It's also that fact that everything has to be a hedge. You can't simply say, "My original research results show that stimulus A causes response B with p<0.5, and this is what I did". The first problem with that sentence is that you have to be both original (work not done before) and not original (work based closely on work someone else has already published, or else it's too much of a leap). The second problem with that sentence is that you have to hedge, saying instead "seems to indicate", or "possibly blah blah". Also you are forced to spend more time explaining what other people have done with references, than explaining your own work. If it takes you more than a paragraph to explain your own work (which shouldn't have references, because it has to original right?) then you "don't have enough references" because every statement you make must be supported by a reference, never mind that the interesting statements are the stuff you shouldn't be able to to reference because it's new stuff.
Regarding word limits: instead of having a strict word limit of 2500 (for example), instead have a hard limit of 5000, and discounts for every hundred words below that, assuming the publishers are taking money to publish... sorry, silly me, of course they are
As far as your basic requirements are concerned, pretty much any major (git, svn, mercurial) open source version control system will cater for them, with some third party (mostly) free tools. Local server, well established, open source, email notification via hooks, extensive (if not easy to read) documentation... all of these would be covered by the VCS itself. Single sign on integration with Active Directory (AD) can probably be set up using an LDAP extension. Many windows clients exist, most catering to several VCSs at once; which are good and which are bad, I often find is a matter of personal taste. Tortoise* and sourcetree seem to be the most popular at the moment. Tests are generally a matter for the project itself, i.e. part of the code, and automating testing based on source control activity (e.g. test on new commits) can also be done using scripting hooks, although you might prefer some kind of continuous integration system like jenkins.
For your 'nice-to-haves'; you would be looking at a third party stack. I personally would recommend gitlab. It comes with baked in issue tracking, project wikis for documentation/planning, email notifications without you having to script hooks, LDAP/AD integration (iirc, never used it myself), merge/pull requests (i.e. a form of code review). You can attach/upload files of any type to issues/comments/wiki pages, not sure if that's what you are looking for. Alternatively, you could look at gitstack, which just fits into your price range and covers most of the maintenance/admin headaches by the looks of it. I've never used, found it by googling.
Finally, git (and possibly mercurial and svn) has a way to sign off commits using a GPG key. This work flow is also accessible through gitlab. Basically, a change is made and committed to branch which is then pushed to the gitlab server. This generates a pull request to some pre-designated branch (e.g. trunk/development/whatever). When the pull request is approved, it can be signed using the approver's GPG key. I'm not sure is this covers your specific use case; I'm afraid I'm not sure exactly what you want from the signing part of your requirements
DISCLAIMER: This advice is based exclusively on personal experience, does not constitute legal advice, makes no guarantee of merchantability or fitness to a particular purpose implied or otherwise, did not harm any kittens in the making thereof, and may cause the reader distress by making them learn something.
It's not about our cognitive ability to predict the the future. It's about our evaluation of the importance long term threats, meaning not days or weeks into the future, but decades. What we suck at is assigning importance to it. In this sense, yes we choose to ignore the problem, because there are more pressing problems of the day, and we do know better. Of course, part of the problem is that we rationalise the choice. We come up with arguments against the acting in mitigation of the predicted risk based on various well known psychological shortcomings, e.g. confirmation bias (we support counter arguments that are false), framing (over simplifying the problem), etc...
As nice as communism sounds, there's an inherent problem with rentals.
Yes, but I'd argue that most those problems are introduced by capitalist renting out in the first place
Anyone who's been a landlord knows that people don't take care stuff they don't own. Rental cars are abused, apartments are damaged and left uncleaned, taxis are smelly, public toilets are filthy and broken down.
Rental cars are abused because generally because as the renter you know you are already paying overheads and they are built into your rental fee. Rental cars are often cleaner than privately owned cars because they are cleaned between every rental, i.e. every few days. The insurance on rental cars is expensive compared to insurance I can get privately, so yeah, I'll happily leave fast food wrappers in the car and not hassle about a scratch, because it's covered. I've already paid for the repairs and the cleaning anyway.
Then let's look at taxis. They get used roughly 8x more than privately owned cars hour for hour. They also are generally not a cheap form transport. It's the taxi owner/driver's responsibility to keep it clean, and they generally charge appropriately. Whether they actually clean or not, different story. To be fair though, 8x usage does mean cleaning gets difficult, and there's a reasonable expectation on the driver/owner's side that people are going to treat the taxi with some respect and not puke or litter casually. However, in the course of a day, scrunched up till slips, gum wrappers, etc accumulate no matter how much care is taken.
Public toilets, covers a wide variety of installations. Some have cleaning tools available for users to clean u after themselves, so can brush out the bowl if necessary. But those get stolen (god knows who'd want to steal a toilet brush from a public toilet though) and broken. Again, they are generally cheap plastic tools that are used far more than they were ever designed to be used. Then you get toilets where there are no tools, but cleaning staff. Those tend to be clean, and you either pay for those directly, or they're subsidized like mall toilets. From personal experience, toilets get filthy through use. Night clubs and bars are the worst because they probably see the most usage with the least cleaning. Free public toilets on the street would be next, but I wouldn't call either of those rentals.
