
My understanding (sorry can't find a source to cite) is that in the current US military, no general officer has an "real" rank higher than G-2 (Major General / Rear Admiral Upper Half). You only get appointed to jobs that require a G-3 or G-4, but if you didn't hold those jobs you would be treated as your "real" rank. If you retire while holding one of those jobs, then your retirement is treated at that rank level.
Can anyone more knowledgeable than me confirm/deny or improve this explanation?
...is the worst piece of misinformation in Stallman's essay that is continuously repeated on Slashdot and elsewhere. Free software is controlled by the people who write it and to a (much) lesser degree by the people who are willing to read and edit the source code before compiling it and installing it. If you're Richard Stallman, congratulations! The "user" does turn out to control the software. But for 99% of the world, that's just not true, and the only value in "free software" is that you're trading trust in a faceless company with trust in a bunch of programmers who you don't know either. Opinions will vary on which of those entities is more trustworthy under various conditions.
If your website makes money by selling ads, anything that removes those ads has not made your content more valuable. It has in fact made that content worth nothing to the provider.
Maybe it seems more valuable to you... but as has been said time and time before, with any free service, you are not the customer. You are the product.
He doesn't WANT out. Or perhaps the people pulling his strings don't want him out.
Or what about if the people who pull the strings of the people who pull the strings of Obama DO want out? Or what if the gray aliens DON'T want out but the lizard people and Freemasons DO want out? THEN what do the people who pull the strings of the people who pull Obama's strings do? Or maybe the Obama is pulling THEIR strings, and he's ambivalent and letting the lizard people take the fall?
How do you know the FBI doesn't already have a file on each of us going back 15 years? How do you know they don't just have it sitting in databases and decide to simply look it up when they are authorized?
Take the tinfoil hat off. This is the same US government that loses hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue annually because they don't even have a system to track your W-2 statements automatically for tax purposes. But you think they have a 15 year file with everything online about 300 million citizens? Why bother with that if you can't even make people pay taxes?
Yes, we all think modern government surveillance is creepy and illegal, but let's not give the government more credit for intelligence or reach than it is actually due. The government has neither unlimited money or unlimited access, despite what Slashthink tells you.
Why would Meego have turned around Nokia's fortunes where Symbian would not? There have been plenty of "alternative" mobile OSes launched already (Bada, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS, Windows Phone... hell - even BlackBerry is an "alternative" OS these days) but none have been much more than a blip on the big Android/iOS radar screen. Why would Meego have been different?
It wasn't a government that pushed to find the new world. Columbus had to search for funding for his expedition. Sounds like a commercial endeavor being done by an entrepreneur to me.
People tend to vastly overestimate how much defacto power a president has.
Why do people on Slashdot keep saying this? The POTUS really does hold ultimate power over the Executive Branch of the US Government, which includes the DoD and the DNI agencies. I get that we want to think he doesn't know or that he's just some dupe, but he's not. (It reminds me of how Soviet citizens in the '30s would look at terrible abuses or atrocities - usually specifically approved by Stalin - and often say, "If only Stalin knew!")
Anyone who has spent much time around the government in DC can tell you that, yes, defense companies and lobbyists wield a lot of influence over the Legislative Branch... but they're not really in charge of the National Security apparatus - the president is. And he's not some patsy. The sad truth about these activities is that he knows about them and he thinks they're OK.
Maybe he's right that they do actually stop terrorist attacks, maybe he's just letting these programs continue because he doesn't want to look "soft" on terrorism or get blamed if there's another attack. I don't know and neither do you. But either way please don't delude yourself that the POTUS has not 100% approved what the intelligence community's big initiatives and scope of surveillance are.
Be nice to see you accomplish a fraction of what he has ("big talker/armchair qb" that you are by comparison).
Hogwash. Think about that idea and by logical extension there should only be about 50 people in the entire tech industry who have any right to comment on anything. Do you really think someone can't comment on a story about Bill Gates because they haven't founded a major software company? Everyone, regardless of what they have accomplished or not, has a right to an opinion; whether you care about their opinion or not is up to you.
