Will you be changing cellphones every month when your current provider no longer has the lease to the spectrum band you were using? Phones can only support so many radio band filters without increasing size and cost, so different versions are frequently built with support for only the frequency bands used by specific carriers, especially on low-cost phones. You know that the radios on the cellphone towers don't magically support every frequency as well, right? Would you spend large sums of $$$ to buy equipment tuned for a particular spectrum band if you didn't know if you could keep if for the long run (at least the life of the equipment)?
More importantly, the companies that buy spectrum do so because it becomes an asset with a known, fixed cost. Renting means rates may fluctuate or change (as they must, right? Otherwise the spectrum will not underpriced or overpriced.) Businesses - especially the ones that throw around the big piles of cash needed to stand up wireless networks - don't like having to guess how much their underlying costs will be from month to month.
I said nearly the exact same thing as a solution for keeping the IPV4 address space from running out
Do you really want to renumber all your public IPs every month when the rent goes up and your company doesn't want to pay it?
The Second Amendment does not affirm our right to own guns for "personal defense;" it affirms our right to own guns for defense against tyranny.
Read the Second Amendment again and spot the word "tyranny" for me. Don't find it? Because the SA says that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It's easy to ignore the first half of the sentence and just pay attention to the second, but that's disingenuous.
Furthermore, you have to take it in the context of the times in which it was written. The United States at this point had no standing army. (Historical aside: the US was very averse to keeping a standing army until after World War II. On the eve of the Civil War, the whole strength of the US Army was 15,000 men; just before World War II, in 1940, the US Army's size was smaller than that of Belgium.) Much of this aversion was due to the fact that it was Britain's desire to keep a standing professional army in the colonies that necessitated the Intolerable Acts which taxed the colonists to pay for said army.
At any rate, the presumption of the framers in 1791 would likely have been that the US needed to call on a citizen militia if it was invaded (or if it had to put down internal rebellions, such as the Whiskey Rebellion or Shays' Rebellion). Therefore, the citizens of the US should be prepared to take up arms as needed under the direction of the government (i.e. a well regulated militia), not against it. I know it's easy to have a romantic view of the Founding Fathers that they somehow encoded into the Constitution the seeds of the government's demise if it became too "tyrannical," but it's just not there in the text of the Second Amendment.
Personally, I like guns. I don't think there's anything wrong with responsible gun ownership. But please don't try to use the Second Amendment as a source for saying Americans should be armed and prepared to fight their own government with military-grade firearms.
Animals do not, generally, behave as amoral rapists, murderers and child molesters
Sorry - I am about as unreligious as one can get while still being able to get along with coworkers/friends/etc. who are religious - but this is a deeply silly argument. Amoral is, by definition, lacking in the scruples or strictures defined by the human concept of "morals." Animals are all "amoral."
"Morals" are a meta-conversation about behavior which large-brained social creatures such as humans use to form behavioral norms which go beyond direct self-interest (or pack interest in some social animal contexts). "Animals" as we think of most non-human creatures on this planet are simply not capable of that kind of thought.
Every dog that has ever tried to hump your leg is a "rapist." Pretty much any male animal will f--k any other female (or male in some species) member of their species at any time, regardless of consent, unless they are genetically programmed to wait for signs of estrus/fertility and "presenting" before doing so. There are no voluntarily vegan brown bears who do so because they feel bad for salmon. Lions, wolves and other predatory animals feel no compunctions around murdering alpha pack animals in order to take their place. I don't have the knowledge to speak to animal "child molestation" but I'm fairly certain that horny animals will f--k whatever they think they can.
Animals don't have religion, but they don't have morals either. To suppose that one is a requirement for the other is a base fallacy at best.
And still even with that outlier, at this point it is not a concern about network congestion.
Maybe it isn't a concern for Frontier (yet). But look at their footprint and you will see it's very different in terms of density and demographics. Verizon for example might just have more serious bandwidth abusers, as evidenced by the fact that their territory includes Philadelphia, which is solely populated by terrible human beings.
Just ribbing you there, Philly. I grew up in Bucks County, so we're paisans and we probably bumped into each other on South Street or at the Spectrum! Ha ha! Please don't track me down and assault me with cheesesteaks or subject me to harangues about the Eagles quarterback situation!
It's good to know that Frontier isn't planning on data caps (yet). But the amount that you can safely infer about other networks from theirs is somewhat limited.
Yes, one could argue that Merissa Mayer hasn't gotten results for Yahoo. But that would be overlooking the fact that she started with a dying company. No, it's not robust, but it does look like she'll be able to get someone to pay millions for the company, problems and all. Can you do that?
Precisely this. It mystifies me why people still don't understand how what you get paid is determined in a market environment. (This is not applicable in a unionized or government environment where all employees are assumed to be fungible in terms of skills and compensation is based on "how long have you been here?")
How much you get paid is not based on how hard your job is, or how good you are at it, but how scarce your skill set is, and how important that skill set is. To wit:
Starting NFL left tackles don't get $8M/year because they work 160 times harder than the team janitor, they get it because there is only a limited number of humans who are 6'4"/300+ lbs with the agility and stamina to get beat up by and still excel against another set of the world's best 6'4"/300+ lbs athletes on the other side of the ball. Left tackles are rare and in demand because the success or failure of these particular athletes can determine whether your football team wins a championship and adds tens of millions of dollars to your revenue or sucks and empties the stands of ticket holders. (Oh, and they protect your $15M/year quarterback from getting beaten to a pulp.)
Conversely, there are also a limited number of people qualified to teach Masters-level courses in Socialist Realism art and Stalinist Gothic architecture. These people are also rare, but might get paid as much as the janitor if they are lucky. That's because they are scarce, but no university is going to lose attendance because of the lack of a masters-level 20th Century Soviet Art class. Or if it does, then its percentage of employed graduates will only go up.
So we come to CEOs. CEOs are (usually) genuinely the most pivotal employees in a company, since a great CEO at a Fortune 500 company is almost literally worth their weight in gold, and a terrible CEO is absolutely worth their equal value in horse manure. While the CEO's job sounds simple to everyone who hasn't been in senior management at a big company before, it really isn't. There is a very specific skill set involved, and if that doesn't seem like a big deal to you, imagine that you need to do an interview on CNBC tomorrow and depending on how you do, literally tens or hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of your shareholders' wealth may increase or disappear. If you haven't faced that kind of pressure before, then don't assume you actually know what their job is like.
Okay, so at long last coming around to Marissa Mayer. Has she turned Yahoo! around, as was her mandate? Nope. Was her job arguably impossible from the start because Yahoo! was already irretrievably a has-been? Probably. So why did they give her a $55M golden parachute when they hired her? Simple. Because she almost certainly would have made at least $55M in stock by this point if she had stayed at Google. So she took a big risk by going to Yahoo! - at which, yeah, she probably failed - but she would have been crazy to try if they hadn't guaranteed her this kind of Plan B. It all comes back to my original point about how rare your skill set is, and how important it is. In this environment, you have to throw these kinds of compensation packages out at candidates just to get someone with decent qualifications to give up their sure thing and try to pull your broken down company out of the ditch.
try an old rotary dial phone on a landline... it totally blows away anything since.
I love the shout out to old school POTS, but it really doesn't blow away anything since, not by a long shot. You may not have had an opportunity to try it, but if your phone and carrier support VoLTE calls using the AMR-WB codec (often marketed as "HD Voice,") you will hear a immediately noticeable improvement in audio quality over traditional 64 kbps uncompressed circuit-switched voice.
The catch is that you have to have a LTE phone which supports VoLTE (most premium smartphones made in the last two years do, but don't expect it in "feature phones" or a lot of prepaid-type lower end smartphones). You need to be in a LTE (rather than 3G fallback) coverage area when you initiate the call, as does your recipient. Your carrier also has to support VoLTE with AMR-WB (most big US carriers do nowadays but you may not have it on their MVNOs or "value" brands). Lastly, the person on the other end of your call has to have a setup which supports it too, and you probably have to be using the same wireless carrier. There is some effort (such as between AT&T and Verizon in the US) to enable cross-carrier VoLTE HD Voice, but it's not generally available yet.