And now housing. This is the first case where usage between the average rental and the average privately owned property is generally the same. Except, if as the owner of a house, I scratch or scuff the wall, I can use crack filler and paint carefully over it to my own satisfaction. As a renter, the same offence means I have to repaint an entire wall, which is the owner taking a chance in my opinion. I suppose it comes down to expectations. If you owns your own place, you're happy to put with minor cosmetic issues, but if you rent, you expect perfection. So in the case, the owner is perhaps justified. The non-cosmetic differences are generally the owner's responsibility to take care of, and here you are absolutely right. Rental apartments are never taken of by their owners as if they were their own. If my toilet/geyser/plumbing breaks, I call get it repaired within 24 hours. If I'm renting, especially through an agency, it can takes days, often nearly a week. Then there's cleanliness. Where I live, if you're renting, when you move in the place is supposed to be clean (it often isn't very) and empty (assuming unfurnished rental). When you leave, you must leave it clean, and agencies administering rentals will call in a cleaning service, prior to inspection, to clean the place, and deduct the costs from your deposit. Since that happened to me the first time, I asked the rental agency every time if this was they're MO, and if it was, well since I'd already paid for the cleaning service regardless, I'd happily leave the place as a wreck.
I'm aware of the difference between Calc and gnumeric, but I was trying to answer the question of "what is considered a basic task?" which isn't exactly dependent on a specific piece of software. I have more experience with gnumeric, as I pointed out. And yes, once you hit large spreadsheets, you should use a database, but often I have to deal with large datasets that are stored in databases and *exported* as.csv files for analysis, or with.csv files dumped directly from sensors or other devices. Whilst I'm writing the programs that either produce or consume these, it's often easier to view them in a spreadsheet, rather than a text file layout, because the visual distinction of column is preserved. I admit, that this is probably not a common use case though, and hence not a "basic task", but databases aren't great at data analysis, which is why this stuff often gets loaded into a spreadsheet, this is where statistics applications come in. Good luck getting Bossman McMBA to use something like that. So I'd say this is probably somewhere between "basic" and "advanced". I would like to throw one more thing into the hat though, and that is the MS Word is appalling at handling large documents (40 pages plus, depending on the machine). LO/OO writer is much better in this regard, and I do regard this as a "basic task"; There are many business documents (quarterly reports, impact assessments, white papers, blah) and even personal documents (academic dissertations, and student projects, home authorship of books) that can get this large.
Okay, God forbid, I'm actually going to try and treat this fairly. Firstly, recent incarnations of MS Word work using semantic styling, but don't force you to use it. This is much the same as in OO/LO. In general MS tools load files a LOT faster, and are more visually appealing (granted, eye of the beholder and all that), however they don't handle large files. Try opening a 400Mb.csv file in Excel vs in Gnumeric. As far as user friendly interfaces are concerned, I'd say they are both about equally klunky. The ribbon is a menu, really, just looks a little different. Some people prefer it, some people don't.
Now, the "basic tasks" concept. Basic tasks for word processing to me include: writing a letter, writing business document (contract, memo, invoice, quote, waybill, meeting minutes), creating/using templates for those standard documents, designing home flyers (lost dogs, bake sales etc) . These generally require the following 'features' from the software: text manipulation, text formatting, image insertion and basic manipulation (resizing, placement, possibly cropping), tables, tab stops, template editing, headers, footers, page numbering, and text->image conversions (e.g. for banner headings). Both OO/LO and MS Word do all these about equally well imho.
Advanced features: Mail Merge, Mathematical equation editing, Track changes/revision control, cross referencing (index, citations, bibliography, table of contents, list of images etc)
As far as the spreadsheets go, excel and gnumeric are very similar in features as far as I've used them. Never used OO/LO Calc, so I can't say. I suppose charts might be a distinguishing factor, but again, I rarely use charts generated from spreadsheets.
Presentation software (Powerpoint, Impress) seems to be where things really start to differentiate. More transitions, and more bling, in general, is available to PowerPoint users, and compatibility is HORRIBLE even between between powerpoint versions, let alone PP and OO/LO.
In summary: as far basic word processing goes, I don't see a marked difference apart from aesthetics. For Maths, they're both pretty horrible. Track changes they're both about the same (revision control in word processing sucks generally), and I'm not sure about mail merge
Or a surge pricing multiplier kicks in while you are waiting your 20 minutes for the car to pitch up, only to suddenly get a cancellation notification... I guess the driver found a better fare.
Also, I should point out that the LLVM/clang situation is a bit more complex. If I recall, LLVM came about because the gnu toolchain deliberately obfuscates it's output and interoperability interfaces with other tools even within the toolchain. This strategy was chosen because the outputs of the individual software tool in the toolchain were not, and could not be protected by the GPL (any version). It would have been possible for a proprietary product to be developed that didn't link to gcc (or another part of the toolchain) to take the useful output of gcc (e.g. a parsed abstract syntax tree) and use it to any number of cool things. The product could still be distributed with gcc (and the required accompanying notices) but the rest of the code would be locked up, because it doesn't link to gcc, only depends on it at runtime. This violates the spirit of the GPL which is not only to make software free, but to keep it free.
