> Anyone who wants decent mobile gaming has already got a choice of dozens of devices that also do more than just play games.
?????
You used the word decent, and then went on to allude to a whole bunch of touchscreen only devices. I don't think that word means what you think it means. Touchscreen controls for any action game are torture, and most games designed specifically for phones and tablets are about as deep as a kiddie pool. So no, there are not dozens of choices, there are a handful. And that handful have Nintendo or Sony logos on them.
"This housing complex in Lethbridge is referred to as 'the compound.' Local McDonald's employees said up to eight foreign workers live in each suite and they pay the franchise owner $400 per month each for rent. (CBC)
The McD's franchise owner managed to make $3200 per suite per month. In LETHBRIDGE. That's like waterfront downtown Vancouver rent rates for a luxury condo.
The only person the McDs franchisee was helping was himself.
I had a suggestion for simple reforms to Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program that was being similarly abused, except it wasn't limited to tech workers. Specifically the TFW program was set to for companies that couldn't find Canadian talent to fill roles. It was meant to be used for things like say a high end Indian restaurant needed to bring in a chef from India with 30+ years of experience, but instead was used to replace teenage cashiers at McDonalds franchises.
My suggestion was very simple: If you cannot find a worker for a particular job, you apply to the TFW program for a permit to hire a foreign worker to fill the slot. The government does market studies and knows what an average wage for that position is and to fill it with a TFW, the company will pay 150% of the average wage for that position to get that worker into Canada and employed. The company pays the ministry the worker's 150% wage and then the worker receives a cheque from the government at the average wage for that position as per the market study. The excess monies are used to pay for operation of the TFW program and also to set aside grants to train Canadians to fill these worker deficiencies.
Another reason the pay goes through the TFW office was that there were several cases of the workers being underpaid once they arrived here, or in one particularly egregious instance, a McD's franchisee was also acting as the landlord for his TFWs in a house he owned and would "helpfully" pre-deduct rent and utilities from their paycheques.
I'd be willing to bet that if the TFW and H1-B programs enacted this simple reform, the demand for foreign workers would plummet like a stone and it would still leave the door open for those businesses that actually cannot find someone in-country for a particular job.
? How does Microsoft's "network" come into it when someone plays Rocket League? I play Rocket League on a PC against Psynet (PS4) players all the time and there's not material difference. They are not routing through Sony's network, the connection is from their PS4 through their ISP to the Rocket League server directly, just like my PC's is. Xbox would work the same.
There's the side issue of the console players not being able to properly compete with the PC Master Race in things like 1st person shooters but that doesn't come into play with RL or games like it.
The aggregate track record of US and Euro companies having hazardous materials in their products versus products from China is pretty clear cut. While there can be outliers both ways, the historical record shows that western products are far more likely to be safe.
After all, I haven't recently heard about any milk in the US killing babies due to melamine being added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
Or lead/arsenic/cadmium in US toys: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8944028/One-third-of-Chinese-toys-contain-heavy-metals.html
Or "gutter oil" being a thing in the West: http://world.time.com/2014/01/08/is-a-suspended-death-sentence-enough-for-a-chinese-gutter-oil-dealer/
Add to that the fact that the people making the knockoffs generally care little about any laws that might be broken in pursuit of their profit.
Yes but regulations are a good thing. You might get leather shoes from China that are knockoffs that are every bit as good and durable as the real McCoy, but what you don't know is the leather before processing was treated with arsenic which is slowly leeching into your skin.
Putin's playbook? I'd say there's more than a little of the Goring playbook in there too coupled with some adlibbing.
"Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
It's looking more and more like the coup attempt was either encouraged and Erdogan took full advantage, or it was a false flag attack. This way Erdogan doesn't have to tell the people they are being attacked and (inserrt group here) is exposing the country to danger, he arranged a demonstration of it.
Now he's in the denounce whoever he wants as coup conspirators and make them the enemies the people rally against phase. For example, this morning it was announced that they banned all academics from leaving the country:
So now he's revoked 21,000 private teacher licenses, removed 24 broadcast licenses from TV and radio stations, demanded the resigation of all 1577 deans of schools in the country, and fired 15000 education ministry personnel. You know what THAT sound like? Time to start indoctrinating the youth of Turkey with his truth, not the objective truth.