At best most shareholders care only about where the stock is next quarter.
I hear this a lot on Slashdot but it's just not true (depending on how you define "most"). The majority of publicly traded shares out there are in the hands of large mutual funds and banks. These are absolutely long-term investors - they want as little volatility as possible and they have a strong interest in picking companies that match their investment profile ("growth companies," "low risk companies with dividends," whatever) and sticking with them.
Day trading individuals and HFT arbitrageurs etc. only care about day to day or hour to hour. They may command a lot of attention, but they really aren't a big part of the market unless you're talking about penny stocks, pink sheets or other exchanges that the "big boys" of investment don't want to touch.
Android and Apple got to the market first while Blackberry was still sporting it's banal interface and relying on entrenched government contracts for it's bread-and-butter. That was a ridiculous short-sighted and lazy gamble by BB.
It may have been short-sighted but it wasn't lazy. The problem was that RIM saw what Android and iPhone did, and honestly thought that nobody would want it. I recall reading an interview with a RIM engineer at the time saying they laughed when they saw the iPhone because all the feedback they had ever got from customers (who were all corporations) was that users wanted long battery life, a good keyboard and strong enterprise management.
They just totally missed that with the advent of the iPhone and later Android that regular people would start buying smartphones, and they cared about different things than corporate IT departments did. And the market for regular people buying smartphones was way bigger than the corporate market... so apps and market share swung to Apple/Android... then BYOD started to come along... and the corps started allowing the devices end users wanted rather than what the company wanted. And it just snowballed from there.
So RIM wasn't lazy, they just missed out on what the future of smartphones would be and they paid the price.
How the heck can a company that makes products where demand outstrips supply by "some margin" go bankrupt?
This is the new, post-bankruptcy company.
It's pretty easy, actually. Just charge less for your product than it costs you to make, market and deliver it (including your pension, healthcare and other overhead costs), and demand will actually make you go bankrupt faster. That's kinda what happened to the last company.
Google's providing wifi, thus education, and hopefully thus good health, is more useful than second- and third-world countries becoming dependent on first-world drugs
No. When you're dying of malaria, you need the fucking drugs, not access to WebMD. I know this is Bill Gates and everybody loves to hate him, but WTF? Really?
Except the Supreme Court disagrees with the Ninth Circuit, see Larry Flynt versus Jerry Falwell, Hustler magazine was allowed to use a likeness of Falwell in a parody
Totally different issues. The right to use a public figure's likeness in a work of parody or satire is well established by the above case. This case is about EA selling people a video game that uses this football player's likeness and not paying him. No parody, satire or other "fair use" involved - it's a flat out commercial product that depends in large part on the use of real-world people's likenesses to attract customers.
There is no longer a left or right, or Democrat and Republican. It's one team
Sorry, this is just flat-out incorrect. People who keep parroting this line tend to be either single-issue voters (where neither party agrees with them) or willfully ignorant. There are very much two parties, and they do want very different things. For example, the US is in the middle of the largest restructuring of its healthcare system ever, and whether you agree with it or not you can't reasonably say that it would have happened had the other party been in power.
Both parties would like to initiate a lot of change, but you're not seeing any because there isn't a supermajority for either party in the Senate to overcome fillibusters and push through anything really controversial. If you ever one party or the other get 60 solid votes in the Senate, boy will you find out fast just how eager they have been for a long time to show their differences and initiate significant change.
It's sad that both parties toe the same line when it comes to national security vs. civil liberties... but please don't try to pretend that both parties are the same. It inspires apathy among the poorly informed and perpetuates the myth that voting doesn't matter.
Precisely. Linux as a kernel has "won," but Linux as a desktop OS is still far behind. And I think that's what Linus was talking about at the time, Linux on the desktop.
Android is "Linux" to approximately the same extent that MacOS X is "BSD" or "Mach," and I don't think anyone imagines that BSD has "won" because of Office for Mac or that there are 900K iOS apps out there. I think it's much more appropriate to say that if anyone "won" here it's Android, but I think that Linus is smart enough not to try to take credit for what Google has done on top of "his" kernel.