Yes... but over a long enough time (a shorter time probably) those same mutations might occur naturally. And if the mutations are not beneficial to the organism (as opposed to beneficial to humans), then they are very likely to lost again. Look, if they create an e. coli strain that produces something amazing, for instance, a viable crude oil substitute, but it also happens to be highly effective at out-competing wild type e. coli in the human gut as a side effect, and coincidently killing us because we've basically swallowed litres of crude oil, I'd say it might still be worth the risk. If they're producing vanillain, or insulin, then definitely. The problem with the crude oil scenario, is that an escapee colony would start producing a never ending oil slick. But again, the mutations would likely be lost because the organism won't need them.
The whole idea is that the escapees won't survive long enough to reproduce, as being without their essential amino acids, their growth would be limited, and bacterial reproduction rates are tied to growth rates. Also, consider that as long as they're provided with the non-native amino acids, they're under no selective pressure to revert to the wild type. Yes, it's possible, but very very unlikely.
Captonian here. The summary is a bit misleading. In South Africa there are two nationwide requirements for anyone (including Uber drivers) to transport members of the public. They must be personally licensed to drive (i.e. have a valid drivers license), and also licensed to transport members of the public (a public drivers licence, which requires not having a criminal record, not having ever had your driver's license revoked, etc...). In Cape Town specifically, there's an additional by-law that means the vehicle must be licensed. This requirement is the case in most municipalities in South Africa, although some municipalities classify Uber's service as "chartered transportation" and Cape Town classifies it as a "metered taxi service".
A local talk radio show had both a representative from Uber and a representative from the city’s Safety and Security department. Both Uber and the city confirmed that Uber only checks the national requirements, i.e. the driver's credentials. Uber doesn't check that the vehicle is licensed to transport. To be fair, Uber apparently goes above and beyond the minimum checks regarding the driver, doing deeper background checks etc, but they do not check that the vehicle is licensed. All of the impounded vehicles were impounded due to a lack of the vehicle license. Uber seems to be trying to spin things saying that the City's bureaucracy is way too slow, but what it comes down to is the fact that are plenty of metered taxi's already, they need to be licensed, and there are a limited number of licenses. Uber's been categorised as a metered taxi service, so no new uber drivers are going to be given vehicle licenses. Uber wants to be reclassified as a chartered transport service, and here things get a little fuzzy. As far as I can tell, a chartered transport service requires an upfront statement of cost, i.e. the driver/company has to provide a quote for the proposed route. Airport shuttles fall under this for example, because they charge a fixed amount per suburb/area, they don't charge per kilometre. I'm not sure how exactly uber determines the fare, but it's not fixed, so technically, they're not a chartered service.
So it doesn't look like it's the city's fault. They're following the law. Now, it's open to discussion whether Uber is at fault for not ensuring their driver's vehicles are licensed, or whether it should be the driver's responsibility, but from the consumer side, I'd say the expectation is that Uber has done their due dilligence.
While I agree with most of what you say, including your conclusion that the complete removal of copyright will mean de facto replacement by a patronage system, you miss two crucial points. Firstly, the fundamental difference between the arts in before the 19th century and today is that the distribution costs are now negligible, especially if the distribution is digital, but even if the distribution is physical. It costs less to produce most art in physical form and more importantly to reproduce than ever before in human history, yet prices do not come down. There's also a clear divorce between production costs and retail costs. A new DVD from a block buster movie with a budget in the 100's of millions costs the same or less to buy than the latest top 10 CDs with production budgets in the 10's of millions. Consumers get this, they understand they're being screwed by the CD producers. They're being charged what the CD producers think the market will bear... except clearly the market won't bear it, because piracy is rampant. Music producers (especially) love to harp on about lost sales, but flat out refuse to consider piracy as market indicator. Let's assume there were a full proof way prevent piracy. Sales would stay pretty flat, or I suspect drop a fair bit. People pirate way more than they could ever afford to buy, and if suddenly forced to buy everything, they would pick and choose a lot more, like back in the 80's and early 90's when kids saved their pocket money to buy that one album they'd been eyeing for three months. Concert and performance revenue would probably fall off (except for really big, well publicised, acts, i.e. the guys who are already coining it) because of lack of exposure. CD prices would be forced down. Lack of exposure is why I think CD sales might actually drop in this scenario. The same argument holds for other types of digitally reproducible art.
Secondly, the content-creation (for want of a better term) industry is a lot like the the professional sports industry. We only really here about the super stars, who are 1% of all the attempts at success. The current copyright regime is already in effect a patronage system, except the "rich dudes" are rich corporations who decide who they will promote. Yes consumers can vote with their money, which only constrains who will be promoted to largely popular inoffensive artists, whereas in a true patronage system the individual tastes of the rich dudes funded a wider variety of creative efforts. There are also a lot more "rich dudes" now than ever before. They're called the middle class. They have a fair amount of disposable income. No single person in the middle class has the money to fund an artist in the same way as traditional patronage systems, but there are vastly more potential consumers for art than ever before in human history, and what's more is the skills required to reproduce a performance and the costs involved are way less than before too, allowing artists to either manage distribution themselves, or pay substantially less than previously to someone else to do it for them.