And that doesn't even go into his removal of the cops, judges, Energy ministry employees, finance ministry employees, governors, interior ministry personnel, and more. AND he banned all 3 million civil servants from taking vacation indefinitely.
> The unlucky sap they hire to impound the tractor would be looking down the barrel of a 12 gauge shotgun.
And then the nearest city/state SWAT team comes out, has a standoff that ends in Farmer John getting tazed, shot or blown up with a remote robot delivered bomb like in Dallas, and his farm falls into receivership with it not being worked. One of John Deere's agribusiness megafarm subsidiaries buys it and everyone wins. Except farmer John who is now a felon in prison or a corpse.
> b) Uber's success comes from the breaking of the laws relating to taxicab services and employment
And to add to the latter half of that a little more, Uber had grandly proclaimed that their drivers would make good money, whereas the data now being seen would suggest working at McDs would be more lucrative.
Usually those TOSs are on something that was paid for. I have a hard time believing that any court would force a company to compensate someone for something lost because they put it on a free service. Because if they did, the day after that ruling a lot of free services would send out a "You have 30 days to back your shit up because we're closing our doors" notice.
Cool, so when a member of your family does something reprehensible you're all right with us dragging YOU out into the middle of the street and shooting you in the back of the head for the neighborhood to watch?
It sounds insane but people actually have problems paying $1 for an app, and will talk endlessly about it to me as they debate the value of buying it to put on their $700 smartphone or $400 tablet while they sip on their $4 latte-macchaito-slushie-whatever. Hell, even I do it from time to time "Is this REAAALLY worth $2? Maybe I'll stick with the free version with ads..." So I would expect anything that lowers the perceived cost will increase sales, even if its people lying to themselves about how it's "cheaper" because everyone in their family can now have a copy of *thing that nobody else in their family wants*.
Sure, no problem. But again, all your link says is:
"Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."
Xerox already invested in Apple and "had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab". That's all. No mention of compensation for anything Apple took from PARC. Everything I said is still valid. Apple exchanged shares and in part got a chance to talk with PARC engineers as a result of that, but there was no agreement on them actually taking any of the tech and bringing it to market themselves. If they had suggested anything like that ahead of time I guarantee anyone with a brain at Xerox would have never allowed the visit.
First of all, two people replied both citing a site named Obamapacman as the definitive source. Just saying.
Secondly, from your own link:
"Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share."
They were granted access for 3 days in exchange for that money. The shares paid - ahead of time - for the access, which was presumably to pick peoples' brains there for ideas. It doesn't say anything at all about compensation for actually lifting their prototyped research or licensing or anything else.
I can go pay $10,000 to attend a TED symposium, does that mean I can rip off any ideas I hear or see there scot free?
> If by stolen you mean bought, then yes. He recognised the people and paid for it.
Oh, big old citation needed for this one. Apple was known to have hired a few PARC people away from Xerox several months after Jobs visited PARC but there is to my knowledge no public mention of any compensation to Xerox whatsoever.
I'm no fan of Republicans but she mishandled top secret data. Even military darling General Patreus got nailed when he did it on a much smaller scale and with far less exposure. This whole thing smacks of two tiered law.
Sure, but what are you defining as a "niche" hobby? Building PCs, or PC gaming? Because PC gaming isn't all that niche. For example, GTA 5 sold more than 2 million copies to PC players on launch month and that's hardly a game that the overall population partakes in. Casual PC gaming is massive and doesn't require a lot of hardware, most of the $500 value boxes people buy for home are more than up to those kind of games.
In this day and age, it seems anyone who either uses Tor or operates an exit node is opening themselves to crazy risks. Especially the exit node operators. With the kind of traffic going through some of them you have to be a moron to run one...
Yes I am aware of that, but to my knowledge the shotgun on an EOD robot hasn't been used to kill a human before. That's the difference. If you know of an incident where that has happened please feel free to point it out.
> There are major perceived racial issues and conflicts at hand, and you want to focus on the specific equipment at hand?
Yes, actually. Here is the problem: The situation is emotionally charged right now, and that is not the place from which to make long lasting policy.
> This was not an autonomous killing machine. It was similar to an RC car with an explosive charge attached to it
OK fine. So does that mean that in future the police should be authorized to use RC cars with explosives embedded in them to stop car chases in a manner similar to the awful Clint Eastwood movie "The Dead Pool"? Perhaps mandating the RC cars in question must be equipped with a speaker belting out "Welcome to the Jungle" as well?