That sounds like a long list of caveats, but in a few years I imagine VoLTE calling with HD Voice will the be the rule rather than the exception. Try it out yourself and see if you aren't amazed at the change in audibility and clarity of phone calls.
Maybe Woz is just honest enough to do his taxes at face value rather than run around and find every loophole that he can.
The headline should more accurately read, "Man Who Makes Lots of Money and 'Was Never Interested In Money' Says Giving More Money To Government Is Not a Big Deal."
I love Woz, both as a technologist and an interesting (if sometimes slightly loopy) thinker. But for the rest of us who don't make more money than we know what to do with, yes we are going to try to minimize the amount we have to hand over to the government. I have money but not nearly so much that I would ever forgo taking my entitled tax exemptions for my kids, my mortgage interest, etc.
Woz may have a point, but he has all the money he will ever want, and doesn't care much about it in the first place. Bully for him. That doesn't make it wrong for everyone else who isn't in that same circumstance to "find every loophole" that we can legally in order to keep more money in our own pockets.
You can't just trademark your likeness and shut down all political parody or it would soon cease to exist.
Correct. Political parody is explicitly protected as fair comment - this explicit protection was established in the famous Larry Flynt "free speech" trial over a fake ad in Hustler magazine with a fake interview with Moral Majority founder discussing his first sexual encounter as a Campari liqueur fueled romp with his mother in an outhouse. It had nothing to do with Jerry Falwell's trademark/IP rights to his name or likeness, and everything to do with political discourse, of which parody is considered a valid form. Incidentally, parody can be considered "fair use" in most contexts with public figures, not just political ones.
And yet...
Parody for political commentary is protected as part of the public right to discourse. Making money doing so is not. So, no, Bernie Sanders can't sue you for making a picture of him doing bong hits with Che Guevara and posting it online. (Or he could sue, but he wouldn't win, at least on free speech grounds.) But if you started selling the images - then you would run afoul of his personality rights, by which using someone's name or likeness to make money is something he could sue for and win, because money making ventures are considered outside the realm of pure free discourse and becomes "exploitative."
So bottom line - make fun of a political figure with their likeness? No problem. Try to make money doing it? Yeah, problem.
One last note... you don't have to sue anyone and everyone who uses your trademark in order to defend it. You do, however, have to demonstrate that you are defending it in cases where there is a significant likelihood that it may cause confusion. For example, if you trademarked Slurm brand soda, and someone else produced Slurm brand automobiles, you don't have to sue them if you don't plan to make automobiles yourself. You do have to sue if they are infringing on your trademark in an area where you want to say that you hold yourself as having the rights to. (There are some exceptions with really well known brands like Coca Cola, but Apple doesn't have to sue every Apple Fruit Stand or Apple Moving & Storage business in the country because it's not diluting their trademark on computers and electronics.)
And not just that - the article (or at least the summarized portion) makes the "hackers" in question sound like extortionists.
If I find your wallet on the ground, if you are going to just say "thanks" to me for giving it back and not giving me a reward, does that make it in any way justifiable for me to give the credit cards in your wallet to a criminal just because the criminal will pay me?
There is a perfectly legitimate argument to be made that because you don't give out rewards for lost wallets, I don't have much incentive to search for your wallet. But if I find it and then don't give it back to you because someone else will pay more? I just don't see how that is morally defensible.
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?
Correct.
In a formal, logical sense you are right. But as the philosopher David Hume said (I am paraphrasing just a bit): "The fact that the sun has come up yesterday, and the day before, and so on every day we remember is not proof that the sun will come up tomorrow. But it is a very persuasive indicator."
there is very little you could say against Trump that doesn't count many times over against Hillary.
I agree that both are ethically challenged. But there is a very important difference that I think you're overlooking.
Listen to Trump's statements about how he will try to solve problems on the world stage. They all boil down to something like "I will be a better negotiator." That's the entirety of his solution. Pro Tip: when there is a big, difficult problem that a lot of smart people have tried to solve and nobody has managed yet - peace in the Middle East, macroeconomics, whatever - and somebody comes in with a simple answer, it is usually an indication that the person in question doesn't understand the problem. Or at least not in sufficient complexity. Trump's answer to Iran? "I would have negotiated a better deal." Trump's answer to Putin? "I would get along with him better." No strategy other than that. It's the equivalent of presenting your boss with an intractable problem and he or she saying, "Work smarter, not harder." It's useless and intellectually dishonest.
Clinton, whether you like the quality of her work or not, at least was exposed to what it's like to deal with other countries during her time as Secretary of State. She knows that problems are tough and answers aren't always easy. Trump seems to think the opposite and the first time he tries to solve a Big Problem with one of his easy answers and fails, it won't be just him but also the US and the world that pay the price.
Just say no to people who tell you that they have easy answers to everything. They are either fools or they are counting on you to be one.
They've really done a good job at pricing the locals out of the park over the last 15 years [...] It's probably because we didn't spend all our money on food and merch; we were just taking up space as far as they're concerned.
Yes, yes you were. Why on Earth would you even think that Disney cares about pricing out the locals? Maybe Disney Land was, but I know for a fact that Disney World wasn't built to cater to locals. If these parks had been built for locals, there would be a Disney (Land/World) in every large city. Disney World in particular was built to cater to idiots like me and my two young girls who couldn't wait to take a six hour plane ride and wait for hours just to get into Jedi Camp. If Disney had the foresight to have built some Frozen-themed ride back when I last visited, my girls would never have left the park without a court order and an armed security detail. They built that park for the legions of fools with small children like me who will come from all over the planet in order to spend money like $20 bills cause dysentery.
Welcome to Disneyland, the pinnacle of American capitalism.
If you mean Disney (Land/World) succeeds admirably at vacuuming money out of the wallets of people who are willingly spending it there, then yeah. Hell, after I got back from dropping piles of cash at Disney World, I realized their level of genius at making money and bought stock in DIS. (The share price has taken some dings lately with cable cord cutting hurting ESPN, their real cash cow, but I have still made money on it and consider it a long term investment.)
If that's a way of complaining about not being priced for locals to visit often, then refer to my previous statement about the park not being intended for you in the first place...
University presidents are an oddity to me though; i know it is a tough job and requires overseeing a large number of people making over $150k, but I have trouble understanding what they actually manage...
The answer to your question is, basically, "nothing." That's what the provosts, deans, and other administrators are for. A university president is - generally - nothing like a CEO from a management perspective.
What you have to understand is that a university president's job is really to be chief salesperson. His or her customers? Major corporations and alumni with money to donate.
As a nonprofit organization, your typical public (or private) college or university already manages its day to day budget pretty well. It knows what its costs are, what its budget is, and as a result how many students it needs to admit (or how many it can support). There is no direct profit motive to make more money than it spends.
But the endowment? Major grants for research, or government funding? Growing those is the job of the university president. Success in those areas creates a virtuous cycle where attracting a top-flight researcher brings in more research money, or bringing in big name faculty results in more student applications, which leads to more success. If your university has more cachet, it leads to better employment success among your alumni, who then have more money to donate post-graduation, which increases the endowment, which gives you more money to spend on attracting... you get the idea.
A university president does little day to day management other than making sure that the activities of the actual managers don't do anything detrimental to the above concerns. But if you think of their job as a salesperson... well, I don't know how well salespeople are paid where you work, but everywhere I have worked if you can demonstrate proven results in bringing the bucks, you are getting paid far better than everyone else around you. And maybe - depending on your view of the value of really good salespeople - that helps to explain how these people are paid.
Is it a supply and demand situation that sets the salaries or is it like some other situations where you have an in club who give themselves or each other raises?
