A distinction without a difference. "Downloading" a video puts a file in/Downloads. "Streaming" a video puts a file in/Temp. Maybe/Temp isn't "intended" for long-term storage, but the things put there are files on the drive just the same.
Well fortunately the law can decide it doesn't only matter what you do but why you do it, like murder and self-defense. Or less seriously, watching a movie by yourself or with your friends and family as opposed to public display. Copies that are temporary or transitory are treated differently from those that are permanent, otherwise all those copies in memory and network buffers, frame buffers, audio buffers and whatnot would all have trouble with copyright. And yes, that includes actual storage in caches and such, your hard disk being one of them.
Or to put it a different way, it becomes a copyright infringement - of the reproduction right - when a court find it was your intent to make a permanent copy. That is to say, if you copy that file from/Temp to/Downloads that's the infringement. Also there's such a thing as legal pedigree, if you have a CD and can legally make an MP3 from it that does not mean you can download the same MP3 from an illegal copy on the Internet - a copy of an illegal copy is always illegal. It does not have anything to do with the actual bits and bytes.
Better definition: a demagogue proposes premises he knows are false to people he knows are fools.
Still fits most politicians, they all promise more than they could possibly deliver. If Jesus Christ himself ran for office and said he'll feed five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread, they'd promise to feed ten thousand with one fish and five buns.
In that case, I'd be very alarmed about a 21% fluctuation - in either direction - in such a short timescale, because that kind of volatility in an actual currency never a good sign and usually indicates some severe financial problems, or even an impending collapse.
Most of it is just the same boom-bust cycles as in the stock market, everybody wants to get in when it goes up and everybody wants to get out when it goes down. Central banks actually do quite a bit to stabilize the currency, with nobody to do that and very few having any kind of commitments in Bitcoins it will be volatile. For moderate amounts that is of course annoying but not deal breaking in that it's "win some, lose some". There's of course the chance of a death spiral since there's no real floor for how low it can go, but as long as there are enough people who will to buy on the belief it'll bounce back - and there's many believers - it doesn't seem much of a real risk.
Cash is really not a good investment vehicle anyway, for most people cash is what bridges you from the paycheck to paying rent and groceries. The holding of currency is mostly just because the transaction cost of buying and selling something more durable like valuable metals or speculating in stocks isn't worth it. I'd use Bitcoin much the same, enough to pay this month's bills and the savings in something else. Sure losing 21% of my paycheck in a weekend would suck - though a 21% gain would be great, but it's not really going to shake my net worth in its foundations. I still don't see the great case for Bitcoin, but it certainly beats bartering.
It is not supposed to matter to you as an ISP. You sell bandwidth. What your customer does with said bandwidth is none of your business.
If all customers wanted was bits they could offer you rand(). Reality is those bits must be transported to you from somewhere and that has varying cost for the ISP. Behind the scenes there's a huge struggle over peering, transit and CDNs on whose terms and prices. It doesn't really cost the ISP the same for you to download from your neighbor's FTP server as from a server in Australia. And the big ISPs ("tier 1"), CDNs like Akamai and big content providers like Netflix do throw their weight around to make sure they get the better end of the deal.
Just because network neutrality hides it from the consumer doesn't make it go away, it's just tying the ISP to offer a variable cost bandwidth at a fixed price. It's good to avoid double dipping because the ISP can charge content providers on a whim, but it also takes away their ability to charge for actual differences in cost. They have to average it out, but are always looking for ways to make the mix cheaper. Like back when the web was a big part of it, caching was a big thing. It's not new and it's not going away.
may not be money but that's irrelevant (...) compensation for illegal activity, even if by redeemable poker chips, is still breaking the law.
If you sell guns and crossbows and you're charged with selling a crossbow in violation of gun laws it very much matters how "projectile weapon" is defined. That's for the specific money laundering charge, but he might also be in general trouble because they wanted his assistance in an illegal act which makes him an accessory before the fact. If a person told you he's going to kill his wife it doesn't matter if you sell him a gun or crossbow or knife, it's providing a murder weapon. But the gun laws can't apply unless there was a gun involved.
Depends on rendering complexity, I guess. If you can do Super Mario-style graphics well in VR, there could be a niche for that separate from photorealistic VR. Like how the Wii was a big hit despite having the weakest graphics, for more casual players and use as a gimmick.
It does matter if API design involves substantial creativity. If the API design is not simple and obvious, and if the work to design the API is a substantially creative endeavor, the API becomes eligible for copyright, and indeed, this is what the courts have now found (at least in the specific case of the Java APIs). As much as I don't like the idea of copyrightable APIs, I can't really fault the ruling. Fortunately, the court has now also ruled that using APIs is fair use
And that's really what I find strange, because if you think APIs are creative and copyrighted, when if not in the Google case are they infringed? They copied much of it, for profit, reducing the market for licensed use of Java. It feels like one bad twisting of the law to fix another bad twisting of the law. And "fair use" is an affirmative defense that depends on your particular case, just because Google won doesn't mean the APIs are now free. If you use them in some other way in some other context maybe the judge will rule against you. It's not as fucked up as it could have been, but still pretty messed up.
But of course that's obvious. They've also been indoctrinated by 'social media', the media in general, and corporations that sharing everything is normal, and that 'privacy' is something anomalous, and that only people with something to hide want privacy. The real question is: will they live long enough to learn the error of their ways, and even more to the point, will they learn that before they reproduce and pass on their indoctrinated ways to another generation?