Or maybe that's silly. After all, Reaper drones are similar to RC planes and we already know they work well. From a functional standpoint, taking out the perpetrator with that remote bomb bot and bomb was a drone strike. It was a remotely operated vehicle that was deliberately guided to kill a target by using an explosive device.
Do we REALLY want to open the door to using drone strikes in policing? Today it's a sniper. Tomorrow? Raid on a drug house? The day after that, who knows? We already know from experience that extraordinary measures put in place "only for terrorists" have been abused all to hell.
"William Randolph Hearst understood that a war with Cuba would not only sell his papers, but also move him into a position of national prominence. From Cuba, Hearst's star reporters wrote stories designed to tug at the heartstrings of Americans. Horrific tales described the situation in Cuba--female prisoners, executions, valiant rebels fighting, and starving women and children figured in many of the stories that filled the newspapers. But it was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor that gave Hearst his big story--war. After the sinking of the Maine, the Hearst newspapers, with no evidence, unequivocally blamed the Spanish, and soon U.S. public opinion demanded intervention."
It's worth noting that in 1976 an American naval investigation team concluded the Maine was most likely destroyed by an internal fire or accident in the ammunition room and the Spanish had nothing to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Anyone who wants decent mobile gaming has already got a choice of dozens of devices that also do more than just play games.
?????
You used the word decent, and then went on to allude to a whole bunch of touchscreen only devices. I don't think that word means what you think it means. Touchscreen controls for any action game are torture, and most games designed specifically for phones and tablets are about as deep as a kiddie pool. So no, there are not dozens of choices, there are a handful. And that handful have Nintendo or Sony logos on them.
> This is particularly important if the company is giving the employee the room at below-market rates.
HA Ha ha ha. ha. Trust me, that wasn't his motivation. At all.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mcdonald-s-foreign-worker-practices-face-growing-investigation-1.2607365
"This housing complex in Lethbridge is referred to as 'the compound.' Local McDonald's employees said up to eight foreign workers live in each suite and they pay the franchise owner $400 per month each for rent. (CBC)
The McD's franchise owner managed to make $3200 per suite per month. In LETHBRIDGE. That's like waterfront downtown Vancouver rent rates for a luxury condo.
The only person the McDs franchisee was helping was himself.
I had a suggestion for simple reforms to Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker program that was being similarly abused, except it wasn't limited to tech workers. Specifically the TFW program was set to for companies that couldn't find Canadian talent to fill roles. It was meant to be used for things like say a high end Indian restaurant needed to bring in a chef from India with 30+ years of experience, but instead was used to replace teenage cashiers at McDonalds franchises.
My suggestion was very simple: If you cannot find a worker for a particular job, you apply to the TFW program for a permit to hire a foreign worker to fill the slot. The government does market studies and knows what an average wage for that position is and to fill it with a TFW, the company will pay 150% of the average wage for that position to get that worker into Canada and employed. The company pays the ministry the worker's 150% wage and then the worker receives a cheque from the government at the average wage for that position as per the market study. The excess monies are used to pay for operation of the TFW program and also to set aside grants to train Canadians to fill these worker deficiencies.
Another reason the pay goes through the TFW office was that there were several cases of the workers being underpaid once they arrived here, or in one particularly egregious instance, a McD's franchisee was also acting as the landlord for his TFWs in a house he owned and would "helpfully" pre-deduct rent and utilities from their paycheques.
I'd be willing to bet that if the TFW and H1-B programs enacted this simple reform, the demand for foreign workers would plummet like a stone and it would still leave the door open for those businesses that actually cannot find someone in-country for a particular job.
? How does Microsoft's "network" come into it when someone plays Rocket League? I play Rocket League on a PC against Psynet (PS4) players all the time and there's not material difference. They are not routing through Sony's network, the connection is from their PS4 through their ISP to the Rocket League server directly, just like my PC's is. Xbox would work the same.
There's the side issue of the console players not being able to properly compete with the PC Master Race in things like 1st person shooters but that doesn't come into play with RL or games like it.
The aggregate track record of US and Euro companies having hazardous materials in their products versus products from China is pretty clear cut. While there can be outliers both ways, the historical record shows that western products are far more likely to be safe.