In the context of college football/basketball coaches (and ONLY for these two sports which actually make money for a college - the rest are Title IX welfare recipients), it is exactly supply and demand. There are a very limited number of head coaches in these sports who can demonstrate a sustained ability to win. The ability to win (and the stature of the coach and his proven ability to but his players into the NFL/NBA) drives the quality of the recruits for the school. The quality of the recruits and the quality of the coaches together drive the ongoing success of the program, which turns into moving up to better athletic conferences which generate more TV revenues for the school and its athletic program. While most of that money goes right back into the athletic program, it also constitutes in effect free advertising for the university/college as a whole and drives student application interest. A winning football/basketball program creates a virtuous cycle, whereas a losing program creates a downward spiral. Hence the tremendous competition for the best coaches and market-driven pay.
While some may earnestly question the value of a top-tier athletics program to an institution of learning, that free advertising is hard to deny. Would you have ever heard of smaller schools like St. John's, Georgetown, or Gonzaga without their basketball programs? Would the names Notre Dame, Alabama or Oregon State carry any cachet outside local areas if it weren't for their football teams? How many students applied to these schools who otherwise wouldn't because they knew and loved these schools for their athletics?
I got my undergrad degree at a small school (University of Richmond) with a good academic reputation but little national brand name recognition. Yet I know that my undergrad alma mater's admission applications go up every year after it makes one of its irregular trips to the NCAA Tournament... so the colleges overall are clearly getting something out of it, and as long as the athletics programs are paying for themselves, why not?
people simply plug in numbers without thinking about what results make sense; and thus blindly accept whatever results they get
I don't think that's the issue so much as that financial projections are in many ways more art than science. I think a lot of the Slashdot readership, being generally from the "technical" side of their employers rather than the "business" side have a view of what is actually involved.
Let's take the example of an ISP. Forecasting your data usage needs is simple, right? Costs are subscribers x bandwidth rates. Your revenue is subscribers x monthly fee. Do you make a profit?
In reality, though, you never estimate your costs that way because of "breakage." Breakage is the fraction of what people pay for that they don't actually use, such as minutes on your cellphone plan that you don't use, or a rebate coupon that you don't send in. Every business has breakage, and they all use that as part of their modeling.
So if you tried to estimate your costs in the straightforward way where all your users used all their bandwidth all the time, your costs would be (probably much) higher than your competitors and you wouldn't get any customers. You have to factor in a breakage/utilization estimate in your own numbers - based off what people really use vs. what they could use - in order to arrive at a competitive rate. And the amazing thing is that most of the time, that works out pretty well.
But all you really have to assume proper breakage rates is what people have done in the past. If people in general start using more (or less) bandwidth, or you start attracting a particular customer base with different usage patterns (such as heavy Torrent users vs. senior citizens who just want to check e-mail) then your calculations can be way off. That sounds like exactly what happened here.
It is probably a result of bad forecasting on their part, but not from a simple engineering error. They had to make some educated guesses, but the guessing part is unavoidable. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong.
Umm, before we advocate the summary execution and public hanging of those involved, I might like to get a wee bit more information about what we're discussing. Stuff that, you know, the summary might have actually included such as:
Which countries are potentially party to this?
How do the provisions differ from currently accepted law in those countries?
Who has enforcement rights over violations?
It's also worth noting that the story has only one link, to a blog which is politically opposed to the treaty. A cursory Google search would point you to a muchwiderrange of viewpoints on the agreement. Some are pro-treaty, some against, but they all provide much better context than the linked article. I don't particularly care one way or another, but any story with only one viewpoint expressed is usually a sign of either a lazy editor or an agenda.
I hate to keep dredging up the "Slashdot flame bait post because it has no actual 'editors'" trope, but damn. I imagine that if I submitted a story that said "Apple CEO advocates eating puppies" and linked to a blog somewhere that suggested it, the story would be published immediately and without actual review or "editing." Which is, you know, what an "editor" is supposed to do.
I strongly believe however that there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. There are simply too many cases of someone posting something like "You can't install your own apps on MacOS X," or "Restriction on drones are prohibited by the Constitution," or "Android has 95% of the smartphone market," or "Abandonware is not legally copyrighted anymore," or "Hitler was a religious Catholic." And many of these comments are rated up - leave aside my somewhat joking political examples - because the comment sounds informative but mods don't know any better. The comment is usually followed by a stream of "OMG you are demonstrably, factually wrong" posts but often those are invisible to those browsing at higher mod levels and the net effect is to present a demonstrably incorrect statement as true.
These statements aren't necessarily trolls (again, except maybe the political ones) or flame bait, and they aren't just overrated. They are simply wrong in some way that could be factually demonstrated or logically proven. There really does need to be some mod for "your factual claim is provably incorrect." Preferably followed up by some comments citing counterclaims to the contrary.
Websites that change owners frequently pretty much scream "potentially valuable asset that nobody has figured out how to make money on!" Because if they did actually make money, they wouldn't be getting sold. So Slashdot is a pretty obvious money sink, but it does have a desirable reading audience, many of whom are absurdly vocal about how they don't want to read ads, subscribe or otherwise do anything that would, you know, make the site profitable.
My advice? Focus on content quality - Slashdot could easily post 3x the stories it does today, and have better QA - just by maybe hiring someone with some journalism credentials rather than making the people who write the back end server code pretend to be editors. Improve the quality and make it "must read" material that people are willing to pay for. And try encouraging some writers to create original content - not BS video interviews with talking heads from sponsors, but actual longform journalism. If Slashdot is actually a good enough read, you can monetize a subscription tier that echoes "Slate Plus," "ESPN Insider," etc.
In Slashdot's "glory days," it didn't have a lot of competition. There was no Gawker/Gizmodo/iO9/whatever to read about the coolest Star Wars prequel rumors; people came to Slashdot for that. Even though there's a lot of competition now, Slashdot (barely) hangs on to a superior virtue: a better quality of commenters and a better moderation system than other "nerd" sites. Slashdot was never very well managed, even back in the "CmdrTaco/Hemos Glory Days." Inject some QA into the story vetting/writing process and you'll see a resurgence of readership.
Let me continue to beat this dead horse: all that Slashdot really has going for it is a (minority) smart readership and a superior comment rating system. Explore and improve that. Gamify the f--k out of Karma. Do profiles on crazy frequent Slashdot contributors (not Bennett Hasleton) and let them have a real name and a voice. More badges, go back to numerical representations of karma, give higher upmods to really good contributors, whatever. Reward posters that get a lot of up- or down-mods because they're usually saying something interesting one way or another, even if they're being mod-bombed by ideologues. Reward longer posts. Finally introduce a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. This mod system is your real asset - pay some attention to it, which hasn't been done in many many years.
Thank you for showing up to answer questions. Please continue to be engaged. Slashdot has always shown an astonishing lack of self-awareness! Why were there thousands of off-topic posts about how much Beta sucked and why? Because Slashdot's editors didn't even think through the idea that people have opinions of their product enough to introduce a way for people to have meta-discussions about Slashdot. When your readers/commenters are the "product" to your advertisers, how do you not give them a place to comment/vent/respond about Slashdot itself? In the 15+ years I have read this site, I don't remember a single post from "management" saying "how are we doing? comment here." That's just either willful disregard of feedback or idiocy. And seriously, the site itself gets sold, and the post about it is when somebody else submits a link? YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S SOMETHING YOU COULD HAVE ANNOUNCED YOURSELVES? I mean, WTF?
Lastly, please just be open. What's working, what's not. I think people would be willing to turn off ad blockers or pay for Slashdot if someone in charge just said, "Hey, we lose money on this site. We need help. How are you willing to support us? Do you want to donate (a la Wikipedia) in exchange for having ads turned off? Would you be willing to subscribe? Can we do more ads if they follow a certain vetting process?"
It's sad to admit this, but Slashdot has been my "home page" since at least 1999. I'd hate to see it go away, and I'd love to keep it alive and healthy, as long as it's worth keeping.
The French unquestionably played a decisive role in the American Revolution. It is a very debatable question whether the US would exist today had the French not intervened on the side of the Colonies in the revolution, and it is probably more likely that it would not. So the US owes the Ancien Regime of 250 years ago a great deal. But let's not overstate things.
Jackass. Wild guess, but just in case you're USAian (I am), FYI there wouldn't be a USA if France (also Spain and the Netherlands) 240 years ago hadn't intervened in the struggle.