Not to rain on your parade but privacy is a choice. Not everybody wants it, not everybody needs it. I don't know if you remember JenniCam? From 1996 to 2003 she broadcast pretty much her whole life on the Internet right down to having sex. Not that it was a porn cam or anything, it was just everything and at the height it had 3-4 million viewers daily. Now that's a rather extreme example, but I know at least one that I'd call hyperactive on social media. I think he loves every moment of it. Near as I can tell he's networking well both in the business and pleasure department, yes Zuckerberg probably has a file on him thick enough to give Gestapo multi-orgasms but so far I can't really see any huge negative consequences from it.
Now I couldn't do it, I'm probably the polar opposite because quite frankly I feel my life is none of your business. And I don't feel a need to keep all the people who aren't there updated on where I am or what I'm doing. Like if I go to a concert, I'll just be at the concert I won't be a damn livestream to everyone else who's not there. It's not that I couldn't post most of it online because it's just boring everyday life same as everyone else but I don't feel like sharing. Which means I don't particularly like it when I'm tagged and checked in and whatnot by other people, but it's a compromise. You say it like privacy is a truth they should learn, I'm thinking it's more of a choice. And as long as the choice isn't being made for me....
This has nothing to do with a litigious society. T&C's are this way because nobody in their right mind would accept them if they weren't obfuscated beyond comprehension.
Like that BSD license an AC quoted?:
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Every word of that blob has come because some lawyer somewhere has managed to twist contract law, liability law, tort law or some other crazy law to say you're on the hook. Really all you needed to say is:
This software is provided "as-is" without any warranty.
That's it really. You're not promising it does anything now, you're not promising it will do anything in the future. The rest is just crap, if you tell me you're going to do something stupid with it I shouldn't have the burden of convincing you otherwise.
Terms & conditions are the product of decades of such crap piling up, every time a lawyer goes for a crazy loophole you clam it up with more legalese because hey, who cares? Nobody reads it anyway. In fact, maybe it's not even your product but you read about someone else's case and preemptively add it to your T&C. Be honest, despite all the legalese how often has any company actually used it? For the most part I pay, they deliver. If they don't deliver, I don't pay. That seems to work with 90% of the companies and resolve 90% of the conflicts with the reminder and the last 1% I just dispute the bill and see if they'll take me to court. No takers yet.
Indeed. Roughly 80% of M&A's fail, and lose value for shareholders. But every CEO is sure his deal will be one of the 20%.
Depends on what the long term effect is, which I don't think you can conclusively say is a loss. Many buy-outs are to pay off a potential challenger before they become a real threat or to pick up a failing company's assets so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands or to round out a portfolio so you can be a "full service" partner. Very often there's an element of insurance and short term you'll pay the "insurance premium" as the bought assets are devalued back to their actual value or even put in the drawer. I think those are a relatively large part of the volume where you don't expect the bought assets by themselves to be much of a money maker. And then there's the big, spectacular failures...
1. Do NOT use a contractor. They have a vested interest in bloat and delay. 2. Use your own subordinates so they have skin in the game, and their future raises and promotions depend on the success of the project.
1. Depends. Small contractors have often been the ones pushing to cut through the fluff and get real specs and deliverables on the table because they know the budget is fixed, not delivering makes them look bad and if they don't it'll just fizzle like so many projects we have that are ongoing but never really materialize. "Too big to fail" projects that'll be funded next year too unless hell freezes over are different, but then you're often screwed because you really don't have the skills or resources in-house. In fact big projects almost always fail because of the next one. 2. For the most part, that simply can't happen. There's no authority to make incentive or performance-based pay, I have my pay grade and overtime pay. As for raises, if I were to get any significantly more pay than anyone with less education, experience and tenure it'd raise hell with unions and whatnot. And it's often the same with promotions, you'll get promoted when it's your turn because if they pass up a candidate that's better on paper there's actually a formal complaint process. Same with public procurement processes, nobody's free to do what they feel is best for the bottom line.
As for 3-5. they're generally good ideas. If you give people too much time and money to try solving every problem forever, they'll sit around making grand plans and often dismissing the reasons why the current system has become such a mess as bad design, when in reality it's a messy world out there and kludges are our way to cope.
5. Avoid (...) even announcing the project until you have something working.
Sadly I've found this is the easiest way to get something done, particularly if it's the type of solution that's not great but less terrible than the one we have. They say learn to walk before you run, but nobody here seems to have heard it. Every time there's a project to get on our feet, somebody must come in and crush it because it's not good enough. Which usually means we're crawling around for a few more years while they argue about their master plan to simultaneously win the 100m dash and the marathon at the Olympics.
I'm so tired of pie-in-the-sky plans that end up a mad dash to deliver the barest minimum because somebody finally put the foot down, basically throwing away 90% of the work because there was no time to even try implementing anything remotely like it. There should be like a shot clock, if you've spent 30% of your budget start implementing and figure out where the rubber meets the road. Anything else leads to meaningless exercises like trying to estimate a solution where we haven't even decided on the principle for the solution, much less made an actual design and broken it down into work that needs doing and could reasonably be estimated.