I view piracy as a form of civil disobedience protesting inflated prices. If digital content were reduced to 25% I'm pretty sure sales would more than quadruple. Also, considering the percentages the artists get paid, they're getting screwed the least by piracy. I know that there are plenty of other people involved in music and film production, but for the most part, they all get paid salaries, not royalties. So they're not getting screwed by piracy.
P.S. I'm viewing things from a South African perspective, where minimum wage is approximately $1 an hour and new release DVDs cost about $18 ~ $25, and a new CD will set you back around $20. E-books range widely from $1 to $15, and physical books are minimum of $25 hard cover, $12 paperback. At minimum wage South Africans have to work 2 and a half days to afford a DVD/CD/Ebook/book.
Main advantage: I want a phone with everything... Best camera, biggest storage best screen. Right now, that cost's me bout $1000 in my country before the reverse subsidizations kick in. I say reverse, because in my country, buying a phone on plan costs more over time than buying the phone outright upfront for the more expensive phones, taking into account the costs of the plan without any phone. That's a BIG layout where I'm from, but if I can buy those components over time and upgrade according to my own priority list, I can assemble the phone within my budget. Better, after two years roll by, I only have to upgrade the components which are underpowered for me. The screen won't degrade over time, so I can keep that. The battery might need replacement, and the camera upgrading. Chances are a quad-core will still be sufficient in 2 years, if PC's are anything to go by. Wifi, bluetooth, NFC, qi charging, etc... once they're in, they won't need upgrading for a while.
It does NOT require creativity. It requires logic. I do this for a living too, and have done so for 30 years. Two people trying to solve the same problem (developing a communications protocol, because that's what an API is) are almost always going to come up with the same solution. Even if they don't, the number of possible solutions is small, and it's NOT a creative choice picking one above the other, it's a technical choice.
Where I live, one pays a hefty deposit when your are connected to the grid in a residential property (refunded when you sell, paid when you buy). In addition, one is charged a flat monthly connection fee plus a usage based fee. It sound like the utilities just need to (a) start charging a monthly connection fee to cover their fixed costs, and (b) if they are already charging this, increase that fee accordingly as renewable power generation increases. If someone doesn't want to pay the connection fee, and feels they can get by on power generated by themselves alone, they can disconnect from the grid.
First of all, if you are developing a proprietary software product, you're legal department might want to weigh in on the exposure of code via submitted patches on a public bugzilla database. Secondly, if you're developing an ERP system, you have a LOT of established, mature, and tested (which will be interpreted by the PHBs looking to buy your product as "bug free") competitors out there. in this case exposing the bug database HIGHLIGHTS your products immaturity, which is probably a bad thing for sales. That said sales should realise they are marketing an immature product. Presumably your product has other differentiating points that will help it gain market share, and I'm assuming lower price is probably one of the main selling points. Sales cannot hide the fact your product is immature, but they do have a point asking you not to go around highlighting it. The last thing, is to do an in depth analysis of the costs of running the public database, versus the costs of sanitizing reports on a regular basis plus the added burden of support staff to manage the bug database on behalf of clients. The bean counters are aware of the fact that there should be staff dedicated to shielding customers from the ugliness of the development process, and that those people shouldn't be developers, because developers cost more per hour... right? All in all, the gory details on your side will determine whether it's good business to continue in an open manner, or seal things up...
The only thing we have going for us, is that the vast majority of us won't raise the eyebrows of any government employees in our lifetimes. The sad part is that a lonely few will, and they'll be dealt with unfairly and harshly.
Which means it falls to us as the vast majority to hold those who abuse their governmental power to account when they deal with someone unfairly. A duty, I'm sad to say, we are all falling woefully short of...
And before anyone bitches about me just bitching, here is the first and most important step you can take. Inform Yourself! Check your putative representative's voting records, and compare it to what he's saying. Go out and but a newspaper from the "other side", to get balanced view of things. Challenge your friends when they make wild, or even just unsubstantiated, statements. A phrase I like personally (from CSI) "state your source". It's gentle, and mostly non-offensive, and goes down well as a pop-culture reference. And lastly, if you don't have the resources to fact check something, suggest it to a fact checking agency. They don't work for free often, but if you put something on their radar, they can at least look in to it when some suitably close paid for work comes in. Better yet, tip off the opposing politician's campaign, and get them to pay for it.
What I don't understand is why they don't just make everyone's life easier and sell the unlimited plans by bandwidth, not 'data limit', i.e. unlimited 1Gb/s costs X, unlimited 2Gb/s costs more etc. Pay for your speed, and never sell more than some fraction of a towers total bandwidth, so that two or three big down loaders at once don't clobber everyone else.