As mentioned, the French played a potentially decisive role. But they didn't do it because they loved America, they did it because they hated the British and saw them as engaged in their own proto-"Vietnam" and saw it in their own best interests to jump in. Remember that the French, 20 years earlier, had "owned" Canada and still had rights to most of trans-Mississippi North America. So it wasn't exactly altruistic. Spain (which was just in it to recapture Gibraltar) and the Netherlands played almost no functional role, other than a potential Spanish-French invasion of Britain keeping their fleet at home in 1779.
Key material and funding and morale support was provided from the beginning. Lafayette arrived in 1777 and stood with Washington through the critical Valley Forge ordeal. In 1778 France entered into an outright alliance.
100% agreed. It is in fact very likely that France's support of the Colonies in the American Revolution indirectly led to the ouster of the French monarchy in their own forthcoming revolution because of the debt they racked up in supporting the nascent US. So, again, mad props to France.
The USA suffered 6824 battle deaths during the Revolution; the French, 10,000.
Misleading at best, if not outright wrong. If France did indeed incur those deaths, it was in naval combat in the West Indies trying to win or protect territories there, unrelated to the US.
France lost 1,150,000 sons in battle in WW1. Together with Russia (1,800,000) they bore the brunt of the fighting. The entire British Empire lost 734,000. The USA? 53,000 - about (but not quite) the same figure as Canada, and almost exactly the same number as Australia.
No arguments there either, but WWI was a European war. The vast majority of Americans at the time wanted nothing to do with it, and only became involved after the Kaiser's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare (and the revelation of the Zimmermann telegram) more or less forced the US in. The US only participated actively in the last six months of WWI, so of course their deaths were lower. But it is still very arguable that the US economic and materiel support in the war was one of the few key deciding factors in support of the Triple Entente.
In one and one half months of fighting in the Battle of France in WW2, the French suffered 360,000 casualties. Compare to 1.1 million military casualties by the US (four times the population of France) in three and one half years of fighting.
No arguments there either. But it would be absolutely insane to argue that the US's participation in WW2, along with that of the Soviets, was not the deciding factor. France (at least the part that wasn't under the collaborationist Vichy government) suffered mightily during the war. But to suggest that France's contribution was greater than that of the US is just silly.
Long story short, the French are not "cheese eating surrender monkeys." They have a proud tradition of victorious warfare dating at least back to Charlemagne. And they were the unquestioned masters of Europe during the Napoleonic era. But all that is no reason to try to diminish the US record in order to try to prove that the French are bad-asses.
Cuba survived in large part thanks to support from the old USSR. NK survives in large part thanks to support from China.
True but Cuba's gravy train dried up after 1991 and they have still limped on for 25 years under the same Communist government led by people with the same last name. You're right that North Korea, for all their "juche," does more or less completely rely on their Sugar Dragon to the North, although much of its foreign exchange is actually through illegal black market trade rather than the largesse of the Chinese government.
I'm not sure Iran has that level of support behind them (though its also possible I'm just not fully up on international politics..)
You're right that Iran doesn't have a sponsoring patron in quite the same way. But they have a strong pipeline in illicit technology with their neighbor Pakistan, and as long as somebody still needs oil, they are never going to lack for foreign exchange like Cuba or North Korea did, where all they have to export to the global market is cigars or Kim Jong Un bobbleheads, respectively.
The fundamental problem, though, is that the only way to actually stop a country from doing what you don't want them to do is to successfully invade it. Otherwise -- since sanctions and negotiations are of limited effect -- if they're really motivated, they're going to do it.
Precisely this. Did 50 years of sanctions effect regime change in Cuba? No? Did all the international sanctions out the wazoo against North Korea prevent it from building nukes? No? So why would a continued regimen of sanctions on Iran, no matter how harsh, have made a difference? Arguably, only the US policy of "constructive engagement" with China has made any significant change in unfriendly regimes in the past half-century (and you would have to find it in your heart to thank Richard Nixon for that one). Seriously, I hear a lot of conservatives gripe about the Iran deal, but what would they have done differently that would show better results?
If you're still disappointed, at least you can see this as a bright side: Obama has at least bought you 10 years for neoconservatism to come back into fashion so the Cruz administration will have time to invade Iran before they have the ability to turn Tel Aviv into a big radioactive parking lot in retaliation.
users could spend as much or as little as they wanted but... would limit the amount that any one user could be charged overall for a single game.
Yeah, you got yourself a contradiction right there. The word "limit" and the words "as much... as they wanted" are inherently contradictory.
This would limit any hardship on any one individual
Hardship? HARDSHIP???? It is buying fake goddamn items in a fucking video game. There is no "hardship" here, just people who want to spend money on things and/or idiots who disable the built-in protections against allowing people (like children) who don't understand money to spend that money.
95% of us, myself included, are idiots in how we spend our money. Some people buy boats or airplanes. Some people spend every free dollar upgrading their rice rocket with spinning wheels and glowing license plates. Some people gamble, either in casinos or on lottery tickets. Some people buy $17 cocktails in Manhattan, others run through $8 packs of cigarettes like they were candy. Some people put themselves through grad school to get a Medieval History degree and go 5-6 figures in debt to do so. Some people buy houses that are bad investments, some buy bad stocks and others lavish hundreds or thousands on Kickstarters that never pay out. Some people spend thousands on vacations to far flung parts of the globe and come back with nothing more to show for it than a few T-shirts and trinkets. And plenty of others will spend cash happily on escorts or prostitutes for transitory sexual experiences.
Some people will read the above list and think "to each his own." Other people will read the list and think everyone is morons except for the people who indulge in their own personal money sink listed above. A fiscally conservative "objective" observer might see everyone involved as idiots. But those people are probably not much fun.
The moral of the story: people of legal age who have the maturity to earn money have the freedom to spend it on whatever asinine thing they want. When you put yourself in the position of deciding what people should be "allowed" to spend money on, and how much, you are objectively making them more financially sound at the expense of making them less free. Don't be too eager to take that role up, lest you eventually find someone else who thinks that what you spend money on should be capped or disallowed.
The default should be opt-out with a prompt, not opt-in with a non-obvious setting somewhere to disable things.
It is, for the most part. The default setting on iOS is to require the user's Apple ID/password before making any purchase. You can set it to not require a password for 15 minutes, after having the password entered, or you can set it to not require a password at all. Both of the latter items require the user (the person with the credit card account and password) to actively change settings from the default. Or, god forbid, give their Apple ID/password to their little kid.
Sorry the dad got butthurt that Apple didn't send him any warnings - I'm not sure how, since in the US, I get a receipt e-mail from Apple within 24 hours of any purchase - but this is unequivocally his fault because he either disabled default settings or gave his kid the password. (Also, instead of expecting Apple to mind his credit card, perhaps he could have set up warnings with his credit cards provider to automatically notify him if his balance exceeded a certain amount?) Sorry, I simply can't tease this out to be Apple's fault here.
However, stating this fact will make this post very unpopular with all the Android fanboys who came here to hate on Apple, so I expect this post to disappear into moderation oblivion shortly.
With iOS, you don't control the phone. You can try to jailbreak it, but Apple will do everything they can to stop you.
From my perspective, I certainly do control my phone. I control what apps and content I use; I control how and with whom I interact using my phone; I have never been prevented from doing anything with my phone that I wanted to (other than perhaps getting free worldwide data, using it as Doctor Who-style Psychic Paper, and finding a software upgrade to turn it into an Espresso machine).
What I want to do with my phone just doesn't happen to include jailbreaking it or using alternative app stores. I just don't get the value of doing either of those things, given how I use my phone. Not trying to be a troll, but please can you tell me what the advantages of those things would be for someone like me who is 1.) happy with the functionality that iOS provides, and 2.) happy with the choice of apps I have already (which, BTW, includes non-public, corporate apps that I can choose to install through my employer's MDM/MAM system)? Other than "zOMG SHEEPLE STALLMAN FREEDOMZ!!!!!!?"