The thing is, most of us here in Europe already have it of sorts. I just checked the standard for social aid here in Norway, essentially the lowest form of benefits if you don't qualify for anything else and have no means to sustain yourself. Last year it was 5700 NOK/month = $8200/year + cheapest form of housing with insurance and utilities. Norway is expensive so purchasing power parity adjusted that's more like $7400 and since we have 25% general VAT, 15% on food the government will make quite a bit back so maybe more like having $6000 in the US. But with rent, insurance and utilities taken care of you can stretch those $500/month quite a bit if you just look for second hand stores, flea markets, giveaways and such. That said, some counties have also introduced activity requirements so you will be wasting your days doing community service, not just sit around and play WoW. But nobody's going to end up in a tent camp, unless they have such drug problems we can't really house them anywhere.
All of my machines are running Windows 10... shrugs... (...) I'd be more concerned if Microsoft was pushing people to Win8 and the crappy fail that was the Metro Start Screen.
You got 2 + 2 but can't add it up to 4... what happens the next time Microsoft has a bright idea? You're strapped in for the ride whether you like it or not. Does it look like they care what their customers want? Does it look like they'll take no for an answer? I think Microsoft has looked at their past failures and decided they were right and the users were wrong but the users were in charge. That's going to change with Win10, you're now on a very short leash and when Microsoft yanks you follow. No more "thanks but I'd rather stay on WinXP/Win7 the rest of the decade" or "hell no, I'm not installing your telemetry spyware". Of course they're being nice now, even strangers in a van has figured out you offer free candy not free broccoli. That does not mean it's going to end well.
And what exactly is stopping French/German/Other EU companies from making their own national "Netflix" showing 100% local content? What do you mean no one wants to fucking pay for it? Surely there must be someone stupid enough to pay again for what they get through their local service anyway.
Want to and want to, here in Norway there is a lot of subsidy over the culture budget and other regulations and it's as much wanted as the other laws we have in a democracy I guess. Music, theaters, festivals, authors, movies, museums, various volunteer groups, religious/ethnic minorities and whatnot in total get support of almost 1% of the GDP. Part of that is also "hidden" in other regulations like for our public broadcaster NRK which will play 35%+ Norwegian music on radio and a very high degree of locally produced content in general. It's no secret that it's cultural protectionism.
Despite that, Norwegian movies have 20% market share in the cinemas, 80% is foreign films and mostly the big international blockbusters. Foreign series like Game of Thrones is huge, same with international artists. Literature is more of a mix, but it's not like we're trying to keep a monoculture more like trying to keep the local culture from becoming a casualty of global economic interests. I don't really see this working very well with a streaming service though, on a broadcast there is just so many hours in a day. If you're streaming people watch what they want when they want, the percentage of the catalog doesn't really matter.
If nothing else they'll probably just tax us some more and increase the budgets, I guess.
"Use the best tool for the job..." Now remember, we wouldn't have Git if it were't for some stubborn activist
This is the open source walled garden philosophy. As long as we make a major stink about any non-free software and chase them away to keep the sanctity of the garden, sooner or later an open source alternative will appear. If Photoshop came to Office it'd be bad for GIMP. If MS Office came to Linux it'd be bad for LibreOffice. Competition is bad. Choice is bad. If the open source alternatives are shit then you either eat shit or create a better open source solution. And those are the only two options.
The only reason that ended well is that you had Linus to save the day. Again. Otherwise he'd probably just have to go back to using tarballs and shooting his kernel project in the foot because of RMS & friends, his project is a massive success despite all attempts to destroy it because of some ideological rant. The older I get, the more I have the feeling that RMS won the lottery convincing Linus to use the GPL and that GNU/Hurd would have been a total disaster that never saw any real world use.
When some people talk you should think letting proprietary software run on Linux was like letting the snake into the Garden of Eden. So now Steam runs on Linux, bringing with it closed source games and DRM. It still doesn't stop anyone else from continuing to make open source games without DRM. What's wrong with winning on merit and not on ideology? Open source is great when it does the job. Heck, for the price and flexibility I'll put up with a few warts. But when I really need something else, I'd like it to be available. I don't want to be in my own walled garden of open source for my own protection.
You honestly think Zen or Polaris will put AMD on an even footing with Intel? If so what makes you think that?
Well the entire paragraph was about process tech. Polaris and Zen is launching on GlobalFoundries' 14nm process, Intel has announced that for the next year or they'll stay on 14nm with Kaby Lake. So give or take a little marketing bullshit 14 ~= 14. Whether the design is any good, we'll see...
If it's true that TSMC can do volume at 10 nm then it really is a watershed. Intel is struggling to do volume at 10 nm
We'll see. As far as I know, Intel doesn't announce test tapeouts since they're not in the business of selling design and process tech but rather actual processors. But if you look at slides from their 14nm release you see PRQ = product release qualification = volume production was late Q2 2014 and there's yield graphs back to May 2013. Considering Intel was on a two-year tick-tock I would think it's natural if their first test was mid-2015 and Kaby Lake was announced in July because the yields were way too low.
A full 300mm wafer is 70695 mm^2, a Skylake quad is 122mm^2 and at 10nm you're probably looking at ~1000 CPUs/wafer. So with 0,1% yield you can issue the PR release saying you've made a 10nm chip, but if you don't have consistency in the process it's not worth launching because the net result costs more than a mature 14nm process. In any case parity is pretty good too, being a half-node behind is fighting with a cost handicap that's really tough to beat as AMD has noticed. When they launch Zen/Polaris it's the first time in forever they're on roughly even footing with Intel.
Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?