After all, I haven't recently heard about any milk in the US killing babies due to melamine being added:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
Or lead/arsenic/cadmium in US toys:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8944028/One-third-of-Chinese-toys-contain-heavy-metals.html
Or "gutter oil" being a thing in the West:
http://world.time.com/2014/01/08/is-a-suspended-death-sentence-enough-for-a-chinese-gutter-oil-dealer/
Add to that the fact that the people making the knockoffs generally care little about any laws that might be broken in pursuit of their profit.
Yes but regulations are a good thing. You might get leather shoes from China that are knockoffs that are every bit as good and durable as the real McCoy, but what you don't know is the leather before processing was treated with arsenic which is slowly leeching into your skin.
> Erdogan is clearly following Putin's play book.
Putin's playbook? I'd say there's more than a little of the Goring playbook in there too coupled with some adlibbing.
"Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
It's looking more and more like the coup attempt was either encouraged and Erdogan took full advantage, or it was a false flag attack. This way Erdogan doesn't have to tell the people they are being attacked and (inserrt group here) is exposing the country to danger, he arranged a demonstration of it.
Now he's in the denounce whoever he wants as coup conspirators and make them the enemies the people rally against phase. For example, this morning it was announced that they banned all academics from leaving the country:
http://www.reuters.com/article/turkey-security-education-idUSI7N1A3004
So now he's revoked 21,000 private teacher licenses, removed 24 broadcast licenses from TV and radio stations, demanded the resigation of all 1577 deans of schools in the country, and fired 15000 education ministry personnel. You know what THAT sound like? Time to start indoctrinating the youth of Turkey with his truth, not the objective truth.
And that doesn't even go into his removal of the cops, judges, Energy ministry employees, finance ministry employees, governors, interior ministry personnel, and more. AND he banned all 3 million civil servants from taking vacation indefinitely.
> The unlucky sap they hire to impound the tractor would be looking down the barrel of a 12 gauge shotgun.
And then the nearest city/state SWAT team comes out, has a standoff that ends in Farmer John getting tazed, shot or blown up with a remote robot delivered bomb like in Dallas, and his farm falls into receivership with it not being worked. One of John Deere's agribusiness megafarm subsidiaries buys it and everyone wins. Except farmer John who is now a felon in prison or a corpse.
Nothing much to add, frankly ALL cars should have a black box that records telemetry for a rolling 5 minute period and can be examined after a crash.
> b) Uber's success comes from the breaking of the laws relating to taxicab services and employment
And to add to the latter half of that a little more, Uber had grandly proclaimed that their drivers would make good money, whereas the data now being seen would suggest working at McDs would be more lucrative.
Usually those TOSs are on something that was paid for. I have a hard time believing that any court would force a company to compensate someone for something lost because they put it on a free service. Because if they did, the day after that ruling a lot of free services would send out a "You have 30 days to back your shit up because we're closing our doors" notice.
Cool, so when a member of your family does something reprehensible you're all right with us dragging YOU out into the middle of the street and shooting you in the back of the head for the neighborhood to watch?
It sounds insane but people actually have problems paying $1 for an app, and will talk endlessly about it to me as they debate the value of buying it to put on their $700 smartphone or $400 tablet while they sip on their $4 latte-macchaito-slushie-whatever. Hell, even I do it from time to time "Is this REAAALLY worth $2? Maybe I'll stick with the free version with ads..." So I would expect anything that lowers the perceived cost will increase sales, even if its people lying to themselves about how it's "cheaper" because everyone in their family can now have a copy of *thing that nobody else in their family wants*.
Sure, no problem. But again, all your link says is:
"Finally, as several authors have pointed out, there were actually two visits by groups from Apple to Xerox PARC in 1979. Steve Jobs was on the second of the two. Jef Raskin, who helped arranged both visits, explained that he wanted Jobs to visit PARC to understand work that was already going on at Apple. The Macintosh project had escaped the chopping block several times, and Raskin had tried to explain to Jobs the significance of the technologies it was incorporating. By showing that other companies considered this kind of work exciting, Raskin hoped to boost the value of the Macintosh's work in Jobs' eyes. Unbeknownst to Raskin, Jobs had his own reasons for visiting PARC: Xerox's venture capital arm had recently made an investment in Apple, and had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab."