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It's also that fact that everything has to be a hedge. You can't simply say, "My original research results show that stimulus A causes response B with p<0.5, and this is what I did". The first problem with that sentence is that you have to be both original (work not done before) and not original (work based closely on work someone else has already published, or else it's too much of a leap). The second problem with that sentence is that you have to hedge, saying instead "seems to indicate", or "possibly blah blah". Also you are forced to spend more time explaining what other people have done with references, than explaining your own work. If it takes you more than a paragraph to explain your own work (which shouldn't have references, because it has to original right?) then you "don't have enough references" because every statement you make must be supported by a reference, never mind that the interesting statements are the stuff you shouldn't be able to to reference because it's new stuff.
Regarding word limits: instead of having a strict word limit of 2500 (for example), instead have a hard limit of 5000, and discounts for every hundred words below that, assuming the publishers are taking money to publish... sorry, silly me, of course they are
As far as your basic requirements are concerned, pretty much any major (git, svn, mercurial) open source version control system will cater for them, with some third party (mostly) free tools. Local server, well established, open source, email notification via hooks, extensive (if not easy to read) documentation ... all of these would be covered by the VCS itself. Single sign on integration with Active Directory (AD) can probably be set up using an LDAP extension. Many windows clients exist, most catering to several VCSs at once; which are good and which are bad, I often find is a matter of personal taste. Tortoise* and sourcetree seem to be the most popular at the moment. Tests are generally a matter for the project itself, i.e. part of the code, and automating testing based on source control activity (e.g. test on new commits) can also be done using scripting hooks, although you might prefer some kind of continuous integration system like jenkins.
For your 'nice-to-haves'; you would be looking at a third party stack. I personally would recommend gitlab. It comes with baked in issue tracking, project wikis for documentation/planning, email notifications without you having to script hooks, LDAP/AD integration (iirc, never used it myself), merge/pull requests (i.e. a form of code review). You can attach/upload files of any type to issues/comments/wiki pages, not sure if that's what you are looking for. Alternatively, you could look at gitstack, which just fits into your price range and covers most of the maintenance/admin headaches by the looks of it. I've never used, found it by googling.
Finally, git (and possibly mercurial and svn) has a way to sign off commits using a GPG key. This work flow is also accessible through gitlab. Basically, a change is made and committed to branch which is then pushed to the gitlab server. This generates a pull request to some pre-designated branch (e.g. trunk/development/whatever). When the pull request is approved, it can be signed using the approver's GPG key. I'm not sure is this covers your specific use case; I'm afraid I'm not sure exactly what you want from the signing part of your requirements
DISCLAIMER: This advice is based exclusively on personal experience, does not constitute legal advice, makes no guarantee of merchantability or fitness to a particular purpose implied or otherwise, did not harm any kittens in the making thereof, and may cause the reader distress by making them learn something.
It's not about our cognitive ability to predict the the future. It's about our evaluation of the importance long term threats, meaning not days or weeks into the future, but decades. What we suck at is assigning importance to it. In this sense, yes we choose to ignore the problem, because there are more pressing problems of the day, and we do know better. Of course, part of the problem is that we rationalise the choice. We come up with arguments against the acting in mitigation of the predicted risk based on various well known psychological shortcomings, e.g. confirmation bias (we support counter arguments that are false), framing (over simplifying the problem), etc ...
Now there's an Internet of Things for you!
As nice as communism sounds, there's an inherent problem with rentals.
Yes, but I'd argue that most those problems are introduced by capitalist renting out in the first place
Anyone who's been a landlord knows that people don't take care stuff they don't own. Rental cars are abused, apartments are damaged and left uncleaned, taxis are smelly, public toilets are filthy and broken down.
Rental cars are abused because generally because as the renter you know you are already paying overheads and they are built into your rental fee. Rental cars are often cleaner than privately owned cars because they are cleaned between every rental, i.e. every few days. The insurance on rental cars is expensive compared to insurance I can get privately, so yeah, I'll happily leave fast food wrappers in the car and not hassle about a scratch, because it's covered. I've already paid for the repairs and the cleaning anyway.
Then let's look at taxis. They get used roughly 8x more than privately owned cars hour for hour. They also are generally not a cheap form transport. It's the taxi owner/driver's responsibility to keep it clean, and they generally charge appropriately. Whether they actually clean or not, different story. To be fair though, 8x usage does mean cleaning gets difficult, and there's a reasonable expectation on the driver/owner's side that people are going to treat the taxi with some respect and not puke or litter casually. However, in the course of a day, scrunched up till slips, gum wrappers, etc accumulate no matter how much care is taken.
Public toilets, covers a wide variety of installations. Some have cleaning tools available for users to clean u after themselves, so can brush out the bowl if necessary. But those get stolen (god knows who'd want to steal a toilet brush from a public toilet though) and broken. Again, they are generally cheap plastic tools that are used far more than they were ever designed to be used. Then you get toilets where there are no tools, but cleaning staff. Those tend to be clean, and you either pay for those directly, or they're subsidized like mall toilets. From personal experience, toilets get filthy through use. Night clubs and bars are the worst because they probably see the most usage with the least cleaning. Free public toilets on the street would be next, but I wouldn't call either of those rentals.