Pretty much. Random people who happen to catch a rare disease that the doctor would never have seen before nor have any real reason to believe the pasient has instead of something more common could spread a while before anyone realizes the severity. The people who work on these kinds of diseases in a lab would quickly raise all the warning flags and the incident be shut down real quick. The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection in say the departure hall of an airport to overwhelm containment efforts. That would require a whole other level of sophistication than IEDs and guns though.
I will not trust my child with a private computer, digital camera, or cell phone until high school. (...) You hate me? I'm so very sad. No child has ever hated a parent before.
All kids do at some point, that doesn't change the fact that some parents really are being unreasonable. It's not proof you're doing it right. And kids have a pretty good idea what normal is, if nine out of ten in their class gets to have something or do something they will know you are being very uptight, it's not like they're asking for ice cream for dinner or bedtime to be after midnight. That's when your kids will start lying to you, when they were at a friend's house they weren't playing Civilization it was Call of Duty. They weren't watching Harry Potter, they were looking at The Dark Knight. They weren't just doing homework they also talked to people on Facebook. And they did get ice cream on a Tuesday.
And if they know that all hell will break loose and they'll be grounded for a week if you find out, it's not going to scare them straight. It'll only confirm their belief that you're being an asshole and that if they want to have fun and do the same stupid shit other kids to they have to do it in secret. It sounds like you think you can flip a switch when they start high school and start trusting them then but it'll be like letting a dog that's been yanked around off the leash, it's going to run and keep running. If the kids feel your parenting is something they should try to get away from as much and as quickly as possible, you're doing it wrong. Being a parent is more than being a prison guard and they're not on parole. It's a learning process from a dependent child to an independent adult and you're the teacher.
But isn't Moore's law more about transistors per unit cost, rather than performance per cost? Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding in the headline... which seems about as common as specialized chips in modern technology.
Actually just transistor density, not cost at all. But in the popular press there's no invalid use of computers and Moore's law, it can be about performance, cost, size, IPC, battery life or whatever. Anything that's twice as good in two years or whatever best fits your story follows Moore's law. In this case it's not even an actual use, it's comparing totally unrelated improvements to imaginary iterations of it.
I'd imagine watts/m^2 very quickly turns into watts/$ when it comes to maintaining ever larger fields of panels.
This is what a big solar plant looks like, does it look like land comes at a premium? As for people, you power 80000 households with 80 permanent jobs, one of their new projects is 90000 households with 35 permanent jobs. For the most part they just sit there, it's probably cheaper to just let them gather dust for the most part and even a small improvement in reliability probably means much more than watts/m^2. Doesn't matter if you get a little lower efficiency, you really do make it up on volume.
Uh, there's two unrelated bits to this: a) Would connecting these people to the Internet increase the world's GDP by $6.7 trillion b) Who'd pay for it and who'd profit from it
The former is certainly possible, around here we can feed the whole population with like 2% working in agriculture while the rest do more valuable things. Surely the poor countries of the world could advance, produce more and become more efficient through trade. It doesn't happen today because they don't have any valuable skills to trade back. This could be the target of aid programs, on the assumption that it's better to teach a man to fish than handing out charity.
The other part, would anyone profit? Well I'd say it's hard to get some kind of kickback on teaching illiterate kids to read and write, but we do that too. For Facebook it's setting themselves up for dominance 10-20 years from now when most the world is online, but if you look at the western world it's hard to single out any company in particular that reaps the benefits of us being Internet-connected.
It's many businesses a little here and there and often it's that we can do services quicker and cheaper increasing productivity but not really padding any profit margins. Like I don't stand in line at the bank, it's open 24x7 from anywhere I got Internet access. But I don't think my online bank makes more money than the old one did, probably quite the opposite. Some e-tailers win and retailers lose, Netflix wins and cable/satellite TV loses but overall we're more efficient. I'm not sorry the whip and buggy companies fell to make room for car accessories instead.
Consider this more of a deep investment idea, like what would we need to do to make the next generation a computer programmer instead of an illiterate farmer. Quite a lot, probably. But that's how the world moves forward, like we barely have need for illiterate people anymore. We want everyone to learn how to read and write and do math, it's more productive. And maybe it'd be a good idea if everyone could use the Internet too, I certainly find it very convenient and couldn't really imagine life without it anymore.
Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?
Of course it might not be entirely free Internet, but no modern nation can really afford to go without it these days. It's mostly North Korea and a bunch of countries in Africa that compete to be the world's poorest countries that lack it. Authoritarian regimes manage to control it just fine, if you are the law and don't have to worry about constitutions or civil rights or whatever you just put up the Great Firewall and block everything you don't like or that doesn't play ball with the government.
"Firefox 'Tops' Microsoft browser share.... if you don't count chrome which has an 60% install base"
"Ferrari tops Lamborghini sales" is a perfectly valid sentence, it doesn't imply either is the absolute top. Though it gets a little confusing since you can parse it both as "Firefox Tops (Microsoft Browser = IE + Edge) market share" or "Firefox Tops Microsoft (browser market share)", which would say Firefox is the most used browser on Windows. But if you'd substituted for "IE and Edge" a normal reading would suggests it beats both IE and Edge, not the total of IE and Edge so it's not easy to make a short, clear and correct headline.
Slashdot Mirror
A distinction without a difference. "Downloading" a video puts a file in /Downloads. "Streaming" a video puts a file in /Temp. Maybe /Temp isn't "intended" for long-term storage, but the things put there are files on the drive just the same.