I'm not being pedantic and trying to argue over definitions rather than their underlying meanings, as you suggest. However, hopefully you can understand my point that to say a thing with which you are not permitted to do anything you like is not "owned" by you is at best an overly dramatic choice of words since it connotes something far more meaningful.
For my personal purposes - which I understood when I purchased an Apple product - there is nothing that I would like to do with it which I cannot. If you want to install any app from any source any time, or roll your own phone OS, go do it! Have fun! As many on Slashdot go to great lengths to point out, Android is there for you if you want to do that. If you don't, and happen to prefer the iOS UI/app store catalog, why is this a problem?
Slashdot Mirror
We should be renting them by the month.
Will you be changing cellphones every month when your current provider no longer has the lease to the spectrum band you were using? Phones can only support so many radio band filters without increasing size and cost, so different versions are frequently built with support for only the frequency bands used by specific carriers, especially on low-cost phones. You know that the radios on the cellphone towers don't magically support every frequency as well, right? Would you spend large sums of $$$ to buy equipment tuned for a particular spectrum band if you didn't know if you could keep if for the long run (at least the life of the equipment)?
More importantly, the companies that buy spectrum do so because it becomes an asset with a known, fixed cost. Renting means rates may fluctuate or change (as they must, right? Otherwise the spectrum will not underpriced or overpriced.) Businesses - especially the ones that throw around the big piles of cash needed to stand up wireless networks - don't like having to guess how much their underlying costs will be from month to month.
I said nearly the exact same thing as a solution for keeping the IPV4 address space from running out
Do you really want to renumber all your public IPs every month when the rent goes up and your company doesn't want to pay it?
The Second Amendment does not affirm our right to own guns for "personal defense;" it affirms our right to own guns for defense against tyranny.
Read the Second Amendment again and spot the word "tyranny" for me. Don't find it? Because the SA says that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It's easy to ignore the first half of the sentence and just pay attention to the second, but that's disingenuous.
Furthermore, you have to take it in the context of the times in which it was written. The United States at this point had no standing army. (Historical aside: the US was very averse to keeping a standing army until after World War II. On the eve of the Civil War, the whole strength of the US Army was 15,000 men; just before World War II, in 1940, the US Army's size was smaller than that of Belgium.) Much of this aversion was due to the fact that it was Britain's desire to keep a standing professional army in the colonies that necessitated the Intolerable Acts which taxed the colonists to pay for said army.
At any rate, the presumption of the framers in 1791 would likely have been that the US needed to call on a citizen militia if it was invaded (or if it had to put down internal rebellions, such as the Whiskey Rebellion or Shays' Rebellion). Therefore, the citizens of the US should be prepared to take up arms as needed under the direction of the government (i.e. a well regulated militia), not against it. I know it's easy to have a romantic view of the Founding Fathers that they somehow encoded into the Constitution the seeds of the government's demise if it became too "tyrannical," but it's just not there in the text of the Second Amendment.
Personally, I like guns. I don't think there's anything wrong with responsible gun ownership. But please don't try to use the Second Amendment as a source for saying Americans should be armed and prepared to fight their own government with military-grade firearms.
Animals do not, generally, behave as amoral rapists, murderers and child molesters
Sorry - I am about as unreligious as one can get while still being able to get along with coworkers/friends/etc. who are religious - but this is a deeply silly argument. Amoral is, by definition, lacking in the scruples or strictures defined by the human concept of "morals." Animals are all "amoral."
"Morals" are a meta-conversation about behavior which large-brained social creatures such as humans use to form behavioral norms which go beyond direct self-interest (or pack interest in some social animal contexts). "Animals" as we think of most non-human creatures on this planet are simply not capable of that kind of thought.
Every dog that has ever tried to hump your leg is a "rapist." Pretty much any male animal will f--k any other female (or male in some species) member of their species at any time, regardless of consent, unless they are genetically programmed to wait for signs of estrus/fertility and "presenting" before doing so. There are no voluntarily vegan brown bears who do so because they feel bad for salmon. Lions, wolves and other predatory animals feel no compunctions around murdering alpha pack animals in order to take their place. I don't have the knowledge to speak to animal "child molestation" but I'm fairly certain that horny animals will f--k whatever they think they can.
Animals don't have religion, but they don't have morals either. To suppose that one is a requirement for the other is a base fallacy at best.
And still even with that outlier, at this point it is not a concern about network congestion.
Maybe it isn't a concern for Frontier (yet). But look at their footprint and you will see it's very different in terms of density and demographics. Verizon for example might just have more serious bandwidth abusers, as evidenced by the fact that their territory includes Philadelphia, which is solely populated by terrible human beings.
Just ribbing you there, Philly. I grew up in Bucks County, so we're paisans and we probably bumped into each other on South Street or at the Spectrum! Ha ha! Please don't track me down and assault me with cheesesteaks or subject me to harangues about the Eagles quarterback situation!
It's good to know that Frontier isn't planning on data caps (yet). But the amount that you can safely infer about other networks from theirs is somewhat limited.
Yes, one could argue that Merissa Mayer hasn't gotten results for Yahoo. But that would be overlooking the fact that she started with a dying company. No, it's not robust, but it does look like she'll be able to get someone to pay millions for the company, problems and all. Can you do that?
Precisely this. It mystifies me why people still don't understand how what you get paid is determined in a market environment. (This is not applicable in a unionized or government environment where all employees are assumed to be fungible in terms of skills and compensation is based on "how long have you been here?")
How much you get paid is not based on how hard your job is, or how good you are at it, but how scarce your skill set is, and how important that skill set is. To wit:
Okay, so at long last coming around to Marissa Mayer. Has she turned Yahoo! around, as was her mandate? Nope. Was her job arguably impossible from the start because Yahoo! was already irretrievably a has-been? Probably. So why did they give her a $55M golden parachute when they hired her? Simple. Because she almost certainly would have made at least $55M in stock by this point if she had stayed at Google. So she took a big risk by going to Yahoo! - at which, yeah, she probably failed - but she would have been crazy to try if they hadn't guaranteed her this kind of Plan B. It all comes back to my original point about how rare your skill set is, and how important it is. In this environment, you have to throw these kinds of compensation packages out at candidates just to get someone with decent qualifications to give up their sure thing and try to pull your broken down company out of the ditch.
try an old rotary dial phone on a landline... it totally blows away anything since.
I love the shout out to old school POTS, but it really doesn't blow away anything since, not by a long shot. You may not have had an opportunity to try it, but if your phone and carrier support VoLTE calls using the AMR-WB codec (often marketed as "HD Voice,") you will hear a immediately noticeable improvement in audio quality over traditional 64 kbps uncompressed circuit-switched voice.
The catch is that you have to have a LTE phone which supports VoLTE (most premium smartphones made in the last two years do, but don't expect it in "feature phones" or a lot of prepaid-type lower end smartphones). You need to be in a LTE (rather than 3G fallback) coverage area when you initiate the call, as does your recipient. Your carrier also has to support VoLTE with AMR-WB (most big US carriers do nowadays but you may not have it on their MVNOs or "value" brands). Lastly, the person on the other end of your call has to have a setup which supports it too, and you probably have to be using the same wireless carrier. There is some effort (such as between AT&T and Verizon in the US) to enable cross-carrier VoLTE HD Voice, but it's not generally available yet.
That sounds like a long list of caveats, but in a few years I imagine VoLTE calling with HD Voice will the be the rule rather than the exception. Try it out yourself and see if you aren't amazed at the change in audibility and clarity of phone calls.
Maybe Woz is just honest enough to do his taxes at face value rather than run around and find every loophole that he can.
The headline should more accurately read, "Man Who Makes Lots of Money and 'Was Never Interested In Money' Says Giving More Money To Government Is Not a Big Deal."
I love Woz, both as a technologist and an interesting (if sometimes slightly loopy) thinker. But for the rest of us who don't make more money than we know what to do with, yes we are going to try to minimize the amount we have to hand over to the government. I have money but not nearly so much that I would ever forgo taking my entitled tax exemptions for my kids, my mortgage interest, etc.