And now housing. This is the first case where usage between the average rental and the average privately owned property is generally the same. Except, if as the owner of a house, I scratch or scuff the wall, I can use crack filler and paint carefully over it to my own satisfaction. As a renter, the same offence means I have to repaint an entire wall, which is the owner taking a chance in my opinion. I suppose it comes down to expectations. If you owns your own place, you're happy to put with minor cosmetic issues, but if you rent, you expect perfection. So in the case, the owner is perhaps justified. The non-cosmetic differences are generally the owner's responsibility to take care of, and here you are absolutely right. Rental apartments are never taken of by their owners as if they were their own. If my toilet/geyser/plumbing breaks, I call get it repaired within 24 hours. If I'm renting, especially through an agency, it can takes days, often nearly a week. Then there's cleanliness. Where I live, if you're renting, when you move in the place is supposed to be clean (it often isn't very) and empty (assuming unfurnished rental). When you leave, you must leave it clean, and agencies administering rentals will call in a cleaning service, prior to inspection, to clean the place, and deduct the costs from your deposit. Since that happened to me the first time, I asked the rental agency every time if this was they're MO, and if it was, well since I'd already paid for the cleaning service regardless, I'd happily leave the place as a wreck.
I can't think of any rental system off the t
I'm aware of the difference between Calc and gnumeric, but I was trying to answer the question of "what is considered a basic task?" which isn't exactly dependent on a specific piece of software. I have more experience with gnumeric, as I pointed out. And yes, once you hit large spreadsheets, you should use a database, but often I have to deal with large datasets that are stored in databases and *exported* as .csv files for analysis, or with .csv files dumped directly from sensors or other devices. Whilst I'm writing the programs that either produce or consume these, it's often easier to view them in a spreadsheet, rather than a text file layout, because the visual distinction of column is preserved. I admit, that this is probably not a common use case though, and hence not a "basic task", but databases aren't great at data analysis, which is why this stuff often gets loaded into a spreadsheet, this is where statistics applications come in. Good luck getting Bossman McMBA to use something like that. So I'd say this is probably somewhere between "basic" and "advanced". I would like to throw one more thing into the hat though, and that is the MS Word is appalling at handling large documents (40 pages plus, depending on the machine). LO/OO writer is much better in this regard, and I do regard this as a "basic task"; There are many business documents (quarterly reports, impact assessments, white papers, blah) and even personal documents (academic dissertations, and student projects, home authorship of books) that can get this large.
Okay, God forbid, I'm actually going to try and treat this fairly. Firstly, recent incarnations of MS Word work using semantic styling, but don't force you to use it. This is much the same as in OO/LO. In general MS tools load files a LOT faster, and are more visually appealing (granted, eye of the beholder and all that), however they don't handle large files. Try opening a 400Mb .csv file in Excel vs in Gnumeric. As far as user friendly interfaces are concerned, I'd say they are both about equally klunky. The ribbon is a menu, really, just looks a little different. Some people prefer it, some people don't.
Now, the "basic tasks" concept. Basic tasks for word processing to me include: writing a letter, writing business document (contract, memo, invoice, quote, waybill, meeting minutes), creating/using templates for those standard documents, designing home flyers (lost dogs, bake sales etc) . These generally require the following 'features' from the software: text manipulation, text formatting, image insertion and basic manipulation (resizing, placement, possibly cropping), tables, tab stops, template editing, headers, footers, page numbering, and text->image conversions (e.g. for banner headings). Both OO/LO and MS Word do all these about equally well imho.
Advanced features: Mail Merge, Mathematical equation editing, Track changes/revision control, cross referencing (index, citations, bibliography, table of contents, list of images etc)
As far as the spreadsheets go, excel and gnumeric are very similar in features as far as I've used them. Never used OO/LO Calc, so I can't say. I suppose charts might be a distinguishing factor, but again, I rarely use charts generated from spreadsheets.
Presentation software (Powerpoint, Impress) seems to be where things really start to differentiate. More transitions, and more bling, in general, is available to PowerPoint users, and compatibility is HORRIBLE even between between powerpoint versions, let alone PP and OO/LO.
In summary: as far basic word processing goes, I don't see a marked difference apart from aesthetics. For Maths, they're both pretty horrible. Track changes they're both about the same (revision control in word processing sucks generally), and I'm not sure about mail merge
Or a surge pricing multiplier kicks in while you are waiting your 20 minutes for the car to pitch up, only to suddenly get a cancellation notification... I guess the driver found a better fare.
Yes, but the lowest level of hell is reserved for printers, and alarm clocks that go off during morning sex.
Yes, the "disruptive" factor is that a small(ish) company can do it now too, not having to be part of the big boys club first. That's just not on!
Since I found Serenity
Also, I should point out that the LLVM/clang situation is a bit more complex. If I recall, LLVM came about because the gnu toolchain deliberately obfuscates it's output and interoperability interfaces with other tools even within the toolchain. This strategy was chosen because the outputs of the individual software tool in the toolchain were not, and could not be protected by the GPL (any version). It would have been possible for a proprietary product to be developed that didn't link to gcc (or another part of the toolchain) to take the useful output of gcc (e.g. a parsed abstract syntax tree) and use it to any number of cool things. The product could still be distributed with gcc (and the required accompanying notices) but the rest of the code would be locked up, because it doesn't link to gcc, only depends on it at runtime. This violates the spirit of the GPL which is not only to make software free, but to keep it free.