Well fortunately the law can decide it doesn't only matter what you do but why you do it, like murder and self-defense. Or less seriously, watching a movie by yourself or with your friends and family as opposed to public display. Copies that are temporary or transitory are treated differently from those that are permanent, otherwise all those copies in memory and network buffers, frame buffers, audio buffers and whatnot would all have trouble with copyright. And yes, that includes actual storage in caches and such, your hard disk being one of them.
Or to put it a different way, it becomes a copyright infringement - of the reproduction right - when a court find it was your intent to make a permanent copy. That is to say, if you copy that file from /Temp to /Downloads that's the infringement. Also there's such a thing as legal pedigree, if you have a CD and can legally make an MP3 from it that does not mean you can download the same MP3 from an illegal copy on the Internet - a copy of an illegal copy is always illegal. It does not have anything to do with the actual bits and bytes.
Better definition: a demagogue proposes premises he knows are false to people he knows are fools.
Still fits most politicians, they all promise more than they could possibly deliver. If Jesus Christ himself ran for office and said he'll feed five thousand with two fish and five loaves of bread, they'd promise to feed ten thousand with one fish and five buns.
In that case, I'd be very alarmed about a 21% fluctuation - in either direction - in such a short timescale, because that kind of volatility in an actual currency never a good sign and usually indicates some severe financial problems, or even an impending collapse.
Most of it is just the same boom-bust cycles as in the stock market, everybody wants to get in when it goes up and everybody wants to get out when it goes down. Central banks actually do quite a bit to stabilize the currency, with nobody to do that and very few having any kind of commitments in Bitcoins it will be volatile. For moderate amounts that is of course annoying but not deal breaking in that it's "win some, lose some". There's of course the chance of a death spiral since there's no real floor for how low it can go, but as long as there are enough people who will to buy on the belief it'll bounce back - and there's many believers - it doesn't seem much of a real risk.
Cash is really not a good investment vehicle anyway, for most people cash is what bridges you from the paycheck to paying rent and groceries. The holding of currency is mostly just because the transaction cost of buying and selling something more durable like valuable metals or speculating in stocks isn't worth it. I'd use Bitcoin much the same, enough to pay this month's bills and the savings in something else. Sure losing 21% of my paycheck in a weekend would suck - though a 21% gain would be great, but it's not really going to shake my net worth in its foundations. I still don't see the great case for Bitcoin, but it certainly beats bartering.
It is not supposed to matter to you as an ISP. You sell bandwidth. What your customer does with said bandwidth is none of your business.
If all customers wanted was bits they could offer you rand(). Reality is those bits must be transported to you from somewhere and that has varying cost for the ISP. Behind the scenes there's a huge struggle over peering, transit and CDNs on whose terms and prices. It doesn't really cost the ISP the same for you to download from your neighbor's FTP server as from a server in Australia. And the big ISPs ("tier 1"), CDNs like Akamai and big content providers like Netflix do throw their weight around to make sure they get the better end of the deal.
Just because network neutrality hides it from the consumer doesn't make it go away, it's just tying the ISP to offer a variable cost bandwidth at a fixed price. It's good to avoid double dipping because the ISP can charge content providers on a whim, but it also takes away their ability to charge for actual differences in cost. They have to average it out, but are always looking for ways to make the mix cheaper. Like back when the web was a big part of it, caching was a big thing. It's not new and it's not going away.
may not be money but that's irrelevant (...) compensation for illegal activity, even if by redeemable poker chips, is still breaking the law.
If you sell guns and crossbows and you're charged with selling a crossbow in violation of gun laws it very much matters how "projectile weapon" is defined. That's for the specific money laundering charge, but he might also be in general trouble because they wanted his assistance in an illegal act which makes him an accessory before the fact. If a person told you he's going to kill his wife it doesn't matter if you sell him a gun or crossbow or knife, it's providing a murder weapon. But the gun laws can't apply unless there was a gun involved.
At the end of the day, any fiat currency is only worth whatever you think it's worth.
I wish. Unfortunately my money is only worth what other people think it's worth.
Depends on rendering complexity, I guess. If you can do Super Mario-style graphics well in VR, there could be a niche for that separate from photorealistic VR. Like how the Wii was a big hit despite having the weakest graphics, for more casual players and use as a gimmick.
It does matter if API design involves substantial creativity. If the API design is not simple and obvious, and if the work to design the API is a substantially creative endeavor, the API becomes eligible for copyright, and indeed, this is what the courts have now found (at least in the specific case of the Java APIs). As much as I don't like the idea of copyrightable APIs, I can't really fault the ruling. Fortunately, the court has now also ruled that using APIs is fair use
And that's really what I find strange, because if you think APIs are creative and copyrighted, when if not in the Google case are they infringed? They copied much of it, for profit, reducing the market for licensed use of Java. It feels like one bad twisting of the law to fix another bad twisting of the law. And "fair use" is an affirmative defense that depends on your particular case, just because Google won doesn't mean the APIs are now free. If you use them in some other way in some other context maybe the judge will rule against you. It's not as fucked up as it could have been, but still pretty messed up.
But of course that's obvious. They've also been indoctrinated by 'social media', the media in general, and corporations that sharing everything is normal, and that 'privacy' is something anomalous, and that only people with something to hide want privacy. The real question is: will they live long enough to learn the error of their ways, and even more to the point, will they learn that before they reproduce and pass on their indoctrinated ways to another generation?