Woz may have a point, but he has all the money he will ever want, and doesn't care much about it in the first place. Bully for him. That doesn't make it wrong for everyone else who isn't in that same circumstance to "find every loophole" that we can legally in order to keep more money in our own pockets.
You can't just trademark your likeness and shut down all political parody or it would soon cease to exist.
Correct. Political parody is explicitly protected as fair comment - this explicit protection was established in the famous Larry Flynt "free speech" trial over a fake ad in Hustler magazine with a fake interview with Moral Majority founder discussing his first sexual encounter as a Campari liqueur fueled romp with his mother in an outhouse. It had nothing to do with Jerry Falwell's trademark/IP rights to his name or likeness, and everything to do with political discourse, of which parody is considered a valid form. Incidentally, parody can be considered "fair use" in most contexts with public figures, not just political ones.
And yet...
Parody for political commentary is protected as part of the public right to discourse. Making money doing so is not. So, no, Bernie Sanders can't sue you for making a picture of him doing bong hits with Che Guevara and posting it online. (Or he could sue, but he wouldn't win, at least on free speech grounds.) But if you started selling the images - then you would run afoul of his personality rights, by which using someone's name or likeness to make money is something he could sue for and win, because money making ventures are considered outside the realm of pure free discourse and becomes "exploitative."
So bottom line - make fun of a political figure with their likeness? No problem. Try to make money doing it? Yeah, problem.
One last note... you don't have to sue anyone and everyone who uses your trademark in order to defend it. You do, however, have to demonstrate that you are defending it in cases where there is a significant likelihood that it may cause confusion. For example, if you trademarked Slurm brand soda, and someone else produced Slurm brand automobiles, you don't have to sue them if you don't plan to make automobiles yourself. You do have to sue if they are infringing on your trademark in an area where you want to say that you hold yourself as having the rights to. (There are some exceptions with really well known brands like Coca Cola, but Apple doesn't have to sue every Apple Fruit Stand or Apple Moving & Storage business in the country because it's not diluting their trademark on computers and electronics.)
And not just that - the article (or at least the summarized portion) makes the "hackers" in question sound like extortionists.
If I find your wallet on the ground, if you are going to just say "thanks" to me for giving it back and not giving me a reward, does that make it in any way justifiable for me to give the credit cards in your wallet to a criminal just because the criminal will pay me?
There is a perfectly legitimate argument to be made that because you don't give out rewards for lost wallets, I don't have much incentive to search for your wallet. But if I find it and then don't give it back to you because someone else will pay more? I just don't see how that is morally defensible.
Having been wrong 99 times in the past in exactly similar situations is not an argument against something?
Correct.
In a formal, logical sense you are right. But as the philosopher David Hume said (I am paraphrasing just a bit): "The fact that the sun has come up yesterday, and the day before, and so on every day we remember is not proof that the sun will come up tomorrow. But it is a very persuasive indicator."
there is very little you could say against Trump that doesn't count many times over against Hillary.
I agree that both are ethically challenged. But there is a very important difference that I think you're overlooking.
Listen to Trump's statements about how he will try to solve problems on the world stage. They all boil down to something like "I will be a better negotiator." That's the entirety of his solution. Pro Tip: when there is a big, difficult problem that a lot of smart people have tried to solve and nobody has managed yet - peace in the Middle East, macroeconomics, whatever - and somebody comes in with a simple answer, it is usually an indication that the person in question doesn't understand the problem. Or at least not in sufficient complexity. Trump's answer to Iran? "I would have negotiated a better deal." Trump's answer to Putin? "I would get along with him better." No strategy other than that. It's the equivalent of presenting your boss with an intractable problem and he or she saying, "Work smarter, not harder." It's useless and intellectually dishonest.
Clinton, whether you like the quality of her work or not, at least was exposed to what it's like to deal with other countries during her time as Secretary of State. She knows that problems are tough and answers aren't always easy. Trump seems to think the opposite and the first time he tries to solve a Big Problem with one of his easy answers and fails, it won't be just him but also the US and the world that pay the price.
Just say no to people who tell you that they have easy answers to everything. They are either fools or they are counting on you to be one.
They've really done a good job at pricing the locals out of the park over the last 15 years [...] It's probably because we didn't spend all our money on food and merch; we were just taking up space as far as they're concerned.
Yes, yes you were. Why on Earth would you even think that Disney cares about pricing out the locals? Maybe Disney Land was, but I know for a fact that Disney World wasn't built to cater to locals. If these parks had been built for locals, there would be a Disney (Land/World) in every large city. Disney World in particular was built to cater to idiots like me and my two young girls who couldn't wait to take a six hour plane ride and wait for hours just to get into Jedi Camp. If Disney had the foresight to have built some Frozen-themed ride back when I last visited, my girls would never have left the park without a court order and an armed security detail. They built that park for the legions of fools with small children like me who will come from all over the planet in order to spend money like $20 bills cause dysentery.
Welcome to Disneyland, the pinnacle of American capitalism.
If you mean Disney (Land/World) succeeds admirably at vacuuming money out of the wallets of people who are willingly spending it there, then yeah. Hell, after I got back from dropping piles of cash at Disney World, I realized their level of genius at making money and bought stock in DIS. (The share price has taken some dings lately with cable cord cutting hurting ESPN, their real cash cow, but I have still made money on it and consider it a long term investment.)
If that's a way of complaining about not being priced for locals to visit often, then refer to my previous statement about the park not being intended for you in the first place...
University presidents are an oddity to me though; i know it is a tough job and requires overseeing a large number of people making over $150k, but I have trouble understanding what they actually manage...
The answer to your question is, basically, "nothing." That's what the provosts, deans, and other administrators are for. A university president is - generally - nothing like a CEO from a management perspective.
What you have to understand is that a university president's job is really to be chief salesperson. His or her customers? Major corporations and alumni with money to donate.
As a nonprofit organization, your typical public (or private) college or university already manages its day to day budget pretty well. It knows what its costs are, what its budget is, and as a result how many students it needs to admit (or how many it can support). There is no direct profit motive to make more money than it spends.
But the endowment? Major grants for research, or government funding? Growing those is the job of the university president. Success in those areas creates a virtuous cycle where attracting a top-flight researcher brings in more research money, or bringing in big name faculty results in more student applications, which leads to more success. If your university has more cachet, it leads to better employment success among your alumni, who then have more money to donate post-graduation, which increases the endowment, which gives you more money to spend on attracting... you get the idea.
A university president does little day to day management other than making sure that the activities of the actual managers don't do anything detrimental to the above concerns. But if you think of their job as a salesperson... well, I don't know how well salespeople are paid where you work, but everywhere I have worked if you can demonstrate proven results in bringing the bucks, you are getting paid far better than everyone else around you. And maybe - depending on your view of the value of really good salespeople - that helps to explain how these people are paid.
Is it a supply and demand situation that sets the salaries or is it like some other situations where you have an in club who give themselves or each other raises?
In the context of college football/basketball coaches (and ONLY for these two sports which actually make money for a college - the rest are Title IX welfare recipients), it is exactly supply and demand. There are a very limited number of head coaches in these sports who can demonstrate a sustained ability to win. The ability to win (and the stature of the coach and his proven ability to but his players into the NFL/NBA) drives the quality of the recruits for the school. The quality of the recruits and the quality of the coaches together drive the ongoing success of the program, which turns into moving up to better athletic conferences which generate more TV revenues for the school and its athletic program. While most of that money goes right back into the athletic program, it also constitutes in effect free advertising for the university/college as a whole and drives student application interest. A winning football/basketball program creates a virtuous cycle, whereas a losing program creates a downward spiral. Hence the tremendous competition for the best coaches and market-driven pay.
While some may earnestly question the value of a top-tier athletics program to an institution of learning, that free advertising is hard to deny. Would you have ever heard of smaller schools like St. John's, Georgetown, or Gonzaga without their basketball programs? Would the names Notre Dame, Alabama or Oregon State carry any cachet outside local areas if it weren't for their football teams? How many students applied to these schools who otherwise wouldn't because they knew and loved these schools for their athletics?