Great, they have to make their money on ads, I don't have to like it and if I can work a way to block them I will.
You are the product on Facebook, and showing you ads is how they make money. If you don't like that business model, why are you using Facebook?
Like you said, you don't have to like Facebook, and you don't have to like the way they make their money. So why not use Diaspora or some other liberated, un-exploitative, pro-freedom solution that won't trouble you with ads, rather than struggling to find a way to use Facebook in a way that violates their terms of service?
Surely an evil, non-free exploiter like Facebook can't be so much better than a project that respects your freedom that you wouldn't rather use it instead? And once you explain to your friends how their freedom is being violated, won't they drop Facebook too? It seems pretty obvious to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so obvious at all. Other estimates show very different lifetimes for coins and bills, and conclude that paper bills are actually a much better deal. Check out the great NPR Planet Money story on this very topic.
If you go into an unsupervised national park, you are only doing what we all used to do, up until a few decades ago.
What, you mean back when it was somebody's private property and you were trespassing?
Look, national parks don't have fences and even Obama and his darn gubmint haven't tried to build any. I'm pretty sure you can get yourself into any one of them as long as you don't use the road crossings - nobody's going to expend any effort trying to stop you. Just don't come crying if you accidentally start a fire, fall down a cliff or run out of water on "your" land and nobody is there to come help you.
I don't care personally what OS the computer (which some people call phone for no good reason)
Because it makes phone calls and that's what 90% of users use it for at least in part?
It's a computer and you as the user should be able to do what you want with it.
Agreed, absolutely! You did buy it for full price like you buy a computer, right? If you did, then you are 100% correct. Did you buy it for several hundred dollars less than the true cost because you agreed to use it under a carrier's terms and conditions for a fixed period of time? Then you are getting what you paid for.
Yes, we are no longer citizens, but subjects who may or may not go on our land at the whim of the those who rule by our consent.
Huh? OK, I'm not allowed to go into a national park while there are no federal employees to keep me safe or respond to problems. I'm also not allowed to build a burger stand or an oil well in the middle of a national park either. Neither of these things makes it any less "my" land. Part of the whole point of a national park is that not just any jackass can do anything they want with it even though it's "their" land - it is held in trust for us all by the government.
1. Create an enterprise hardened version of Android
Samsung did this already. It's called Knox. As most Android vendors have discovered, competing with Samsung is a losing proposition.
3. Provide a compatibility layer/VM for existing Blackberry apps on their devices
If that could easily be done, they would have done it for BB 10. And honestly, can you name one BlackBerry app worth having that doesn't exist on Android already? Ironically, BB did build Android compatibility into BB 10... but it apparently hasn't made the platform any more popular.
My understanding (sorry can't find a source to cite) is that in the current US military, no general officer has an "real" rank higher than G-2 (Major General / Rear Admiral Upper Half). You only get appointed to jobs that require a G-3 or G-4, but if you didn't hold those jobs you would be treated as your "real" rank. If you retire while holding one of those jobs, then your retirement is treated at that rank level.
Can anyone more knowledgeable than me confirm/deny or improve this explanation?
Very true, but it goes beyond that. This:
free software is controlled by its users
...is the worst piece of misinformation in Stallman's essay that is continuously repeated on Slashdot and elsewhere. Free software is controlled by the people who write it and to a (much) lesser degree by the people who are willing to read and edit the source code before compiling it and installing it. If you're Richard Stallman, congratulations! The "user" does turn out to control the software. But for 99% of the world, that's just not true, and the only value in "free software" is that you're trading trust in a faceless company with trust in a bunch of programmers who you don't know either. Opinions will vary on which of those entities is more trustworthy under various conditions.
making their content MORE valuable
If your website makes money by selling ads, anything that removes those ads has not made your content more valuable. It has in fact made that content worth nothing to the provider.
Maybe it seems more valuable to you ... but as has been said time and time before, with any free service, you are not the customer. You are the product.
He doesn't WANT out. Or perhaps the people pulling his strings don't want him out.