Not to rain on your parade but privacy is a choice. Not everybody wants it, not everybody needs it. I don't know if you remember JenniCam? From 1996 to 2003 she broadcast pretty much her whole life on the Internet right down to having sex. Not that it was a porn cam or anything, it was just everything and at the height it had 3-4 million viewers daily. Now that's a rather extreme example, but I know at least one that I'd call hyperactive on social media. I think he loves every moment of it. Near as I can tell he's networking well both in the business and pleasure department, yes Zuckerberg probably has a file on him thick enough to give Gestapo multi-orgasms but so far I can't really see any huge negative consequences from it.
Now I couldn't do it, I'm probably the polar opposite because quite frankly I feel my life is none of your business. And I don't feel a need to keep all the people who aren't there updated on where I am or what I'm doing. Like if I go to a concert, I'll just be at the concert I won't be a damn livestream to everyone else who's not there. It's not that I couldn't post most of it online because it's just boring everyday life same as everyone else but I don't feel like sharing. Which means I don't particularly like it when I'm tagged and checked in and whatnot by other people, but it's a compromise. You say it like privacy is a truth they should learn, I'm thinking it's more of a choice. And as long as the choice isn't being made for me....
This has nothing to do with a litigious society. T&C's are this way because nobody in their right mind would accept them if they weren't obfuscated beyond comprehension.
Like that BSD license an AC quoted?:
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
Every word of that blob has come because some lawyer somewhere has managed to twist contract law, liability law, tort law or some other crazy law to say you're on the hook. Really all you needed to say is:
This software is provided "as-is" without any warranty.
That's it really. You're not promising it does anything now, you're not promising it will do anything in the future. The rest is just crap, if you tell me you're going to do something stupid with it I shouldn't have the burden of convincing you otherwise.
Terms & conditions are the product of decades of such crap piling up, every time a lawyer goes for a crazy loophole you clam it up with more legalese because hey, who cares? Nobody reads it anyway. In fact, maybe it's not even your product but you read about someone else's case and preemptively add it to your T&C. Be honest, despite all the legalese how often has any company actually used it? For the most part I pay, they deliver. If they don't deliver, I don't pay. That seems to work with 90% of the companies and resolve 90% of the conflicts with the reminder and the last 1% I just dispute the bill and see if they'll take me to court. No takers yet.
Indeed. Roughly 80% of M&A's fail, and lose value for shareholders. But every CEO is sure his deal will be one of the 20%.
Depends on what the long term effect is, which I don't think you can conclusively say is a loss. Many buy-outs are to pay off a potential challenger before they become a real threat or to pick up a failing company's assets so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands or to round out a portfolio so you can be a "full service" partner. Very often there's an element of insurance and short term you'll pay the "insurance premium" as the bought assets are devalued back to their actual value or even put in the drawer. I think those are a relatively large part of the volume where you don't expect the bought assets by themselves to be much of a money maker. And then there's the big, spectacular failures...
1. Do NOT use a contractor. They have a vested interest in bloat and delay.
2. Use your own subordinates so they have skin in the game, and their future raises and promotions depend on the success of the project.
1. Depends. Small contractors have often been the ones pushing to cut through the fluff and get real specs and deliverables on the table because they know the budget is fixed, not delivering makes them look bad and if they don't it'll just fizzle like so many projects we have that are ongoing but never really materialize. "Too big to fail" projects that'll be funded next year too unless hell freezes over are different, but then you're often screwed because you really don't have the skills or resources in-house. In fact big projects almost always fail because of the next one.
2. For the most part, that simply can't happen. There's no authority to make incentive or performance-based pay, I have my pay grade and overtime pay. As for raises, if I were to get any significantly more pay than anyone with less education, experience and tenure it'd raise hell with unions and whatnot. And it's often the same with promotions, you'll get promoted when it's your turn because if they pass up a candidate that's better on paper there's actually a formal complaint process. Same with public procurement processes, nobody's free to do what they feel is best for the bottom line.
As for 3-5. they're generally good ideas. If you give people too much time and money to try solving every problem forever, they'll sit around making grand plans and often dismissing the reasons why the current system has become such a mess as bad design, when in reality it's a messy world out there and kludges are our way to cope.
5. Avoid (...) even announcing the project until you have something working.
Sadly I've found this is the easiest way to get something done, particularly if it's the type of solution that's not great but less terrible than the one we have. They say learn to walk before you run, but nobody here seems to have heard it. Every time there's a project to get on our feet, somebody must come in and crush it because it's not good enough. Which usually means we're crawling around for a few more years while they argue about their master plan to simultaneously win the 100m dash and the marathon at the Olympics.
I'm so tired of pie-in-the-sky plans that end up a mad dash to deliver the barest minimum because somebody finally put the foot down, basically throwing away 90% of the work because there was no time to even try implementing anything remotely like it. There should be like a shot clock, if you've spent 30% of your budget start implementing and figure out where the rubber meets the road. Anything else leads to meaningless exercises like trying to estimate a solution where we haven't even decided on the principle for the solution, much less made an actual design and broken it down into work that needs doing and could reasonably be estimated.