I got my undergrad degree at a small school (University of Richmond) with a good academic reputation but little national brand name recognition. Yet I know that my undergrad alma mater's admission applications go up every year after it makes one of its irregular trips to the NCAA Tournament... so the colleges overall are clearly getting something out of it, and as long as the athletics programs are paying for themselves, why not?
people simply plug in numbers without thinking about what results make sense; and thus blindly accept whatever results they get
I don't think that's the issue so much as that financial projections are in many ways more art than science. I think a lot of the Slashdot readership, being generally from the "technical" side of their employers rather than the "business" side have a view of what is actually involved.
Let's take the example of an ISP. Forecasting your data usage needs is simple, right? Costs are subscribers x bandwidth rates. Your revenue is subscribers x monthly fee. Do you make a profit?
In reality, though, you never estimate your costs that way because of "breakage." Breakage is the fraction of what people pay for that they don't actually use, such as minutes on your cellphone plan that you don't use, or a rebate coupon that you don't send in. Every business has breakage, and they all use that as part of their modeling.
So if you tried to estimate your costs in the straightforward way where all your users used all their bandwidth all the time, your costs would be (probably much) higher than your competitors and you wouldn't get any customers. You have to factor in a breakage/utilization estimate in your own numbers - based off what people really use vs. what they could use - in order to arrive at a competitive rate. And the amazing thing is that most of the time, that works out pretty well.
But all you really have to assume proper breakage rates is what people have done in the past. If people in general start using more (or less) bandwidth, or you start attracting a particular customer base with different usage patterns (such as heavy Torrent users vs. senior citizens who just want to check e-mail) then your calculations can be way off. That sounds like exactly what happened here.
It is probably a result of bad forecasting on their part, but not from a simple engineering error. They had to make some educated guesses, but the guessing part is unavoidable. Sometimes you're right, sometimes you're wrong.
These fascists need the Benito treatment.
Umm, before we advocate the summary execution and public hanging of those involved, I might like to get a wee bit more information about what we're discussing. Stuff that, you know, the summary might have actually included such as:
It's also worth noting that the story has only one link, to a blog which is politically opposed to the treaty. A cursory Google search would point you to a much wider range of viewpoints on the agreement. Some are pro-treaty, some against, but they all provide much better context than the linked article. I don't particularly care one way or another, but any story with only one viewpoint expressed is usually a sign of either a lazy editor or an agenda.
I hate to keep dredging up the "Slashdot flame bait post because it has no actual 'editors'" trope, but damn. I imagine that if I submitted a story that said "Apple CEO advocates eating puppies" and linked to a blog somewhere that suggested it, the story would be published immediately and without actual review or "editing." Which is, you know, what an "editor" is supposed to do.
In Finland I get 250/100Mbps for 29.90 EUR/m.
What wireless technology is your phone using that it gets 100 Mbps download?
Add a disagree mod.
I disagree. (You see what I did there.)
If you disagree, respond and explain why.
I strongly believe however that there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. There are simply too many cases of someone posting something like "You can't install your own apps on MacOS X," or "Restriction on drones are prohibited by the Constitution," or "Android has 95% of the smartphone market," or "Abandonware is not legally copyrighted anymore," or "Hitler was a religious Catholic." And many of these comments are rated up - leave aside my somewhat joking political examples - because the comment sounds informative but mods don't know any better. The comment is usually followed by a stream of "OMG you are demonstrably, factually wrong" posts but often those are invisible to those browsing at higher mod levels and the net effect is to present a demonstrably incorrect statement as true.
These statements aren't necessarily trolls (again, except maybe the political ones) or flame bait, and they aren't just overrated. They are simply wrong in some way that could be factually demonstrated or logically proven. There really does need to be some mod for "your factual claim is provably incorrect." Preferably followed up by some comments citing counterclaims to the contrary.
So here's some unsolicited advice (yay!):
Websites that change owners frequently pretty much scream "potentially valuable asset that nobody has figured out how to make money on!" Because if they did actually make money, they wouldn't be getting sold. So Slashdot is a pretty obvious money sink, but it does have a desirable reading audience, many of whom are absurdly vocal about how they don't want to read ads, subscribe or otherwise do anything that would, you know, make the site profitable.
My advice? Focus on content quality - Slashdot could easily post 3x the stories it does today, and have better QA - just by maybe hiring someone with some journalism credentials rather than making the people who write the back end server code pretend to be editors. Improve the quality and make it "must read" material that people are willing to pay for. And try encouraging some writers to create original content - not BS video interviews with talking heads from sponsors, but actual longform journalism. If Slashdot is actually a good enough read, you can monetize a subscription tier that echoes "Slate Plus," "ESPN Insider," etc.
In Slashdot's "glory days," it didn't have a lot of competition. There was no Gawker/Gizmodo/iO9/whatever to read about the coolest Star Wars prequel rumors; people came to Slashdot for that. Even though there's a lot of competition now, Slashdot (barely) hangs on to a superior virtue: a better quality of commenters and a better moderation system than other "nerd" sites. Slashdot was never very well managed, even back in the "CmdrTaco/Hemos Glory Days." Inject some QA into the story vetting/writing process and you'll see a resurgence of readership.
Let me continue to beat this dead horse: all that Slashdot really has going for it is a (minority) smart readership and a superior comment rating system. Explore and improve that. Gamify the f--k out of Karma. Do profiles on crazy frequent Slashdot contributors (not Bennett Hasleton) and let them have a real name and a voice. More badges, go back to numerical representations of karma, give higher upmods to really good contributors, whatever. Reward posters that get a lot of up- or down-mods because they're usually saying something interesting one way or another, even if they're being mod-bombed by ideologues. Reward longer posts. Finally introduce a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod. This mod system is your real asset - pay some attention to it, which hasn't been done in many many years.
Thank you for showing up to answer questions. Please continue to be engaged. Slashdot has always shown an astonishing lack of self-awareness! Why were there thousands of off-topic posts about how much Beta sucked and why? Because Slashdot's editors didn't even think through the idea that people have opinions of their product enough to introduce a way for people to have meta-discussions about Slashdot. When your readers/commenters are the "product" to your advertisers, how do you not give them a place to comment/vent/respond about Slashdot itself? In the 15+ years I have read this site, I don't remember a single post from "management" saying "how are we doing? comment here." That's just either willful disregard of feedback or idiocy. And seriously, the site itself gets sold, and the post about it is when somebody else submits a link? YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S SOMETHING YOU COULD HAVE ANNOUNCED YOURSELVES? I mean, WTF?
Lastly, please just be open. What's working, what's not. I think people would be willing to turn off ad blockers or pay for Slashdot if someone in charge just said, "Hey, we lose money on this site. We need help. How are you willing to support us? Do you want to donate (a la Wikipedia) in exchange for having ads turned off? Would you be willing to subscribe? Can we do more ads if they follow a certain vetting process?"
It's sad to admit this, but Slashdot has been my "home page" since at least 1999. I'd hate to see it go away, and I'd love to keep it alive and healthy, as long as it's worth keeping.
The French unquestionably played a decisive role in the American Revolution. It is a very debatable question whether the US would exist today had the French not intervened on the side of the Colonies in the revolution, and it is probably more likely that it would not. So the US owes the Ancien Regime of 250 years ago a great deal. But let's not overstate things.
Jackass. Wild guess, but just in case you're USAian (I am), FYI there wouldn't be a USA if France (also Spain and the Netherlands) 240 years ago hadn't intervened in the struggle.
As mentioned, the French played a potentially decisive role. But they didn't do it because they loved America, they did it because they hated the British and saw them as engaged in their own proto-"Vietnam" and saw it in their own best interests to jump in. Remember that the French, 20 years earlier, had "owned" Canada and still had rights to most of trans-Mississippi North America. So it wasn't exactly altruistic. Spain (which was just in it to recapture Gibraltar) and the Netherlands played almost no functional role, other than a potential Spanish-French invasion of Britain keeping their fleet at home in 1779.