Yes ... but over a long enough time (a shorter time probably) those same mutations might occur naturally. And if the mutations are not beneficial to the organism (as opposed to beneficial to humans), then they are very likely to lost again. Look, if they create an e. coli strain that produces something amazing, for instance, a viable crude oil substitute, but it also happens to be highly effective at out-competing wild type e. coli in the human gut as a side effect, and coincidently killing us because we've basically swallowed litres of crude oil, I'd say it might still be worth the risk. If they're producing vanillain, or insulin, then definitely. The problem with the crude oil scenario, is that an escapee colony would start producing a never ending oil slick. But again, the mutations would likely be lost because the organism won't need them.
The whole idea is that the escapees won't survive long enough to reproduce, as being without their essential amino acids, their growth would be limited, and bacterial reproduction rates are tied to growth rates. Also, consider that as long as they're provided with the non-native amino acids, they're under no selective pressure to revert to the wild type. Yes, it's possible, but very very unlikely.
Captonian here. The summary is a bit misleading. In South Africa there are two nationwide requirements for anyone (including Uber drivers) to transport members of the public. They must be personally licensed to drive (i.e. have a valid drivers license), and also licensed to transport members of the public (a public drivers licence, which requires not having a criminal record, not having ever had your driver's license revoked, etc...). In Cape Town specifically, there's an additional by-law that means the vehicle must be licensed. This requirement is the case in most municipalities in South Africa, although some municipalities classify Uber's service as "chartered transportation" and Cape Town classifies it as a "metered taxi service".
A local talk radio show had both a representative from Uber and a representative from the city’s Safety and Security department. Both Uber and the city confirmed that Uber only checks the national requirements, i.e. the driver's credentials. Uber doesn't check that the vehicle is licensed to transport. To be fair, Uber apparently goes above and beyond the minimum checks regarding the driver, doing deeper background checks etc, but they do not check that the vehicle is licensed. All of the impounded vehicles were impounded due to a lack of the vehicle license. Uber seems to be trying to spin things saying that the City's bureaucracy is way too slow, but what it comes down to is the fact that are plenty of metered taxi's already, they need to be licensed, and there are a limited number of licenses. Uber's been categorised as a metered taxi service, so no new uber drivers are going to be given vehicle licenses. Uber wants to be reclassified as a chartered transport service, and here things get a little fuzzy. As far as I can tell, a chartered transport service requires an upfront statement of cost, i.e. the driver/company has to provide a quote for the proposed route. Airport shuttles fall under this for example, because they charge a fixed amount per suburb/area, they don't charge per kilometre. I'm not sure how exactly uber determines the fare, but it's not fixed, so technically, they're not a chartered service.
So it doesn't look like it's the city's fault. They're following the law. Now, it's open to discussion whether Uber is at fault for not ensuring their driver's vehicles are licensed, or whether it should be the driver's responsibility, but from the consumer side, I'd say the expectation is that Uber has done their due dilligence.
You should be allowed to care
While I agree with most of what you say, including your conclusion that the complete removal of copyright will mean de facto replacement by a patronage system, you miss two crucial points. Firstly, the fundamental difference between the arts in before the 19th century and today is that the distribution costs are now negligible, especially if the distribution is digital, but even if the distribution is physical. It costs less to produce most art in physical form and more importantly to reproduce than ever before in human history, yet prices do not come down. There's also a clear divorce between production costs and retail costs. A new DVD from a block buster movie with a budget in the 100's of millions costs the same or less to buy than the latest top 10 CDs with production budgets in the 10's of millions. Consumers get this, they understand they're being screwed by the CD producers. They're being charged what the CD producers think the market will bear... except clearly the market won't bear it, because piracy is rampant. Music producers (especially) love to harp on about lost sales, but flat out refuse to consider piracy as market indicator. Let's assume there were a full proof way prevent piracy. Sales would stay pretty flat, or I suspect drop a fair bit. People pirate way more than they could ever afford to buy, and if suddenly forced to buy everything, they would pick and choose a lot more, like back in the 80's and early 90's when kids saved their pocket money to buy that one album they'd been eyeing for three months. Concert and performance revenue would probably fall off (except for really big, well publicised, acts, i.e. the guys who are already coining it) because of lack of exposure. CD prices would be forced down. Lack of exposure is why I think CD sales might actually drop in this scenario. The same argument holds for other types of digitally reproducible art.
Secondly, the content-creation (for want of a better term) industry is a lot like the the professional sports industry. We only really here about the super stars, who are 1% of all the attempts at success. The current copyright regime is already in effect a patronage system, except the "rich dudes" are rich corporations who decide who they will promote. Yes consumers can vote with their money, which only constrains who will be promoted to largely popular inoffensive artists, whereas in a true patronage system the individual tastes of the rich dudes funded a wider variety of creative efforts. There are also a lot more "rich dudes" now than ever before. They're called the middle class. They have a fair amount of disposable income. No single person in the middle class has the money to fund an artist in the same way as traditional patronage systems, but there are vastly more potential consumers for art than ever before in human history, and what's more is the skills required to reproduce a performance and the costs involved are way less than before too, allowing artists to either manage distribution themselves, or pay substantially less than previously to someone else to do it for them.