The thing is, most of us here in Europe already have it of sorts. I just checked the standard for social aid here in Norway, essentially the lowest form of benefits if you don't qualify for anything else and have no means to sustain yourself. Last year it was 5700 NOK/month = $8200/year + cheapest form of housing with insurance and utilities. Norway is expensive so purchasing power parity adjusted that's more like $7400 and since we have 25% general VAT, 15% on food the government will make quite a bit back so maybe more like having $6000 in the US. But with rent, insurance and utilities taken care of you can stretch those $500/month quite a bit if you just look for second hand stores, flea markets, giveaways and such. That said, some counties have also introduced activity requirements so you will be wasting your days doing community service, not just sit around and play WoW. But nobody's going to end up in a tent camp, unless they have such drug problems we can't really house them anywhere.
All of my machines are running Windows 10... shrugs... (...) I'd be more concerned if Microsoft was pushing people to Win8 and the crappy fail that was the Metro Start Screen.
You got 2 + 2 but can't add it up to 4... what happens the next time Microsoft has a bright idea? You're strapped in for the ride whether you like it or not. Does it look like they care what their customers want? Does it look like they'll take no for an answer? I think Microsoft has looked at their past failures and decided they were right and the users were wrong but the users were in charge. That's going to change with Win10, you're now on a very short leash and when Microsoft yanks you follow. No more "thanks but I'd rather stay on WinXP/Win7 the rest of the decade" or "hell no, I'm not installing your telemetry spyware". Of course they're being nice now, even strangers in a van has figured out you offer free candy not free broccoli. That does not mean it's going to end well.
And what exactly is stopping French/German/Other EU companies from making their own national "Netflix" showing 100% local content? What do you mean no one wants to fucking pay for it? Surely there must be someone stupid enough to pay again for what they get through their local service anyway.
Want to and want to, here in Norway there is a lot of subsidy over the culture budget and other regulations and it's as much wanted as the other laws we have in a democracy I guess. Music, theaters, festivals, authors, movies, museums, various volunteer groups, religious/ethnic minorities and whatnot in total get support of almost 1% of the GDP. Part of that is also "hidden" in other regulations like for our public broadcaster NRK which will play 35%+ Norwegian music on radio and a very high degree of locally produced content in general. It's no secret that it's cultural protectionism.
Despite that, Norwegian movies have 20% market share in the cinemas, 80% is foreign films and mostly the big international blockbusters. Foreign series like Game of Thrones is huge, same with international artists. Literature is more of a mix, but it's not like we're trying to keep a monoculture more like trying to keep the local culture from becoming a casualty of global economic interests. I don't really see this working very well with a streaming service though, on a broadcast there is just so many hours in a day. If you're streaming people watch what they want when they want, the percentage of the catalog doesn't really matter.
If nothing else they'll probably just tax us some more and increase the budgets, I guess.
"Use the best tool for the job..." Now remember, we wouldn't have Git if it were't for some stubborn activist
This is the open source walled garden philosophy. As long as we make a major stink about any non-free software and chase them away to keep the sanctity of the garden, sooner or later an open source alternative will appear. If Photoshop came to Office it'd be bad for GIMP. If MS Office came to Linux it'd be bad for LibreOffice. Competition is bad. Choice is bad. If the open source alternatives are shit then you either eat shit or create a better open source solution. And those are the only two options.
The only reason that ended well is that you had Linus to save the day. Again. Otherwise he'd probably just have to go back to using tarballs and shooting his kernel project in the foot because of RMS & friends, his project is a massive success despite all attempts to destroy it because of some ideological rant. The older I get, the more I have the feeling that RMS won the lottery convincing Linus to use the GPL and that GNU/Hurd would have been a total disaster that never saw any real world use.
When some people talk you should think letting proprietary software run on Linux was like letting the snake into the Garden of Eden. So now Steam runs on Linux, bringing with it closed source games and DRM. It still doesn't stop anyone else from continuing to make open source games without DRM. What's wrong with winning on merit and not on ideology? Open source is great when it does the job. Heck, for the price and flexibility I'll put up with a few warts. But when I really need something else, I'd like it to be available. I don't want to be in my own walled garden of open source for my own protection.
You honestly think Zen or Polaris will put AMD on an even footing with Intel? If so what makes you think that?
Well the entire paragraph was about process tech. Polaris and Zen is launching on GlobalFoundries' 14nm process, Intel has announced that for the next year or they'll stay on 14nm with Kaby Lake. So give or take a little marketing bullshit 14 ~= 14. Whether the design is any good, we'll see...
If it's true that TSMC can do volume at 10 nm then it really is a watershed. Intel is struggling to do volume at 10 nm
We'll see. As far as I know, Intel doesn't announce test tapeouts since they're not in the business of selling design and process tech but rather actual processors. But if you look at slides from their 14nm release you see PRQ = product release qualification = volume production was late Q2 2014 and there's yield graphs back to May 2013. Considering Intel was on a two-year tick-tock I would think it's natural if their first test was mid-2015 and Kaby Lake was announced in July because the yields were way too low.
A full 300mm wafer is 70695 mm^2, a Skylake quad is 122mm^2 and at 10nm you're probably looking at ~1000 CPUs/wafer. So with 0,1% yield you can issue the PR release saying you've made a 10nm chip, but if you don't have consistency in the process it's not worth launching because the net result costs more than a mature 14nm process. In any case parity is pretty good too, being a half-node behind is fighting with a cost handicap that's really tough to beat as AMD has noticed. When they launch Zen/Polaris it's the first time in forever they're on roughly even footing with Intel.
Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?