Or what about if the people who pull the strings of the people who pull the strings of Obama DO want out? Or what if the gray aliens DON'T want out but the lizard people and Freemasons DO want out? THEN what do the people who pull the strings of the people who pull Obama's strings do? Or maybe the Obama is pulling THEIR strings, and he's ambivalent and letting the lizard people take the fall?
How do you know the FBI doesn't already have a file on each of us going back 15 years? How do you know they don't just have it sitting in databases and decide to simply look it up when they are authorized?
Take the tinfoil hat off. This is the same US government that loses hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue annually because they don't even have a system to track your W-2 statements automatically for tax purposes. But you think they have a 15 year file with everything online about 300 million citizens? Why bother with that if you can't even make people pay taxes?
Yes, we all think modern government surveillance is creepy and illegal, but let's not give the government more credit for intelligence or reach than it is actually due. The government has neither unlimited money or unlimited access, despite what Slashthink tells you.
Why would Meego have turned around Nokia's fortunes where Symbian would not? There have been plenty of "alternative" mobile OSes launched already (Bada, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS, Windows Phone... hell - even BlackBerry is an "alternative" OS these days) but none have been much more than a blip on the big Android/iOS radar screen. Why would Meego have been different?
It wasn't a government that pushed to find the new world. Columbus had to search for funding for his expedition. Sounds like a commercial endeavor being done by an entrepreneur to me.
You do know where Columbus got his funding, right?
People tend to vastly overestimate how much defacto power a president has.
Why do people on Slashdot keep saying this? The POTUS really does hold ultimate power over the Executive Branch of the US Government, which includes the DoD and the DNI agencies. I get that we want to think he doesn't know or that he's just some dupe, but he's not. (It reminds me of how Soviet citizens in the '30s would look at terrible abuses or atrocities - usually specifically approved by Stalin - and often say, "If only Stalin knew!")
Anyone who has spent much time around the government in DC can tell you that, yes, defense companies and lobbyists wield a lot of influence over the Legislative Branch... but they're not really in charge of the National Security apparatus - the president is. And he's not some patsy. The sad truth about these activities is that he knows about them and he thinks they're OK.
Maybe he's right that they do actually stop terrorist attacks, maybe he's just letting these programs continue because he doesn't want to look "soft" on terrorism or get blamed if there's another attack. I don't know and neither do you. But either way please don't delude yourself that the POTUS has not 100% approved what the intelligence community's big initiatives and scope of surveillance are.
Be nice to see you accomplish a fraction of what he has ("big talker/armchair qb" that you are by comparison).
Hogwash. Think about that idea and by logical extension there should only be about 50 people in the entire tech industry who have any right to comment on anything. Do you really think someone can't comment on a story about Bill Gates because they haven't founded a major software company? Everyone, regardless of what they have accomplished or not, has a right to an opinion; whether you care about their opinion or not is up to you.
At best most shareholders care only about where the stock is next quarter.
I hear this a lot on Slashdot but it's just not true (depending on how you define "most"). The majority of publicly traded shares out there are in the hands of large mutual funds and banks. These are absolutely long-term investors - they want as little volatility as possible and they have a strong interest in picking companies that match their investment profile ("growth companies," "low risk companies with dividends," whatever) and sticking with them.
Day trading individuals and HFT arbitrageurs etc. only care about day to day or hour to hour. They may command a lot of attention, but they really aren't a big part of the market unless you're talking about penny stocks, pink sheets or other exchanges that the "big boys" of investment don't want to touch.
Android and Apple got to the market first while Blackberry was still sporting it's banal interface and relying on entrenched government contracts for it's bread-and-butter. That was a ridiculous short-sighted and lazy gamble by BB.
It may have been short-sighted but it wasn't lazy. The problem was that RIM saw what Android and iPhone did, and honestly thought that nobody would want it. I recall reading an interview with a RIM engineer at the time saying they laughed when they saw the iPhone because all the feedback they had ever got from customers (who were all corporations) was that users wanted long battery life, a good keyboard and strong enterprise management.