Xerox already invested in Apple and "had agreed to show Apple what was going on in its lab". That's all. No mention of compensation for anything Apple took from PARC. Everything I said is still valid. Apple exchanged shares and in part got a chance to talk with PARC engineers as a result of that, but there was no agreement on them actually taking any of the tech and bringing it to market themselves. If they had suggested anything like that ahead of time I guarantee anyone with a brain at Xerox would have never allowed the visit.
First of all, two people replied both citing a site named Obamapacman as the definitive source. Just saying.
Secondly, from your own link:
"Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share."
They were granted access for 3 days in exchange for that money. The shares paid - ahead of time - for the access, which was presumably to pick peoples' brains there for ideas. It doesn't say anything at all about compensation for actually lifting their prototyped research or licensing or anything else.
I can go pay $10,000 to attend a TED symposium, does that mean I can rip off any ideas I hear or see there scot free?
> If by stolen you mean bought, then yes. He recognised the people and paid for it.
Oh, big old citation needed for this one. Apple was known to have hired a few PARC people away from Xerox several months after Jobs visited PARC but there is to my knowledge no public mention of any compensation to Xerox whatsoever.
I'm no fan of Republicans but she mishandled top secret data. Even military darling General Patreus got nailed when he did it on a much smaller scale and with far less exposure. This whole thing smacks of two tiered law.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal" -- Steve Jobs.
No doubt said as he was running a device with a UI stolen from Xerox.
Sure, but what are you defining as a "niche" hobby? Building PCs, or PC gaming? Because PC gaming isn't all that niche. For example, GTA 5 sold more than 2 million copies to PC players on launch month and that's hardly a game that the overall population partakes in. Casual PC gaming is massive and doesn't require a lot of hardware, most of the $500 value boxes people buy for home are more than up to those kind of games.
You mean I don't get a nVidia Titan and 1TB SSD with my Xbox One, or PS4? What the hell man?!??!
In this day and age, it seems anyone who either uses Tor or operates an exit node is opening themselves to crazy risks. Especially the exit node operators. With the kind of traffic going through some of them you have to be a moron to run one...
Yes I am aware of that, but to my knowledge the shotgun on an EOD robot hasn't been used to kill a human before. That's the difference. If you know of an incident where that has happened please feel free to point it out.
And that's how you get the PATRIOT act. So don't act surprised when you get another equally bad law from this incident.
>5 people are dead. 5 more are in the hospital.
> There are major perceived racial issues and conflicts at hand, and you want to focus on the specific equipment at hand?
Yes, actually. Here is the problem: The situation is emotionally charged right now, and that is not the place from which to make long lasting policy.
> This was not an autonomous killing machine. It was similar to an RC car with an explosive charge attached to it
OK fine. So does that mean that in future the police should be authorized to use RC cars with explosives embedded in them to stop car chases in a manner similar to the awful Clint Eastwood movie "The Dead Pool"? Perhaps mandating the RC cars in question must be equipped with a speaker belting out "Welcome to the Jungle" as well?
Or maybe that's silly. After all, Reaper drones are similar to RC planes and we already know they work well. From a functional standpoint, taking out the perpetrator with that remote bomb bot and bomb was a drone strike. It was a remotely operated vehicle that was deliberately guided to kill a target by using an explosive device.
Do we REALLY want to open the door to using drone strikes in policing? Today it's a sniper. Tomorrow? Raid on a drug house? The day after that, who knows? We already know from experience that extraordinary measures put in place "only for terrorists" have been abused all to hell.
They certainly did, but let's not pretend Hearst's motives for doing so were humanitarian in nature. To cite PBS as well:
http://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_journalism.html
"William Randolph Hearst understood that a war with Cuba would not only sell his papers, but also move him into a position of national prominence. From Cuba, Hearst's star reporters wrote stories designed to tug at the heartstrings of Americans. Horrific tales described the situation in Cuba--female prisoners, executions, valiant rebels fighting, and starving women and children figured in many of the stories that filled the newspapers. But it was the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor that gave Hearst his big story--war. After the sinking of the Maine, the Hearst newspapers, with no evidence, unequivocally blamed the Spanish, and soon U.S. public opinion demanded intervention."
It's worth noting that in 1976 an American naval investigation team concluded the Maine was most likely destroyed by an internal fire or accident in the ammunition room and the Spanish had nothing to do with it.