Pretty much. Random people who happen to catch a rare disease that the doctor would never have seen before nor have any real reason to believe the pasient has instead of something more common could spread a while before anyone realizes the severity. The people who work on these kinds of diseases in a lab would quickly raise all the warning flags and the incident be shut down real quick. The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection in say the departure hall of an airport to overwhelm containment efforts. That would require a whole other level of sophistication than IEDs and guns though.
I will not trust my child with a private computer, digital camera, or cell phone until high school. (...) You hate me? I'm so very sad. No child has ever hated a parent before.
All kids do at some point, that doesn't change the fact that some parents really are being unreasonable. It's not proof you're doing it right. And kids have a pretty good idea what normal is, if nine out of ten in their class gets to have something or do something they will know you are being very uptight, it's not like they're asking for ice cream for dinner or bedtime to be after midnight. That's when your kids will start lying to you, when they were at a friend's house they weren't playing Civilization it was Call of Duty. They weren't watching Harry Potter, they were looking at The Dark Knight. They weren't just doing homework they also talked to people on Facebook. And they did get ice cream on a Tuesday.
And if they know that all hell will break loose and they'll be grounded for a week if you find out, it's not going to scare them straight. It'll only confirm their belief that you're being an asshole and that if they want to have fun and do the same stupid shit other kids to they have to do it in secret. It sounds like you think you can flip a switch when they start high school and start trusting them then but it'll be like letting a dog that's been yanked around off the leash, it's going to run and keep running. If the kids feel your parenting is something they should try to get away from as much and as quickly as possible, you're doing it wrong. Being a parent is more than being a prison guard and they're not on parole. It's a learning process from a dependent child to an independent adult and you're the teacher.
But isn't Moore's law more about transistors per unit cost, rather than performance per cost? Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding in the headline... which seems about as common as specialized chips in modern technology.
Actually just transistor density, not cost at all. But in the popular press there's no invalid use of computers and Moore's law, it can be about performance, cost, size, IPC, battery life or whatever. Anything that's twice as good in two years or whatever best fits your story follows Moore's law. In this case it's not even an actual use, it's comparing totally unrelated improvements to imaginary iterations of it.
I'd imagine watts/m^2 very quickly turns into watts/$ when it comes to maintaining ever larger fields of panels.
This is what a big solar plant looks like, does it look like land comes at a premium? As for people, you power 80000 households with 80 permanent jobs, one of their new projects is 90000 households with 35 permanent jobs. For the most part they just sit there, it's probably cheaper to just let them gather dust for the most part and even a small improvement in reliability probably means much more than watts/m^2. Doesn't matter if you get a little lower efficiency, you really do make it up on volume.
Uh, there's two unrelated bits to this:
a) Would connecting these people to the Internet increase the world's GDP by $6.7 trillion
b) Who'd pay for it and who'd profit from it
The former is certainly possible, around here we can feed the whole population with like 2% working in agriculture while the rest do more valuable things. Surely the poor countries of the world could advance, produce more and become more efficient through trade. It doesn't happen today because they don't have any valuable skills to trade back. This could be the target of aid programs, on the assumption that it's better to teach a man to fish than handing out charity.
The other part, would anyone profit? Well I'd say it's hard to get some kind of kickback on teaching illiterate kids to read and write, but we do that too. For Facebook it's setting themselves up for dominance 10-20 years from now when most the world is online, but if you look at the western world it's hard to single out any company in particular that reaps the benefits of us being Internet-connected.
It's many businesses a little here and there and often it's that we can do services quicker and cheaper increasing productivity but not really padding any profit margins. Like I don't stand in line at the bank, it's open 24x7 from anywhere I got Internet access. But I don't think my online bank makes more money than the old one did, probably quite the opposite. Some e-tailers win and retailers lose, Netflix wins and cable/satellite TV loses but overall we're more efficient. I'm not sorry the whip and buggy companies fell to make room for car accessories instead.
Consider this more of a deep investment idea, like what would we need to do to make the next generation a computer programmer instead of an illiterate farmer. Quite a lot, probably. But that's how the world moves forward, like we barely have need for illiterate people anymore. We want everyone to learn how to read and write and do math, it's more productive. And maybe it'd be a good idea if everyone could use the Internet too, I certainly find it very convenient and couldn't really imagine life without it anymore.
Probably half of those people would never be ALLOWED to connect to the internet, even if it were possible to provide access. Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, many of the impoverished African kleptocracies... which of those governments would ever allow their subjects any information about a better way of life?
You're pretty ignorant.
Iran: 39 million (49%)
Saudi-Arabia: 21 million (65%)
China: 721 million (52%)
Of course it might not be entirely free Internet, but no modern nation can really afford to go without it these days. It's mostly North Korea and a bunch of countries in Africa that compete to be the world's poorest countries that lack it. Authoritarian regimes manage to control it just fine, if you are the law and don't have to worry about constitutions or civil rights or whatever you just put up the Great Firewall and block everything you don't like or that doesn't play ball with the government.
"Firefox 'Tops' Microsoft browser share.... if you don't count chrome which has an 60% install base"
"Ferrari tops Lamborghini sales" is a perfectly valid sentence, it doesn't imply either is the absolute top. Though it gets a little confusing since you can parse it both as "Firefox Tops (Microsoft Browser = IE + Edge) market share" or "Firefox Tops Microsoft (browser market share)", which would say Firefox is the most used browser on Windows. But if you'd substituted for "IE and Edge" a normal reading would suggests it beats both IE and Edge, not the total of IE and Edge so it's not easy to make a short, clear and correct headline.