I view piracy as a form of civil disobedience protesting inflated prices. If digital content were reduced to 25% I'm pretty sure sales would more than quadruple. Also, considering the percentages the artists get paid, they're getting screwed the least by piracy. I know that there are plenty of other people involved in music and film production, but for the most part, they all get paid salaries, not royalties. So they're not getting screwed by piracy.
P.S. I'm viewing things from a South African perspective, where minimum wage is approximately $1 an hour and new release DVDs cost about $18 ~ $25, and a new CD will set you back around $20. E-books range widely from $1 to $15, and physical books are minimum of $25 hard cover, $12 paperback. At minimum wage South Africans have to work 2 and a half days to afford a DVD/CD/Ebook/book.
Main advantage: I want a phone with everything... Best camera, biggest storage best screen. Right now, that cost's me bout $1000 in my country before the reverse subsidizations kick in. I say reverse, because in my country, buying a phone on plan costs more over time than buying the phone outright upfront for the more expensive phones, taking into account the costs of the plan without any phone. That's a BIG layout where I'm from, but if I can buy those components over time and upgrade according to my own priority list, I can assemble the phone within my budget. Better, after two years roll by, I only have to upgrade the components which are underpowered for me. The screen won't degrade over time, so I can keep that. The battery might need replacement, and the camera upgrading. Chances are a quad-core will still be sufficient in 2 years, if PC's are anything to go by. Wifi, bluetooth, NFC, qi charging, etc... once they're in, they won't need upgrading for a while.
It does NOT require creativity. It requires logic. I do this for a living too, and have done so for 30 years. Two people trying to solve the same problem (developing a communications protocol, because that's what an API is) are almost always going to come up with the same solution. Even if they don't, the number of possible solutions is small, and it's NOT a creative choice picking one above the other, it's a technical choice.
Where I live, one pays a hefty deposit when your are connected to the grid in a residential property (refunded when you sell, paid when you buy). In addition, one is charged a flat monthly connection fee plus a usage based fee. It sound like the utilities just need to (a) start charging a monthly connection fee to cover their fixed costs, and (b) if they are already charging this, increase that fee accordingly as renewable power generation increases. If someone doesn't want to pay the connection fee, and feels they can get by on power generated by themselves alone, they can disconnect from the grid.
First of all, if you are developing a proprietary software product, you're legal department might want to weigh in on the exposure of code via submitted patches on a public bugzilla database. Secondly, if you're developing an ERP system, you have a LOT of established, mature, and tested (which will be interpreted by the PHBs looking to buy your product as "bug free") competitors out there. in this case exposing the bug database HIGHLIGHTS your products immaturity, which is probably a bad thing for sales. That said sales should realise they are marketing an immature product. Presumably your product has other differentiating points that will help it gain market share, and I'm assuming lower price is probably one of the main selling points. Sales cannot hide the fact your product is immature, but they do have a point asking you not to go around highlighting it. The last thing, is to do an in depth analysis of the costs of running the public database, versus the costs of sanitizing reports on a regular basis plus the added burden of support staff to manage the bug database on behalf of clients. The bean counters are aware of the fact that there should be staff dedicated to shielding customers from the ugliness of the development process, and that those people shouldn't be developers, because developers cost more per hour... right? All in all, the gory details on your side will determine whether it's good business to continue in an open manner, or seal things up...
I followed your link, and then clicked random comic, and got this... http://ars.userfriendly.org/ca... Also, appropriate
PHB's love them, they feel like they've learned something important because PRETTY PICTURES.
The only thing we have going for us, is that the vast majority of us won't raise the eyebrows of any government employees in our lifetimes. The sad part is that a lonely few will, and they'll be dealt with unfairly and harshly.
Which means it falls to us as the vast majority to hold those who abuse their governmental power to account when they deal with someone unfairly. A duty, I'm sad to say, we are all falling woefully short of...
And before anyone bitches about me just bitching, here is the first and most important step you can take. Inform Yourself! Check your putative representative's voting records, and compare it to what he's saying. Go out and but a newspaper from the "other side", to get balanced view of things. Challenge your friends when they make wild, or even just unsubstantiated, statements. A phrase I like personally (from CSI) "state your source". It's gentle, and mostly non-offensive, and goes down well as a pop-culture reference. And lastly, if you don't have the resources to fact check something, suggest it to a fact checking agency. They don't work for free often, but if you put something on their radar, they can at least look in to it when some suitably close paid for work comes in. Better yet, tip off the opposing politician's campaign, and get them to pay for it.
What I don't understand is why they don't just make everyone's life easier and sell the unlimited plans by bandwidth, not 'data limit', i.e. unlimited 1Gb/s costs X, unlimited 2Gb/s costs more etc. Pay for your speed, and never sell more than some fraction of a towers total bandwidth, so that two or three big down loaders at once don't clobber everyone else.