They just totally missed that with the advent of the iPhone and later Android that regular people would start buying smartphones, and they cared about different things than corporate IT departments did. And the market for regular people buying smartphones was way bigger than the corporate market... so apps and market share swung to Apple/Android... then BYOD started to come along... and the corps started allowing the devices end users wanted rather than what the company wanted. And it just snowballed from there.
So RIM wasn't lazy, they just missed out on what the future of smartphones would be and they paid the price.
How the heck can a company that makes products where demand outstrips supply by "some margin" go bankrupt?
Google's providing wifi, thus education, and hopefully thus good health, is more useful than second- and third-world countries becoming dependent on first-world drugs
No. When you're dying of malaria, you need the fucking drugs, not access to WebMD. I know this is Bill Gates and everybody loves to hate him, but WTF? Really?
vendor were selling all kinds of gear.
1.2 Pineapple's per minute were sold
The Pineapple run Linux, based on OpenWRT, is packed with open source tools
I, for one, am imagining a world where a Slashdot "editor" can parse the English language and fix typos. Blows my mind, but there it is.
Except the Supreme Court disagrees with the Ninth Circuit, see Larry Flynt versus Jerry Falwell, Hustler magazine was allowed to use a likeness of Falwell in a parody
Totally different issues. The right to use a public figure's likeness in a work of parody or satire is well established by the above case. This case is about EA selling people a video game that uses this football player's likeness and not paying him. No parody, satire or other "fair use" involved - it's a flat out commercial product that depends in large part on the use of real-world people's likenesses to attract customers.
There is no longer a left or right, or Democrat and Republican. It's one team
Sorry, this is just flat-out incorrect. People who keep parroting this line tend to be either single-issue voters (where neither party agrees with them) or willfully ignorant. There are very much two parties, and they do want very different things. For example, the US is in the middle of the largest restructuring of its healthcare system ever, and whether you agree with it or not you can't reasonably say that it would have happened had the other party been in power.
Both parties would like to initiate a lot of change, but you're not seeing any because there isn't a supermajority for either party in the Senate to overcome fillibusters and push through anything really controversial. If you ever one party or the other get 60 solid votes in the Senate, boy will you find out fast just how eager they have been for a long time to show their differences and initiate significant change.
It's sad that both parties toe the same line when it comes to national security vs. civil liberties... but please don't try to pretend that both parties are the same. It inspires apathy among the poorly informed and perpetuates the myth that voting doesn't matter.
Precisely. Linux as a kernel has "won," but Linux as a desktop OS is still far behind. And I think that's what Linus was talking about at the time, Linux on the desktop.
Android is "Linux" to approximately the same extent that MacOS X is "BSD" or "Mach," and I don't think anyone imagines that BSD has "won" because of Office for Mac or that there are 900K iOS apps out there. I think it's much more appropriate to say that if anyone "won" here it's Android, but I think that Linus is smart enough not to try to take credit for what Google has done on top of "his" kernel.
Great, they have to make their money on ads, I don't have to like it and if I can work a way to block them I will.
You are the product on Facebook, and showing you ads is how they make money. If you don't like that business model, why are you using Facebook?
Like you said, you don't have to like Facebook, and you don't have to like the way they make their money. So why not use Diaspora or some other liberated, un-exploitative, pro-freedom solution that won't trouble you with ads, rather than struggling to find a way to use Facebook in a way that violates their terms of service?
Surely an evil, non-free exploiter like Facebook can't be so much better than a project that respects your freedom that you wouldn't rather use it instead? And once you explain to your friends how their freedom is being violated, won't they drop Facebook too? It seems pretty obvious to me.
Point to _one_ NYTimes article where they get the science right? Shouldn't be too hard.
You're right. Posted three hours ago, 2nd link from the top of the page.
I mean, really?
when was the last time a major newspaper or network broke a political scandal that wasn't sex.
Do you actually read newspapers, or do you just bitch about them?
Where are they when voter suppression is a fact of life in most of the Southern United states?
Why would I give a rats ass about the Zimmerman trial if I wasn't in that community?
Do you even listen to yourself?