Key material and funding and morale support was provided from the beginning. Lafayette arrived in 1777 and stood with Washington through the critical Valley Forge ordeal. In 1778 France entered into an outright alliance.
100% agreed. It is in fact very likely that France's support of the Colonies in the American Revolution indirectly led to the ouster of the French monarchy in their own forthcoming revolution because of the debt they racked up in supporting the nascent US. So, again, mad props to France.
The USA suffered 6824 battle deaths during the Revolution; the French, 10,000.
Misleading at best, if not outright wrong. If France did indeed incur those deaths, it was in naval combat in the West Indies trying to win or protect territories there, unrelated to the US.
France lost 1,150,000 sons in battle in WW1. Together with Russia (1,800,000) they bore the brunt of the fighting. The entire British Empire lost 734,000. The USA? 53,000 - about (but not quite) the same figure as Canada, and almost exactly the same number as Australia.
No arguments there either, but WWI was a European war. The vast majority of Americans at the time wanted nothing to do with it, and only became involved after the Kaiser's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare (and the revelation of the Zimmermann telegram) more or less forced the US in. The US only participated actively in the last six months of WWI, so of course their deaths were lower. But it is still very arguable that the US economic and materiel support in the war was one of the few key deciding factors in support of the Triple Entente.
In one and one half months of fighting in the Battle of France in WW2, the French suffered 360,000 casualties. Compare to 1.1 million military casualties by the US (four times the population of France) in three and one half years of fighting.
No arguments there either. But it would be absolutely insane to argue that the US's participation in WW2, along with that of the Soviets, was not the deciding factor. France (at least the part that wasn't under the collaborationist Vichy government) suffered mightily during the war. But to suggest that France's contribution was greater than that of the US is just silly.
Long story short, the French are not "cheese eating surrender monkeys." They have a proud tradition of victorious warfare dating at least back to Charlemagne. And they were the unquestioned masters of Europe during the Napoleonic era. But all that is no reason to try to diminish the US record in order to try to prove that the French are bad-asses.
Cuba survived in large part thanks to support from the old USSR. NK survives in large part thanks to support from China.
True but Cuba's gravy train dried up after 1991 and they have still limped on for 25 years under the same Communist government led by people with the same last name. You're right that North Korea, for all their "juche," does more or less completely rely on their Sugar Dragon to the North, although much of its foreign exchange is actually through illegal black market trade rather than the largesse of the Chinese government.
I'm not sure Iran has that level of support behind them (though its also possible I'm just not fully up on international politics..)
You're right that Iran doesn't have a sponsoring patron in quite the same way. But they have a strong pipeline in illicit technology with their neighbor Pakistan, and as long as somebody still needs oil, they are never going to lack for foreign exchange like Cuba or North Korea did, where all they have to export to the global market is cigars or Kim Jong Un bobbleheads, respectively.
The fundamental problem, though, is that the only way to actually stop a country from doing what you don't want them to do is to successfully invade it. Otherwise -- since sanctions and negotiations are of limited effect -- if they're really motivated, they're going to do it.
Precisely this. Did 50 years of sanctions effect regime change in Cuba? No? Did all the international sanctions out the wazoo against North Korea prevent it from building nukes? No? So why would a continued regimen of sanctions on Iran, no matter how harsh, have made a difference? Arguably, only the US policy of "constructive engagement" with China has made any significant change in unfriendly regimes in the past half-century (and you would have to find it in your heart to thank Richard Nixon for that one). Seriously, I hear a lot of conservatives gripe about the Iran deal, but what would they have done differently that would show better results?
If you're still disappointed, at least you can see this as a bright side: Obama has at least bought you 10 years for neoconservatism to come back into fashion so the Cruz administration will have time to invade Iran before they have the ability to turn Tel Aviv into a big radioactive parking lot in retaliation.
users could spend as much or as little as they wanted but ... would limit the amount that any one user could be charged overall for a single game.
Yeah, you got yourself a contradiction right there. The word "limit" and the words "as much ... as they wanted" are inherently contradictory.
This would limit any hardship on any one individual
Hardship? HARDSHIP???? It is buying fake goddamn items in a fucking video game. There is no "hardship" here, just people who want to spend money on things and/or idiots who disable the built-in protections against allowing people (like children) who don't understand money to spend that money.
95% of us, myself included, are idiots in how we spend our money. Some people buy boats or airplanes. Some people spend every free dollar upgrading their rice rocket with spinning wheels and glowing license plates. Some people gamble, either in casinos or on lottery tickets. Some people buy $17 cocktails in Manhattan, others run through $8 packs of cigarettes like they were candy. Some people put themselves through grad school to get a Medieval History degree and go 5-6 figures in debt to do so. Some people buy houses that are bad investments, some buy bad stocks and others lavish hundreds or thousands on Kickstarters that never pay out. Some people spend thousands on vacations to far flung parts of the globe and come back with nothing more to show for it than a few T-shirts and trinkets. And plenty of others will spend cash happily on escorts or prostitutes for transitory sexual experiences.
Some people will read the above list and think "to each his own." Other people will read the list and think everyone is morons except for the people who indulge in their own personal money sink listed above. A fiscally conservative "objective" observer might see everyone involved as idiots. But those people are probably not much fun.
The moral of the story: people of legal age who have the maturity to earn money have the freedom to spend it on whatever asinine thing they want. When you put yourself in the position of deciding what people should be "allowed" to spend money on, and how much, you are objectively making them more financially sound at the expense of making them less free. Don't be too eager to take that role up, lest you eventually find someone else who thinks that what you spend money on should be capped or disallowed.
The default should be opt-out with a prompt, not opt-in with a non-obvious setting somewhere to disable things.
It is, for the most part. The default setting on iOS is to require the user's Apple ID/password before making any purchase. You can set it to not require a password for 15 minutes, after having the password entered, or you can set it to not require a password at all. Both of the latter items require the user (the person with the credit card account and password) to actively change settings from the default. Or, god forbid, give their Apple ID/password to their little kid.
Sorry the dad got butthurt that Apple didn't send him any warnings - I'm not sure how, since in the US, I get a receipt e-mail from Apple within 24 hours of any purchase - but this is unequivocally his fault because he either disabled default settings or gave his kid the password. (Also, instead of expecting Apple to mind his credit card, perhaps he could have set up warnings with his credit cards provider to automatically notify him if his balance exceeded a certain amount?) Sorry, I simply can't tease this out to be Apple's fault here.
However, stating this fact will make this post very unpopular with all the Android fanboys who came here to hate on Apple, so I expect this post to disappear into moderation oblivion shortly.
With iOS, you don't control the phone. You can try to jailbreak it, but Apple will do everything they can to stop you.
From my perspective, I certainly do control my phone. I control what apps and content I use; I control how and with whom I interact using my phone; I have never been prevented from doing anything with my phone that I wanted to (other than perhaps getting free worldwide data, using it as Doctor Who-style Psychic Paper, and finding a software upgrade to turn it into an Espresso machine).
What I want to do with my phone just doesn't happen to include jailbreaking it or using alternative app stores. I just don't get the value of doing either of those things, given how I use my phone. Not trying to be a troll, but please can you tell me what the advantages of those things would be for someone like me who is 1.) happy with the functionality that iOS provides, and 2.) happy with the choice of apps I have already (which, BTW, includes non-public, corporate apps that I can choose to install through my employer's MDM/MAM system)? Other than "zOMG SHEEPLE STALLMAN FREEDOMZ!!!!!!?"
I'm not being pedantic and trying to argue over definitions rather than their underlying meanings, as you suggest. However, hopefully you can understand my point that to say a thing with which you are not permitted to do anything you like is not "owned" by you is at best an overly dramatic choice of words since it connotes something far more meaningful.
For my personal purposes - which I understood when I purchased an Apple product - there is nothing that I would like to do with it which I cannot. If you want to install any app from any source any time, or roll your own phone OS, go do it! Have fun! As many on Slashdot go to great lengths to point out, Android is there for you if you want to do that. If you don't, and happen to prefer the iOS UI/app store catalog, why is this a problem?